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.
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.
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.
Luke Roberts has argued that MacSweeney's sequence Toad Church was much influenced by the Maritime Museum setting and by the work of French poets like Jules Laforgue and Arthur Rimbaud.
Inspired by punk, MacSweeney began work on a series of "State of the Nation" Bulletins, including Colonel B, Jury Vet, Liz Hard, and Wild Knitting.
[7] Other critics, including John Wilkinson, Marianne Morris, William Rowe, and Luke Roberts, have argued for the political significance of this writing, as an attack on Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government and a response to the ABC Trial and forms of state violence such as the Falklands War and the Troubles.
In a review for Reality Studios, Maggie O'Sullivan noted it "places him right in the dynamic of English poetry, right in there up to his head, in the real and vital bloodstream of Blake, Shelley, Clare, and Bunting.
[11] After years of relative silence, MacSweeney re-emerged in 1993 with Hellhound Memos and selected poems in Tempers of Hazard, joining Thomas A. Clark and Chris Torrance.
[12] In 1995, Equipage published Pearl, collecting poems set in the Sparty Lea of MacSweeney's youth, where he taught a mute girl to read and write.
[13] In the last nine months of his life he acted as mentor and editor to the West Cumbrian poet Emma McGordon, and relaunched the Blacksuede Boot Press to publish her first pamphlet collection The Hangman & the Stars, just two weeks before his death.
In 2018, Shearsman Books brought out Desire Lines: Unselected Poems, 1966–2000, which collects the material left out of the earlier volume alongside previously unpublished sequences.