Pickard grew up in the working-class suburbs of Cowgate, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Blakelaw, and left school at the age of fourteen. Three years later he met Basil Bunting and was instrumental in the older poet's return to writing in the early 1960s, leading to the latter's most acclaimed poem, the long, autobiographical Briggflatts, published in 1966. The association also produced Bunting's scathing "What the Chairman told Tom" ("I want to wash when I meet a poet.... my twelve-year-old can do it - AND rhyme!"). In 1963, with his first wife Connie, Pickard founded and ran the Morden Tower Book Room, where he organised a series of readings by British and American modernist tradition poets, including Bunting. He also set up the Ultima Thule Bookshop - specialising in poetry, music and alternative counter-culture publications - between 1969 and 1973. During this period he also travelled in the United States to give performances and renew friendships with some of the American Morden Tower readers, including Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley and Ed Dorn. Allen Ginsberg said of him: "I am an old admirer of Tom Pickard's poetry and believe as does Basil Bunting that he is one of the most live and true poetic voices in Great Britain."