Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

[. . .] What Gabriele D’Annunzio wrote about France, “everyone has two homelands, one his own and one – la France”, holds good for England too. Yet there is a difference. Marianne (France) takes it for granted that all and sundry owe Her admiration, adoration, transport at the sight of her beauty: tributes to be given prostrated, at which She nonchalantly turns her back – frowning to the sale métèque who speaks broken French and waters Her wines in the wrong way. But Britannia is delighted on hearing your thick accent, your mistakes and malapropisms, and even if you implore her to be stopped and corrected, She hugs you and beams at you with a radiant smile, “Me, correct your mistakes or your accent? I wouldn’t dream of it! It is charming!”

Feeling welcome feeling at ease and at home at once: that makes all the difference . . . But Dear Diary, aren’t you a bit late with your Questionnaire? For I have spent half of my adult life in this country and by now I have become a kind of freak, a mongrel: nowadays I manage to find my bearings in this troubled world of ours as an Englishman (à titre d’honneur). My outlook, my taste in literature in music, in philosophy is English; my affinity to David Hume, to Coleridge, to Sterne, the Sitwells, Joyce, to JB Cabell is greater than to any one of the “Classics” of my old country; but in culinary matters my stomach is still hopelessly continental. I still share the opinion of Brillat-Savarin that “to finish a meal without cheese is a sin against the Holy Ghost”. I still find myself, when in Rome, in Paris, in Munich, Cologne, Vienna or Budapest, feeling ruefully “at home” and, unlike a number of my monoglot co-citizens trotting the globe, I’m shamelessly polyglot. This is some kind of schizophrenia which is quite safe and sound, you can live with it and even make an asset of it. [. . .]

I found myself in a country that was a monarchy, had a Monarch, had many dukes and duchesses – just like the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in which I was born. Hard work was rewarded by hard currency, inflation was never heard of: what I earned I could keep or spend at leisure, no one came in the dead of night to arrest me. Not just once did I catch myself – in my first little terrace house up in Parliament Hill Fields – at daybreak bursting into laughter with happiness: the screws were nowhere, the Ministry of Thought not in evidence, my Gulag days were over, my prison past sunk into oblivion.

I took advantage immediately. The “natives” were slow and slack, I was quick and workaholic. As the years went by, the increase in our living standards became visible: my second rambling Victorian beauty of a house, by now full of antiques, was dubbed a “mini-château” by friends less fortunate (or less diligent) than me, and as to literature, I pushed on by leaps and bounds, turning more and more envious wellwishers into enemies. Once my books started filling over a yard of shelf space I could safely say, si hostes requiris, circumspice: if you want to see my enemies, just look around.

[. . .] Some of my fans, all of them well-meaning, knowledgeable people, cannot help viewing literature as a racecourse and seeing in me some kind of a racehorse in literature. They would like to see me pass the post and “win”, for this would be some kind of a justification of their faith in me and of their hope for Hungarian literature. Some of their cheerleaders go on droning into my ears, “Do stop writing in that semi-Asiatic lingo, do switch to English or French” . . . “We’ll find someone to ‘doctor’ your text, everything that is un-English in it will be duly ironed out, do not chicken out of it, the post is in sight” . . . ”For God’s sake, man, turn over a new leaf and produce something in English to hawk around, you fool!”

Well – you know, my Dear Diary, as well as I do – that the first mild inclination to try my hand at scribbling in English was soon defeated by dismal results: what I churned out was well-nigh beyond ‘doctoring’, my priggish (Central-European) purple prose was irredeemable and unoutironable – I realised that pretty soon.

In their utter naïveté, my fans were unable to accept that someone who had failed to switch languages wouldn’t be able to do so once he or she has passed forty. What brought me to these shores, apart from my good instinct and my lucky star, was a long-standing romantic attachment to English (Anglo-Irish-Scottish-American) philosophy. I always cottoned on more to Hume than to Kant, more to Berkeley than to Hegel – and to my absolutely impractical mind this was of paramount importance when, between the States, France and England, I had to choose. [. . .]

Yet there was another thing, too, that, in their utter candidness, my cheerleaders failed to realise. The more my mind, my nerves, my digestive system became adapted to the English milieu – to the cadence of the language and the rhythm of everyday life on these isles, the more I learnt about Anglo-Saxon Literature the more I became steeped in various idioms, slangs and dialects, proverbs and archaisms, cockneyisms and body-language – the more the sad truth dawned on me that there was a supreme, near-metaphysical barrier in literature that was as good as insuperable for me.

Once you have been born a maximalist you won’t be satisfied with less than the best. In my value-scales and according to my standards in literature, it is no use penning anything unless you are in full command of the tongue you are writing in: in other words, if you do not possess the vocabulary of a Mervyn Peake, of an Anthony Burgess, of a James Branch Cabell, in my book you are a non-starter. True, you still may achieve Fleet Street quality as a distinguished columnist, a high-ranking journalist or as an author of best-selling novels, but you won’t be in the same class. In your background from Beowulf to Finnegans Wake there is a gaping dearth that cannot be filled. Your synonyms are few and far between, your approach is foreign, your style is at best lacklustre, mostly dull, your redoubled efforts may founder in disastrous verbosity, even garrulousness.

That’s the secret of it: the pun – heart and soul of the language – escapes you: you do not know when a pun is a pun, you have a handle and don’t know how to handle it. The whole gamut of the language from the first vestiges of it, through medievalisms, latinisms of the schoolmen, until modern times, all shades and hues, lilts and brogues, fad-words and fashion idioms, part faded and part forgotten hopes and abbreviations, sayings and limericks – all of them should be in your bone-marrow and at your fingertips.

The purity and the discipline of thought of a Hume, married to the riches and effortlessness of a Pope, the trouvailles of a genius in his or her prime, coupled to the pith of an old master – those are the tools, the minimum to start with. If you haven’t got that, there is no point in committing one single iota to paper.