Jeff Nuttall Biography

British poet and novelist, born in Clitheroe, Lancashire, educated at Hereford School of Art and Bath Academy of Art. He became Head of Fine Art at Liverpool Polytechnic in 1981. Nuttall was eminently involved with the underground poetry movement in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s and became its principal apologist with Bomb Culture (1968). His first substantial collection of poems, Poems I Want To Forget (1965), was followed by many others including Journals (1968) and Sun Barbs (1976). His Selected Poems and Poems 1962–69 were both published in 1970. The anarchically experimental ethos of Nuttall's poetry is indicated by his remark that ‘I am hardly at all concerned with direct verbal/syntactical “meaning”.’ Among his numerous novels are Oscar Christ and the Immaculate Conception (1968) and The Gold Hole (1978). Performance Art: Memoirs and Scripts (two volumes, 1979) collects his writings for the theatre. The Bald Soprano (1989) is an impressionistic portrait of the musician Lol Coxhill.