This book was prompted by a vague feeling that the city of Liverpool and the three poets associated with the now-celebrated Mersey Sound volume (in the Penguin Modern Poets series, 1967) presented an assortment of paradoxes. First, there was the notion that Liverpool was hardly a ‘cultural centre’ in the way that such a thing had been explained to me during my schooling. My secondary modern education in Leeds had led me to classify poetry as something that bore no relation to the pop lyrics of the late 1950s and early 1960s; yet critics were talking about Liverpool as a place of renaissance and music revolution.

Secondly, there was the realisation that the poets in that volume were somehow not the same as the poets I was given to study in the first year of my English degree. My friends and I separated Roger McGough from Stephen Spender but were unable to say why we did so. With hindsight, it is possible to see McGough, Adrian Henri and Brian Patten and their associated world of students, workers and musicians as a key element in a movement of literary renewal – one that was not conscious of being ‘literary’ at all.

Gladsongs and Gatherings, then, began with a conviction that McGough, Patten and Henri were important in British literary history for several reasons. Their attitudes, despite having literary antecedents in writers such as Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91), Allen Ginsberg (1926–97) and Adrian Mitchell (born 1932), were hard to define in performance, and it was surely the delivery and realisation of often throw-away lines that emphasised their achievement. Those who saw the performances in coffee bars and pubs attest to something different, a direct and somehow natural sensibility and wit that was already well established in the city and its people.

In the course of interviewing McGough and Patten in preparation for this collection, I became aware that the actual practitioners are reluctant to provide an explanation of what they did 30 years ago; in fact, their poetics is based largely on a specifically Romantic conviction that the self is not only central to creativity but generative of a dramatised instant of feeling.