How Bill Griffiths turned his poetry into a political witness
Bill Griffiths died in 2007, but his work refuses to settle. For more than thirty years, he produced poems, translations, historical pamphlets, political tracts, and archival catalogues with relentless energy. Hard as it is to get the full measure of his output, one subject runs through nearly everything he wrote: prison.
The publication of his Collected Poems (2010, 2014, 2016) has given readers a panoramic — if still overwhelming — view of his career. Even now the editor, Alan Halsey, could only take the record up to 1996 in more than 1,200 pages. Griffiths never stopped adding material to the sequence, revising older texts, and letting poems blur into one another. The effect is like following a maze whose walls shift each time you move.
Archive activism and a letter from a future prime minister
A telling clue lies at the Bill Griffiths Collection held at Brunel University. In November 1993 Tony Blair, then Shadow Home Secretary, wrote to thank Griffiths for an essay called HMP: Revising Prison. Blair’s letterhead showed his constituency home in Trimdon Colliery, only a few miles from Seaham, where Griffiths had relocated in 1990 — a conscious act of solidarity in a town hit hard by deindustrialisation.
The thought of the future prime minister studying a comb-bound Amra pamphlet, its cover drawn by hand, seems almost absurd. Yet Griffiths kept up pressure on a string of politicians. After Blair became Labour leader in 1994 the poet switched his attention to Jack Straw; he also corresponded with the British Medical Association about medical care in prisons, with Members of the European Parliament, and with the editors of numerous newspapers. All of this was part of a sustained campaign.
A key private reason for this turn was Griffiths’s friendship with a man called Delvan, whom he met in Seaham. Delvan served time at Wandsworth and Highpoint, and Griffiths collaborated with him on at least four books — Review of Brian Greenaway & Notes from Delvan, Delvan’s Book, Star Fish Jail, and Seventy-Six Day Wanno, Mississippi and Highpoint Journal. These works borrow from Delvan’s first-hand testimony of racist police harassment, court procedure, and prison life. Letters reproduced in Seventy-Six Day Wanno are held in the university archive, but access to them is now restricted under data protection law. Inside the poem no such restrictions apply.
A history of protest in the penal system
When Griffiths began publishing poems in Poetry Review (Autumn 1972), readers would have had fresh memories of one of the largest series of prison disturbances in English history. In January 1972 a general strike began among prisoners. It culminated on 4 August in a coordinated national strike involving more than 10,000 inmates across thirty penal institutions.
Demands were publicised by a new group: the Preservation of the Rights of Prisoners, known as PROP. Modeled partly on the Folsom Prison strike of 1970 and the Attica uprising of 1971 in California, PROP proposed a 24-point programme of prisoners’ rights, including better legal advice, education, and parole conditions. Membership required direct experience of detention, so that former inmates could direct the organisation.
Griffiths himself had spent time on remand at Brixton in 1971. He told an interviewer afterwards that it made him “determined never to write the sort of poem that is simply entertaining, that helps people to carry on enjoying the world as it is.” By 1972 the ambitious cycles Cycles and Craze began appearing in samplers and chapters. Both sequences deal with violence, control, and the language of the underclass. Mixing thieves’ cant, Romany, ballads, news reports, and slang, they favour a tight, sprung rhythm that keeps sounds sharp and shifts unpredictable.
The protests eventually broke down. A get-tough policy from the Prison Officers Association followed, along with the Home Secretary’s refusal to negotiate with PROP. Over 1,700 men were disciplined, with loss of remission and long periods in solitary. PROP split into two factions; pockets of its energy survived in pamphlet publishing. Two important books — Brian Stratton’s Who Guards the Guards? (1973) and the analysis of the Hull riot, Don’t Mark His Face (1976) — smuggled out eyewitness accounts of brutality that are still shocking in their understatement.
Allusions to the state and its officials
Griffiths’s earliest surviving poem — preserved on a floppy disk labelled “/!cpt” and compiled in 1991 — is called ‘Apology’. It sketches Barnaby Falk, a working man who rides a clapped-out bike, does odd jobs, and at closing time drinks himself happy in a hedge. There is barely a sign of danger until the last lines, where the poet wonders “which first the day – / Light or police will send him off.” After that the police never leave his field of vision.
A sharper gaze settles on the nature of sovereignty in the two-line condensation from Craze:
watched the queen tell a cop break my nose
and the queen told the cops I was an animal.
These lean, almost throwaway observations behave like explosive counters. One minute the poet writes fragmented description; the next moment he delivers fatal observations.
The political landscape pushed into this writing runs wide: miners’ mass pickets, the Angry Brigade trials, Bloody Sunday, internment without trial of Irish republicans in English jails. But instead of becoming reportage, Griffiths’s poetry stays inside a dark mutability — prison becomes a shifting temporal threat, not a fixed fact. In ‘Cycle Three: H. M. Prison Brixton’, the voices break into a bleak fugue:
To the sickish kids
nothing. all the epileptics,
taken like no monster swans
prison
like houses
going in a sort of late dog
watching, hey master —
all built,
blocks, octagons
Though Griffiths shares grammatical compression with poets like J. H. Prynne, he does not share Prynne’s reticence regarding emotionally naked declaratives. Descriptions sometimes read like score marks, as if the poem is not presenting a scene but performing a call-and-response with the inmate who invented it. He spoke of these as “evidence” poems in an interview with Will Rowe. Evidence of what? The answer he gave suggests the poem itself becomes courtroom, forensic testimony — a genre intermediate between memoir and document.
An eccentric treasure box: essays and later work
By the early 1990s two tones hardened. After a mid‑life rupture Griffiths self-published HMP: Revising Prison, a tightly reasoned argument for abolishing the judicial system at root. It is light on romanticising the prisoner as hero, heavy on the concrete reform that should come after “revision”. In the same intense decade he blended journal and letter writing to produce Seventy-Six Day Wanno with a collaborator; those books left restrictable documentary records sitting in the legal field of the archive while their poetic doppelgänger circulated freely to anyone.
A comparison with the propaganda published by PROP illuminates a central tension. Where the activist pamphlets delivered victims’ testimonies virtually raw, Griffiths never sacrificed the claims of perception and perceptual cracking. He sounds like nothing else, yet also like samples from everything between Broadside Montage concerts, concrete verso settings, and half-of-songs overheard. So the antagonisms rarely ease; each line of policing arrives trembling with its sense of control over process. One critic described the effect as “grassroots public speech mutating to music”, what Griffiths elsewhere calls ‘grave police music’.
Reading beside the archive
Has time only delivered old key-to-verse forms from the library? The light that illuminates this maze might be nothing else than the accidental holdings: a dry overhead striplight, the intimate glow of a reading room, or simply the hum of the laptop as password-restricted documents clash with the open poem. Since the early 1990s when co-op transcripts and letters began to seed hybrid works like Seventy-Six Day Wanno, each collected volume becomes its own arrest file — thick with allusions that require a specialised key. But this is the boundary the poetry shares with a new form of public observation. Abolitionist in procedure, forensic in atmosphere, and unlimited by the laws of exhibition that bound PROP’s historical testimony, the cycle gestates with each period back, barely closing.
Griffiths makes a negative comparison with ‘monster swans’: I imagine the swan spreading its wings, hard to control and to capture. The comparison is ironic because swans come under royal protection while the prisoner detained at her majesty’s pleasure is in these circumstances more like a dog, tail between legs. This situation, Griffiths reminds us, is ‘all built’: the prison is not natural, but can and should be changed.
In this respect, Griffiths’ work could be read alongside several other sequences in the British experimental tradition that deal with the law. A provisional list would include Barry MacSweeney’s Jury Vet, written between 1979 and 1981, a delirious and violent engagement with Official Secrets Acts trials and the beginnings of Thatcherism; Eric Mottram’s Legal Poems (1986) and Maggie O’Sullivan’s her/story: eye (1994–99), which deal in different ways with internment and the Hunger Strikes at Long Kesh in Northern Ireland; Geraldine Monk’s Interregnum (1994), a treatment of witch trials in early modern England punctuated by ‘Gaol Songs’; Tom Pickard’s reconstruction of the story of a border outlaw and folk hero, The Ballad of Jamie Allan (2007); and Linton Kwesi Johnson’s many poems chronicling police harassment in Brixton and New Cross.
But Griffiths brought his prison poems to a temporary halt in 1978, in a work of desolate prose called An Account of the End. Published by Richard Tabor’s Lobby Press, An Account of the End begins by narrating a series of arrests and the disintegration of the relationships of the poet’s closest friends. Part Five turns to the deaths of men in prison and police custody:
It is specific: Stephen Smith hanged himself in a punishment cell in Wormwood Scrubs on the 8th August 1974 following a programme of mistreatment including beatings, having his glasses smashed and so on, alleged that is by two hundred prisoners whose petition was smuggled out and then ignored.
In December 1977, Griffiths had written to Eric Mottram asking him for a character reference in the hope that he could access the inquest report about the death of Michael Dell, who drowned while attempting to escape a Borstal in Cambridgeshire. The application was evidently unsuccessful, and Dell’s name slips through the cracks, lost to the state records and reports in the local newspaper. In An Account of the End, Griffiths strips his work of invention, soberly judging his poetry against the traces these bodies leave behind. In one bitterly sarcastic passage he reflects both on the kinds of material I have been drawing on throughout this essay and on the position of the avant-garde poetry culture:
I take a look back through all the leaflets of the early 70’s. They are so fierce and so straight […] Now it’s just a matter of pointing the worst law-breakers out and all will go well. There’s a better state network too covering the arts for the whole country. If I’m favoured they may even print this for me, as there is no way I can afford it.
The collapse of his faction’s involvement in the Poetry Society brought about a crisis in Griffiths’ writing. Commenting self-reflexively on his listing of the dead, Griffiths
writes, ‘The plain compilation is a danger.’ But the work of poetry is suspended until ‘its good rhythms get to mean more than every aeon-rub and tear of instituted obliteration’. At this point the thread goes slack. Though the law continues as a theme throughout his writing in the 1980s, especially seen through the work of Boethius, the prison itself falls away.
On Sunday April 1st, 1990, prisoners staged a protest in the chapel of Strangeways Prison, Manchester. After the sermon they refused to leave, and as the anger mounted the Prison Officers began to evacuate the premises. After seizing keys from a guard, prisoners began unlocking the cells and quickly took control of the jail. The resulting siege and rooftop protest lasted 25 days. As in 1972, the disturbances spread to other prisons and came at a time of national unrest. On March 31st in central London the Poll Tax riots had forced the final defeat of Thatcher’s government, leading to her resignation in November. Soon after, the UK signed the Maastricht Treaty, integrating economic and fiscal policy with the European Union, and preparing the ground for EU conventions on Human Rights and justice. This is the context in which Griffiths returned to writing directly about prison.
The essay Griffiths sent Tony Blair in 1993, A Bill Griffiths Essay, begins with the critique of a television programme about HMP Wandsworth. Though Griffiths doesn’t name the film, it was a three-part series entitled Turning the Screws directed by the influential documentary maker and criminologist Roger Graef. Graef came to prominence in the 1980s with a series of films about police and policing. The focus of the Wandsworth documentary is on an industrial dispute between the Prison Officers Association (POA) and the Home Office. In 1989, a new shift system had been introduced, leading to a ten-day strike by the POA, during which the Metropolitan Police were brought in to control the prison. The dispute was never completely resolved, and following the Strangeways uprising, the POA were concerned about the conditions for prisoner association, the time spent by inmates outside of their cells. In the preface to A Bill Griffiths Essay, written at the same time as Seventy-Six Day Wanno, Griffiths complains that under the pretence of neutrality, the film reproduces:
[A] pre-established mythology of a three-tier society: a decision-making elite, a hard-working and dedicated corps of middle-men, and a substratum composed of characterless, nameless beings who inexplicably keep falling down stairs.
This is an accurate description. The narrative of Turning the Screws revolves largely around the chain-smoking union rep and the reforming Prison Governor, who occasionally quotes Macbeth. Each hour-long episode removes us further from the prison, until the final hearing at the Home Office where a repeat of the 1989 strike is averted. Though Griffiths notes in A Bill Griffiths Essay that there are two moments where the façade slips and we are presented with shots of a wounded prisoner and an officer disciplining an inmate, these are at best light pricks of conscience. The protagonists are the Officers; the antagonists are the management: the prisoners make little impression.
Where Graef starts from the standpoint of authority, Griffiths sides only and always with the prisoners. In A Bill Griffiths Essay his argument moves both outwards and inwards, from solitary confinement and institutional violence to Britain’s imperial past. The regime of the prison comes to rest as the keystone of the system, the point at which the State’s dynamic of internal suppression and external aggression is forged and sustained. As he says: ‘The use of prison to try and re-establish past ideals of submission and control seems more a model of extinction than any way forward.’ Griffiths arrives at this conclusion by way of the immediate materials at hand: television, newspapers, and his own experiences. While he was certainly familiar with Foucault and other sociological studies, he does not rely on theory for his claims. His prose is restrained, as it is in other contemporary essays such as In Rebuttal of the Guardian: On the Role of Solitary Confinement in British Prisons – Call for an Inquiry (1994) and Some Notes on the Metropolitan Police, London: With Some Footnotes on the Magistrates’ Courts (1994). He avoids the rhetoric of pathos, preferring instead to present his case with gentle irony. In what may be his first published essay, A Note on Democracy (1974), he leaves a generous margin for notes and supplies a return address for feedback and improvement.
But it’s possible that the essay Tony Blair promised to study closely wasn’t an essay at all. The two texts written in collaboration with Delvan are hybrid works: both A Bill Griffiths Essay and Seventy-Six Day Wanno smuggle poetry in the guise of prose, letters and diaries in the guise of poems and spoken testimony shaped by hand. A casual glance would hardly register the complexity.
Seventy-Six Day Wanno, Mississippi and Highpoint Journal – to give its full title – begins on April 23 1993. The previous day, the teenager Stephen Lawrence had been murdered by a racist gang at a bus stop in South London. The next day the Provisional IRA would bomb Bishopsgate. Neither event is mentioned in the text, which details Griffiths’ friendship with the young prisoner, Delvan. The book is laid out as an A4 landscape, split into two even columns. On the left-hand side runs Delvan’s journal, progressing chronologically, and beginning with his arrival at Wandsworth. He is almost immediately assaulted by prison guards:
I got sentenced to five months today. I am in Wandsworth prison, not the greatest place on earth, have got off to a seemingly bad start. Got a little bit of hassle off a screw for blanking him, when asked if I was ready to get banged up. He was not happy about this, he called four of his mates up to my cell, walked in slapped me across the face three or four times. I had to hold my hands behind my back to stop myself lashing out.
The incident is retold in more dramatic fashion in A Bill Griffiths Essay:
He sort of went a bit wild, him: ‘You black bastard,’ he yells at me,
‘You black shit: you see this whistle?
All I need is blow on this, see: and there’ll be eight of us
all over you, yes, and: off to the block head-down.
The right-hand side of the page is varied. It begins with a letter from Delvan to Bill, and is followed by Bill’s reply. These are the letters inaccessible at the archive in Brunel under data protection laws. As the book progresses, short poems from the incidents Delvan reports start to appear. Over the course of his 76-day stretch, Delvan is moved to Highpoint Prison, and we read about the bureaucratic obstacles this
creates: his visitors, who aren’t informed of the move, turn up at a prison where he is no longer held; his money and other personal belongings aren’t transferred with him; he has trouble getting help with his housing benefit forms. Between 76-Day Wanno and A Bill Griffiths Essay we are presented with a racist, violent, petty institution, and a portrait of survival within its confines.
Griffiths is sensitive to the special status of documents within the prison system. Unlike Graef, he makes the material conditions and terms of the book’s composition absolutely clear. In one passage, after Delvan has been transferred to Highpoint, we learn about the letters:
Letters are safe.
They are sealed, taken to Cambridge and posted.
It’s better and quicker than Wanno.
The letters come in,
and if there’s one for you,
your names posted on a noticeboard so
you know to go
and collect it.
There is a strange tenderness to the poems. Though the content is drawn from Delvan’s correspondence and conversation, the quotations aren’t exact. Griffiths instead imitates his friend’s voice, finding in it a weakened poetry. The prison routine is still too demeaning for the ‘good rhythms’ he put aside in Account of the End, the full music of Transformation Scene or Delbouffe. Instead, the march back-and-forth from the cell is marked by tired end-rhymes, ‘Wanno’, ‘so’, ‘go’. Where the earlier sequences placed the burden of interpretation on the reader, here Griffiths emphasizes the formal and structural devices of his writing. He makes the process of composition visible.
There is, however, one major exception: A Bill Griffiths Essay was published in two different variations, and only one features the poems. The editions are otherwise identical. It seems likely to me that the poems – later made into a longer standalone sequence called ‘How Highpoint is Better Than Wandsworth’ – were written to obscure the letters Bill sent to Delvan. These letters talk about a separate legal case
under review in the Magistrates’ Court: they are, perhaps, the wrong kind of evidence. The poems, then, are practical, necessary, tactical. Griffiths is a resourceful poet, and midway through A Bill Griffiths Essay he explains to Delvan that he’s working on another sequence, which will be issued in a signed limited edition to raise funds for the outstanding Magistrates’ fine. This is Ninety R R Capsules (or Trente-Six Chants…), issued in forty copies as ‘a gesture of support from the printing world’. A few pages later we learn that the book has raised £290.18. With full disclosure, Griffiths tells Delvan and tells his reader that the 18 pence was ‘someone paying for a stamp’. He describes the book as ‘my only successful publication ever.’
The text of Ninety R R Capsules is in two parts, telling the story of Delvan’s imprisonment, his childhood and adolescence. It is a work of sustained anger, analysis and poetic invention, and deserves to be more widely known. It presents a kind of prison writing that recalls the political engagement of the 1970s and it fuses documentary engagement with poetic experimentation in a tradition that stretches back to Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead. At the highest points of intensity, the division between Bill and Delvan disappears, leaving the poem to speak with painful clarity:
Is it act? drama? : It’s me causing it all?
and only I move? : yet you have not felt the weight of this ziggurat,
seen the slant : heard the broad cattle-groans,
been picked out : or bred to
or congratulated : or admired
for this grade of de-manning: this culture of sovereign shit :
the golden blood,
the complete overturning : that sets your taboos safe, outside,
keeps that normality self-placed : this is ritual.
Meaningless here : to make sense there.
(CP3, p. 199)
The barbarity of the prison system, its crushing waste of human life, is intolerable. I write this five miles away from Wandsworth Prison, with the windows open,
daylight pouring through the trees. The poem makes it impossible for me to forget the existence of the people incarcerated there. In the 12 months leading up to March 2017 there were 344 deaths in prison custody: 113 self-inflicted fatalities; 199 deaths due to natural causes; 3 apparent homicides; and 29 other deaths, 24 of which are ‘awaiting confirmation’ prior to being classified’. In March 2016, the BBC broadcast another documentary about Wandsworth, and though it showed the chaos of the prison rife with violence and drugs, the prisoners remained – as in 1992 – a ‘substratum composed of characterless, nameless beings’.
Griffiths’ work gives character, gives names, gives voices to the cold statistics of punishment and death at the hands of the State. In the middle of Ninety R R Capsules there’s a moment that catches my breath every time I read it:
Come on, let me tell you
the effect of the radios.
Suppose several were all tuned in the same,
one same song playing on them
and you stood in the doorway
for a listen.
Well, that was the whole music roll
about the landing
a proud sound,
something tinny and from wherever the bass
and running round and round the ears
back.
The prisoners’ radio is a weak and precarious instrument: but this is an image of solidarity, co-operation, and collective life. The passive receiver can be transformed through collaboration into a device for broadcast. Together, the tinny amplifiers make the bass appear, make the proud sound, the prisoners themselves heard along the landing and the doorway into the world. I started by describing the sheer quantity of work Griffiths produced as like a labyrinth; but maybe this is a better image. Each sequence like a radio, ready to be used.
From a single-sheet document, ‘Statement by London Group of PROP/Prisoners’ Charter’, undated, c. 1973. Collection of the author. Interview with Bridget Penney and Paul Holman, September 14, 1993. Online: <http://www.invisible-books.co.uk/?page_id=341>.
Brian Stratton, Who Guards the Guards? (London: Prop, 1973). The version I have seen, a slim red paperback, is described as the third edition, printed at the War on Want building on Caledonian Road, London. It thanks the Stranglers and the students of Oxford Polytechnic for helping to fund the publication.
PROP, Don’t Mark His Face: Hull Prison Riot 1976 (London: PROP, 1976). This volume contains a contribution from Jake Prescott, convicted in 1971 as a member of the Angry Brigade.
Alan Halsey notes: ‘Animals clearly fascinate Griffiths and appear in many of his poems. They are “outlaws” without being formally outlawed; they live outside human jurisdiction, although human jurisdiction does affect their lives and they have no choice in the matter. They live in human consciousness and at the same time far beyond it; they seem to us deeply emblematic but we suppose they inhabit a world without emblems.’ Alan Halsey, ‘Pirate Press: A Bibliographical Excursion’, The Salt Companion to Bill Griffiths, pp. 55–71 (60–61). (Cambridge: Lobby Press, 1978), n.p. This passage recalls the closing lines of Gilles Deleuze’s preface to a collection of letters by the prisoner ‘H.M.’, who hanged himself: ‘A specific number of people are directly and personally responsible for the death of H.M.’ Deleuze, ‘H.M.’s Letters’, in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1954–1974, ed. by David Lapoujade, trans. by Mike Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2004).
Griffiths also mentions the attempted suicide of George Ince. Ince, who was tried by Judge Melford Stevenson, was convicted based solely on the visual identification of four witnesses. He was later acquitted. See the report by JAIL: Martin Walker and Bernadette Brittain, Identification Evidence: Practices and Malpractices (London: Jail, 1978), pp. 4–5.
Eric Mottram Collection, King’s College London. Mottram: 5/100/1–36. The most extensive account of the events can be found in Nicki Jameson and Eric Allison, Strangeways 1990: A Serious Disturbance (London: Larkin Publications, 1995). (Seaham: Amra Imprint, 1993). There are many variances to this edition, some of which are recorded by Alan Halsey in CP3, pp. 513–14.
Graef is also the author of two books of documentary narrative. The first, Talking Blues: The Police in Their Own Words (London: Collins Harvill, 1989), is an ‘emotional mosaic’ of British and Northern Irish police officers (p. 11). The second, Living Dangerously (London: HarperCollins, 1992), features interviews with young offenders on an ‘extreme probation’ course in South London. While he expresses sympathy with his young subjects and offers them material assistance, his position is always that of the liberal reformer. As Foucault argues: ‘Prison “reform” is virtually contemporary with the prison itself: it constitutes, as it were, its programme.’ Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Vintage Books, 1977), p. 234.
Though Delvan notes at one point that he sits next to an IRA supporter while being transported from Wandsworth to Highpoint.
Bill Griffiths and D.R. McIntosh, Seventy-Six Day Wanno, Mississippi and Highpoint Journal (Seaham: Amra Imprint, 1993), n.p. (Seaham: Amra Imprint, 1993), collected in CP3, pp. 191–209 (193). As discussed below, the poems only appear in some variants of Seventy-Six Day Wanno, Mississippi and Highpoint Journal. They were later published as a sequence in their own right, ‘How Highpoint is Better than Wandsworth’, CP3, pp. 465–472 (467).