Almost thirty years ago, William Cookson invited me to take part in a reading for Agenda at The Tricycle Theatre, in London – an invitation that, I confess, came as something of a surprise. At that time, I was very much a literary outsider: I worked full time in the computer industry, designing knowledge-based systems; I lived in an extremely sleepy suburb just outside Guildford; my usual reason for going into the city was to interview clients, mostly underwriters from the larger insurance firms. True, I had published a couple of proverbially slim volumes with Secker and Warburg, but I had taken part in very few readings and I knew almost nobody on what some people, even then, were calling ‘the poetry scene.’ Nevertheless, flattered (and because it was William) I agreed to go – and, naïve as I was, I did so without even asking who the other participants might be.
The day of the reading came: Shakespeare’s birthday, 1994. A Sunday, as it happened, which meant an early departure for work the next morning. As the train pulled in to Waterloo, I started to get nervous. I was a terrible reader, everybody said so. I was a computer nerd, happiest when solitary, and in most situations, socially awkward. If I had a natural habitat, it was in the broad- leafed woodland around my home village, or my canal-side garden plot… By the time I reached the theatre, this vague anxiety had grown to simmering point – and then I walked into the auditorium and discovered who, exactly, I would be reading with. Stephen Spender. Harold Pinter. James Fenton. The list goes on. Christopher Logue. Hugo Williams. Anne Beresford. For a long moment, I seriously considered making a run for it.
Now, looking back, I am deeply grateful for the lessons of that evening. When I got back to Bramley, that night, I was no less of an outsider but, even though the conversations I managed over the course of the evening, both with fellow readers and with audience members, were halting and desultory (on my part, at least), I was coming home with a sense that, somewhere in the capital, there was a loose community of people for whom poetry was a vital art – not just the poetry they or their friends wrote, but all poetry. Old poetry, new poetry, poetry in translation. For me, this latter point made all the difference: still an apprentice in verse, I had learned what little I knew of poetry’s music from French and Spanish poets, in the main, as well as from inspired translations of many poets I could not read in the original, from Rilke and Celan to Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam. It may sound naïve, now, but that evening illuminated my sense of what was happening, not on the much-discussed ‘scene’, but in the poetry world.
Poetry is, or ought to be, the broadest of churches, but it also depends and subsists on certain key qualities that, for me, have always been at the centre of Agenda’s philosophy. First, that it is the nature of poetry to be musical, to find ‘song’s truth’ in its diverse forms; second, that poetry prospers by exchange, by dialogue and, most of all, by listening to the music of others and of the world itself; third, that it is not unrealistic to stake the claim, with Hannah Arendt, that ‘metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about’– and, in my view, Agenda has always been attuned to this sense of poetry’s possibilities.
Now, with all these things in mind, I am both honoured by, and all too aware of the responsibilities entailed in, my stepping into an editorial role that has been so conscientiously and elegantly upheld over six plus decades by, first, William Cookson and, more recently, Patricia McCarthy. Over the years, Agenda has consistently fulfilled a combined remit that few other quarterly magazines would seriously contemplate, introducing the work of exciting new poets, while offering in-depth critical insights into the work of significant international writers and inviting established poets into convivial and insightful discussions and interviews. It is my aim to continue in this same vein, not just by drawing on my own associations and shared ambitions for poetry that have built up over many years of reading, listening to and simply being curious about other poets, poetry curators and critics, but also by seeking out the work of new writers, for whom the crafting of poetry – its unique philosophical power (what the great Spanish philosopher- poet Maria Zambrano called la razón poética); its ability to sing in all the ways that song can happen; its full, and often dissident, engagement with preserving and revitalising language – is a central concern. Going forward, I hope that the Agenda of the future can live up to this established tradition of advocating for, and celebrating poetry for its own sake: for what it can do, for what it dares and, just as importantly, for what it refuses to concede.