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

When the schoolboy Imlah came up to Magdalen College in the winter of 1975 to be interviewed, the view of poetry he had chosen to present to his examiners in his Scholarship and Entrance papers seemed conventional enough, though expressed with eye-catching economy and oddity. He had written, for example, on the symbolism of Yeats as the ‘trained eruption of the subconscious intellect’ and elaborated upon the skills of the poet to perfect the intractable material of life, ‘repeatedly throwing himself, like Antony into Cleopatra’s seductive slime, into “that most fecund ditch of all” where “all the ladders start”; and his sacrifice has “left its mark”, ambiguously.’

All good candidates can themselves risk ambiguity in the helter-skelter of a three-hour paper. Mick had clearly spent a happy time deploying his reading and making connections between one thing and another. Presented with a passage of practical criticism about the sensual Tess observed by Angel at Talbothays, he remembered some lines of Tennyson from The Princess that startled me. The hook was probably only the word ‘crimson’ but the analogy was confident, and his immediate comments about Angel as ‘the snake in the garden’ established him as an attractively resourceful reader across centuries.

If I thought him showing off a little (as I probably did) I was ready to pose awkward questions. Writing of suffering in King Lear, he had remarked: ‘Ophelia’s death is positively barbaric.’ I couldn’t resist asking him if he thought the actual Ophelia’s death (in Hamlet, of course) was also undeserved. He was unfazed, and fenced the implied rebuke with his characteristically leisurely decisiveness. In later years I came to value beyond measure Mick thinking on his feet: whatever emerged would be wonderfully worth it.

Schoolboys in such situations are taught to show their own creativeness, and again the line between showing and showing off is a narrow one. But the passage that most struck me at the time made it clear that you could afford to misremember a character of Shakespeare’s if you had a feeling for Shakespeare’s effect on you such as the following (he had been asked to write to the statement ‘Subject without style is barbarism; style without subject is dilettantism’):

Let us look at a rose. Between it and the eye, in the dark room of the blank page, a number of authors are congregated, each with his own torch, his style. We have no perception of the rose without them. Each takes his turn: some torches cast a glowing white light which reveals the rose to be nothing more than a stalk, thorns, and a cluster of waxy petals. We are disappointed with the poverty of this impression. Some others seem to be shining their torches straight into our own eyes. It is very colourful, indeed; it is not unpleasurable; but after the seduction of dazzlement has been in progress for some minutes, we turn away, tired, knowing nothing new about the rose.

One bald old man, conspicuously taller than the rest— father, one called him—has the trick. His radiantly beautiful light seems to emerge from the heart of the rose, and intensifies, as much as it clarifies, the perception; the rose suddenly seems the essence of all things to us; Emily Dickinson, of our party, has gone very cold, and swoons, muttering that this poetry has removed the top of her head.

The sentiment of this conception may be forgiven on account of its innate sense of drama; and of its assured use of the semi-colon. We of course had no hesitation in awarding Mick his Demyship. A little shy beneath his then enormous hair, suspicious of high-brow taste, unusually a keen sportsman, he nonetheless took to literary Magdalen like no other undergraduate I had known. He was still more or less there as a Junior Lecturer in 1988, twelve years after matriculation and a dazzling career in College rugby, cricket and soccer; after his secretaryship of the John Florio Society where his minutes effortlessly outbid the actual meetings for significance; after his First in Schools; after his graduate work on Arthurian myth in Victorian poetry; after his work as an editor for the revived Oxford Poetry and for the London Poetry Review; and above all after his decisive beginnings as a poet, learning to wield his own torch in dark places.

Mick’s early poetry was, as might be expected of one who had written so well about Yeats, not averse to echoes of the poet Auden had called ‘that old Cagliostro.’ An ambitious entry for the College’s Richard Selig prize called ‘To Stuart, On Losing Elaine, probably to Another’ begins with a nod to ‘High Talk’:

Tottering on stilts, he found
His head so far above the ground
That he couldn’t tell where the ground was

Stuart has a vision of Christ, and intends the negotiation of a view of suffering and purpose in life that is rebuked by the smug speaker of the poem. What therefore emerges as a complex poem of disengagement from Christianity with erotic rivalry as a stalking-horse (a procedure that seems to be Eliotic) is also awash with Hopkinsian effects mediated through the cadences of late Dylan Thomas:

Next to Stuart, who’s spitting out moving splinters
I am stuck, wooden-hearted if at all;
A little idol on rocks, a boss of winters,
Stiff, like my chair,
Poor-beggarly crowned,
And nodding to the drowned
Through stagnant air.

This sort of self-criticism was to become characteristic of the speakers of his poems, but figuratively it has a somewhat preening air. Mick may not at the time have been particularly looking for a way out of this modernist mishmash of overdeveloped metaphor, but a way out was certainly thrust at him in the shape of the very first author I made him read, that forbidding but (as I knew) also seductive gateway to the Victorian syllabus, Robert Browning.

Browning, while admitting no rivals in this sort of determined over-management of the metaphorical life of a poem (which of course may well have contributed to his initial appeal), gave Mick a crucial new kind of scenario: the elaborated monologue, with its unique psychological revelation of a predicament. I was myself interested in predicament and in the possibilities of the Browningesque poem at that time, and contrived a blatant imitation of the master himself in Staunton’s section of my poem about chess-players, ‘The Most Difficult Position.’ I mention this only to admit that I was soundly trumped by Mick’s vivid contributions to the genre, ‘The Zoologist’s Bath’ (which develops the revisionary Biblical obsession of ‘To Stuart. . .’ in a bizarre Victorian direction) and ‘Quasimodo says Goodnight’ (which strikes deeply into the male unease with sexuality that was to remain a major theme in his poetry). It soon became obvious to me that Mick was not merely a bright undergraduate poet, but a rapidly maturing writer who deserved an audience. It was probably soon after his graduation that I proposed publishing a pamphlet of his poems at the Sycamore Press, which I ran with my wife Prue, and which was actually a treadle machine in our tiny garage that had already published the first work of James Fenton and others.

Hand setting and printing a pamphlet of poems is a lengthy business: you take each slug of type from the case and learn to read backwards (minding your ps and qs) and upside down (minding your ns and us) as the lines accumulate in the composing-stick. Undergraduates came at weekends to help, rewarded by gin-and-tonics. The ordinary tortuousness of the process was increased by Mick’s ingrained perfectionism. Although his attitude to his poems was sometimes dry and dismissive, he worked on them endlessly and was loath to deliver finalised copy to the printer. When it did come, it was marvellous, just like his weekly essay, handwritten on A4 sheets, folded twice and produced from the back pocket of his jeans some way into a tutorial as though its triumphant existence were not only a surprise to his tutor but to himself.

The process of revision was a sometimes over-laboured perfectionism, as he himself was the first to admit. For example, in an early TS of ‘Quasimodo’ the economical lines ‘you do not recognize / That I have had to stow you in a lair / Among spies, for the streets are mad with spite’ were imaginatively elaborated for the pamphlet into ‘you cannot scale the height / To which these hands have hauled your daily fear; / Above, ten yards of tower; beyond, thin air; / Below, a wink of bonfire, memory / Of spite as faint as drowning, pale as water.’ As the weeks (the months) went by with revision after revision, I could see the rewriting never ending at all, as every aside was followed up, every rift laden. However, a publisher who has been a tutor can afford to be demanding. The poems had to be set. They had to be machined. Pages had to be folded and collated. At one point I guiltily required a revision myself. ‘Quasimodo’, with its massive paragraphs, began in the very centre of the pamphlet, its first 70-odd longish lines occupying a single forme and using up a very great deal of my body fount. I ran out of ‘k’s, and was forced to ask Mick to lose two words with a ‘k’ in them. It was easy enough: one ‘know’ became ‘tell’ and another one became ‘see’. It is evidence of Mick’s fine judgement that when the poem was reprinted in his first collection he decided to keep the second of these changes, but not the first.

The early clottedness and strange shifts of image do to an extent remain in The Zoologist’s Bath and other Adventures (which eventually appeared in June 1982), particularly in the poems that boldly tackle the cartoon student life of drink, sex and snatched sleep. In a sometimes half-facetious interview in the following year, Mick proclaimed the source of such poems to be in dreams, which he tried to bring on by eating lumps of cheese before going to sleep. One of these dreams, about the rich taste of blood, seems to have been the starting-point of his epic sequence ‘The Drinking Race.’ Perhaps the most effectively mysterious of the poems was ‘Abortion’, which managed to be about a severe hangover, a disastrous voyage and an actual abortion at the same time:

Have you ever heard a noise that you think
Is unearthly (especially when you’re half asleep)
But when you get it into focus it’s only
Them snoring, or your neighbour revving up?

Well that’s how this whirring began,
Like something familiar mistaken, becoming
As I struggled to call it a pump or the cistern
Neither, nothing else, and very loud.

Till sailors’ boasts fell silent in the spray.
When we took the first buffet I dropped
My pointless jacket and almost at once
I was doubled-up in air but couldn’t breathe.

And dizzy I saw an experiment
With magnets, me the broken one,
A horseshoe facing down,
Sucked up. I passed clean out

And was lucky to survive; the boat
Melted in blood, but I stiffened safely,
A rabbit’s foot, gristly
In someone’s cabinet.

Is this badly-behaved drunk the morning after (‘like a reclaimed monster’) to continue to think of himself as a social survivor, a kind of trophy? Or is he to be flushed away in the loo? The puzzling ending of this peculiarly unnerving poem is a prime example of the gruesome quality of the pamphlet that earned it Peter Porter’s admiring summary in an Observer review: ‘Browning in the world of Hammer films’. In the second year after the publication of the pamphlet, Mick secured the E. C. Gregory Award that usually signals the arrival of a ‘promising’ poet still under 30 (Jamie McKendrick and Carol Ann Duffy were among that vintage year) but a number of his submitted poems didn’t survive into his Chatto collection, Birthmarks of 1988. When Mick’s vein of penetrating whimsy failed to connect with a viable subject he was distinctly unsatisfied.

Birthmarks, however, was a notable success because it had indeed found a new and radical subject. This Chatto collection naturally included the troubled dreams and fantasies of the Sycamore pamphlet (and also an early surreal quest poem about St Anthony that had appeared in a Sycamore Press Florio anthology and is, like ‘To Stuart. . .’, a curious harbinger of the brilliant ‘Muck’, the first and perhaps most challenging poem of The Lost Leader). But in general the collection enlarged Mick’s hallmark theme of male uncertainty into a notable investigation of guilt, shame and embarrassment. He had attempted some ambitious poems of this kind in 1983 or 4, such as ‘Doing It’ and ‘Love Letters’, but he did not collect them, as there was evidently in the end something either too staged or openly rueful about their analysis of metaphysical diffidence or sexual commitment. The triumphant successes of Birthmarks, on the other hand, embodied misunderstandings of class, culture and gender in absorbing fictive episodes and confessions, with a new flamboyance of prosodic technique.

There is the bland self-justifying betrayer of innocence in ‘Clio’s’, for example, and an alarmingly matter-of-fact downplaying of sexual jealousy in ‘Her Version.’ These poems disturb because they have closely observed the resourceful duplicity of the mating game. They needed no lumps of cheese. Nor did what is possibly the first of Mick’s ‘Scottish’ poems, ‘Goldilocks’, with its parasitic tramp needling the narrator’s precarious Oxford disguise (‘Couldn’t you spare a wee thought for your dad?’). This note of confronted shame is also marked in the title-poem:

On my decline, a millipede
Helped me to keep count;
For every time I slipped a foot
Farther down the mountain

She’d leave a tiny, cast-off limb
Of crimson on my cheek
As if to say—
You’re hurting us both, Mick…

The poem is resolute about what this means:

That it’s as bad to fall astray
As to start from the wrong place.
Now I have earned the purple face.
It won’t go away.

A little later, drafting a note about himself for possible inclusion in a New Statesman booklet, he wrote: ‘most of my poems are dramatic narratives, which have to work as stories first. Sometimes the narrator suffers an unpleasant shock about himself when his origins or natural limitations re-assert themselves. Hence the title of my book: Birthmarks.’ The frequent vivacity, violence or vulgarity of these re-assertions is most marked in the poem ‘Cockney’, where the assonantal rhymes themselves (like his parody of Owen’s pararhymes in ‘The Drinking Race’) mark the fatal metamorphosis of self-revelation:

Moreover, the skit I had chosen to grace the occasion (‘My Way—in
                                       the Setting for Tuba by Mahler’)
Had even the Previns in generous stitches (it seemed an acceptable 
                                       social milieu
If only because it was something like six million light years away 
                                       from the planet of Millwall.

The speaker’s artistic pretensions are soon exploded by the appearance of the ghost of his accusing mother:

                 …‘You!’ she demanded, ‘You who last month in the 
                                       Seychelles
Took drinks with a Marquis, and studded the spine of Lucinda 
                                       with seashells—
You are the same little boy that I sent out in winter with Cockney 
                                       inscribed on your satchel!’

And as she dispersed, one or two of my neighbours were squinting 
                                       at me as you do a bad odour,
And even my friendly advances were met by a flurry of coughs and 
                                       a mutter of Oh, dear—
For try as I might I just couldn’t assemble the sounds that came out 
                                       in a delicate order:

ALL ROYT MOY SAHN! HA’S YOR FARVAH?
LEN YOU TEN NOWTS?—CALL IT A FOIVAH
TRAVELLED IN TEE-ASCANY?—DO ME A FIVAH!

This clash of cultures seems outrageous, simple as the concept is. Outrageous, too, is ‘The Drinking Race’ itself, partly drawn from his pointed ‘Ralph Crozier’ feature in the Poetry Review of January 1984. But like most epics it remained unfinished, or only partly-collected, and its grim subject was revisited with greater maturity in later work. Not at all simple, however, was a new note of gnomic playfulness in poems like ‘Tusking’ and ‘Silver’, but these were also seeds of a kind, to find an astonishing fulfilment in the ludic fables of ‘The Lost Leader.’ Playfulness was to become a key to his resourcefulness, but it was only earned after the early discovery of where his own ladders started.

This account of Mick’s early poetry up to Birthmarks is necessarily sketchy, but it is intended to indicate a number of his abiding qualities as a poet—ruthless and painstaking self-criticism, technical and imaginative energy, rumbustious humour and honesty of subject (the ability to confront demons). And I feel privileged to have been a sort of midwife to his work at Oxford. I am grateful for his long friendship and for his own endless example, advice and encouragement, not least in our Welsh cottage in the 1980s and 1990s where he would enliven writing parties with lipograms, joint double-dactyls, Welsh golff (including four pages of detailed rules about the strict play with toe and tennis-ball), ferocious pontoon, and tall tales of almost falling off the mountain while looking for ever more ancient pieces of the local crashed Halifax B11. Ars longa, vita brevis.