blonde poker forum

Just had a bit of a barney with my beloved about something.

Which of the following people is more famous:

Rob Andrew or Tony Harrison?

Have you heard of either or both of them?

Nappy duties for a week for the loser! So it's vitally important!!!!!!!!!!!

whos tony harrison?

who is tony harrison?

Rob Andrew  = Egg Chaser?
Tony Harrison = No idea

Good Luck

I agree, who is he   0:-)

Rob Andrew.

who on earth is tony harrison

btw rob andrew is the current coach of newcastle RFC

Tony Harrison
Tony Harrison

Genres | Bibliography | Prizes and awards | Critical perspective
Author statement | Related links | Printer-friendly version

 

 
 
 
 Photo: © Jane Bown
 
 
 
Biography
Tony Harrison is Britain's leading film and theatre poet. He has written for the National Theatre in London, the New York Metropolitan Opera and for the BBC and Channel 4 television. He was born in Leeds, England in 1937 and was educated at Leeds Grammar School and Leeds University, where he read Classics and took a diploma in Linguistics.

He became the first Northern Arts Literary Fellow (1967-8), a post that he held again in 1976-7, and he was resident dramatist at the National Theatre (1977-8). His work there included adaptations of Molière's The Misanthrope and Racine's Phaedra Britannica.

His first collection of poems, The Loiners (1970), was awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1972, and his acclaimed version of Aeschylus's The Oresteia (1981) won him the first European Poetry Translation Prize in 1983. The The Gaze of the Gorgon (1992) won the Whitbread Poetry Award.

His adaptation of the English Medieval Mystery Plays cycle was first performed at the National Theatre in 1985. Many of his plays have been staged away from conventional auditoria: The Trackers of Oxyrhyncus was premièred at the ancient stadium at Delphi in 1988; Poetry or Bust was first performed at Salts Mill, Saltaire in Yorkshire in 1993; The Kaisers of Carnuntum premiered at the ancient Roman amphitheatre at Carnuntum in Austria; and The Labours of Herakles was performed on the site of the new theatre at Delphi in Greece in 1995. His translation of Victor Hugo's The Prince's Play was performed at the National Theatre in 1996.

His films using verse narrative include V, about vandalism, broadcast by Channel 4 television in 1987 and winner of a Royal Television Society Award; Black Daisies for the Bride, winner of the Prix Italia in 1994; and The Blasphemers' Banquet, screened by the BBC in 1989, an attack on censorship inspired by the Salman Rushdie affair. He co-directed A Maybe Day in Kazakhstan for Channel 4 in 1994 and directed, wrote and narrated The Shadow of Hiroshima and Other Film/Poems, screened by Channel 4 in 1995 on the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the first atom bomb. The published text won the Heinemann Award in 1996. He wrote and directed his first feature film Prometheus in 1998.

In 1995 he was commissioned by The Guardian newspaper to visit Bosnia and write poems about the war. His most recent collection of poetry is Under the Clock (2005).

Tony Harrison lives in Newcastle upon Tyne.

 

 

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Genres (in alphabetical order)
Drama, Poetry, Screenplay

 

 

Bibliography
Earthworks   University of Leeds, 1964


Aikin Mata: The Lysistrata of Aristophanes   (translator)   Oxford University Press, 1966


Newcastle is Peru   Eagle Press, 1969


The Loiners   London Magazine Editions, 1970


The Misanthrope   (translator)   Rex Collings, 1973


Palladas: Poems   (translator and introduction)   Anvil Press Poetry, 1975


Phaedra Britannica   Rex Collings, 1975


Bow Down   Rex Collings, 1977


The Passion   Rex Collings, 1977


From the School of Eloquence and Other Poems   Rex Collings, 1978


Looking Up   (with Philip Sharpe)   Migrant Press, 1979


A Kumquat for John Keats   Bloodaxe, 1981


Continuous (50 Sonnets from the School of Eloquence and Other Poems)   Rex Collings, 1981


The Oresteia   (adaptation)   Collings, 1981


US Martial   Bloodaxe, 1981


Selected Poems   Penguin, 1984


Dramatic Verse 1973-1985   Bloodaxe, 1985


The Fire Gap: A Poem with Two Tails   Bloodaxe, 1985


The Mysteries   Faber and Faber, 1985


V   Bloodaxe, 1985


Theatre Works 1973-1985   Penguin, 1986


Anno Forty Two: Seven New Poems   Scargill Press, 1987


Ten Sonnets from the School of Eloquence   Anvil Press Poetry, 1987


The Mother of Muses   (limited edition)   Rampant Lions Press, 1989


Losing Touch   (limited edition)   Rampant Lions Press, 1990


The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus   Faber and Faber, 1990


A Cold Coming: Gulf War Poems   Bloodaxe, 1991


Square Rounds   Faber and Faber, 1992


The Common Chorus   (an adaptation of Aristophanes' Lysistrata)   Faber and Faber, 1992


The Gaze of the Gorgon   Bloodaxe, 1992


Black Daisies for the Bride   Faber and Faber, 1993


Poetry or Bust   Salts Estates, 1993


A Maybe Day in Kazakhastan   Channel 4 Poetry, 1994


Penguin Modern Poets 5   ((Tony Harrison, Simon Armitage, Sean O'Brien))   Penguin, 1995


Permanently Bard   Bloodaxe, 1995


Selected Poems   Penguin, 1995


The Shadow of Hiroshima and Other Film/Poems   Faber and Faber, 1995


Plays   (Contents: Poetry or Bust; The Kaisers of Carnuntum; The Labourers of Herakles)   Faber and Faber, 1996


The Prince's Play/Victor Hugo   (translator)   Faber and Faber, 1996


Prometheus   Faber and Faber, 1998


Plays 1: The Mysteries   Faber and Faber, 1999


Laureate's Block and Other Occasional Poems   Penguin, 2000


Plays 4: The Orestia/The Common Chorus (parts 1 and 2)   (translator)   Faber and Faber, 2002


Under the Clock   Penguin, 2005


 

  Buy books by Tony Harrison at Amazon.co.uk 

 

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Prizes and awards
1972   Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize   The Loiners


1983   European Poetry Translation Prize   The Oresteia


1987   Royal Television Society Award   (film)   V


1992   Whitbread Poetry Award   The Gaze of the Gorgon


1994   Prix Italia (Italy)   (film)   Black Daisies for the Bride


1996   Heinemann Award   The Shadow of Hiroshima and Other Film/Poems


 

 

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Critical Perspective

Harrison has forged a singular career as a poet, dramatist, film-maker - and these all in verse. He was a working class scholarship boy and his obsession with class and his passion for classical literature remain the two driving forces of his work. His early poems, collected in The Loiners (1970) (Loiners are residents of Leeds), were muscular and anguished about sex, class, family and the struggle to acquire culture. The characteristic poem was perhaps 'Thomas Campey and the Copernican System', the poem that opens the book. Thomas Campey was a poor second-hand bookseller who sold books off a handcart. Harrison is a buyer of second-hand books and the ironic distance between the culture Campey purveys and his own pathetic circumstances is at the heart of Harrison's art. He insists on both high art and the consequences for the class he came from of the stratification of society that high art entails.

Harrison travelled very widely in his early years as a poet, especially in Africa and Eastern Europe. The African poems convey a teeming panorama of self-disgust and degradation 'I murmur over and over; / buttocks...buttocks...BUTOX, / marketable essence of beef - / negritude - dilute to taste!' from 'The Zeg-Zeg Postcards'.

In his early years Harrison didn't publish conventional self-contained volumes, but worked on series of poems, From the School of Eloquence and Other Poems (1978) and Art & Extinction which were added to over a long period. This hindered an appreciation of his work and his poetry only reached a wide audience with the publication of the Penguin Selected Poems in1984.

From the School of Eloquence and Other Poems contains his best-known poems, sonnets about his parents and extended family, class, and poetry. The title is a good one because all these poems are about 'utterances' of various kinds. He reflects on the inarticulacy of his family, his Uncle Joe who stammered and could 'handset type much faster than he spoke', his English teacher telling him 'Poetry's the speech of kings. You're one of those / Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!' There is an obsessive zeal about these tightly interlocked poems. Themes echo in many poems: fire and destruction, with special reference to the VJ celebrations in 1946 (which he remembers as a boy of 9) and Hiroshima, the extinction of species, the power that articulacy brings, the painful self-limitation of the working class ('too posh for me! He said (though he dressed well) / If you weren't wi' me ah'd nivver dare!').

Harrison spent some time in America in the late 1970s and early 1980s and the poems that emerged were longer, more relaxed and discursive. He said 'I don't read America with the same spikey class instincts as I read England'. Poems like 'Cypress and Cedar', 'The Red Lights of Plenty', 'The Lords of Life', are wide-ranging meditations on nature, homesteading, the American way.

In poetic terms Harrison returned to England with a vengeance with the publication of his most famous poem, v. (1985). A long poem in rhyming quatrains deliberately echoing Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard, v.. captures a moment in English life when the collapse of traditional industries like mining undermined a whole way of life. Harrison puts the resultant nihilism into the mouth of a lager-swilling yobbo and admits, for all his berating of the youth, that there's something of the vandal in him too: he remembers as a teenager letting off a fire extinguisher at a singer and orchestra. The justification he gives for this is revealing:

What I hated in those high soprano ranges
Was uplift beyond all reason and control
And in a world where you say nothing changes
It seemed a sort of pricktease of the soul.

Harrison's next full collection The Gaze of the Gorgon (1992), although a normal miscellany volume, did have some unity. Harrison's poems about the Gulf War, 'Initial Illumination' and 'A Cold Coming', began a new phase for him, appearing in the Guardian newspaper rather than a literary magazine (v. had first appeared in the London Review of Books). Harrison believes that poetry should address the great issues of the day and that it should strive for a mass audience.

This tendency became even more pronounced during the Bosnian conflict of 1992-4. The Guardian sent Harrison to the region as poetic war correspondent. Thanks to poems like these and his television films Harrison had a very high profile during the 1990s. Inevitably his name was mentioned as a contender for Poet Laureate when Ted Hughes died. But Harrison is a fierce republican and he published another poem in the Guardian, 'A Celebratory Ode on the Abdication of King Charles III', which effectively ruled himself out. This and other new poems were published as Laureate's Block by Penguin in 2000. Some critics have felt that in such recent poems the ferocity of his polemic has been detrimental to his verse, which can seem clumsy when compared to the early sonnets.

© Peter Forbes

 

For an in-depth critical review see Tony Harrison by Joe Kelleher (Northcote House, 1996: Writers and their Work Series).



 

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Author statement
'Poetry is all I write, whether for books, or readings, or for the National Theatre, or for the opera house and concert hall, or even for TV. All these activities are part of the same quest for a public poetry, through in that word 'public' I would never want to exclude inwardness. I think how Milton's sonnets range from the directly outward to the tenderly inward, and how the public address of the one makes a clearing for the shared privacy of the other. In the same way I sometimes think that my dramatic poetry has made a clearing for my other poems. I sometimes work with ancient originals written at times when poetry had the range and ambition to net everything, but if I go to them for courage to take on the breadth and complexity of the world, my upbringing among so-called 'inarticulate' people has given me a passion for language that communicates directly and immediately. I prefer the idea of men speaking to men to a man speaking to God, or ever worse to Oxford's annointed. And books are only a part of what I see as poetry. It seems to me no accident that some of the best poetry in the world is in some of its drama from the Greek onwards. In it I find a reaffirmation of the power of the word, eroded by other media and by some of the speechless events of our worst century. Sometimes, despite the fact that the range of poetry has been diminished by the apparently effortless way that the mass media seem to depict reality, I believe that, maybe, poetry, the word at its most eloquent, is one medium which could concentrate our attention on our worst experiences without leaving us with the feeling, as other media can, that life in this century has had its affirmative spirit burnt out.'

 

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Definately Rob Andrew then

Camel, WHICH beloved. Katherine, or Jake?

still no idea who tony harrison is

You win the longest post ever on Blonde totally unrelated to poker.

Well done


Rob Andrew. By a country mile.

i would like to say my typing skills have improved alot in the past few days to allow me to type all that in seconds

Katharine is vaguely related to Rob Andrew.

However he is "nowhere near as famous as Tony Harrison who is regarded as a god!"

"Tony who?" was my exact reply.

I think I am going to have clean hands for the next week :D

Thankyou!

Glad to be of help :)up

All that in a quarter of an hour, what a forum!

but, in the Camelette's defence, you are asking a load of blokes (so far) who wouldn't know poetry if it came up at hit them on the arse.

hardly a representative sample!


but don't let that stop you getting a week of sleep filled nights and clean hands!!!

shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I will have to stop her reading this thread now! Thanks Mr End!

If you had said Tony Robinson it would have been a debate! Rob Andrew by a country mile.

I read Keith's post and was worried that I didn't know who Tony Harrison was.

Fortunately the responses made me feel a little better!

Sheriff

keith ask david young, if his answer is rob andrews then its case closed

Actually there may be merit in this argument.....

Due to the word of others (i.e Camel's missus) I'm now persuaded to believe that Tony Harrison exists!

Sheriff

Camel, tell Camelette that if she had said Tom Paulin not Tony Harrison, she would have had a stronger case  :)up

Just had to listen to renditions of all Harrison's best poems.

Beginning to wish I'd never heard of him too...

and you're still awake?


did it send Jake off?


clever, these Mum's....

Well I think it depends on how one defines "more famous".

Personally, I have heard of Rob Andrew but not the other geezer FWIW.

Condolances to Mrs. Camel, but I'm sure Master Camel is delighted  ;)

Considering that this is a (mostly) male orientated site, I don't think asking a question involving a rugby player, and a poet (is that what he does?) will help you find a fair answer.

For what it's worth, I've never heard of this Harrison, but, then again, I doubt too many females know who Rob Andrew is.

Rob Andrew is a legend

never heard of the Tony guy

Sloppy,

Are you suggesting blokes don't like poetry?

There was a young lady from Texas,
etc etc

line 2 is

that loved everything to do with xmas


anyone know the rest

4/7 Red-Dog does.....

Rob Andrew might.

I'm not educated enough to know any poets.

I only just found out that William Hill wrote Romeo and Juliet.

who is tony harrison?

didn't he used to be an artist on kids tv.

nope hold on that' tony hart.

most definitely rob andrew then.... ;)

During the 90's I went through a period of buying a book a week...one week it was drama, the next it was poetry....One of the plays I picked up was Harrison's 'The Common Chorus   (an adaptation of Aristophanes' Lysistrata)   Faber and Faber, 1992' which was to put it bluntly PRETTY PANTS....suffice to say that's the last time I paid for anything by him (oh, and I can't imagine any of the women I know having the foggiest as to who he is but I'm sure a fair few quite fancied Rob Andrew so for my money Rob would come out ahead in the fame stakes).


If anyone wants any poetry worth reading (that isn't in the least bit up it's own ace) then give Fred Voss a try(Grad school dropout who tours the country working as a lathe operator in big machine shops) 'Carnegie Hall with Tin Roofs'.

Will.

I would like to have a big bet this the first time Aristophanes has been mentioned on a poker forum in the history of the internet.

Hmmmm....you're probably right in terms of a direct reference though discussion of 'The Birds' is never far from the heart of the more popular threads on here. ;)

as in THE Tony Harrison??? the great (and one of few) british sonnet writers in recent times?????

nah gotta say more peopel would have heard of Rob Andrew, even tho i dont do egg chasing he had a pretty mean right boot

and someone whose critical faculties extend discussion of Aristophanes with the use of the words "Pretty Pants" in the same sentence should be encouraged to post more.

I don't/didn't know who either of them were!!!!!

:blonde:

I thought that this  :blonde: had been imported especially for Soopyn.

We're gonna miss the super sat to Rob's home game Ralph  :blonde:

I just PM'd Nick to say that, and that I/we would be playing the next one and the STT at high noon.

 :)up

I'm not so sure, someone must have it as a screen name somewhere. What price would you take?