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Jeff Nuttall

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This article is about the poet, actor, and artist. For the church historian, see Geoffrey Nuttall.

Jeff Nuttall
Born
Jeffrey Addison Nuttall

(1933-07-08)8 July 1933
Clitheroe, Lancashire, England
Died4 January 2004(2004-01-04) (aged 70)
Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, Wales
Occupation(s)Poet
Publisher
Actor
Painter
Sculptor
Jazz trumpeter
Anarchist sympathiser
Social commentator

Jeffrey Addison Nuttall (8 July 1933 – 4 January 2004) was an English poet, publisher, actor, painter, sculptor, jazz trumpeter, anarchist[1] and social commentator who was a key part of the British 1960s counter-culture. He was the brother of literary critic A. D. Nuttall.

Life and work

Nuttall was born in Clitheroe, Lancashire, and grew up in Herefordshire. He studied painting in the years after the Second World War and began publishing poetry in the early 1960s. Together with Bob Cobbing,[2] he founded the influential Writers Forum press and writers' workshop.[3]

He also associated with many of the American beat generation writers, especially William Burroughs. Nuttall's self-published My Own Mag mimeographed newsletter provided Burroughs with an important outlet for his experimental literature in the early 1960s.

In 1966 he was one of the founders of the People Show, an early and long-lasting performance art group and was involved in the founding of the UK underground newspaper International Times. In 1967 two of his illustrations appeared in the counter-cultural tabloid newspaper The Last Times (Volume 1, number 1, Fall 1967) published by Charles Plymell.

His book Bomb Culture (1968) was one of the key texts of the countercultural revolution of the time, a work which drew links between the emergence of alternatives to mainstream societal norms and the threatening backdrop of potential nuclear annihilation. Nuttall was one of the pioneers of the happening in Britain.

Nuttall served as Chairman of the National Poetry Society from 1975 to 1976, a period when the Society briefly served as a home for the British Poetry Revival. He was poetry critic for several national newspapers and was the Poetry Society nominee for Poet Laureate but was overlooked in favour of Ted Hughes.

Nuttall worked as an art teacher; senior lecturer at Leeds Polytechnic and was head of fine art at Liverpool Polytechnic. As an actor, he appeared in over 40 feature films and television programmes.[4] His Selected Poems was published by Salt Publishing in 2003.[5] He had 4 children, Daniel, Sarah, Toby and Timothy

Works

  • Poems (1963), with Keith Musgrove
  • The Limbless Virtuoso (1963), with Keith Musgrove
  • The Change (1963), with Allen Ginsberg
  • My Own Mag (1963–66)
  • Poems I Want to Forget (1965)
  • Come Back Sweet Prince: A Novelette (1966)
  • Pieces of Poetry (1966)
  • The Case of Isabel and the Bleeding Foetus (1967)
  • Songs Sacred and Secular (1967)
  • Bomb Culture (1968), cultural criticism
  • Penguin Modern Poets 12 (1968), with Alan Jackson and William Wantling
  • Journals (1968)
  • Love Poems (1969)
  • Mr. Watkins Got Drunk and Had to Be Carried Home: A Cut-up Piece (1969)
  • Pig (1969)
  • Jeff Nuttall: Poems 1962–1969 (1970)
  • Oscar Christ and the Immaculate Conception (1970)
  • George, Son of My Own Mag (1971)
  • The Foxes' Lair (1972)
  • Fatty Feedemall's Secret Self: A Dream (1975)
  • The Anatomy of My Father's Corpse (1975)
  • Man Not Man (1975)
  • The House Party (1975)
  • Snipe's Spinster (novel, 1975)
  • Objects (1976)
  • Common Factors, Vulgar Factions (1977), with Rodick Carmichael
  • King Twist: a Portrait of Frank Randle (1978), biography of music hall comedian
  • The Gold Hole (1978)
  • What Happened to Jackson (1978)
  • Grape Notes, Apple Music (1979)
  • Performance Art (1979/80), memoirs and scripts, two volumes
  • 5X5 (1981), with Glen Baxter, Ian Breakwell, Ivor Cutler and Anthony Earnshaw (edited by Asa Benveniste)
  • Muscle (1982)
  • Visual Alchemy (1987), with Bohuslav Barlow
  • The Bald Soprano. A Portrait of Lol Coxhill (1989)
  • Art and the Degradation of Awareness (1999)
  • Selected Poems (2003)

Selected filmography

References

  1. ^ Gray, Maggie (2017). Alan Moore, Out from the Underground: Cartooning, Performance, and Dissent. Springer. p. 29. ISBN 978-3-319-66508-5.
  2. ^ Robert Sheppard. "Obituary: Bob Cobbing | Books". The Guardian. Retrieved 24 July 2014.
  3. ^ [1] Archived 21 November 2008 at the Wayback Machine
  4. ^ Jeff Nuttall at IMDb
  5. ^ "Salt — Publishers of Lesley Glaister, Alison Moore, Alice Thompson, the Best British anthologies and Modern Dreams". Salt Publishing. Retrieved 24 July 2014.
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