Jeff Nuttall: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

Jeff Nuttall (July 8, 1933 - January 4, 2004) was an English poet, publisher, actor, painter, sculptor, jazz trumpeter, anarchist sympathiser and social commentator who was a key part of the British 1960s counter-culture.

Nuttall was born in Clitheroe, Lancashire, and grew up in Herefordshire. He studied painting in the years after the Second World War and began publishing poetry in the early 1960s. Together with Bob Cobbing, he founded the influential Writers Forum Press and writers workshop. He also associated with many of the American beat generation writers, especially William Burroughs. His 1968 book Bomb Culture was one of the key texts of the countercultural revolution of the time, a work which drew the links between the emergence of alternatives to mainstream societal norms and the threatening backdrop of potential nuclear cataclysm. Nuttall was one of the pioneers of the happening in Britain.

Nuttall served as Chairman of the National Poetry Society from 1975 to 1976, a period when the Society briefly served as a home for the British Poetry Revival. He was poetry critic for a number of national newspapers and was the Poetry Society nominee for Poet Laureate but was overlooked in favour of Ted Hughes.

Nuttall worked as an art teacher. In his later life he appeared in several films and on TV. His Selected Poems was published in 2003.