During that period, he reinvented his style and subject matter to speak of natural phenomena - animals of the urban city and people in desolate landscapes.
In 1972, his sound poetry on recording tape which he had been making since the middle of the 1960s led to an invitation to be guest composer at Fylkingen in Stockholm where he worked for relatively short periods, on and off, for five years from 1974.
His essay "So many things" discusses issues arising from that period (in "CLASP: late modernist poetry in London in the 1970s", edited by Robert Hampson and Ken Edwards; Shearsman, Bristol; ISBN 9781 84861 460 4).
He had in 1976 co-founded the very influential sound poetry performance group jgjgjg (with PC Fencott and cris cheek), which blazed a trail through Europe's avant-garde scene and then disbanded in less than 3 years.
In 1980, Upton completed a BA degree in English Literature and History at Kingston Polytechnic and fell in love with a married woman.
After his BA and a PGCE at Kingston, he went on to take an MA in English and American Literature at King's college, London, and has spoken often of the experience of being taught about Melville by the famous Eric Mottram.
In 1981, Upton had a substantial exhibition under the title Deteriorating Texts at the LYC Museum and Art Gallery in Cumbria.
As a result of these new skills, he reappeared in the poetry world with In Praise of John Coltrane which had been largely computer generated with code the poet wrote himself.
A renewed friendship with Bob Cobbing led to the publication of two volumes of apparently autobiographical verse, Messages To Silence and Unsent Letters which he had been writing since the late 1980s.
This was followed by another volume from Form Books, Letters To Eric, different in verse method and apparently more reliably autobiographical with references to marital breakup.
From 1994 until the end of the century he and Cobbing wrote a collaborative visual poem called Domestic Ambient Noise, now out of print, which has been highly praised.
In 2000, he performed with Bob Cobbing on a number of occasions, including the weekend celebration of the completion of Domestic Ambient Noise.
[3] At the same time, the publication of Meadows by Writers Forum in 2000 and of Wire Sculptures by Reality Street in 2003 confirmed the quality of his writing on the page.
More recently, Writers Forum published "Snap shots and video" and Veer Publications "a song and a film".