Richard Caddel - Biography

Biography

Caddel was born in Bedford and grew up in Gillingham, Kent. He studied music at the University of Newcastle, but changed to English after meeting poets Basil Bunting and Tom Pickard. He helped Tom and Connie Pickard organise the seminal Morden Tower poetry readings.

Caddel's work was influenced by Bunting, by the Americans Lorine Niedecker, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creeley and William Carlos Williams, and by the English landscape tradition as represented by John Clare.

He published a number of small pamphlets, most of which were collected in three books; Sweet Cicely (1983), Uncertain Time (1990) and Larksong Signal (1997) A volume of selected poems, Magpie Words, appeared in 2002. His final book, Writing In The Dark, was published in late 2003.

With his wife Ann, Caddel ran Pig Press, through which he published a number of the more interesting avant-garde British, Irish and American poets of the latter half of the 20th century.

Caddel edited Bunting's Uncollected Poems in 1991 and his Complete Poems in 1994. With Peter Quartermain, he edited the anthology Other: British And Irish Poetry Since 1970 (1998). He served as Director of the Basil Bunting Poetry Centre at Durham University for a number of years up to his death. A lifelong asthmatic, Caddel died of leukaemia on 1 April 2003.