He began a reading career on
Edinburgh Festival fringe in 1960, with the London poets
Pete Brown,
Mike Horovitz and
Libby Houston. In 1965 Jackson founded the yearly series of readings during the Edinburgh Festival in the
Traverse Theatre (with
Tony Jackson, no relation). These readings became a platform for the Liverpool poets
Brian Patten,
Adrian Henri and
Roger McGough and for the older Scottish poets
Edwin Morgan,
Robert Garioch and
Norman McCaig.
Hamish Henderson brought folk singers
Pentangle played there, as did
The Scaffold. Poets such as
Pete Morgan and
Pete Roche (editor of the influential 1967 anthology
Love Love Love: The New Love Poetry) first appeared at these Traverse readings. Jackson went on from this time till the early 1970s to give hundreds of readings throughout Britain, often solo, but mostly with Patten, Mitchell, Morgan, Houston and others of the poets mentioned above. In 1973, Jackson announced that he was retiring from the "reading scene". The time had come he said "to obey the poetry", rather than merely purveying it to others. This move of Jackson’s only makes sense when it is considered that his poetry had never been one of nature description or social anecdote, but had themes of self-inquisition and self-undoing.
Heart of the Sun (published in 1986 by Open Township) has a long introduction entitled "Reasons for the Work", describing his poetic evolution through the years since the decision to "retire". Jackson had always had considerable philosophical and historical interests and a main feature of the introduction is his account of how experiences of his own led him to the work of
Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian Christian initiate. This new phase in Jackson’s life led to the writing of short
stories, in italics because they are not so much realist, but have something of the nature of
myth and
fable. He was also writing ideas pieces, investigating and expressing "the spirit forces" at work in our time. ==Publications==