Bill Griffiths
Extremely distressing news just in: the poet Bill Griffiths died very suddenly at home. Just got the news sitting here at work waiting for the next proofreading job, & it’s the kind of news that makes you feel sick in the stomach. Bill was not especially old, & while he didn’t look exactly like the healthiest specimen I assumed we’d still have him around for years to come.
My one meeting with Bill was a sojourn in the Durham/Seaham area. Sat in Ric Caddel’s garden & chatted for an hour or so — this was in 2002, shortly before his death — and then took the coach to Seaham & spent a few days there at Bill’s place before returning to London. It was a quiet but pleasant time: Bill played Mozart on his horribly out-of-tune baby grand, spun countless CDs of his favourite symphonies, we discussed ghost stories (Bill, who at the time was writing a lot of ghost stories, was not an M.R. James fan, surprisingly), we fried up some fishcakes for dinner, he gave me a stack of his books on local dialect & many of his pamphlets & books (& I gave him a few Gig publications in return). Of the many books of his I own the one I treasure most is a chapbook publication of his translation of Guthlac B, & that’s what I’ll be reading tonight. (Another one to pull out of the stacks is his fine Coach House collection, the result of bp Nichols’ A&R work for the press.)
A post from Tom Raworth here.
Bill’s site here.
Anyway, as always, the lesson is: treasure these guys while they’re still around. & get their books — in their original, colourful, sometimes scruffy editions — while they’re still around, too. Bill’s work just isn’t the same in some stuffy collected-poems volume (though I do recommend getting hold of the o/p Paladin tripledecker collection Future Exiles anyway): you want to see those great old Amra Imprint & Pirate Press & Writers Forum editions.
September 17th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
Sad news Nate. Nice tribute. Bill was the real thing. He made a lot of things possible.