Alan Jackson
Alan Jackson, born in 1938 in Liverpool of Scottish parents, moved to Edinburgh in 1940. His reading career began on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and in 1965 he established the annual Traverse Theatre poetry readings which were to become a platform for the Liverpool poets.
After a career of performing poetry all over Britain, Jackson retired from the scene, having had work published in divers journals, included in the Penguin Modern Poets series in 1968, and published by Fulcrum in 1969. His short poem, ‘Young Politician’, is to be found carved in the Canongate Wall of the Scottish Parliament building.
His poetry, published in about a dozen books and pamphlets, is collected in Salutations: Collected Poems 1960-1989 (Polygon, 1990). Later publications include Walking Through Apocalypse and A Great Beauty (both Lulu, 2007).
By far the most common inquiry the library receives pertaining to Jackson is in regards to four lines, oft quoted and misquoted across the internet, though seemingly never sourced:
O Knox he was a bad man
he split the Scottish mind
the one half he made cruel
and the other half unkind.
The lines are taken from his short poem ‘KNOX (2)’. It was first included in his pamphlet Well ye ken noo (1963), and again in All Fall Down (1965), however, the poem was left out when Jackson went about putting his collected poems together in 1990.