Beats, Poets, Renegades: A 1960s Northern Poetry Underground and its Countercultural Impact

Abstract

This thesis considers the 1960s poetry, writing and publishing of Jim Burns, Dave Cunliffe and Tina Morris who produced little poetry magazines Move and Poetmeat from Preston and Blackburn respectively and also the latter’s small press BB Books.
It places their work within an influential avant garde literary field which spread new forms of poetry alongside the radical politics of what later became known as the counterculture.
This work analyses both their literary and social impact, for the first time linking a northern poetry underground with a radical activism still visible today.