![]() ![]() We did publish him later, of course, with poems in Slow Dancer 19/20 (1987) and 22 (1989), as well as a pamphlet, The Walking Horses (1988) – his third – which included ‘Greenhouse’, so I sort of got my way in the end. That’s great, I said, trying to make it sound enthusiastic rather than grudging – here was someone who was going somewhere and without my help. Sorry, he said, but it’s just been taken by the Times Literary Supplement. I was particularly struck by one of Armitage’s poems called ‘Greenhouse’ and, at the end of the evening, thinking, I suppose that he might be quite pleased, asked him if I could publish it in the next issue of Slow Dancer magazine. And let’s take a moment here to realise I’m relying on a somewhat faulty memory, but the basic facts are as they are. Being the visitor, I got to read last, with two young poets I had yet to meet – Simon Armitage and Craig Smith – forming the undercard. ![]() This during that brief envelope of time when the Today Programme was seriously asking if it was true Huddersfield was the poetry capital of Great Britain. Somewhere in the mid-80s it would have been and I’d been invited up from Nottingham, where I was then living, to take part in a series of readings at the Central Library in Huddersfield that were being organised by Peter Sansom, he of The Poetry Business, Smith/Doorstop and The North. ![]()
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