1987 - 2000
1987 - 1990
The first Huddersfield Poetry Festival took place in 1987, coordinated by writers living and working in the town, in response to a national promotion taking place that year, called Poetry Live, which was initiated by the Arts Council and some of the leading British poetry publishers. With writers in residence at both the central library and the polytechnic, a new company based in Huddersfield calling itself The Poetry Business, and a number of local community arts companies using poetry in their work, the town was well-supplied with people willing to work for the cause. As a result of the excellent attendance figures for this first Festival, it was decided to continue the adventure, with the local council's Cultural Services department coordinating and funding the Festival between 1988 and 1990. So, credit to Kirklees Metropolitan Council for backing our vision from the start.
These first four years saw the Festival establish itself as a context in which voices from the local community were made welcome and given equal status with visiting stars. Black writers and women writers were also given prominence, while music was there from the very beginning. Perhaps the highlight of these years, among many superlative nights, was a week of activities which were not even officially part of the Festival, which took place in October 1988 and included a spellbinding performance by Ntozake Shange with trumpeter Rasoul Sadiq, in a packed, hot Huddersfield Art Gallery, with Albert Irvine's massive, mad, energetic abstract painting Mile End as a backdrop. Mile End was our constant companion in these years.
In 1991, with assistance from Kirklees Cultural Services, an independent organisation was created to run the Festival, and in January 1992 this organisation registered as a co-operative, with a membership composed of local writers.
1991 also saw changes in our programme, when we held the last of our mid-year Festivals and followed it with our first Autumn Season of events. From 1992 onwards, the Festival consisted of two seasons, in Spring and Autumn.
Over this period, the Festival changed venues several times, moving out of Huddersfield Art Gallery into local pubs and bars. We also began to include more workshops and process-based activities, to involve our audience more actively and more equally in the Festival programme. Another successful innovation we made, beginning in 1991, was the introduction of The Poetry Marathon, an all-day midsummer outdoor poetry reading held in Huddersfield's town centre piazza, to raise money for charity. The Marathons were followed in the evening of the same day by The Poetry Party, to reward all those who had taken part with music, a drink or two, and yet more poetry! Some of our finest moments occurred at The Marathons, perhaps the best being the scorching day Benjamin Zephaniah gave a superb performance for upwards of 2000 poetry fans, shoppers, sunbathers, children, stray dogs, flocks of pigeons and assorted members of the public.
Sadly, while it raised money for good causes, The Marathon cost us a good deal, so we had to discontinue it, with the last one taking place in summer 1995. But as one door closes another opens, and the gradual expansion of the Festival, as well as its increasing national reputation in England, were capped in October 1995 by The World Poetry Festival, a week of readings by literary stars, underpinned by an extensive workshop and education programme. With the financial support of the Swansea-based UK Year of Literature, we mounted our biggest ever Festival, featuring writers from far and wide. Among many excellent readings, Nina Cassian, Jack Hirschman and Miroslav Holub gave unforgettable performances, while every high school in the Borough received a visit from a writer.
As if this wasn't enough, we followed The World Poetry Festival with yet another departure, a weekend of coordinated workshops and performances, called A Writer's Journey. This project introduced a structure which we developed in subsequent years, by bringing writers together to collaborate on a single theme, on this first occasion the theme of growing up and becoming who we are. The work generated was so good we published it as an anthology, called A Journey.
During this period of growth we also began organising projects and tours for writers from outside the UK, our first International Writer in Residence being the San Franciscan novelist Peter Plate. After that year, our visiting writers played a bigger and bigger part in our Autumn Seasons, as well as travelling all over the UK.
1996 - 2000
Looking back, what we like about the Festival was that it never ceased to evolve. The hugely successful World Poetry Festival of 1995 brought certain chapters to a close, and opened new ones. Most particularly, it showed us that a programme combining workshops and events, combining poetry and other artforms, and introducing that magic ingredient of writers from abroad, was a far truer expression of the mix of internationalism and localism, upon which the Festival was based, than a simple programme of readings. So, from the Spring Season of 1996, all Festival events were inseparable from workshops, and the Festival itself became more and more a showcase for new work produced in its own workshop projects. Also, our Autumn Season was increasingly based around our International Writers in Residence, with the likes of Jack Hirschman, Devorah Major, David Meltzer, Erin Mouré and Sarah Murphy taking part in workshops, visiting schools and colleges, and performing in Huddersfield and around the UK.
One successful addition to the recipe was our adoption, in spring 1996, of the text/jazz/improv group Sang as Festival house band. Apart from the not inconsiderable achievement of creating a unique ambience at all events, Sang's musicians played an increasingly important role in the Festival, to the extent that in the spring of 1997 we created a month-long text-music project around them, called Begin Here, which culminated in two evenings of performance by 8 writers, most working with Sang, and who had each written a new piece and devised its setting in collaboration with the musicians over the month preceding the Festival. In 1998 Begin Here became demo/text, and following its success, demo/text became an annual project, supplying radical and exciting new text-music performances for our Spring and Autumn Seasons up to 2001. (It also resulted in some excellent live recordings which we hope to issue as CD's one day).
During this period, the Festival moved house yet again, making its new home in Autumn 1997 in the newly-opened Window on The World Café Bar, itself part of Huddersfield's then new Media Centre. The WoW Café proved to be our most hospitable venue, creating a great ambience and offering full access to people of all abilities. It was such a success that we moved our whole organisation into The Media Centre in January 1999, and played a part in the Centre's development as an arts venue and resource, in partnership with the Centre's digital research facility, though that role ended when we left the Media Centre in 2004
While the gradual submergence of the Festival by demo/text was an undoubted success artistically, little by little, over the last few years of its life, the audience for the Festival was disappearing. In Spring 1999, when we put on our last Season of readings separate from a demo/text project, among other low attendances we achieved an audience of 7 for a reading by Anne Stevenson and Lee Harwood. While neither is a populist celebrity, both are of considerable importance in the British poetry scene, so we felt it was an indication that the Festival had run its course when such fine poets could not draw an audience in Huddersfield. At this point we decided to let the Festival rest, while we concentrated on developing national tours for demo/text. Then demo/text developed into orfeo 5, so the performance element of our work has never gone away.
The University of Huddersfield now runs Huddersfield Literature Festival, which they set up in 2005. With academic precision, they claim it is 'the town's first literature festival'.
