Barry MacSweeney (17 July 1948 – 9 May 2000) was an English poet and journalist. His organizing work contributed to the British Poetry Revival. Life and work 1960s Barry MacSweeney was born in Newcastle upon Tyne. He left school aged 16, and began working as a journalist at the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, where he shared an office with the poet Basil Bunting. He began attending readings at the Morden Tower series, run by Connie and Tom Pickard, and took an active part in the thriving arts scene in mid-1960s Newcastle. Visitors to the Tower included American poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Edward Dorn, as well as poets from across Britain. At a reading in 1965, MacSweeney met Andrew Crozier, who would include him in the first issue of The English Intelligencer. Through the Intelligencer, MacSweeney got to know J.H. Prynne, John James, Peter Riley, and others associated with the "Cambridge School". With Prynne, MacSweeney organised the Sparty Lea Poetry Festival in Easter 1967. Influenced in part by the Berkeley Poetry Conference of 1965, around two-dozen poets gathered at cottages belonging to MacSweeney's family in a remote area of the North of England, near Allendale. Though MacSweeney later claimed the festival was marked by class tensions and hostilities between rival factions, the meeting was an important moment for the British Poetry Revival. In the summer of 1967 MacSweeney was enrolled for a journalism degree course in Harlow, Essex, making regular visits to the Intelligencer poets in Wivenhoe and Cambridge. In September his sequence 'The Boy From the Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother' was circulated to the magazine mailing-list. MacSweeney's poems were picked up by Michael Dempsey, editor of Hutchinson New Authors Ltd, who was keen to capitalise on the success of the Penguin Mersey Poets anthology and the growing youth audience for poetry. His work appeared in the widely-available commercial edition in 1968, also titled The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother. As a publicity stunt, Hutchinson arranged to have the twenty-year-old poet nominated for the prestigious Oxford Professor of Poetry. He lost to Roy Fuller, and was satirised in the broadsheet press. The book went on to sell 11,000 copies and appear in an American edition in 1969. According to Nicholas Johnson, it took "half a lifetime for his reputation to recover". 1970s After the Hutchinson controversy, MacSweeney started his own press, the Blacksuede Boot.