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The Editor Regrets

Suddenly, out of the blue, one morning in December 1965, a letter arrived on the delightfully old-fashioned headed notepaper of the Poetry Society (‘Patron, Sir Compton Mackenzie, LL.D., F.R.S.L., President, Professor Nevill Coghill, M.A., F.R.S.L.’), written, but not signed, by Robert Armstrong, Secretary and Treasurer.

John Smith, it said, had decided that a four-year stint as Editor of the Poetry Review was ‘about enough’. He and Armstrong had undertaken ‘an intimate review’ of the situation, and were now writing to ask whether I might care to take on the job.

I think it was John – a poet and literary agent – who had actually put my name forward. I’d corresponded with him for about fifteen years, first from Cornwall as an admirer of his poetry, and had known him personally in London for five or six; we had much the same view of contemporary poets and poetry, and I suppose it wasn’t altogether surprising that he suggested me.

It would, I thought, be rather interesting to see what I could do with the Review. I’d seen it, off and on, since the mid-’50s. It was published by the Poetry Society and supported by the money they raised from their examinations in verse-speaking. These had been set up, or at least the basic textbook in verse-speaking had been written, by Wallace Nichols, himself a bad stammerer who nevertheless spoke verse impeccably (and wearing another hat wrote the adventures of a Roman slave detective for the London Mystery Magazine). Wallace lived just outside Penzance in the Elizabethan wing of a mansion occupied by His Honour Judge Scobell Armstrong, an eccentric who once ordered the defendant in a court case to pay costs in frogs.

I’d begun occasionally to contribute poems and reviews myself, which were sympathetically accepted by John. But editing it? I didn’t hesitate nearly long enough. I didn’t realize, for instance, that the then Council of the Poetry Society looked on the magazine as a

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Suddenly, out of the blue, one morning in December 1965, a letter arrived on the delightfully old-fashioned headed notepaper of the Poetry Society (‘Patron, Sir Compton Mackenzie, LL.D., F.R.S.L., President, Professor Nevill Coghill, M.A., F.R.S.L.’), written, but not signed, by Robert Armstrong, Secretary and Treasurer.

John Smith, it said, had decided that a four-year stint as Editor of the Poetry Review was ‘about enough’. He and Armstrong had undertaken ‘an intimate review’ of the situation, and were now writing to ask whether I might care to take on the job. I think it was John – a poet and literary agent – who had actually put my name forward. I’d corresponded with him for about fifteen years, first from Cornwall as an admirer of his poetry, and had known him personally in London for five or six; we had much the same view of contemporary poets and poetry, and I suppose it wasn’t altogether surprising that he suggested me. It would, I thought, be rather interesting to see what I could do with the Review. I’d seen it, off and on, since the mid-’50s. It was published by the Poetry Society and supported by the money they raised from their examinations in verse-speaking. These had been set up, or at least the basic textbook in verse-speaking had been written, by Wallace Nichols, himself a bad stammerer who nevertheless spoke verse impeccably (and wearing another hat wrote the adventures of a Roman slave detective for the London Mystery Magazine). Wallace lived just outside Penzance in the Elizabethan wing of a mansion occupied by His Honour Judge Scobell Armstrong, an eccentric who once ordered the defendant in a court case to pay costs in frogs. I’d begun occasionally to contribute poems and reviews myself, which were sympathetically accepted by John. But editing it? I didn’t hesitate nearly long enough. I didn’t realize, for instance, that the then Council of the Poetry Society looked on the magazine as a private journal for members, and incidentally as an outlet for their own poetry, for most of them were poets – with the exception of the admirable chairman, Mrs Hester Marsden-Smedley, sometime Mayor of Chelsea, who presided at meetings and at lectures, often happily slipping into unconsciousness after introducing the speaker. I remember John Betjeman being particularly amused to see her snoring gently through a reading of Summoned by Bells. I don’t think John Smith ever made a really firm attempt to change the conception of the magazine as basically a platform for the Society’s members – though perhaps he did, and the reaction was one of the reasons why he decided he had had ‘about enough’, because the Council, and even more the General Secretary, were not amused when I tried to do so. Robert Armstrong was an accountant but was devoted to what I suspect he may have called ‘poesy’. Fifteen years earlier, Muriel Spark had edited the Review, and I was amused to read in her autobiography, when it came out, that he had been a major irritant in her life. The trouble was that he really wanted to edit the magazine himself, or at least to ensure from a distance that it only contained work by his friends and/or himself. He never actually confronted me, but even when he ceased to be Secretary he caused endless trouble with the Council, who seemed to have been given the assurance that anything they sent me would be published without question. In those days, despite John’s best endeavours, the Review was pretty much a joke with professional poets and critics, and it was generally known that one of the easiest ways of making Geoffrey Grigson laugh (and they weren’t legion) was to mention the magazine. Would it be possible to change that? Well, one way, I thought, would be to get a few reputable names together. So I wrote to a few poets I knew, and many I didn’t, and among the contributors to my first two issues (Spring and Summer, 1966) were – in no particular order – Charles Causley, Roy Fuller, Vernon Watkins, Anna Akhmatova, Thom Gunn, William Plomer, Elizabeth Jennings, John Heath-Stubbs, Adrian Mitchell, Ted Walker and Vernon Scannell. None of these, I should point out, had ever submitted poems before. I don’t think it would have occurred to them. However, it had occurred to a lot of other poets, if ‘poets’ is the word I seek. John Smith had not told me how many unsolicited manuscripts he had had to deal with. The problem was that the Poetry Review was then the only periodical listed in the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook with the word ‘poetry’ in the title, so anyone with a piece of verse lying about the house almost automatically sent it off to the office in Earls Court, and twice a week I would collect a number of large buff envelopes containing about 250 other envelopes, each concealing a clutch of what someone thought of as poems. Sometimes, of course, they really were poems. I did ‘discover’ – though really of course they had discovered themselves; all I did was recognize them – a number of fine poets, some of whom have subsequently made reputations, and some not. I remember with pleasure coming across the work of Ted Walker, Edward Lucie-Smith, Thomas Blackburn, Harry Guest, Tully Potter . . . and indeed Seamus Heaney, who had just published his first collection, Eleven Poems. I’d never heard the name or read the poems, but the ones he sent leaped off the page with unmistakable life and spirit. I’d never been backward, as an ordinary reader, in claiming to recognize a good poem when I saw it, but reading or at least looking at almost a thousand a week severely damaged my conviction. An immediate reaction of ‘rubbish’ was all too often followed by the thought that perhaps, after all, it wasn’t. I went through several weeks of self-doubt. But then I mentioned this to George MacBeth, who at that time was editing a BBC Radio poetry magazine. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘all you can do is print what you like.’ That helped a lot – though it sometimes led to trouble. I fought a bitter battle with Armstrong, for instance, about turning over almost an entire issue to a very long poem entitled ‘Ichor’, by Gavin Bantock. In the end, I invoked the aid of Nevill Coghill, who fortunately also admired the poem and wrote a Foreword to the issue praising it and claiming that it was ‘happy for us that our new editor is a man of risks and discoveries’. Well, yes and no. The reaction of almost everybody else was negative – and I have to say I think everybody else was probably right. Ploughing through the buff envelopes was a mixed pleasure. Admittedly, most could be stuffed back in the enclosed stamped addressed envelope without too much compunction. Occasionally, it was worth scribbling on the rejection slip something condescending like: ‘Not quite – but please do send something more when you have it.’ Always a mistake – one invariably got, by return of post, a larger envelope containing 35 more poems. There was, however, the very real pleasure of the thoroughly bad poem – the poem that the editors would without question have published in The Stuffed Owl had they had the joy of reading it. One of my favourites was the ‘Ode to a Sweat Gland’, by E. F. St John Lyburn, who must have been a doctor. His poem was not just a fancy, it was a practical essay:
You should wrap in a plastic and sweat the whole day. This will stop the blood clotting, this really will pay. The cause is thrombosis, you may get it again. The blood is now thinner as a wet sweat is sane. So a tip to you all is to stop this sad plight For virtue is knowledge, and to sweat is a right.
There was much, much more. Antonio Carmentine was more laconic, more romantic, more in touch with nature and the seasons, which he welcomed with a joyous trill:
Spring is a welcome season, As we all know the reason, For the snows and ice have finally melted And the animals no longer need to be shelted . . .
while
Winter is a time which all will remember, Which usually occurs in early November, When the glorious summer heat Has vanished in endless retreat, Leaving behind a thick carpet of dazzling white snow Which in turn will have to go.
Carmentine’s prosody, I thought, might have been envied by the immortal William McGonagall. Prosody wasn’t – I’m sure isn’t – a strong point with most amateur poets. Alan Gardner, for instance, was passionate about music, but his rhythms were not perhaps as light and flexible as those of his favourite composers:
Now Beethoven wrote sweet music While the works of Bach are rather sad, George Bizet gave us opera, And Brahms’s songs are sometimes glad . . . Wolfgang Mozart surpassed all others And deserves a fuller account of his fame; In six weeks he wrote his three brilliant symphonies, E flat, G minor and C are their names.
Bad poetry has an irresistible charm, especially when it can be described as ‘thoroughly well-meaning’, like the ‘Ode Dedicated to James Gibb on his Retirement as the Fraserburgh Golf Club Professional in 1969’. But I must confess to feeling slightly guilty for smiling at such poems, however sympathetically. Some of course are almost impossible to smile at; the tragedy of Aberfan brought out a number of them. In what is on the whole a non-poetry-reading country, it is surprising how many people try to express themselves in verse (I bet my successor at what is now a first-rate magazine was deluged with bad verse after the death of Princess Diana). I battled on with the Review for five years. They got me cheap. I was allowed, I think, to claim for necessary postage, on production of a post office receipt, but though the poets were (properly) paid, I wasn’t. However, I had the last laugh. Just after I handed over the job to some other patron of the art, I nearly threw away the correspondence file I’d kept – the Society had no room for it, they said – but then I decided to hand it over to a bookseller who specialized in selling MSS. To my astonishment (most of the stuff amounted only to ‘Nothing for you at the moment, I’m afraid – W. H. Auden’ or ‘Sorry for the bad handwriting – Stevie Smith’) he was able to sell the collection to an American university library for £1,000 – the deposit on a mortgage for a little cottage in Cambridge. Maybe I should have called it Poets’ Corner. But I didn’t.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 6 © Derek Parker 2005


About the contributor

Derek Parker later edited The Author for eighteen years; he now lives in Sydney. His biography of Voltaire was published in January, and he has just completed a biography of the Countess of Strathmore, great-great-great-great-grandmother of the Queen, to be published next year.

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