Last night I made my own copy of Larkin’s unpublished poem “Dear Jake”. It took a while, pausing, replaying and peering at portions of the typed page as it appeared and was whisked away by the saintly hands of Andrew Motion. An offending word in the poem is censored on the film and bleeped out as the poem is read out; a nice 1950’s touch.

The poem is a companion-piece to “Posterity”, continuing the fun poked by Larkin at his posthumous reputation, and a touching gift to his secretary...

Rather than Parmigianino I think of Self by Marc Quinn: the frozen head cast made from his blood. Every five years he repeats the work, taking the blood from his body over a period of five months. The series becomes a testament of his aging and of his worth. The impression it makes is both innocuous and disturbing. We all have a reaction to blood. Its otherness is there to make us “feel something and think something,” he says, but do we? The eyes of the Self are closed as if trying to get...

A kind of vertigo sets in once you begin to reminisce. Looking at Harold Massingham’s date of birth I realise he must have just been in his fifties when I saw him read in Wath. We thought of him as old, then, as ancient as the woods around Denaby. We thought of him as our own Basil Bunting, an exemplar of craft and commitment, a link to our linguistic Norse and Anglo-Saxon roots. I must be as old now as he was then.

Another evening at the George and Dragon... I remember Frances...

I wake up back in the upstairs room of the George and Dragon. I’m leaning back on my chair with a pint of John Smith’s in front of me as I puff poetically on a Marlboro. Kit Wright is standing before us looking unfeasibly tall and blonde and he’s reading :


Red Boots On


Way down Geneva,
All down Vine,
Deeper than the snow drift
Love’s eyes shine.

Mary Lou’s walking
In the winter time.

She’s got...

I remember the upstairs room at the George and Dragon in Wath-upon-Dearne, a meeting of Wath Writers: Ian McMillan, Martyn Wiley, John Turner, David Harmer...Peter , Keith and me...Listening to Harold Massingham reading his “Ballad of Trees” and his “Impressions of Canvases by Van Gogh.” Both were later published in Sonatas & Dreams, Littlewood Arc 1992. I agree with Ian that Massingham, born in Mexborough in 1932, is “one of the great lost Yorkshire writers; a proto-Martian poet before Craig...