Tom Pickard is something of a legend in his own lifetime. 

By the time he was 15 he was already head and shoulders in the van of the radical free-verse movement which swept into Tyneside’s beat, blues and jazz scene of the early 1960s. 

Free verse found an unlikely home in the wild, emerging youth movement. It was  centred on the anti-bomb struggles, direct action and anarchism and fused with the rhythm-and-blues bars and clubs now marching in time with Liverpool and other industrial cities. 

That movement’s inspiration had been the US beat poets but on Tyneside its resonance was with working-class city kids whose nearest equivalent today would be the rap scene. Young factory lads and lasses, pitlads and shipyard apprentices could listen to this poetry and be cool. 

This, in Stoppard’s words,  was poetry with two fists clenched: “Cap off a spotted bandanna roond his neck/He mingles in the crowded street/a badge/a rolled cape across his chest/men from the North/grey-faced and clear eyed/family men/hunger dancers.” 

Pickard made history when he took control of the abandoned Morden tower on Newcastle’s medieval city walls. 

A veritable invasion of US stars of the free-verse scene started landing at regular intervals in “the toon” along with the stars of its British wing.  

He added to his fame when Newcastle City Council banned him and the unemployed rebel kids from gathering at the Eldon Square park to hear poetry and protest. 

In another country they would have called him a dissident, maybe because he asked: “Who sucks milk from baby mouths?/whose breath is bilious with unemployed bombs?/Whose ulcerous pout is the stoke hold of a prison ship?/Whose legs are knotted with varicose veins/from standing on the necks of health workers? … Whose shadow is the smoke of multi-nationals chasing cheap labour across continents of new markets? … Whose television is programmed by corporations in the government business?”

Pickard’s work was sheer inspiration to young workers listening in awe to this machine gun of words, frequently in uncompromising Geordie and unfettered use of obscenities one would still usually get a belt in the gob for if used in public. 

That facility is all in this brilliant new anthology of his works published by Carcanet press from the early years up to today. 

Hoyoot follows his life from an unemployed, migratory beat-tramp through the cities of Europe — poverty-wracked, angry but spitting blood and fire — to his more mature years, where Pickard has rediscovered the stark beauty and wild history of the borders. It’s a dramatic read. 

There are 298 pages of brilliance here. Pickard’s work, rich and unspoiled with pretension or affectation, is the poetry which should be on the national curriculum as an example of our “British values.” 

Hoyoot is being launched at 7pm tonight at the Lit And Phil, 23 Westgate Road, Newcastle, details: www.litandphil.org.uk.