44:1 Winter 1998

TOM PICKARD

first of may

Since the mid 1990s Tom Pickard has contributed several poems to CR. He is one of the young poets whose rediscovery of Basil Bunting in the early 1960s prompted that poet to write his masterpiece, “Briggflatts” (first published, in those different days, in Poetry). Pickard contributed prose to Fall 1998’s special issue on Bunting and an excerpt from his memoir, “Rough Music (Ruff Muzhik),” appeared in Winter 2000. Here is Pickard’s poem “first of may,” dedicated to Edward Dorn, which was published in Winter 1998.

Geoffrey Treacle contributed a note entitled “In Praise of Bawdiness” to the Winter 2000 issue:

On the back of Tom Pickard's new book, Fuckwind (Buckfastleigh, England: Etruscan Books, 1999), in lieu of an author photograph there is a long shot of bold graffiti on the streets of Newcastle upon Tyne reading "good luck TOM PICKARD." As the notes indicate, the photograph was taken in 1969, after Pickard was arrested during a performance at the Newcastle Festival. On top of the white lettering, some wag (or friend?) has added two black, horizontal prongs to the 1 in "luck." Such an amendment seems appropriate, for Pickard has always posed a challenge to obscenity laws, particularly in his sexual explicitness. Such challenges are familiar to us now from the 1960s, and one immediately thinks of a "poetics of the body" associated with the Beats. Yet all too often, such resistance to puritanism took on a moralistic emphasis — and a reliance on shock value — which now renders the poetry itself rather dated. Pickard, on the other hand, is less concerned with obscenity than with a Rabelaisian bawdiness. In many of his best poems, desire is addressed in a condensed and forthright lyricism — and with a sort of exultation as well. It is these qualities for which Pickard will be read after many more ambitious and sophisticated "projects" have been forgotten.

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