Alan Brownjohn was our 2009 guest poet, with Elaine Feinstein
at the 1st Annual Camden National Poetry Day Celebration
co-produced by the Purple Poets, the West Euston Time Bank
and the Third Age Project, facilitated by a grant of £500 (in total) by Camden

Camden Town Hall Council Chambers
Thursday, October 8th 2009

Alan Brownjohn is a Camden poet (b. July 28, 1931) . Alan is a talented poet, playwright, novelist, journalist, critic and writer of children's books. Alan and Elaine Feinstein are our Honoured 'Poetic Heroes' at the  Purple Poets' HEROES ON POSTCARDS reading at the Camden Town Hall with the Mayor of Camden, Councillor Faruque Ansari, on National Poetry Day,  October 8th 2009 (2 - 4 p.m.).

Come join them to celebrate our Borough of Camden Heroes!

BIOGRAPHY (source: The Poetry Archive)
.... Brownjohn himself acknowledges the moral purpose of his writing: "I write nothing without hoping it might make the world one grain better - a pompous statement which, I suppose, makes me a moralist as a writer, a humanist one." This is borne out by the subject matter of his poems which, for all their stylistic and thematic diversity, are principally interested in human social interaction. Narrative is often the chosen mode of investigation: some poems, 'An Orchard Path' or 'The Presentation' for instance, have the charged mystery of the best short stories. Brownjohn is an acute and sometimes satirical observer of "the minutiae of human behaviour" whether exposing the sinister banalities of modern life in 'Incident on a Holiday' or detailing the rituals of boredom and hierarchy amongst the department store staff in his sequence 'The Automatic Days'. Alongside this social realism is also a strong streak of the fantastic and surreal, often employed in the creation of dystopias as in his description of the overbearing Nanny in 'From his Childhood' whose ringing cry of "Courage!" is both amusing and unsettling.....

His recording was made for The Poetry Archive on 12 July 2002 at The Audio Workshop, London, UK and was produced by Liane Aukin.

Alan Brownjohn's Favourite Poetry Sayings:
"Poetry as 'a criticism of life' has always appealed to me, but it's usually forgotten that Matthew Arnold went on to add 'under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.' In other words, the poetry - which has to come out of a sense of the wonder of existence and the desire to give it meaning and permanence (and sometimes extra colour and oddity) - comes first." - Alan Brownjohn on Matthew Arnold

"Poetry is an exact a science as geometry" - Flaubert

"A poet I admire and enjoy deeply, John Crowe Ransom, said somewhere that writing poetry was somewhat like gardening, which is strange from someone whose poems don?t look in the least 'organic', but have a kind of painted or sculpted formality." - Alan Brownjohn on John Crowe Ransom

Books
Travellers Alone, Liverpool, Heron Press, 1954
- out of print

The Railings, London, Digby Press, 1961
- out of print

To Clear the River (as John Berrington), London, Heinemann, 1964 - out of print

The Lions' Mouths, London, Macmillan, 1966
- out of print

Penguin Modern Poets 14 (Alan Brownjohn, Michael Hamburger and Charles Tomlinson), London, Penguin, 1969
- out of print

Sandgrains on a Tray: Poems, Macmillan, 1969
- out of print

First I Say This: A Selection of Poems for Reading Aloud (editor), London, Hutchinson, 1969
- out of print

Brownjohn's Beasts, London, Secker and Warburg, 1970
- out of print

New Poems 1970-1971 (with Seamus Heaney and Jon Stallworthy), Hutchinson, 1971
- out of print

Warrior's Career, Macmillan, 1972 - out of print
A Song of Good Life, Secker and Warburg, 1975
- out of print

New Poetry 3 (editor with Maureen Duffy), London, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1977
- out of print

A Night in the Gazebo, Secker and Warburg, 1980
- out of print

Goethe's Torquato Tasso (adaptation), London, Angel, 1985
- out of print

The Old Flea-Pit, Hutchinson, 1987
- out of print

Meet and Write: A Teaching Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (editor with Sandy Brownjohn), London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1987

Collected Poems 1952-1983, Hutchinson, 1983 (new ed. 1988)
- out of print

The Observation Car, Hutchinson, 1990
- out of print

The Gregory Anthology 1987-1990 (editor with K. W. Gransden), Hutchinson, 1990

In the Cruel Arcade, London, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994
- out of print

Pierre Corneille's Horace (translator), Angel, 1996
- out of print

The Cat Without E-mail, London, Enitharmon, 2001

The Men Around Her Bed, Enitharmon, 2004

Alan Brownjohn Reading from his poems, CD,
The Poetry Archive, 2005

Collected Poems, Enitharmon, 2006

Publishers
Enitharmon Press
Hutchinson

Prizes
1979 Cholmondeley Award
1985 Travel Scholarship from the Society of Authors
1990 Authors' Club Prize First Novel Award, The Way You Tell Them

WEBSITES FEATURING ALAN BROWNJOHN'S WORK

Camden Books: Windows On The Moon | Alan Brownjohn | Black Spring Press (£15)...  16 April 2009 ...  When we last hit the skids
Poet Alan Brownjohn tells Simon Wroe that his new novel draws on memories of post-war austerity.  "--SUDDEN snowfall in February and a frosty economic climate for all seasons are very 2009 concerns, but to the writer Alan Brownjohn they are strangely familiar portents.
"The poet, who has lived in Belsize Park for nearly 40 years, has just published his fourth novel, Windows on the Moon, an historical fiction about post-war London during the ferocious winter of 1946/47.
"Brownjohn, 16 at the time, remembers this winter as “the most vivid climatic event in my lifetime,” an experience compounded by food rations, threadbare clothes and economic torpor."
http://www.thecnj.co.uk/review/2009/041609/books041609_02.html

Poetry Archive
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=106

British Humanist Association
http://www.humanism.org.uk/about/people/distinguished-supporters/Alan-Brownjohn

Doollee Playwrights Data Base: Plays and Play Publications
http://www.doollee.com/PlaywrightsB/brownjohn-alan.html

Thanks to a £500 grant by the Camden Council
Alan Brownjohn (and Elaine Feinstein)
were our Honoured 'Poetic Heroes'
at the Purple Poets'
HEROES ON POSTCARDS  
National Poetry Day 2009 Reading
hosted by the Purple Poets
at the Camden Town Hall, October 8th 2009 (2 - 4 p.m.)

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