Like many a young creative writer, Peter Ackroyd's earliest ventures were in the field of poetry. As he himself has explained, when he was a boy the only thing that interested him was poetry: ‘When I was a school boy I wrote poetry. And when I was a student I wrote poetry, and when I was at University or at school all I really wanted to read was poetry. That was my great ambition, to be a poet’. As a Cambridge undergraduate Ackroyd soon showed an extraordinary intellectual curiosity – what he described in Notes for a New Culture as ‘the intellectual equivalent of bulimia’ (NNC 7) – that got him a first-class Honours degree in English. As John Walsh has pointed out: ‘At Cambridge, his study technique was to immerse himself in every word written by or about an author who interested him, then distil from his reading a single essay of such nitric brilliance that his tutors and examiners could merely swallow hard and wonder about the safety of their tenure.’ Moreover, Walsh maintains, Ackroyd would soon show a similar overall acquisitiveness in his writing of novels and biographies.

At Cambridge Ackroyd not only read omnivorously, he also became acquainted with a group of teachers and students, including J. H. Prynne, Andrew Crozier, Ian Patterson and Kevin Strutford, some of whom were actively involved in the revitalization of English poetry along the cosmopolitan and heavily experimental lines set by John Ashbery and the New York School of poetry.

Ackroyd's earliest published poem, ‘The Goldfish Sonata’, appeared in the March 1971 issue of The Curiously Strong, a university poetry journal founded at Cambridge in 1969 by Fred Buck and Ian Patterson in order to promote this new kind of experimental poetry. The six-page issue where Ackroyd placed ‘The Goldfish Sonata’ also contained poems by Monk Tamming, Ian Patterson, David Rosenberg and Barry Macsweeney. The first issue consisted of two folio sheets printed both sides. It was distributed by post, for just the price of the stamps, to a growing number of sympathizers and soon increased its number of pages and frequency of appearance until it developed into a quarterly with one editor based in London (Fred Buck and later Ian Patterson) and another in New York (Chan and Paul Dorn).