Robert Shaw (poet)

During a brief revival of touring in the East Midlands 2000–2002 a recording was made of new material, a sequence of verse portraits by Shaw of great jazzmen set against a duo performance of a number associated with each. The duo consisted of Shaw on reeds and Angharad Griffiths on keyboard. In the early 80's Leeds College of Music recorded an Electro-Acoustic Setting by Bill Charleson of 3 Poems by Robert Shaw. Subsequently it was used as part of a thesis presented at the University of York by Charleson.

His creative attachments included the USA's Northwest University, new towns, community projects and academic institutions. From 1992 to 2011 his creative energies were diverted to playing jazz, spending long periods performing in France, Spain and the Irish Republic.

Shaw has experimented in combining poetry with jazz role in the poetry&jazz project. He was the originator, director and poet, as well as performer of poems. He hired musicians, discussed the poems with them, and sketched the possible jazz responses but left the final musical detail to them. He wanted their improvisation, the defining characteristic of jazz, to interact with his "readings" in public performance. The jazzmen were drawn from leading modern jazz groups like those of Ronnie Scott, John Dankworth and Mike Westbrook and the British band of Maynard Ferguson. (Bassist Jeff Clyne, who played a number of engagements with the poetry&jazz touring outfit in 1974, was a member of the Stan Tracey Quartet which made the 1965 classic jazz album inspired by Under Milk Wood.)

A typical programme included straight jazz, poems on their own and, the major ingredient, poetry&jazz fusion. The package broadcast and played a variety of arts and jazz venues, touring Britain extensively from 1972 to 1983, as New Poetry&Jazz (in London, The South and Midlands) and Northern Poetry&Jazz (in The North and Scotland) attracting new followers to both forms. The most settled collaboration was the two years with the Dick Hawdon Quintet.

His early work – Private Time, Public Time, 1969, illustrated by Rigby Graham and published with the financial support of The Arts Council of Great Britain, Causes,1972, and Work in Progress, 1975, was complex and cerebral, with considerable use of ambiguity, but The Wrath Valley Anthology, 1981, with Grindley's Bairns, 1988, marked a more direct, colloquial, even "reductive" approach to irony. The Times Literary Supplement commented, "His wry humour produces a refreshing antidote to the bleak treatment that region (The Pennines) regularly provokes. He can include in his characteristic irony a sense of the predicament of suburban exile. His charmless eccentrics are treated with respect as well as irony."

From 1968 to 1972 he was Lecturer at The University of Southampton. In 1972 he became a freelance, returning to Yorkshire, to the Pennine village of Haworth where his wife, the studio-potter Anne Shaw, had set up Haworth Pottery.

Shaw's first poems were published in periodicals while a student at Leeds. However, becoming involved in the late fifties and early sixties, in anti-nuclear protest, with the Committee of 100 and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, with his wife, Anne Shaw, a Civil Disobedience activist who illegally distributed the government's secret Spies for Peace document, he did not resume literary work again until 1965.

For some years he then taught English in schools and in adult education for the Workers' Educational Association. From 1964 to 1968 he combined being Head of English and Sixth Form at the Leeds Modern School, with a part-time Tutorship at Leeds University and a Visiting Fellowship at The University of York.

Shaw compiled and edited, with a critical survey, the anthology of modern British poetry, Flash Point, 1964, and was himself anthologised in Brian Patten and Pat Krett's The House that Jack Built. Two of his poems – we are going to need poems and A North Country Lass Tells Her Sorrows – were designed as poster-poems by Rigby Graham and Roy Sandford. In 1981 the BBC commissioned a long poem. His reading of this was used as background to a BBC 2 television film about his work in its Pennine setting. His last published collection, in 2000, was Catullus: The Love-Hate Poems Translated by Robert Shaw, in free verse.

Robert John Shaw (born 31 July 1933) is a British poet and pioneer of poetry and jazz fusion.