Peter Barry (poet)

Peter Thomas Barry FEA, FLSW (born 1947) is a British writer and academic.

Background

Peter Barry was born and raised in Liverpool and educated in Catholic grammar schools and at Upholland College in Lancashire. He studied English at King's College, London (1967–70) and American Studies (part-time) at London University's Institute of United States Studies (1970–72), where he was taught by Howell Daniels and Eric Mottram. He published a reminiscence of his London years in Robert Hampson and Ken Edwards (eds), Clasp: late modernist poetry in London in the 1970s.^[1] His two main academic appointments were at LSU College of Higher Education, Southampton (later Southampton University New College), as Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer in English (1980–95), and at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (now Aberystwyth University). Here he was appointed as Senior Lecturer, and subsequently promoted to Reader and Professor of English. He is currently Emeritus Professor of English (1995–Present).

He was the editor of English (the journal of the English Association for twenty years and was elected a Fellow of the English Association.^[2] In 2017, he was elected as a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales (Cymdeithas Ddysgedig Cymru).^[3]

Work

Barry's fields of academic specialism are contemporary poetry and literary theory. During the 1970s, he co-edited the poetry magazine Alembic (with Ken Edwards and Robert Gavin Hampson.^[4] Barry subsequently went on to set up his own magazine, Windows, which he co-edited from 1977 to 1981.^[5]

His first book, which grew out of this editorial experience, was The New British Poetries: the scope of the possible (Manchester University Press, 1993, ISBN 0-7190-3485-X), which he co-edited with Robert Gavin Hampson.^[6] He subsequently published Contemporary British poetry and the city (Manchester University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-7190-5594-6).^[7] This literary critical study of contemporary poets writing about the city was followed by Poetry Wars: British poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (Salt, 2006, ISBN 1-844712-47-8), an archive-based account of events in the Poetry Society in the 1970s.^[8] Poetry Wars received a positive review from Matthew Francis in the leading poetry journal PN Review.^[9]

Barry returned to poetry and the city in a series of essays. These include his contributions to Gladsongs and Gatherings: Poetry in its Social Context in Liverpool since the 1960s (ed. Stephen Wade, Liverpool University Press, 2001) and Writing Liverpool: Essays and Interviews (ed. Michael Murphy and Deryn Rees-Jones, Liverpool University Press, 2007), as well as 'London in Twentieth-Century Poetry' in The Cambridge Companion to London in English Literature (ed. Lawrence Manley, Cambridge University Press, 2011); 'Poetry and the City' in The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry, 1945-2010 (ed. Ed Larissy, Cambridge University Press, 2015); and 'Mapping the Geographies of Hurt in Barry MacSweeney and S. J. Litherland' in Poetry and Geography: Space and Place in Post-War Poetry (ed. David Cooper and Neal Alexander, Liverpool University Press, 2017).

At the same time, Barry was also publishing on literary theory. His first book in this field was Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (Manchester University Press, 1995).^[10] This work has now gone through three editions and sold over 300,000 copies. According to Professor Steven Regan, Beginning Theory has had 'a vital role in shaping the way that theory is taught in Britain and North America'.^[11] In 2015, as part of Oxford University Press's celebration of University Press Week, Barry was asked to provide an account of the genesis and rationale of what was described as a 'ground-breaking and critically acclaimed undergraduate textbook'.^[10]

This orientation towards pedagogy was further evidenced in his next three books, English in Practice: In Pursuit of English Studies (Bloomsbury, 2003), Literature in Contexts (Manchester University Press, 2007 ISBN 978-0-7190-6455-5) and Reading Poetry (Manchester University Press, 2013), while he returned to literary theory with Extending Ecocriticism: Crisis Collaboration and Challenges in the Environmental Humanities (Manchester University Press, 2017, ISBN 978-1-78499-439-6), which he co-edited with William Wellstead.

Barry has also pursued these interests in literary theory, pedagogy and English studies through his editorials in English over twenty years and articles in journals like the THE and PN Review.^[12]

Poetry

Barry is also a published poet. He published his first pamphlet Bretton Days (Share) in the early 1970s, when he was one of the editors of Alembic with Ken Edwards and Robert Gavin Hampson. He was also one of the featured poets in Mugshots, the series produced by Mike Dobbie and Ulli McCarthy (1976–77).^[13] Over the past few years, he has published poetry in Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review and Stand, and a sequence of twelve poems about life at Upholland was included in the anthology Kaleidoscope from Cinnamon Press in 2011.^[2][14]

Scholarship

In 2013, he was the Principal Investigator for the three-year Leverhulme-funded project, Devolved Voices, on English-language poetry written in Wales since Welsh Devolution in 1997.^[15]

References

1. Peter Barry, 'Climbing the Twisty Staircase: 'London' 1970-85' in Robert Hampson and Ken Edwards (eds), Clasp: late modernist poetry in London in the 1970s (Bristol: Shearsman, 2016), 110-14. ISBN 978-1-84861-460-4.
2. "Aberystwyth University - Department of English & Creative Writing : Staff Profiles". aber.ac.uk.
3. Wales, The Learned Society of. "Peter Barry". The Learned Society of Wales.
4. David Miller & Richard Price, British Poetry Magazines 1914-2000 (The British Library, 2006, p.127 ISBN 0-7123-4941-3; Wolfgang Gortschacher, Little Magazine Profiles 1939-1993, University of Salzburg, 1993, pp.163-65 ISBN 3-7052-0608-7; Wolfgang Gortschacher, Contemporary Views on the Little Magazine Scene, Poetry Salzburg, 2000, pp.59, 233, 255, 388, 391, 411 ISBN 3-901993-06-1.
5. Price and Miller, p.339
6. The New British poetries was hailed as a pioneering study in its particular field by the editors of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry in their editorial to their first edition (September 2009). See: https://poetry.openlibhums.org/news/388/.
7. The reviewer in the Times Higher wrote, in relation to Contemporary British Poetry and the City: '[Barry] is a persuasive purveyor of urban mythology, with its lost rivers, haunting palimpsests of the built environment, and cycles of decay and regeneration'.
8. In his review in Jacket magazine, Robert Sheppard described Poetry Wars as 'not only important to the revaluation of the poetry of the 1970s, but of the decades that followed, and to the state of British poetry today'. See "Jacket 31 - October 2006 - Robert Sheppard: "Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court" by Peter Barry". jacketmagazine.com.
9. Matthew Francis, 'When the margins reached the centre', PN Review 175, vol.33.no.5, May–June 2007
10. "Beginning Theory at 20". OUPblog. November 12, 2015.
11. English Association Newsletter
12. See, for example, Peter Barry, 'The Apple of Theory', PN Review 48, vol. 12. no.4 (March–April 1986) on the current state of literary criticism or Peter Barry, 'An academic discipline foresees its death', PN Review 173, vol.33.no.3 (Jan-Feb 2007) on changes in English studies.
13. Miller and Price, pp.288-89.
14. https://inpressbooks.co.uk/product/kaleidoscope ^{[dead link‍]}
15. "Devolved Voices -- Meet the Team: Professor Peter Barry, Principal Investigator" – via www.youtube.com.