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

The boy Mick was, of course, father to the man: his Dulwich contemporaries, even in his Lower School days, recognised someone extraordinary who was going to be a writer. Jeremy Howe (now Commissioning Editor for Radio Four) sat in front of him in 1A, and recalls that Mick spent the whole year writing stories while the others all took interminably dull history notes. He early wrote in a very distinctive bold and clear italic hand. A fierce sportsman, he was famous for bowling fast unplayable balls with what appeared to be genuine malice. The first reference to the stripling bowler Imlah in the College magazine, The Alleynian, in an Under 13 Cricket Eleven, is of a ‘quick man’… ‘reputed to be able to nobble the ball’. Jeremy Howe knew this ferocious bowling: ‘when you faced it you never quite knew from his eyes whether he was aiming for you or the stumps. I suggest the former’. Saturnine and enigmatic, he was liked by his peers who relished his wit. Jeremy Howe also thought Mick one of the most private and silent people—‘I don’t remember his ever venturing an opinion on anything in class, even in our very small English set’. Among his teachers, the poet and critic Richard Godden (now of the University of California at Irvine) recalls tolerating Mick reading Crime and Punishment under the level of the desk during the lesson; and the exuberant Chris Owens cheerfully allowed him to carry on with his own writing rather than perform mundane exercises. The poem ‘Gray’s Elegy’ in The Lost Leader recalls an ostensibly failed English lesson with another English master.

In 1975 Mick was a member of the post-A-Level English Upper Sixth form, of which I was the form master, when all seven boys in the form gained ‘Scholarship’ or ‘Exhibition’ awards in English at Oxford or Cambridge, something of a record for the College. These included Mark Kalderon, a pupil of legendary ability; Pete de Bolla, now Professor, of King’s College, Cambridge, Lecturer in Cultural Studies; and Jeremy Howe. I remember Mick choosing an unfashionable poem by Burns about a louse on a woman’s bonnet at church for ‘practical criticism’ by this group; Martin Blocksidge, who gave him tutorials in Victorian literature for his Upper Sixth term, remembers him saying little, except that in the second simile from ‘God’s Grandeur’ Hopkins was describing an orgasm.

Mick was proud of his 1st XI Cricket colours and of playing for the 1st XV Rugby team; The Lost Leader calls Rugby ‘the perversion I was public-schooled in’. He also played a memorably neurotic Ferdinand in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi. A review in The Alleynian by Jeffrey Greenslade (then up at Cambridge from Dulwich) remarked his low voice and brooding glances, his ‘great intensity and control’: ‘his attitude to his sister seemed rooted in a long-standing disease which determined all his movements and actions and he slipped easily into madness’.

When Mick applied to read English at Magdalen, I reported that he had come top of the internally assessed element of the ‘A level’ examination, marked by the Dulwich English teachers, that he was ‘intellectually very able and subtle, an ironist with an equable temperament,’ and that ‘while laconic in discussion he could animate the whole discussion by a flash of inspiration or by exposing something bogus or pretentious’. A note in my hand on his record card reads, ‘Great depths. A stylish ironist. Lyrical written work’, and registers a hunch that he might become a playwright.

Mick was awarded a Demyship (College Scholarship) at Magdalen in December 1975. It was made clear that this was for his excellent written work, and not for his performance at interview; Emrys Jones wrote to us that he was ‘a little inaccessible’ at interview, and that the dons were ‘momentarily put aback when he said that he didn’t do very much reading for pleasure’. Doubtless rehearsed by his boringly cunning English teachers to enquire whether he would still be able to study Swinburne’s poems if he took the Middle English option, when he was eventually invited to question the panel at the end, he asked what the bathrooms were like.

There was a Dulwich tradition that the English Upper Sixth form would choose and direct a farewell production when their exams were over and they were waiting to hear the results of their Oxford and Cambridge entrance examinations. Jeremy Howe’s production of Endgame was the most memorable of this era: Peter Buckroyd wrote in a review that the play’s pathos and comedy were ‘typified by Nag and Nell. Mick Imlah’s Nag, whose enormous white face and head was an extraordinary dramatic illusion, delivered his long story with control and daring, and he was rewarded by rich laughter from the audience’. Unhappily, if photographs were taken of this production, they do not appear to have survived.

Mick’s inner life and development as a writer are glimpsed in contributions to The Alleynian, revealing his early interest in the grotesque, in disguise and metamorphosis, and the strong flavour of his early found voice with its stylistic devices and sardonic tone. ‘Juvenilia’ doesn’t seem the right term for them, although they contain adolescent motifs.

Mick contributed at fifteen ‘A Basement Story’ to the Summer 1972 issue of The Alleynian. He had studied Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ with Richard Vanstone in the Modern Fourth form, and this very short story is signed ‘K. Imlah’. From a South London household a malign fat freckled boy named Herman (the anglicized name of Kafka’s father, here figured instead as an alienated son) badly cuts his sister on the forehead with a pocket-knife; the next day the boy suffers a metamorphosis, wearing his school uniform, on a double-decker bus. We are in the world of ‘The Zoologist’s Bath’: ‘his legs hammered up and down upon the floor, his whole body convulsed as though possessed, his face bloated and flecked, his very hair writhing in its roots’. His teeth convert to fangs, and then to tusks; he eats a radio from his bag. ‘Hairs sprouted from nose, from arms, clouding white cuffs… school blazer sagged to long cloak’. Once restored to Dulwich schoolboy, ‘Herman, red-faced, lost his crop of facial hair, restored his glasses to balance on public school plump and became

a
            chartered
                                surveyor

The next issue, Autumn 1972, contains a wry poem ‘Himn’, which mysteriously equates prayer with the polishing of boots:

If I reach the top
I see only knee
And not the sprinkle of gold
Around my body
(Which keeps recurring somewhere)
And if I walk away
Fatigued
His son will bend
And plead from blue eyes
With splinters and
Soft
Voice...
Oh and I hope
Something happens when I die.

Two later poems concern sky and earth. The Spring 1973 issue includes ‘Latin Chants and Incense Jets’: ‘a sacred Chorus, spirit of the nation’ hold aloft a spear-trident. The poem begins in curiously Eighteen-Nineties (or even Aleister Crowley nonsense) mode before gathering strength:

A spear thrice blowing in the stiff
Tibetan mystery, thrice its points afire
With glints of perfumed life defiant: pale the sun!
Pale all else, the lance of this devoted choir;
Though small its flame,
Immense its fire,
And power, the same as any star in any dismal sky.
Their gleaming idol
The thickening strange,
The spirit of the song drifts higher

An abrupt change introduces what appears to be the Munich air disaster:

Look!
Your shining namesake, high o’er Munich ’drome
Screeches rending, flapping, broken wing;
Is battered, metal, to its concrete home
Twisting distant while your minions chinking
                                                   softly 
                                                   sing. . . . .

The poem concludes, ‘Sing away, futile eunuchs’.

‘Sweating Surgeon’ from Summer 1973 is quoted here in full:

Though swan-like gliding to our lawn,
I think the stork was scared;
He flapped and furied, and was gone.
I quickly tugged the curtain closed,
And wondered how I’d dared.
So sad; it makes my mother cry,
She, yearning for the bird’s arrival,
Plump with expectation; I’ll not lie!
Now, with twitching, awkward tongue I gasp
How, furtively, I did espy,
Sliding whitely from his furry, furious grasp
The baby boy; I watched him float, and died.

(Thus The Alleynian in the last line, bequeathing a possible misprint and textual crux —not ‘watched him float, and die’?)

Mick’s last contribution in 1974 was a spiteful piece ‘A Fat Boy’, described by a friend as ‘a deadly cruel and accurate portrait’ of a fellow pupil at the College, ‘a Tory voter age 13’. This piece was cited in the magazine by another boy (now an Ambassador) to illustrate his complaint that boys’ compositions lacked joy, truth and beauty, saying the story was ‘wholly grotesque and seems fascinated with its own ugliness’. Mick’s fat boy gets stuck in a wheelbarrow at a suburban garden fête. He bites into a hot dog; tomato sauce spurts over his thumb and nose and drips onto his trouser leg. ‘Someone shoved a lilac in his mouth and called him a lilac. He is a lilac’. His mother disowns her wedged son in disgust, and turns to a little girl carrying ‘a trayful of salmon boats’. Abandoned after the party, ‘at the bottom of the garden there were three; the breeze, the barrow and he…From time to time, women, peering over fences at the roses, are surprised because he is still there, stuck. He is a lilac in a wheelbarrow’.