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James Kirkup: His Life and Work, Part 2
From 1950 to 1952 he was the first Gregory Poetry Fellow at Leeds University, making him the first resident university poet in this country. In 1952, his parents moved south to Gloucestershire and he became the visiting poet at Bath Academy of Art for the next three years. From Bath, he taught in a London Grammar School before leaving England in 1956 to live and work in Europe, America and the Far East. The Japanese people accepted him and appreciated his work and so he settled there, lecturing in English Literature at several of their universities. He found the oriental way of life suited his temperament and that contemplation increased his self-awareness, as this poem from that period illustrates:
For many years
Someone to go with me
What robe would you wear?
For many years, in many lands Amongst his honours, Kirkup held the Atlantic Award for Literature from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1950; he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1962; he won the Japan P.E.N. Club Prize for Poetry in 1965 and was awarded the Scott-Moncrieff Prize for Translation in 1992. In 1997, he was presented with the Japan Festival Foundation Award and, possibly most treasured of all as foreigners rarely attend, he was invited to the Imperial New Year Poetry Reading in the presence of the Emperor and Empress at the Palace in Tokyo. An inveterate traveller, it wasn’t until the early 1990’s that Kirkup settled in Andorra, continuing his links with friends around the world through his wonderful letters. As Michael Thorp, a friend and publisher in Northumberland described:
following: autumn leaves, a postcard of a painting, a newspaper cutting, a poem he had written, a poem he had translated from French, German or Japanese... a letter. The envelope would be part of the letter, alive with stamps. A host of butterflies through the letterbox would signal a letter from James. It was an unfolding and interfolding of gift. Since writing simple verses and rhymes from the age of six, and the publication of his first poetry book, ‘The Drowned Sailor’ in 1947, Kirkup’s published works now encompass several dozen collections of poetry, six volumes of autobiography, over a hundred monographs of original work and translations, not to mention thousands of shorter pieces in journals and periodicals. As a travel writer, he has taken us from England to Greece, Russia, Bangkok, Hong Kong and Macao, Japan, Malaya and the Philippines. Together with his many translations published in Japan, he has also translated into English the works of both contemporary and classical authors in French and Franco African, German, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Russian, as well as Chinese, Japanese, Malayan and Vietnamese, and now has several ‘virtual’ books published with Brindin Press on the internet. Kirkup is also a novelist and dramatist, a literary critic and reviewer, a children’s writer, an essayist and an obituarist. Kirkup has often written both poems and prose about his childhood years on Tyneside. He must have been an unusual child with astonishing powers of observation and he is still blessed with a far reaching and retentive memory. In his first two autobiographies, The Only Child and Sorrows, Passions and Alarms, he writes in great detail of his childhood days spent in the town during the 1920s and 1930s. His colleague and friend, Professor Fumiko Miura wrote of James in her piece, A Poet of Lonely and Independent Vision:
hardly notice, are captured by him and revealed to be bristling with meaning. To possess an uncommon ca- pacity for the celebration of life is, also, to possess the rare capacity for sorrow and loneliness. This relationship between the lonely poet and the world has become one of his major themes. In sharp contrast to the bliss of his sheltered infancy in the love of his parents, he often expresses his long held sense of isolation. A lifetime of writing as profuse and varied as Kirkup’s can only be achieved by someone who sees inspiration in almost every situation and who has a desire to make the most of every opportunity that life has to offer. In his 90th year, he senses that time is precious; his days — and nights — seem to be as creatively busy as ever:
...For once you start at night you cannot stop. In spite of all his works and publications, James Kirkup remains barely known outside his literary world and he feels saddened by this refusal to acknowledge him. Unfortunately, even in his home town, he has received little recognition in the past. However, the South Shields Library and the Museum have now established The Kirkup Collection and it is hoped that this website will also help to bring him the respect and affection he deserves. — Dorothy Fleet 
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