Henry Graham

I read only yesterday about the death of poet Henry Graham. As a contributing editor of Ambit, he was responsible for my first professional publication in a journal. A painter, he turned to poetry, as painters often do. Considerably more sweary as a poet than I, he nevertheless picked out some of my poems from the doubtless massive piles of submissions, giving particular notice to Joan of Arc. They eventually took three poems, wanting to give me double page spread, for which I was paid the princely sum of £10. I never cashed the cheque....

Henry Graham's obituary in The Guardian

His reworking of Shelley's Ozymandias is right up my street....

Ozy

I met a traveller in Antiques Land
who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
stand in the desert . . . which somewhat surprised me, and
considering we’d never met before his frown
and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
left me non-plussed, that's not to say filled with dread,
after all buying an antique warming pan with tiny rings
minding my rhyme and meter when this black guy said
without introduction and with a mocking leer:
My name is Ozy man, I dig old ‘tings:
nothing is too unsightly, none beyond repair!
Noting bedside remains, I found I could repay
his colossal neck with a boundless stare
and quite alone he turned and walked away.

Henry Graham

Draft to Publication 2

Some poems arrive fully formed. Some take a more circuitous route. My Found poems take time; from that first jumbling together of my own words and the words of poets and poems I love to making some sense from them. To make them say what I want them to say.

Even at their most metaphorical, they always express something about me, and are never entirely separate. I have to tread carefully, to not overwork and dilute. Sometimes, my final draft undergoes only the tiniest of changes before publication. Sometimes it's for the best, and sometimes I wish I'd left well alone.

Found Poem II from The Sublime & The Ridiculous came to my attention today. My final draft was:

You meet the weather
coming the other way.
I suffer the air.
It is more than love,

this fiery kiss.
This animal sunset.
Words grow in
my silent mouth.

Your stark eyes tell
of the hawk's violence.
The hare's blood.
The bones at the strand line.

And the published piece:

I now wish I'd kept 'Words grow in my silent mouth' as I think this is really what I wanted to say. How so very often you can't say what you want to. I changed 'eyes' to 'pupils' to make the piece more intimate -- to express how it feels to be so close to someone that you see not just their eyes, but the very centre of their eyes and all extreme emotion. The poems say it better than I do. That's why I write them. These poems are raw, and needed to be left. Some poems stand working over. Some just don't.... 

Draft to Publication 1

When I was 16 I read a piece that had made its way into a Faber & Faber anthology by a young poet called Mark Jones. He would become famous as Mark Lamarr, but his 'Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die'  sparked that first idea that poetry wasn't just sonnets and villanelles. I was far too young to appreciate those; I write them now, in my 40s.

Then I read Lady Macbeth, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Poetry began to make sense, and I have been using it to make sense of the world around me ever since.

Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die

I'm the James Dean of the dole queue

You've got to admire my cheek 

Trying to work out how to live fast and die young

On seventeen-fifty a week

A legend in my own cubicle

All alone, never one of the mob

I'm the James Dean of the dole queue

A rebel without a job