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

When I saw my story published in Staple (Happy Birthday Wordsworth, Staple 57) I hated the ending. 'Wrong! wrong! wrong!' I shouted and threw my clutch of free staples, plus the additional ten I'd bought as 'gifts' to boast to friends, across the room. The story in a nutshell was this. A bright new teacher defies the rules at St Cuthbert's School for Over Privileged Boys. While classes all around her are rigorously spoon-fed to get them through their A levels Miss Pringle goes wild, teaches her own way and disregards the government's assessment objectives as they apply
to her subject, English Literature.

I might add at this point that I am a senior examiner with one of the
national awarding bodies for A level English. I set poetry questions. In fact I'd just finished setting the questions for June 2006 when I wrote this story, because I like writing from experience. It's how my writing got started. My first ever story was called Flashed at in Cleethorpes (I had the idea of working on a collection, Flashed at in Cleethorpes & other Unsavoury Tales) because I was flashed at in Cleethorpes, in the gents by the station. But that's another story.

Letters from parents to Mr Grist the headmaster arrive, complaining
that Miss Pringle doesn't teach properly and demanding their fees back if their over privileged son doesn't get his grade A. Grist orders Mike Jarvis her head of department to pull her into line. But he, poor middle-aged man, a sad figure forever looking for something he's lost, is bewitched. Despite his disapproval of her methods, he has fallen menopausally and hopelessly in love with Miss Pringle. On the day of the exam itself Grist sarcastically suggests Miss Pringle sit the exam alongside the boys to prove to them all that she has at least read the set books. Always up for a challenge, she sashays into the exam room, sits alongside the boys at a desk and begins writing in earnest. Jarvis who is invigilating, pacing the rows giving her more and more paper as she puts up her hand, admires and desires her. His paternal caring side is delighted that his doubts are proved wrong. She has read the set books after all!

Oh no she hasn't, Mr Jarvis! Miss Pringle is writing an attack on you
and the system. "Dear Examiner," she writes. "You and the system are non creative and non vibrant. You are like my dull little head of department Mike Jarvis, reinforcing an uninspired approach to English literature, teaching boys facts when you should be making them feel. These questions, look at them examiner, how they narrow down potential responses, with their tight little rubric answer either or, do this do that, how they reward answers that simply repeat what they have been taught, how they look for essays couched in the kind of language you examiners yourselves would use, with pompous formulations like thus it can be seen that, in conclusion it can be argued that..."

And here's the terrible ending. When Mike Jarvis discovers what she's done, because he reads her paper when he collects it in at the end, he screws it up and writes a set of perfect answers himself to the questions, in her name, yes, the patronising bastard, in her name! And that's the end.

Now what should have happened is this. Mike Jarvis should never have discovered what Miss Pringle actually wrote. Instead the papers should have gone to the board. And that summer would have been one of those summers when the government moves the goal posts. They decide that the examination system is due for a radical rethink. And Miss Pringle's letter would be exactly what the rethink requires. The English literary canon of texts considered most suitable for examination, mainly old texts by tried and tested authors, would be abolished. Nitpicking questions that elicit candidates' responses to a series of assessment objectives would be abolished in favour of a broad brush approach that encourages truly original and creative writing - "Wordsworth? what do you think?" would be the new style of question. And in future all teachers would have to sit the exams themselves, just like Miss Pringle, and all examiners would have to sit at desks too and answer their own questions... and a candidate's
own response, whatever it is, would be cherished as valuable...

Now steady on. The examiner in me, the conservative Mike Jarvis side of me, looks up from his marking at this point and says: you don't really mean that, do you Richard? You're on my side aren't you? Dull destroyers of creativity we might be, but we do recognise the importance of accurate assessment. "Wordsworth? What do you think?" sounds fine in theory, but in reality it just wouldn't work...

And the Miss Pringle in me says: Richard, you sad little man, and whispers: you are Mike Jarvis.

Jarvis is the me I don’t want to become, the me that I fear I already
might be. Miss Pringle is the side of me that wants to save me from that.
Reckless and creative, she is the writer. Mike Jarvis is the examiner.

Perhaps.

But of course the joy of writing is when you leave your real self behind. When you step into a character then let the character take over. True, there’s bits of me in Miss Pringle. There’s bits me of me in Mike Jarvis. The danger is these bits can inhibit. The reason my story in Staple didn’t have the ending it deserved was the restraining hand of steady old Mike Jarvis. And I was afraid of Miss Pringle, afraid of what I’d created, of what Miss Pringle had written, the chutzpah of it, the blasphemy of it. I her author stood alongside Mike Jarvis, screwed up the paper she had written on and put it firmly in the bin.

I’ve made up for it since. I’ve written sixty thousand words more.
Jarvis and Pringle are no longer me. I have set them free. Miss Pringle becomes a poet. Mike Jarvis abandons his teaching career and then... you’ll have to wait for the novel to see. Till then I am keeping it secret.

Many years ago I made the mistake of showing my father that first
story I wrote, Flashed at in Cleethorpes, along with a couple of other pieces I’d had published - in magazines that are no longer with us (one called Jennings Magazine and another called Iron, though Peter Mortimer’s Iron Press still survives). He was upset. He thought there was something shameful about (a) being flashed at in Cleethorpes and (b) admitting it. Worse still was writing about it. He mistakenly thought the central character in a steelworks story (I was born in Scunthorpe and used my experience as a student labourer in my writing) was a version of himself, and that I had represented the north of England in an unfair and unflattering light - Scunthorpe as all steelworks, Cleethorpes as all fish and chips tea and bread and butter. It wasn’t until after his death that I felt I could really write about Scunthorpe and Cleethorpes.

When my father was diagnosed as having oesophogeal cancer he
couldn’t bear to go home and tell my mother so he called off in the
corner shop and told them there. Some years later I wrote a story based on this. The trouble with the story was that in itself the incident is slight and the attempt to bulk it out rather crudely didn’t work. It was rejected by Staple who felt, I think rightly, that the narrative wasn’t compelling enough. Then I rewrote it as a short, true to life, piece for radio and I read it on radio 4 (John Peel’s Saturday morning programme Home Truths). I vividly remember recording it because the story made the producer cry and I had to re-read it because she had been too upset to set the recording levels correctly. She had recently lost her own father to cancer and this made me very aware of the responsibility of writing about such a subject. I could also sense the ghost of my father, looking over my shoulder
as I sat at the microphone, reading my script, disapproving. Because in the account I had suggest his cancer was a kind of double life, almost as if he had a mistress, which in real life he didn’t have, at least as far as I know, and that telling the woman in the corner shop first, before my mother, was a kind of betrayal. And I was also aware of that old adage, all the more impressive for being said in Latin, de mortuis nihil nisi sed bonum -only say nice things about dead people. But anyhow I did it, and when I listened to the broadcast I wondered, if it made the producer cry, did it make anybody else cry? And if so, how many? And there was a very humbling sense of power in that.

And then very recently something else happened that made me write
the story that’s printed here, Forgive Our Foolish Ways. I had difficulty swallowing and was diagnosed as having Barrett’s oesopohagus. It is what doctors charmingly call a pre-cancerous condition. It means that the lining of my gut has become unstable and I have a substantially greater risk than the average person of developing oesophogeal cancer, just like my father. I wrote this story a few days after being diagnosed. I felt I suddenly had a reason to write it. I would not become my father. Though I was writing in the first person, the narrator would not be me. Nor would his father be my father. I had a new freedom, I had escaped my father at last, just as in writing about old Mike Jarvis I had created a persona, only to
step away from him, to expunge him, and know he’s not me. And my new determination also decided that, in spite of the biological odds, my Barrett’s oesophagus would not develop as my father’s did into cancer. Quite by chance Cancer Research UK have announced the biggest clinical trial ever launched at the time I am writing this. It is aimed at people with Barrett’s oesopohagus and I shall be one of their first volunteers.

And now I think I’ll get back to those unsavoury tales about Cleethorpes, and make them more, or maybe less, unsavoury. “Not a lot of people wear fancy specs in Cleethorpes. It’s got more grit that whimsy, Clee,” I originally began. This was true - I was wearing bright red glasses that day I went into the gents and was flashed at. I think they triggered something.

But the flashed-at me I write about now will not be me. Just as the
Cleethorpes in my story need not be Cleethorpes. It’s my Cleethorpes, the gem of the Lincolnshire coast. At school they told us it was only the banks of the Humber estuary not the sea at all, but how can it not be the seaside, Clee? I know, when the tide goes out it goes out for miles and you wonder if it’s ever coming back, and the wind gets up sometimes - but it’s got candy floss, Punch n’ judy, fish and chips and tea and bread and butter, up-and-down horses, the big dipper. How can it not be the seaside? It’s got casinos, marinas, illuminations and swanky hotels. It’s got a climate like the south of France. It’s a prime port of call for cruise ships. It’s got wide white beaches with huge waves ideal for surfing. My Cleethorpes. Anything can happen in Cleethorpes. And it will.