'An Extraordinary Record of History': the making of Silkin's Complete Poems by Jon Glover

Jon Silkin Complete Poems ed. Jon Glover & Kathryn Jenner available now

Jon Silkin’s Complete Poems has just been published. About eight years ago I ventured into Special Collections in the Brotherton Library of the University of Leeds thinking about looking for material with which to start a biography of the poet who died in 1997. For many students and members of the public, in the UK and world wide, he was the first poet whom they had met, the first whose poetry they had heard read by the poet himself, and the author of what remains one of the most worryingly moving poems of the twentieth century, ‘Death of a son; who died in a mental hospital aged one’. I had known Silkin since 1963, and after his death had helped, with poet Rodney Pybus, to ensure that 50 metres of boxes of Silkin Archives would join the 50 metres of boxes already there in Leeds constituting the Stand archive.

On first opening box after box of letters, poetry manuscripts, journals, drafts of books, articles, and lectures, it seemed not only to be a goldmine of fascinating and very personal material, but it was also an apparently unending series of roots into history, both local and recent but also European and beyond. The letters and articles covered twentieth century conflict and biblical catastrophes; his own years of National Service and our complicity in the Holocaust; the melding of individual death and decay with the deaths of millions in war; the ‘Death of a son’ with the threatened death of Nature.

Jon Silkin. Photo credit Christopher Barker

I started to make notes for the biography but after a year or two I thought that a more viable project would be to assemble an edition of Silkin’s Complete Poems. In a sense, without easy access to the poems, a biography might be almost pointless for scholars and the general public. So a Complete Poems became the priority. But there were hundreds of manuscripts to compare with his published books. There was also his own massive collection of journals, all neatly shelved. Whenever he had a poem published in a journal such as Poetry (Chicago), or the Jewish Quarterly, or the TLS, or the most important quarterly of Japan or South America or Scotland, or in Stand, he kept his complementary copy. And it emerged that there were some poems published in journals that had never been collected in book form. So I had to examine every page of every journal in his library to hunt for unknown poems. There was no guarantee that there wouldn’t be a poem; but no guarantee that there would.

Kathryn Jenner, who had worked in cataloguing all of Silkin’s papers, including every page of the thousands of manuscripts, worked with me in dating multiple sheets of paper related to what might have turned into just one finished poem, or what turned into two or three or more separate poems. We worked together on choosing the viable finished poems to transcribe, and it was Kathryn’s monumental job to type up poems which were often in semi-illegible, hand-written form, or through comparing seemingly endless copies of typescript with tiny emendations, either typed or hand-written.

Jon Silkin seemed to have been an endless hoarder. The maps, bus-timetables, political pamphlets and photos from over 50 years might seem an extraordinary body of material to archive. On the other hand, the letters, bus-tickets, publishers’ contracts and lecture notes form, with the poems, an extraordinary record of history – personal and intimate but also widely cultural and historic. In a real sense, Silkin’s Complete Poetry is inseparable from the material records in his archive.

We are now re-starting work on the Biography, and will also start to assemble previously unpublished plays, criticism, essays, fiction and journals. Watch this space.

Jon Glover was born in Sheffield in 1943 and was educated at the University of Leeds, where he met Jon Silkin, Ken Smith, Geoffrey Hill, Peter Redgrove, David Wright and Jeffrey Wainwright and started to help produce and edit Stand magazine. He spent the year 1966-7 in the United States with his wife, Elaine, who comes from near Niagara Falls. In 1968 he moved to what has since become the University of Bolton, where he is currently Research Professor. Two previous books of poetry have been published by Carcanet. He edited The Penguin Book of First World War Prose (1989) with Jon Silkin, and is currently researching the Stand and Silkin archives held at the University of Leeds and working on a biography of Jon Silkin. He is now the Managing Editor of Stand.

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For the next two weeks, we're giving you 25% off Jon Silkin's Complete Poems ed. Jon Glover & Kathryn Jenner

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