01/10/2026
It's National Poetry Day!
🔵Our next blue plaque is for Beeston-born poet, Tony Harrison.
The city of Leeds is central to Harrison's poetry. At the unveiling, we'll be hearing reflections and poetry readings from Tony's family, including his partner, actor Sian Thomas, Richard Burgon MP, and members of the Leeds arts community.
👉Come to the unveiling at 12pm on Monday 12 October. Book your free ticket here: https://zurl.co/Q5xqr
To celebrate National Poetry Day, here's the opening to Harrison's controversial 448 line poem, 'V':
Next millennium you’ll have to search quite hard
to find my slab behind the family dead,
butcher, publican, and baker, now me, bard
adding poetry to their beef, b**r and bread.
With Byron three graves on I’ll not go short
of company, and Wordsworth’s opposite.
That’s two peers already, of a sort,
and we’ll all be thrown together if the pit,
whose galleries once ran beneath this plot,
causes the distinguished dead to drop
into the rabblement of bone and rot,
shored slack, crushed shale, smashed prop.
Wordsworth built church organs, Byron tanned
luggage cowhide in the age of steam,
and knew their place of rest before the land
caves in on the lowest worked-out seam.
This graveyard on the brink of Beeston Hill’s
the place I may well rest if there’s a spot
under the rose roots and the daffodils
by which dad dignified the family plot.
If buried ashes saw then I’d survey
the places I learned Latin, and learned Greek,
and left, the ground where Leeds United play
but disappoint their fans week after week,
which makes them lose their sense of self-esteem
and taking a short cut home through these graves here
they reassert the glory of their team
by spraying words on tombstones, pi**ed on b**r.
👉Read the whole poem here: https://zurl.co/HzTNF
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Image Description:
📸Image 1: The front cover to the print copy of V, which shows a black and white photograph of Harrison sat by his family plot headstone in Beeston cemetery.
