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

It was the university summer of 1957 when E.M. Forster, late Victorian-Edwardian writer and member of the Bloomsbury set, invited me for a drink. Well to be precise, tea! I had gained a TUC mature scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge. Friends were surprised to learn that I was to study the religious, economic, political and social issues of the Middle East. “A bit out your line” some said, forgetting that before the Suez debacle I had been shipped off, as a National Service soldier. I had got hooked on this desert world and my bit of academic learning stood me good through many difficult encounters in those desert regions in later years.

A descending late July sun radiated a pink wash across the medieval white stone of King’s College Chapel whilst a thick aroma of late flowering shrubs drifted upwards to a raised courtyard. As I looked at the dancing light I discovered that an old bespectacled man wearing a thick woollen tweed suit was by my side. He commented on the curious wash of colours and somehow he contrived to get me to say who I was, what I was doing, and more importantly what I wanted to do. “To be a writer”, I blurted out. “Good come to tea. Tomorrow, four o’clock; pull that long bell hook over there by the corner door” and he was gone.

Later one of my tutors, who had witnessed the whole episode asked, “Do you know to whom you were talking too?” I shook my head. “E.M.Forster, you know, the great writer, A Passage to India and all that 1924, you know!” “Forster, who?” was all I managed to say. My journal entry of those days’ records:
“For an old man he vas wonderfully alive, and most astonishing was his utter lack of a sense of his own importance. I found his bluish grey lips disturbing but having asked me questions about my North London street world, he remained silent whilst out I tumbled all my talk of street poverty. Of my Yorkshire Irish father dying from trenches gas, and of my Celtic singing mum working for the rich and famous. All this and much more whilst a blond haired athletic man, younger than my twenty six years toasted thick slices of bread in front of a gas fire in a thickly curtained small Fellow’s Room, made smaller with dark green and highly florid William Morris wallpaper that flowed onto armchair and settee fabrics encrusted with scattered books, magazines and sheaves of hand scribbled writing papers”.

When I had finished drinking my strong milky tea Forster charmingly gave me a glimpse of his personal vision. “There you have it. Your book! It is all there. Write it just like you have told me. Mix in some sex, add some violence and don’t leave out the passion and all in your own voice.” That was his advice. I am still using it.

One year later I was speaking on the same platform as Iris Murdoch at a New Left  Review Marquee meeting in Oxford Street, but we never had a drink together. For me, to have a drink is when one can get intimately acquainted to one way or other. It was Edna O’Brien that I fell in love with. Told her so whilst sitting on the same thick copy of The Sunday Observer before being arrested in a Committee of 100 direct action sitdown demo’ against Nuclear Weapons in London’s Trafalgar Square. She was, and still remains so, a delight. A woman with dancing eyes, and a firm and kissable mouth! “Ah, Bill you’re a lovely man. A dancing man that I shall always remember.” Those words were a gift always to be treasured. We did have many drinks together that led to some brief work on a Children’s play at The Royal Court Theatre.

My grown up children are still surprised when I toss off the names of painters, writers, playwrights and poets I drank with. My Camden Town days straddled my teenage years and early days of marriage. Ration Books were still around and hopeful visions of a socialist society were only just beginning to dim when I found myself drinking in a Camden Town pub where its Edwardian charm and character has since been snuffed out with a beer bar make over. From my street comer political meetings I had met Jock Haston, an old Glaswegian revolutionary communist. It was Jock who introduced me to trade union activist, journalist and singer, Dominic Behan and his ex-house painter of a brother, Brendan. The fact that my father had also been a ‘polished-arsed painter’ and a good drinker was the card of instant friendship. Brendan was a great ‘gas’ of a man. Playwright, author, poet, raconteur and rebel, he loved to talk of his New York days and the dim witted Yankee reporters. “Asking me, I believe you have just come from Toronto, Mr. Behan, and what the purpose of me visit. Well I replied, back in McDaid’s pub in Dublin there’s a special sign on the wall which says DRINK CANADA DRY, so I did. He never got it. But there was worse. This same bugger asked if I was fucking bisexual. I told him he was no gentleman. But he persisted, so I said, you know when St. Patrick banished the snakes from Ireland, they all went off to New York and became theatre critics and reporters.”

I wrote one of Behan’s limericks down. There was a young feller named Rollocks / Who worked for Ferrier Pollocks / As he walked on the Strand / With his girl by the hand / The tide came up to his …..  knee’s. I believe that he added, “Now that’s prose William. If the water had got any higher, it would have been poetry.”

Into the circle one day came a soft faced curly haired Welshman, always neatly dressed in a checked jacket, shirt and tie. As he quaffed his pints, Dylan Thomas would start to recite a poem that would just come out of his head. Then it would be Dominic’s and Brendan’s turn. I would try my luck and make up words, as I still do. As the booze flowed so did the words. Ah, but in those days tape recorders were bloody cumbersome things, and none of us could have afforded one. It would have got in the way of the drinking and I never remembered a word.

It was in the late sixties that I got to drink with motorbike rider, football reporter, poet, playwright and film director B.S. Johnson. Alan Sapper, General Secretary of the film and Television trade union find  introduced us. Brian and his family became part of my life until, like all my drinking friends, an untimely death. Johnson was a man who tugged at all the edges of life. He was generous and abusive, thoughtful and spiteful whilst never wanting to let anyone down. He was not always understood. But in his poetry and prose he continually sensed his ending. Drinking with Brian was always an experience. Once, having downed, together, two bottles of red wine he announced he could light his farts. Before anyone could quietly protest he had dropped his trousers and pants and striking a match applied the lighted end to his bum where he farted with gusto. The result a great flame whooshed across the room. “Now you do it,” he asked. I was uncertain and chickened out by saying that London water that circulated through his room radiators had an inflammable gas. “Bugger off, don’t believe it”. So I unscrewed the radiator air tap and applied a match. The result a beautiful looped blue flame licked up until water in the system filled the void in the heating system and put it out. (1)
     It was Brian, as editor got a poem of mine published in Transatlantic Review, and to have my experiences as a National Serviceman published, along with contemporary’s, Jeff Nuttall, Alan Sillitoe, painter David Hockney and many others in the compilation “ALL BULL” (2)

1 would need to spend many an hour reading through all the accumulated papers that I have stored throughout my eclectic years of living, to seek all those architects, musicians, jazz singers, actors, dancers, poets, writers, film directors and entertainers who helped to make the twenty years of the 1960’s and 70’s a cultural and artistic high point that has yet to be outdone. Today the off spring of Thatcher’s children all wired for sound masturbate and genuflect with utterances of how “COOL” it must have all been, and talk of these people being celebrities. Thirty to forty years ago, the majority of my drinking friends would have scoffed at such a term. We were all just part of the scene. I’m sure that my other drinking partners like Christopher Logue, Arnold Wesker, Bernie Kops, Jeff Cloves, Clancy Sigal, anarchist and architect David Lyle, Glaswegian sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, and Irish painter Gerard Dillion, who once described me as, “A Botticelli of a boy”, because of my then thick black wavy hair, would have all agreed. We were all poets in our way. All visionaries and did not care a fuck for a brief burning of the candle of fame.

Poets End Lines

An Envoi for Oscar Wilde.

Delightful the path of sin
But a holy death’s a habit
Good man yourself there, Oscar,
Everyway you had it..

                                        Brendan Behan.

Should lanterns shine.

I have heard many years of telling,
And many years should see some change.

The ball I threw while playing in the park
Has not yet reached  the ground..

                                           Dylan Thomas.

Distance Piece

I may reach a point /one reaches a point
where all I might have to say/ where all that one has to say
would be that life is bloody awful / is that the human condition is
intolerable.
but that I would not end it /but one resolves to go on
despite everything/ despite everything.

            BS Johnson (poems two 1972)

Everywhere I turned.

They were all parts of other women
All wrapped in whirling fabric
that danced before my senses.

I cannot forget your pale skin
shining with luminosity
from the night wrap of your bedroom
.
                                                 Bill Holdsworth [July 1983]