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

A few Thursdays ago, I spent the day dropping things; a book, my contact lens solution, a lens, the bath-brush (nudged off the back of the door by my shoulder). When you drop things, particularly when you’re not generally clumsy, you become very aware of your surroundings and how you fit in it. How other people fit in it. I was clumsy because I wasn’t concentrating. I wasn’t there in the present time – my hands, shoulder somewhere in the future while my head was in the past. Two days before, I’d been told Archie Markham had died. How, when, and where was the job for the obituaries, and there have been many. What I’ll share here are memories.

   I met Archie in 1993, when I transferred to Sheffield Hallam as a second year undergraduate. I met him on a stairwell at Collegiate Crescent campus. I was going up, he was coming down. We stood on the landing and chatted. I wanted to script films and write about
them. My degree was combined Film and English studies (before it even existed as a course). For ‘light relief’ from the academia I took a poetry writing module.

   In my early tutorials with Archie, I was Eliot (everyone was Eliot to Archie), I was the Objectivists, the French Modernists (not the
English or American, Eliot excused, just the French). And I needed to look to strong women writers, he said, like Jorie Graham and Mimi Khalvati. I needed to find the emotional centre of my work. I needed to read more – Hill, Hughes, Chaucer – I needed to write more. Jacqueline, why would one write these films (flash-in-the-pan!) when one could write poetry? As I write, I can see him opening the window of his office, shifting piles of papers from this chair to that (as much as he hated cliché, he knew when to live it), ignoring the phone ringing (they’ll always call back), and asking me to read my newest work. He would listen, stroke his greying beard, and then say, Aaaah. For some reason, Archie took to my poems and I took to him. When he asked me to stay on to do the MA in
Writing, I couldn’t refuse.

   Anyone who knew him could tell you about Archie’s enthusiasm and abounding generosity, his terrifying time-keeping (how many times I sat on the steps to his office waiting for a tutorial I can’t remember), and his warmth. I’m no different. But at this moment it’s clear memories that come back to me.

   The last time I saw Archie, was before Christmas. He and Mimi
Khalvati had given a reading at the Reform Church in Camden and
afterwards we went for supper. Mimi had a new digital camera and
was taking photo after photo – as many as the memory-card allowed. The waiter took a good one of all of us, and Archie thanked him, not thank-you but Merci. He was a man always between languages and lands, you only have to read his work to know this.

   We talked then about the reading, the gorgeous food, The Poetry School, photography, the Ted Hughes letters and the demise of letter-writing. He asked me about my poetry and also the short stories I said I’d send him to read (I promised myself I’d send him a long letter when I sent the stories later in the year), we talked about Christmas and everyone’s plans and all of it wrapped around the wonderful, terrible tales of Archie’s travels. While we fussed with
Turkish Delight that he couldn’t eat, and gathered bags and whatnots, Archie had already paid the bill. Any protestations withered beneath that West Indian smacking of his lips and his very English stammering and shrugging.

   Walking back to the car, I thought about the ending to his reading; confident, gently witty, generous, he sang, When I find myself in times of trouble, mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be. And we laughed with him.

   I learned the phrase ‘hinterland’ from Archie. It reached into me and found a place to live. We didn’t always necessarily agree on what ‘hinterland’ meant, but we recognized the importance of it to each others’ work. I come from the middle of England where hinterland is history and pre-history, the weight of language, the Mercian kings and queens, but a place anonymous now, at best invisible, whose voices and accents are indistinguishable (some say) from those further north. Belonging to this is important to me. My idea of hinterland is narrow. For Archie, truly defining his hinterland was, I think, almost impossible, I’m from a small island! he’d say as if it needed no explanation. I imagine his traveling, his gathering of history and politics and languages, was part of defining his hinterland.

   He was a man at home wherever he found four good walls and a
friend (new or old) to offer them. When we were working on Mimi’s
festschrift, Archie stayed at mine and Martin’s flat in Walthamstow.
We’d been working late on the order of the contributions and proofing of the book. When we went to bed we left Archie with
clean linen, towels and an invitation to make himself at home. In the
morning the spring cold seeped through the flat and we awoke worrying whether Archie was warm enough. We needn’t have, he’d been up since five, had already made himself a fire (we had a coal
fire) and was sitting on the sofa working over the proofs again.

   There is something special and vaguely unreal about waking up to
a proper fire on a cold morning. It gives the kind of warmth you have to attach to words like ‘nostalgia’, and ‘by-gone days’, but this warmth, because it was so unexpected, was actually very real, very present. Warmer than usual because it had been burning for hours, it had a sense of continuity to it. I laughed as I asked him about it, these are the things we learn in backwards Sheffield, he said, we’re not as sophisticated as you Londoners, we know how to make fires. No one else would get away with calling me a Londoner, but Archie was right, he could make fires and he knew full well how to stoke them and how to draw out the warmth.