The Life of Poetry in Morden Tower

Morden Tower, now one of Britain’s literary landmarks, was once a dusty, near-derelict medieval turret without plumbing or electricity. That changed on Bloomsday 1964 when Tom and Connie Pickard began a new reading series in the tower. Morden Tower quickly became an international poetry center with strong connections to the Objectivist, Beat, and Black Mountain poets and their United Kingdom allies. From Basil Bunting’s first reading of Briggflatts to Allen Ginsberg’s European debut of Kaddish, Morden Tower housed poetry history. This exhibition, opening on September 5, honors that history with a showcase of posters from the 1960s and 1970s advertising the readings, photos, letters, and ephemera that tell a story of the graphic anarchy emblematic of the times.