In 1967, inspired by the 1965 "tribal gathering" of 30 poets and 7,000 spectators at the poetry olympics in the Albert Hall, the 19-year-old MacSweeney had somehow managed to get a ragbag army of the new generation of English poets to come to drink and read and fight together over a period of more than a week (all numbers and dates necessarily remain approximate) in Sparty Lea. The poets were accommodated in a terrace of four cottages belonging to MacSweeney's family and encouraged to give vent to the radical "oppositional poetics" that separated them from the mainstream.
"It was a complete bloody riot," MacSweeney said, shortly before his early death from alcoholism six years ago. "Talk about rednecks getting raunchy out in the country - there were numerous very physical punch-ups, with bottles and chairs."
Some who were there dispute MacSweeney's version of events. On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Festival of Sparty Lea, it remains a hot topic on message boards and poetry websites. One thing at least is beyond dispute: after the Cambridge Marxist-obscurantist poet Jeremy Prynne told the Newcastle poet Tom Pickard to keep his young son quiet during a reading, Pickard went outside and smashed his Land Rover into Prynne's half- timbered Morris Oxford saloon.
"I reckon it was about here," Pickard, who still lives locally, said last week. We were driving slowly past a series of recently sandblasted and conservatoried cottages with enviable views over the Allen Valley. "I drove to the top of the hill, went down into second, slammed on the brakes and sledged into him." It was the kind of delinquent act that endeared Pickard to his friend Allen Ginsberg and others of the Beat Generation. In England, though, it led to his invisibility as an artist. "I was banned from the English intelligentsia", is what I thought I heard Pickard say. "The English Intelligencer", a privately circulated worksheet of the Sixties, is what he actually said, but in protectionist, internecine poetry circles it meant the same thing.
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