Oz Hardwick’s latest collection of prose poetry, Actioning The University, is a cri de cœur over the state of some of the nation’s approach to education. As the humanities bend to the pressures of market forces, York Calling caught up with one of York’s most respected writers.
By Miles Salter
Oz has travelled a long way since the 1980s, when he laboured in a factory in Luton. He began studying in York in the 1990s, eventually gaining a doctorate, and was later made a professor. His influences are wide. They range from Geoffrey Chaucer to Michael Moorcock, taking in the beat poets (Ginsberg and Kerouac), American writers such as Ray Bradbury and Richard Brautigan, Alan Garner and, more recently, Australian prose poets.
At Leeds Trinity University he has encouraged and guided hundreds of students over the last twenty years. He has helped to edit volumes of student writing and lead a regular spoken word evening. His first collection of poetry, The Kind Ghosts, was published in 2004. It has been followed by over twenty books or pamphlets (sometimes as editor), and by a desire to push at the boundaries of what language can do. He has never paused in his quest to read, write and explore. His passions include photography, medieval literature and rock music, especially Hawkwind. He writes regularly on music for R2 magazine, and has chipped in at York Calling once or twice. He has also collaborated widely on music and poetry projects.
Oz writes every day. This disciplined approach has paid off: his poetry has been published widely and he has travelled in America, Germany and Australia, gaining an audience for his quizzical approach. A well-regarded academic, he has his name on numerous tomes, including Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice, published by Routledge in 2022.
Actioning The University is a sort of battered sigh. Humanities in universities are being whittled down in favour of vocational courses (teaching, nursing, childcare, engineering, computer science etc.). Knowledge has become factory-processed, uniform and box-shaped. There is little room left for enquiry, debate or knowledge for its own sake (something that Oz defends vehemently).
In 2024, 4,000 posts were axed at universities in the UK. Leeds Trinity, where Oz has worked, has laid off numerous staff. Writers, historians and philosophers would argue that the soul of learning is being lashed. As Dr Jonathan Marks said, ‘Science can tell you how to clone a dinosaur. Humanities can tell you why that’s probably not a good idea.’
‘Universities in the West have become competing businesses, their only raison d’être being to raise cash for their own self-perpetuation,’ explains Oz. ‘The public good has become commoditised, to the extent that there’s no real sense of actual purpose anymore.’ The poems, he says, could just as easily have been written in the context of the NHS or local government.
Oz did not come from a privileged background. ‘My parents were both very bright people who, due to their working-class backgrounds, didn’t have educational opportunities,’ he explains. After the factory years in the 1980s, Oz was able to gain a place at the University of York as a mature student. It was, he says, ‘an utterly transformative experience’ to trade the noise of machinery for the quiet of the library, where studying and learning were celebrated. He feels gutted at what has been lost in the years since. ‘To see the meaning of “the university” so degraded is profoundly upsetting,’ he says.
Actioning The University is not without its humour – a body is found in the library, in classic Agatha Christie / Cluedo style. Surveying the scene is a character called ‘The Flat Man’, a sort of bland but destructive managerial personality whose vision of the world is extremely limited. The Flat Man sees the cost of everything but the value of nothing.
There is humour in the book, but a weary sadness, too. In the collection’s afterword, Oz quotes Ursula Le Guin, who said: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.” He is conscious of the malaise that is in the ether. ‘More and more,’ he says, ‘capitalism in its current form is working for fewer and fewer people. The things we have taken for granted – education, universal health care and so on – are being undermined. I have no doubt that the capitalist system will collapse, but who knows what will follow?’
Despite the frustrations and disappointments that colour Actioning The University, Oz still believes in the power of words, language and poetry. Like Dylan Thomas, who told the original Under Milk Wood actors to ‘love the words’, he is passionate about the possibility of rubbing syllables together. ‘The arts work for me when they set out to say something different, something that day-to-day functional communication doesn’t encompass. It’s genuinely exciting when they articulate something that couldn’t be expressed as well in another form. I love it when the words kick off their shoes and dance.’
Actioning The University is out now and can be ordered via Yaffle Press at yafflepress.co.uk
Oz Hardwick reads at Bluebird Bakery in Acomb at ‘A Posse Of Prose Poems’, with Bob Beagrie and Anne Caldwell. The event takes place on Thursday 29 October 2026, from 7.30pm. It is ‘pay what you feel’.
Tickets are available here.