John Gibbens was born in the Wirral and grew up in West Germany and West Cumbria. He’s lived in London since 1978, and currently earns his bread on ‘Fleet Street’.

He won the Eric Gregory Award at the age of 21. Collected Poems appeared from Touched Press in 2000. In 2005, the title poem of the Touched Press pamphlet Sand of the Thames won the Southwark Poet of the Year competition.

Poems have also been selected for various anthologies, over the years, devoted to Elvis Presley, Edward Thomas, nuclear arms, the Beatles, the bike and William Blake. (Return to Sender, Elected Friends, Poems for Peace, Things We Said Today, The Art of Bicycling and The William Blake Birthday Book, respectively.)

The latest anthology appearances are in Emergency Verse: Poetry in Defence of the Welfare State (The Recusant, 2011) and The Captain’s Tower (Seren Press), a gathering of poems to mark Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday.

A narrative poem, Orpheus Ascending, set in an alternative Britain of social inequity, repression and violent disorder, will be published by Smokestack Books in March 2012 (available from Amazon.co.uk).

The Nightingale’s Code, his acclaimed “poetic study of Bob Dylan” was published by Touched in October 2001.

Covenant, a set of one-act plays which he also acted in, was produced at the Finborough Theatre in London in 1989 (with Francesca Howell, movement directed by Rosemary Lee, stage deisgn by Emma Withers).

He formed The Children with Armorel Weston in the early Nineties and their first CD, Play, was released in 1999. There have been six further albums, the latest being In Memory of Grace (2011). He also plays with and the poet and clarinettist David Miller in The Mind Shop.

Notable among his festival appearances – which include the Edinburgh and St Ives Festivals – was a poetry reading and songwriting workshop at the poet’s birthplace in Swansea as part of the Dylan Thomas Celebration 2000. He returned for the 2002 Celebration to lecture on the connection betwen the Dylans, Bob and Thomas (see We Walk the Line).

At Heaven’s Gate, a William Blake celebration in the Stroud Subscription Rooms
(photograph by Fred Chance)

 

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