Robert Gavin Hampson

Robert Gavin Hampson (born 1948) is a British poet and academic. Hampson was born and raised in Liverpool, before studying in London and Toronto and finally settling in London. Hampson has taught at Royal Holloway, University of London, since 1973, and has been a Professor of Modern Literature there since 2000. Since 2016, he has been Distinguished Teaching and Research Fellow in the Department of English at Royal Holloway and Visiting Professor at the university of Northumbria. For his contributions to two distinct areas – contemporary innovative poetry and the international study of Joseph Conrad – he is, without a shadow of a doubt, a 'legend'.

Life and work

Robert Gavin Hampson was born in Liverpool in 1948. He studied English Literature at King's College London between 1967 and 1970 and was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to complete a master's degree at University of Toronto.^[1] He then returned to King's College, London, in 1971 where he completed a PhD on Joseph Conrad.

During the 1970s he co-edited the poetry magazine Alembic with Peter Barry and Ken Edwards and was a key figure in the British Poetry Revival.^[2] His work as one of the editors of Alembic has received attention in two books by Wolfgang Gortschacher - Little Magazine Profiles: The Little Magazines in Great Britain, 1939-1993 (University of Salzburg, 1993) and Contemporary Views on the Little Magazine Scene (Poetry Salzburg, 2000)- and, more recently, in an interview (with Ken Edwards) by Sophie Seita in the magazine mimeo mimeo (2014). This has now been republished as 'transatlantic axis of alembic' in Jacket2.^[3]

His best-known work is probably Seaport, which has been written about by Peter Barry, Andrew Duncan, Amy Cutler, Neal Alexander and others. His poetry has been translated into German, Italian and Rumanian. See, for example, Wolfgang Gortschacher & Ludwig Laher, So Also Ist Das: Eine Zweisprachige Anthologie Britischer Gegenswartslyrik (Haymon-Verlag, 2002), and the translation of the sequence 'Lou Mistrau' in the Italian journal 'Soglie' (August 2014).. In 2012, his collection Reworked Disasters was long-listed for the Forward Prize. His more recent work includes 'love's damage', which was published in the Surrey Poetry Festival Magazine (21.05.11), edited by Amy De'Ath and Jonty Tiplady^[4]; 'sonnets 4 sophie' first published in Veer Vier (September 2013)^[5], while an explanation of colours was reviewed by Edmund Hardy and Melissa Flores-Borquez in Intercapillary Space^[6] and out of sight (crater, 2012)and Liverpool (hugs &) kisses, his 2014 collaboration with Robert Sheppard, are reviewed on the other room website.^[7] More recently, he has contributed to Robert Sheppard's European Union of Imaginary Author's project through a collaboration with Sheppard. This collaboration is included in Robert Sheppard (ed.) Twitters for a Lark: Poetry of the European Union of Imaginary Authors (Shearsman, 2017).

During his time as Head of the Department of English, he founded the MA in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway, University of London, with Redell Olsen in 2002 and the MA in Creative Writing with Andrew Motion in 2003.^[8] He has regularly taught on the Poetic Practice pathway, and he was Director of the MA in Creative Writing for 2016–17. Graduates of the Creative Writing programme whom he taught include the novelists Tahmima Anam, Adam O'Riordan, Anna Whitwham and Sarah Perry and the poets Robert Selby and Declan Ryan. Graduates of the Poetic Practice programme whom he taught include Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Prudence Chamberlain, Becky Cremin, Frances Kruk, Ryan Ormonde, Jooyeon Park, Nisha Ramayya, Sophie Robinson, Karen Sandhu and Steven Willey.

He has also made a significant contribution to innovative poetry in London as the organiser of events and conferences and as the convenor and curator of two important seminar series. In the 1970s he organised a short reading series, Future Events, at The White Swan in Covent Garden with Ken Edwards and Mike Dobbie. At the end of the 1970s, he and Erik Vonna-Michel organised three one-day 'Saturday Courses' at Lower Green Farm: Bob Cobbing, Allen Fisher and Eric Mottram were the subjects of the different days. (See Ken Edwards's account of Lower Green Farm in Clasp.) In the 1980s, he organised two conferences on Contemporary innovative Poetry at the Centre for English Studies in the University of London Senate House. In 1999, he was asked to take over the TALKS series that Bob Perelman had established at King's College, London, during Pereleman's year as a visiting professor there. Hilda Bronstein has given an account of the early years of the London TALKS series in How2^[9] The TALKS series continued for some years at King's and then moved to Birkbeck College, University of London. It was superseded by the Contemporary Innovative Poetry Research Seminar, which he runs with Amy Evans Bauer at the University of London Institute for English Studies. In 2004, he set up the Runnymede International Literary Festival in collaboration with Royal Holloway and Runnymede Borough Council. He has continued to be the Festival Director. More recently, the Festival transferred some of it activities to Central London as 'Runnymede in London' through collaboration with the Centre for Creative Collaboration (c4cc)^[10], which also provided the venue for Polyply, the event series run by Redell Olsen, Will Montgomery and Kristen Kreider.^[11]

In 2010–11, he collaborated with the Palestinian visual artist, Leena Nammari, on an concertina book, 'The Long View', as part of the Beyond Text project.^[12] During 2014, he curated an event series, Amid the Ruins, with Carrie Foulkes at the Daniel Blau Gallery, Hoxton Square, London.^[13] In 2017, on the occasion of his retirement from full-time teaching, Redell Olsen edited For Robert: An Anthology (RHUL Poetics Research Centre / The Institute of the Electric Crinolines). ^[14]

He has also pursued a parallel career as a Conrad scholar and editor with three monographs on Joseph Conrad: Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (1992), Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad's Malay Fiction (2000) and Conrad's Secrets (2013). Conrad's Secrets received the first-place prize for the Adam Gillon Award (2015) from the Joseph Conrad Society of America for the best recent work on Joseph Conrad. In 2017, he received the Ian P. Watt Award from the Joseph Conrad Society of America for excellence in Conrad studies. Previous recipients of the award include Norman Sherry and J. Hillis Miller. ^[15]. He was editor of The Conradian (1989–96) and edited various Conrad texts – Lord Jim (1986), Victory (1989), Heart of Darkness (1995) – for Penguin books, as well as Rudyard Kipling's Something of Myself (1987) and Soldiers Three (1993) and Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (2000).^[16] He was elected Chair of the Joseph Conrad Society(UK) in 2015^[17].

He was an adviser for Hanyut (film), a film by the prize-winning Malaysian director U-Wei Haji Saari, based on Conrad's first novel, Almayer's Folly.^[18] He also appears in the 2018 TCM documentary, El sueno imposible de David Lean, an exploration of David Lean's long-held plan to adapt Conrad's masterpiece Nostromo as a film <https://youtube.com/watch?v-O2eDIM5XnOU> and in Sladami Conrada (In the footsteps of Conrad) on Polish television.

In addition, he has undertaken various forms of service to the academic community. He was a panel member for the RAE 2008 and the REF 2014. He was also a panel member for the Rumanian and Hong Kong RAEs. He was a member of the QAA Benchmarking Group for Creative Writing and is currently a member of the Practice Research Advisory Group. ^[19]

He appears as 'a Conrad specialist in London by the name of X' in Jenny Diski's Skating to Antarctica ((1997), and he and his colleague Andrew Gibson (Andrew William Gibson) also make an appearance (lightly disguised) in Adam Roberts's 2003 science-fiction novel, Polystom.^[20]

Publications

Poetry

• Degrees of Addiction (London: Share, 1975).
• How Nell Scored (London: Poet & Peasant, 1976).
• A Necessary Displacement (Orpington: Pushtika, 1978).
• A Feast of Friends (Durham: Pig Press, 1982).
• A City at War (London: Northern Lights, 1985).
• (with David Miller) Nevsky Prospekt (Dublin: hardPressed poetry, 1988).
• A human measure (Dublin: hardPressed poetry, 1989).
• Unicorns: 7 Studies in Velocity (London: Pushtika, 1989).
• (with Gerlinde Roder-Bolton) Dingo (London: Pushtika Press, 1994).
• Seaport: interim edition (Woking: Pushtika Press, 1995)..
• (with Gerlinde Roder-Bolton), higher densities: a new hampshire sampler (Woking: Pushtika Press, 1996).
• C for Security (Woking: Pushtika Press, 2001).
• Pentimento (Pushtika Press, 2005).
• out of sight (Crater Press, 2012.)
• Assembled fugitives: selected poems, 1973–1998 (Exeter: Stride Press, 2001).
• Seaport (Shearsman, 2008).
• an explanation of colours (Veer Books, 2010).
• (with Leena Nammari) The Long View (2011).
• Reworked Disasters (ksf,2012).
• (with Robert Sheppard) Liverpool (Hugs &) Kisses (ship of fools / pushtika, 2015).

'Critical Work

• Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (Macmillan, 1992).

• Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad's Malay Fiction (Palgrave, 2000).

• Conrad's Secrets (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

• (Co-edited with Katherine Isobel Baxter), Conrad and Language (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).
• (Co-edited with Tony Davenport), Ford Madox Ford: A Re-Appraisal (Rodopi, 2002).
• (Co-edited with Max Saunders), Ford Madox Ford's Modernity (Rodopi, 2003).
• (Co-edited with Peter Barry), New British poetries: The scope of the possible (Manchester University Press, 1993).
• (Co-edited with Will Montgomery), Frank O'Hara Now (Liverpool University Press, 2010).
• (Co-edited with Ken Edwards), Clasp: late modernist poetry in London in the 1970s (Shearsman, 2016).

References

• Robert Hampson, http://www.rhul.ac.uk
• Eric Mottram, 'The British Poetry Revival, 1960–1975' in Robert Hampson and Peter Barry, 'New British Poetries: The scope of the possible' (Manchester University Press, 1993).
• 'The hard lyric: re-registering Liverpool poetry' in Peter Barry, 'Contemporary British Poetry and the City' (Manchester University Press, 2000), 137–64.
• Viannu, Lidia. "Interview with Robert Hampson". www.argotistonline.co.uk/Hampson%20interview.htm. Missing or empty |url= (help); |access-date= requires |url= (help)
• Wolfgang Gortschacher, 'Little Magazine Profiles' (University of Salzburg, 1993), pp. 163–65.
• Wolfgang Gortschacher, 'Contemporary Views on the Little Magazine Scene' (Poetry Salzburg, 2000), pp. 388–424
• Richard Price and David Miller, 'British Little Magazines' (British Library Publications, 2006).
• Neal Alexander, David Cooper (eds), Poetry & Geography: Space & Place in post-War Poetry (Oxford University Press)
• http://www.archiveofthenow.org ArchiveoftheNow
• http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/
• http://jacketmagazine.com
• Hampson, Robert. "Seaport". www.shearsman.com/ws-public/upload/223_robert_hampson_seaport.pdf. Shearsman. Missing or empty |url= (help); |access-date= requires |url= (help)
• 'love's damage', Surrey Poetry Festival Magazine (2011) <<http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/436447/12796874>>
• 'sonnets 4 sophie' in Veer Vier <<epc.buffalo.edu/library/Veer-56-1014.pdf>>
• Edmund Hardy and Melissa Flores-Borquez, 'Intellectual Labour' <<http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk>> also at <<http://1blog.oqueasmeninaspensam.com>>
• Hampson Archive, http://otherroom.org/tag/roberthampson
• https://polyply.wordpress.com
• For Robert: an anthology: https://indd.adobe.com/embed/f4f65fa1-970f-467f-8cd0-48405e21d73b?startpage=1&allowFullscree=true