English poet James Kirkup was born in South Shields, Tyne and Wear, on April 23, 1918, and died in Andorra on May 10, 2009. I was introduced to his poetry in the mid-1950s, when my English teacher, Brian Merrikin Hill, recited The Submerged Village and A Correct Compassion at morning assemblies of Wennington School in Wetherby, Yorkshire. Later, I read James' first poems about Japan, which were published in the Listener — a magazine we received in the sixth-form common room. After leaving school, I also traveled to Japan. I worked for six months at a trading company in Tokyo, before becoming a copy editor at The Japan Times. I met James at a poetry reading in Yokohama in 1968, and subsequently at various events in Tokyo and Nagoya. For several years, I sent him everything I wrote — and was touched by his kindness and encouragement. We corresponded until shortly before his death. — Alan Ireland

Career

James Kirkup at the Tokyo grave of
Lafcadio Hearn, circa 1967.

• Durham University: BA (Hons) 1941; Fellow, Grey College, 1992.
• Gregory Fellow in Poetry, University of Leeds, 1950-52.
• Visiting Poet and Head of English Department, Bath Academy of Art, Corsham Court, Wilts, 1953-56.
• Lecturer in English, Swedish Ministry of Education, Stockholm, 1956-57.
• Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Salamanca, 1957-58.
• Professor of English, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan,
1958-61.
• Lecturer in English Literature, University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, 1961-62.
• Literary Editor, Orient/West Magazine, Tokyo, 1963-64.
• Professor, Japan Women's University, 1964-68.
• Poet in Residence and Visiting Professor, Amherst College, Mass., 1968-69.
• Professor of English Literature, Nagoya University, 1969-72.
• Arts Council Fellowship in Creative Writing, University of Sheffield, 1974-75.
• Morton Visiting Professor of International Literature, Ohio University, 1975-76.
• Playwright in Residence, Sherman Theatre, University College, Cardiff, 1976-77.
• Professor of English Literature, Kyoto University of Foreign Studies, Kyoto, Japan, 1977-89.

Awards and memberships

• Atlantic Award in Literature (Rockefeller Foundation), 1950.
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, 1964. (See Note 2 below.)
• Japan P.E.N. Club Prize for Poetry, 1965.
• Mabel Batchelder Award, 1968.
• President, Poets' Society of Japan, 1969.
• Sponsor, Institute of Psychophysical Research, 1970.
• Keats Prize for Poetry, 1974.
• British Haiku Society, 1990.
• Scott-Moncrieff Prize for Translation, 1997.
• Japan Festival Foundation Award, 1997. Invited by the Emperor and Empress to the New Year's
Poetry Party at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo.

In Memoriam: Bertrand Russell, which was later published in The Body Servant, sums up James' philosophy as well as anything. To make the above text easier to read, I have sharpened the type in a photo editor. The smudge looks like blood, but is actually just an "age spot".

To James Kirkup, Poet I, too, have seen Andorra. Like the clean-cut men at Creech who send their missiles screaming into huts in Swat, I came by stealth, with electronic caution; watched you coldly through the disembodied eyeball of a satellite. I set and carefully reset coordinates, clicked on arrows, nudged a needle on a calibrated scale, refined my focus... From the smudge of brown and green, a live topography emerged, with houses, schools and shops – the scattered blocks of some abandoned childhood game – and streets where traffic stopped to give my probing cursor right of way. I found your home, and heard again, I thought, the clacking of your ancient instrument, the ding of carriage bell that warned your poem of the precipice. I paused, my index finger poised impassively above the crouching mouse. And then I moved away. Alan Ireland, 2008

NOTE 1: Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, is home to the MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (drone) that is used to kill people identified as "militants" or "terrorists". NOTE 2: James Kirkup was not, at the time of his death, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. On finding that his name was not included in the list of Fellows, I wrote to The Royal Society of Literature and asked what the story was. I received the following reply, dated April 15, 2009: "Dear Alan Ireland, sorry to have been so slow to reply to your email, asking whether James Kirkup was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. It seems that he dropped off our lists some years ago, and I can only imagine that this must be that he decided that he no longer wanted to be a Fellow, and therefore stopped paying his subscription. But if he would like to be a Fellow, we would be more than delighted to reinstate him. Might it be possible to pass this information on to him? — Maggie Fergusson, Secretary, The Royal Society of Literature, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA." Unfortunately, James died less than a month later. NOTE 3: The poems A House in Summer and Tea in a Space-Ship can be found here. NOTE 4: Visitor statistics as of February 27, 2013: Ukraine 80, United Kingdom 64, United States 39, India 37, China 24, France 18, Poland 16, Russia 11, Singapore 6, Germany 5. It's a little surprising — to me, at any rate — that Japan does not figure in this list.

Click here for my memoir of England in the 1950s, and here for my main site.

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This site was last updated on April 23, 2013.