Heathcote Williams - Poetry

Poetry

Williams himself is said to regard fame as 'the first disgrace,' a phrase Pacino from time to time quotes in private. He has been notoriously reluctant to cooperate in the promotion of his work on a commercial level, refusing, for example, to go to the US to promote AC/DC. He has been the despair of his publishers. The only book-signing tours he has ever done – 'enough,' he complained, 'to cripple a rock-star' – were merely the result of relentless pressure from Jonathan Cape's PR department. This episode, though having undeniably fortunate consequences for the poet's bank balance, was to have – almost as though to confirm his own worst assumptions – agonizingly unfortunate consequences for his private life. Not that this was Williams's debut 15 minutes, exactly. An affair some years earlier with the model Jean Shrimpton, an icon of '60s Swinging London, had resulted in the writer setting himself alight on her doorstep. Whether intentional or the upshot of a magical stunt gone wrong – Williams at the time being an ardent fire-eater – was never entirely clear. It was not unreasonably supposed to be a case of the supermodel dumping the scrivener. Somewhat astonishingly, however, in her autobiography published in the early 1990s, Shrimpton asserted that it was Williams who had in fact walked out on her.

Each was packed with detailed research and scores of photographs. Written some years earlier as visionary propaganda, they were probably the most lavishly illustrated English poetry since William Blake. They had otherwise been gathering dust in a corner of his then agent's office. The North American rights for the poem Whale Nation (1988) alone were sold at the Frankfurt Book Fair for $100,000. A more recent writer on the subject has described it as an "epic plea for the future of the whale, a hymn to the beauty, majesty and intelligence of the largest mammals on earth, as well as a prayer for their protection... Whale Nation became the most powerful argument for the newly instigated worldwide ban on whaling, and for a moment, back in 1988, it seemed as if a shameful chapter in human history might finally be drawing to a close."

Whale Nation was followed by Sacred Elephant (1989) and Autogeddon (1991). The latter still ranks as the most vigorous sustained flow of invective against car culture to date. It characterizes the motor car's global death toll as, "A humdrum holocaust, the third world war nobody bothered to declare." Each poem was made into a film by BBC Television, Autogeddon performed by Jeremy Irons who, somewhat to the chagrin of its author, turned out in promotional interviews to be an unabashed car-lover.

Williams is a consummate reader of his own poems, as well as of the literary classics. His performance of his Buckley-esque Jumping Jesus was characterised by an eminent London literary critic as 'like Alexander Pope on speed.' His public readings of Whale Nation have been known to reduce some members of the audience to tears. His recordings for Naxos Records, which include readings from the Buddhist scriptures, Dante and the Bible, have won awards.

In 2011, Williams began a new collaboration with Roy Hutchins, who had performed Whale Nation, Autogeddon and Falling for a Dolphin in the 1980s. The result was Zanzibar Cats, a performance of recent short poems. In What's on Stage, the reviewer Michael Coveney wrote, 'These wonderful poems seize on political absurdity, planetary destruction and social injustice with relish and delight, as well as great erudition and verbal dexterity.'

In December 2011, Huxley Scientific Press published a collection of poems by Williams on science and nature entitled Forbidden Fruit. The title poem is an elegy for mathematician, computer pioneer, and wartime codebreaker Alan Turing, the centenary of whose birth occurs in 2012. The beat poet Michael McClure has called the book “a collection of inspirations”, adding that it is “as rich and dark as wasp honey”.

Williams's most recent work is published by International Times. Royal Babylon: The Criminal Record of the British Monarchy was made into a video installation by the filmmaker collective Handsome Dog, to coincide with Queen Elizabeth II's diamond jubilee, and his poems Lord of the Drones: The President and the White House Fly, Hollywoodland, and Was Moby Dick Behind 9/11? (2012) are currently being edited into a trilogy—Autopsy: The American Empire Dissected.