My friend Gordon Hodgeon, who has died aged 75, was a poet, teacher, teacher-trainer and arts activist and a hugely influential figure in the worlds of education, publishing and poetry in the north-east for 40 years. Towards the end of his life, profoundly disabled, he produced some outstanding poetry while able to communicate with the world only by blinking.
He was born in Leigh in Lancashire, son of Fred, a wages clerk, and his wife, Nancy. Gordon studied English at Durham University and taught English in a secondary school in Leeds before working as a schools adviser, first in Teesside, later for Cleveland county council.
In the early 1980s he helped to pioneer some of the north-east’s first writing residencies. In the 1990s he helped to organise Writearound, Cleveland’s annual community writing festival. He was the driving force behind Mudfog Press, an independent poetry publisher dedicated to promoting Teesside writers. He was also active for many years in Northern Arts, Cleveland Arts, New Writing North and the Poetry Book Society. In the mid-1980s he was the national chair of the National Association for the Teaching of English.
A member of Lancaster and Morecambe Writers and a founder member of Brotton Writers, Gordon published several books of poetry, including November Photographs, A Cold Spell, Winter Breaks and Old Workings.
For the last eight years of his life, following a series of unsuccessful operations on his spine, Gordon was unable to move his arms and legs, or to breathe without the help of a ventilator. He continued writing poetry despite this, coming to terms with a gradually narrowing view on the world. Some of these poems were dictated to visiting friends and sympathetic staff in the rehabilitation unit in Peterlee, where he spent two years. Others were typed using voice-recognition software.
By the time these poems were published as Still Life in 2012, Gordon could communicate with the outside world only by blinking. Incredibly, this somehow spurred him into a late burst of extraordinary poetry, reporting back from what can only be described as the furthest edge of human endurance. These were the words of a man who could not speak, the poems of a writer who could not pick up a pen, a painful study in eloquent silence. These last poems were published last year by Smokestack Books as Talking to the Dead.
Gordon is survived by Julia, whom he married in 1964, their three children, Edmund, Emily and Ellie, and eight grandchildren.
