Grave Police Music: On Bill Griffiths

This essay takes the publication of Bill Griffiths’ Collected Poems as an opportunity to look again at his poems about prison. While sequences like Cycles and War W/Windsor have long been acknowledged as highpoints of the so-called British Poetry Revival, the broader social context of their composition has been overlooked. I link Griffiths’ work in the 1970s with mass protests in English prisons, and the activism of Preservation of the Rights of Prisoners (PROP). I suggest that the uncollected sequence An Account of the End signals a break in Griffiths’ work, and pick up the thread again in the early 1990s. I argue for the importance of an essay, HMP: Revising Prison, a poem, Star Fish Jail, and a hybrid work of journals and letters, 76-Day Wanno. These works, written in the wake of the Strangeways prison riot, combine prison activism with aesthetic experimentation. The essay combines archival sources, close textual scholarship, and historical investigation.