PNR 286 – editorial (November-December 2025)
In Index on Censorship (2, 1996) Nadine Gordimer quotes Walter Benjamin: ‘One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later.’ This was Tony Harrison’s mature achievement. At his radical best, when he was writing some of the poems first featured in the 1980s in this magazine, in particular ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’, the ‘Art and Extinction’ sequence (PNR 22, 1981) and others in following years, he created the central body of poetry that found and will find him readers. In the 1980s people knew Harrison was the real thing.
His death reminded us of his service to the languages of poetry and of theatre. He opened the English ear to listen in unaccustomed and eventually grateful ways. He made it possible for writers with un-standard Englishes – at home and abroad – to tune their instruments and tell their peculiar truths to readerships and audiences his own work had helped to prepare. He learned to distrust the ‘eloquence’ he had striven to acquire, that put his poetry beyond the range of his community – his parents, his neighbours. The desire to include them, in particular, among his readers and auditors was transformative.