Bill Griffiths

Brian William Bransom Griffiths (20 August 1948 – 13 September 2007), known as Bill Griffiths, was a poet and Anglo-Saxon scholar associated with the British Poetry Revival.

Overview Griffiths was born in Kingsbury, Middlesex, England. As a teenager, he became a Hells Angel; his experiences with bikers provided material for many early poems. From 1971, these poems were published in Poetry Review, under the editorship of Eric Mottram, and by Bob Cobbing's Writers Forum. He also collaborated on a number of performance poetry pieces with Cobbing and others.

Griffiths soon started his own imprint, Pirate Press, which published work by himself and other like-minded poets. In addition to Cobbing and other Writers Forum poets, Griffiths listed his early influences as Michael McClure, Muriel Rukeyser, John Keats, George Crabbe, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Old English poetry.

In 1987, he obtained a Ph.D. in Old English from King's College London. He published a number of editions and translations of Old English texts and authored Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Magic. Durham and other sequences, West House Books, 2002 Ushabtis, Talus, 2001 A Book of Spilt Cities, Etruscan Books, Burkfastleigh 1999 Nomad Sense, Talus Editions, London, 1998 Etruscan Reader 5, Etruscan Books, Buckfastleigh, 1997 Rousseau and the Wicked, Invisible Books, London, 1996 TALISMAN No. 16 Fall 1996 Special Boston/U.K. Issue: a journal of contemporary poetry and poetics Future Exiles, Paladin, 1992