James Kirkup

Poet, playwright and writer

• Born: April 23, 1918
• Birthplace: South Shields, Durham, England
• Died: May 10, 2009

Biography

James Kirkup was born on April 23, 1927, in South Shields, County Durham, England, the only son of working-class parents James Harold and Mary (Johnson) Kirkup. He began writing poetry while attending South Shields Secondary School. In 1941, he received a B.A. with double honors from King’s College, the University of Durham. Upon graduation, his pacifist views led him to seek conscientious objector status, and he was assigned to work for five years as a farm laborer and for the Forestry Commission.

During this time, Kirkup immediately began his extraordinarily prolific career in poetry, autobiography, drama, and translation, eventually writing under the names James Falconer, Andrew James, and Ivy B. Summerforest, as well as his own name. In 1942, Kirkup published his first book of poetry, Indications, which also contained verse by John Ormand Thomas and John Bayliss. The Cosmic Shape: An Interpretation of Myth and Legend with Three Poems and Lyrics, by Kirkup and Ross Nichols, followed in 1946. One of his better-known collections is A Correct Compassion, and Other Poems (1952). Kirkup’s literary association with The Listener and its editor, J. R. Ackerley, dates from this time. His teleplays for the British Broadcasting Corporation began with Peach Garden in 1954, and his first dramatic production, Upon This Rock: A Dramatic Chronicle of Peterborough Cathedral, was staged in 1955. Kirkup has chronicled virtually all phases of his life, beginning with The Only Child: An Autobiography of Infancy (1957), and has published numerous translations from several languages.

Kirkup’s professorial career has been as varied and extensive as his publishing. From 1950 through 1952 he served as the first Gregory Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds, and then taught at the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham, England, until 1956. After teaching in Stockholm, Sweden, and at the University of Salamanca in Spain, Kirkup visited Japan for the first time in 1959. “For the first time in my life I did not feel a stranger on the earth,” he wrote about his experience in Japan. Some of his most critically successful poetry arose out of this sense of place, including the award-winning collection Japan Marine, published in 1965. The remainder of his teaching career was divided between Japan, the United States, and England, except for an unhappy year at the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, where he taught from 1961 through 1962.

Throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, Kirkup’s work was greatly influenced by the Japanese haiku form. In 1978, Kirkup founded the publishing company Kyoto Editions, primarily to publish his own haiku collections. He has won the Atlantic Award in Literature (1950), the International Literary Prize for Japan Marine (1965), the Batchelder Award for translation (1970), and the Keats Prize for Poetry (1974). He is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and was elected a Knight of Mark Twain in 1979. In 1994, Yale University acquired a collection of Kirkup’s papers.

On July 11, 1977, in the case of Whitehouse v. Lemon, the magazine Gay News was found guilty under England’s Blasphemy Law for publishing “The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name,” Kirkup’s poem about a Roman centurion having sexual encounters with the dead body of a gay Jesus. Following the notoriety of the trial, Kirkup left England and settled in Andorra. In July, 2002, a public protest was held in London on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the conviction where protestors read and distributed the poem and demanded the abolition of the Blasphemy Law.