James Simmons (poet)

Throughout his career Simmons wrote and performed exquisitely provocative, yet hilarious and humane, songs about every aspect of contemporary life. In 1970 he founded a new platform for bringing these to a wider audience, the satirical revue – The Resistance Cabaret – with Garvin Crawford, Victor Thompson, David Templeton, Eithne Murphy, Jim Brown, Mike Graves, Jon Marshall and Heather Hutchinson. In varying line-ups, they performed their unique repertoire regularly at venues throughout Northern Ireland until 1976. His poetry collection, West Strand Visions, contains some of the repertoire. He recorded three collections of his own songs – City & Eastern, Love In The Post, The Rostrevor Sessions – and produced a Resistance Cabaret album with the other members. He also set a number of Yeats' poems to music which he released on a tape cassette. The album was called Women's Company and included original songs and a selection of jazz standards.

When Simmons returned to Northern Ireland he took part in The Belfast Group, together with such notables as Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon. In 1968, with his nephew Michael Stephens, Simmons went on a tour of universities in England. When he returned to Ireland, he established The Honest Ulsterman, the most important Irish literary journal of the next 35 years. Simmons served as the editor for 17 of the first 19 issues; he then passed control of the magazine onto a series of younger editors. The Honest Ulsterman published a series of more than 30 poetry chapbooks, including the first collections of work by Paul Muldoon ("Knowing My Place"), Michael Foley ("The Acne and the Ecstasy"), and Michael Stephens ("Blues for Chocolate Doherty"). Members of the Belfast Group frequently published in The Honest Ulsterman.

James Stewart Alexander Simmons (1933–2001) was a poet, literary critic and songwriter from Derry, Northern Ireland.

Simmons was born into a middle-class Protestant family in Derry in 1933 and attended Campbell College in Belfast before moving to the University of Leeds to read for a degree in English. He married Laura Stinson and returned to Northern Ireland to teach at Friends' School Lisburn for five years. His final foreign excursion was a position at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria, where he worked for three years. During this time they had five children: Rachael, Sarah, Adam, Helen and Penelope. He returned to Northern Ireland in 1968, accepting a position at the recently opened New University of Ulster in Coleraine, where he remained until his retirement in 1984.