This article was originally published in The North issue 71.
We are delighted to publish this celebration, despite (or because of) how it will discomfit its subject. Thank you to Kay Laskey, Naomi Jaffa and Dean Parkin for reminding us of The North’s previous feature, Michael Laskey at 60, and suggesting and helping put together this one. Michael has published five books and three pamphlets, including a Selected and a Very Selected Poems. His Collected Poems is out now with Smith|Doorstop. He co-founded the international Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in 1989 and directed it through its first decade, then becoming its Chair. He also founded and co-edited the poetry magazine Smiths Knoll through fifty much-loved issues. He published pamphlets under the Smiths Knoll imprint until 2016, and continues his work as an editor with The Garlic Press (which he established in 2003). A long-term poetry activist, Michael was a founding member of the East Suffolk Poetry Workshop which has been meeting monthly for thirty years. A regular tutor for the Arvon Foundation, he currently leads Cut Loose monthly Saturday morning writing sessions – with Dean Parkin – originally at the arts centre in Halesworth, which have now migrated to online sessions on Zoom.
ANNE BERKELEY
‘Michael’s not a buildings person, he’s a people person,’ said Roy Blackman, when we asked whether Michael was joining the outing to Butley Priory. It was a Smiths Knoll weekend in the mid-90s, when the two editors of that legendary magazine ran workshops for subscribers. They were a terrific double act. While Roy concerned himself with the structure, syntax, the internal logic of a poem, Michael would focus more on its 72 emotional force, its beating heart. Others will write about his scrupulous editing, and his own gracious, witty and humane poetry. I want to pay tribute to Michael’s democratic, evangelical enthusiasm for the art. Anyone who sent off their hopeful batch of poems will remember how they came back within a week, with encouraging comments – if you were very lucky they would even take one without amendments (‘rare for us’). After one of these weekends I was invited to a masterclass. Michael managed to persuade me that the audience weren’t there to see a bloodsport but because they were interested and wanted to learn. And Michael in the chair ensured that everything remained courteous and constructive. And so I was inducted as a regular audience member of that joyous institution, The Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. As the years rolled by, we were introduced to just about every leading and newly emerging British poet you can think of, as well as international poets as varied as Les Murray, Philip Levine, Billy Collins, Anne Carson, Galway Kinnell … It’s invidious to pick anyone out – there were so many. And what a difference it makes to hear the poet read their own poems. Their voice lodges in your head to bring it to their new work when you come across it. Every year we came home with a heavy book bag and fresh ideas.
LIZ BERRY
Michael was one of the first to publish me in Smiths Knoll (I wish I could remember the poem!) and I recall being so thrilled to get his little handwritten note of encouragement, a real way-post on the journey. A wonderful poet and editor and a kind teacher. Wishing him the happiest of birthdays!
PETER CARPENTER
It was a poem about childhood, ‘Another League’, a young boy watching amateur football, sent in hope to Smith’s Knoll, early in the 1990s. It came back to me, with an acceptance note, and some editorial advice, all of it spot on. The bit I remember most vividly is ‘perhaps the pluperfect here ?’ My first encounter with Michael Laskey: warm and valuable advice; scholarship lightly borne; able, just like that, to sniff out any pseudery; an ear attuned to seek out and give a tweak to clunking rhythms, listening out for the ‘music of what happens’, as Heaney had it. I had met a master of his trade. After that, Michael became the go-to person for an Arvon or Ty Newydd residential course; patient yet demanding, caring and generous, but never unrealistic, looking for the next draft, engaging with students we’d taken, pushing them because it mattered to him, conveying this urgency in all he did. ‘Let’s get on with this while we can’. Workshops that revealed a compendious knowledge of contemporary poetry, as well as an enviable reach back to the Metaphysical poets, the Romantics, tradition made vital in a rapid detour or a memorable allusion. Michael’s poetry readings on these courses were self-effacing (letting the words on the page do the job), no ‘egotistical sublime’, poems playful and daring, in control but pushing the boundaries. Minor miracles from the ordinary, the everyday. Moving, memorable. Arising from ‘felt life’: poems about marmalade, garlic, a bike, rain, sport’s days, ironing, bonfires. And then a dramatic monologue like ‘Driving Home’, as read to students, their teachers and co-tutors, at Totleigh Barton in 2003. A poem that left all of us gaping at the reader’s steady gaze as he calmly delivered that last sentence: ‘Softly you close/the up-and-over garage door’.
HELEN IVORY
Michael is an inspirational tutor and a very safe pair of hands. When I was programming the Continuing Education creative writing courses at UEA, he was the first person I looked to to run an Advanced Poetry Diploma.
NAOMI JAFFA
I first met Michael in 1993 when he was on the interview panel for the part-time job of Suffolk’s first Literature Development Worker. I gushed something about re-reading favourite classic novels and I remember being intensely disconcerted by the ironic incredulity of his ‘you re-read?’ response. Despite a derisory knowledge of contemporary poetry, my new duties were to assist Michael run the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival which he’d co-founded in 1989. That first weekend in November 1993, I stepped through the back of a wardrobe to find myself in the Jubilee Hall, laughing and weeping, puzzling and marvelling at poets reading their own poems. I’d read English at Oxford and had no idea that literature could be so relevant and alive. Radically and quite simply, Michael changed and underpinned the course of my life. For 22 years we worked closely together – productively, sometimes disputatiously, hospitably, always whole-heartedly – until the Festival ceased in 2015. Happily, our friendship has continued every year since. They say ‘when the student is ready, the teacher appears’, and certainly I’d never have written or published my own poems without Michael’s steadfast encouragement and editorial acuity. At our monthly workshop group (which I’ve been attending since the mid-1990s) it’s his responses I value most. And being among the first to encounter a new Laskey poem is privilege, treat and education all in one. ‘Gratitude’ and ‘love’ are over-used and devalued words these days, but I don’t know any better ones. Over and over again, for more than half my life, Michael has made me feel like the best version of myself. I couldn’t be more thankful to and for him.
HANNAH LOWE
Whenever I think of Michael Laskey, it’s with envy. I imagine him in his house, which I imagine is somewhere near the sea where he swims, and that he has days devoted to poetry, and that when he does write poems – this is the really envious bit – they are always brilliant. I’ve carried his selected The Man Alone with me for years, because it’s one of the few books I can drop into, read a poem, and immediately want to write a poem back to it. One of these is ‘Ratatouille’, a poem that stirs together its details (of food, books, home decor) and layers (social class, romance, youth, eroticism) so brilliantly, and carries a whole world in its final lines. I can’t quite believe Michael is 80. I was lucky enough to teach an Arvon with him five or so years ago, where we split the morning sessions in half; Michael teaching short, spritely poetry exercises which everyone loved, while I made them wade through different tricky poetic forms, which everyone endured. Happy Birthday Michael. I have been a secret huge fan of you for years, and I’m glad now to out myself, in case you didn’t know.
KATH McKAY
I met Michael at the 2000 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival after he gave me a lovely unsolicited quote for Anyone Left Standing. He turns up when you need him. Often, he would offer a lift from Saxmundham to Aldeburgh when I became a regular punter. Later, he published my poems in Smiths Knoll magazine. Responses were quick, and rejections tempered by encouraging words. Years later, out of the blue, he wrote ‘Smiths Knoll is closing down, and we have money left over to publish pamphlets by poets we like. We like you.’ People 74 underestimate how such words bolster you. Telling the Bees was the result, after I experienced Michael’s laser sharp editing skills: ‘Are you happy with that line?’ ‘What does that mean?’ ‘Is that the right word?’ I responded to his directness because I know he lives to make poetry better. My second full collection, Collision Forces (Wrecking Ball), followed soon after, something which may not have happened without Michael’s pamphlet. After publishing a crime novel, I returned to poetry through attending workshops, including Cut Loose, run by Michael, and Dean Parkin. Using an eclectic range of poetry as springboards, interspersed with discussions about topics such as fried eggs, and stationery, from this mesh poetry emerges. I built towards another collection. Michael’s Garlic Press published Moving the Elephant in 2024. I am very lucky to have had him as an editor. He has a way of making you think, done with humour and professionalism and a deceptive lightness that treats poetry as a dance. Or a balancing act, like in his poem, ‘Bike’, where ‘feet off the ground’, the rider and the bicycle are ‘keeping each other’s balance’, until the rider is ‘clear of the wheel of myself ’. His website image is him riding a bike. Ride on, Michael, ride on.
IAN McMILLAN
There are some people who hold the past, present and future of poetry in their hands, and Michael Laskey is one of them; for decades he has devoted his life to the placing of words on the page and in the air and he has continued to democratise and celebrate this most available of art forms by making it even more available to anyone who wants to experience it. What really moves and inspires me about Michael is that, in turbulent and cruelly austere times, he understands that poetry is a way for us to make sense of a world that apparently makes no sense, and that a poem in a magazine or a discussion in a workshop or a moment at a reading can be something that can feed the soul for years to come. Let’s not forget that this devotion to poetry involves decades of sitting in rooms waiting for somebody to turn up, of sitting at dining room tables reading envelopes full of submissions as a deadline looms, of endlessly encouraging those who need encouragement and suggesting to others that the reshaping of that line might lead to a better stanza. Thanks very much for all this, Michael: here’s to the next 80 years!
HELENA NELSON
Just one word. He’ll pop it into a line casually. A word like ‘baffled’, maybe, or ‘perplexed’. But it’s not just the word. It’s the way his tone has prepared for its sound and shape. No fuss. Unobtrusively expert. Also his tenderness: he places it fondly, syllable by syllable − even when it has negative associations (‘devastation’, ‘tarnished’, ‘interminably’). I don’t know anyone else who cherishes language like this, so utterly, so devotedly. Whenever I read him, words he’s invisibly earmarked leap out, and then I’m welling up. Why? Something to do with vividness, I think. Or mortality. Sometimes a bit of Laskey follows me round all day, and I can’t not notice it ever again: ‘fortitude’, ‘kerfuffle’, ‘fossicking’. Or unassuming terms like ‘dollop’, ‘deft’, ‘humdrum’. There’s that habit, too, of animating inanimate objects − an ironing-board, maybe, or chairs, curtains, a bicycle − even a bonfire. His bedside clock has a life of its own. But so do those words. In Between Ourselves, he says they’re ‘growing absent/ minded and will keep wandering off ’. But they’re safe enough in his poems. Alive and kicking for centuries, I’d say.
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE
Michael Laskey – will turn his face away from too much praise. But what a gracious, whimsical, endearing poet and soul! Energetic enough to create one of the truly unforgettable festivals, dear Aldeburgh, to welcome voices from everywhere, and to shape his own poems that restore our hearts to their sockets, our brains to their hope. Thank you Michael Laskey for your marvellous being, your care, your tender gaze.
DEAN PARKIN
I heard about Michael Laskey before I met him. In the first days of my poetry adventures I summoned up the courage to attend an Arvon Course in May 1997, tutored by Roger McGough and Jo Shapcott at Lumb Bank. During a wonderful week, I remember bemoaning the lack of any culture or poetry where I lived in Suffolk. Both Roger and Jo told me about a man called Michael Laskey who came from my part of the world. A lovely man, they said, who ran the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival and a great magazine called Smiths Knoll. Later that year I got a poem published in Smiths Knoll and attended the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival and finally met Michael and his Festival assistant Naomi Jaffa who later became my partner in work and life. I also started attending the workshop group which was led by Michael and his co-editor Roy Blackman. This really did form the foundations of what became my life as poet, and I worked with Michael and Naomi at the Festival for fifteen years until it ceased in 2015. Michael quickly became my hero, mentor and friend. That we’ve known each other for almost 30 years now is astonishing. That Michael is 80 and still fiercely passionate about poems – reading, writing and editing them – was only ever to be expected and deserves to celebrated. It’s the Laskey zeal and the sharp editorial eye that I treasure. He also has the best laugh too, head back and full-hearted guffaw, and we’re still laughing whenever we get together for our next poetry adventures. As he says, it’s the most fun.
STEPHEN PAYNE
I was a very lucky learner poet. Late in 2009, I received a hand-written letter from Michael inviting me to be the Smiths Knoll mentee. Michael is a great teacher as well as a great poet, and for the same reason: how brilliantly he blends rigour and generosity. Michael taught me that every phrase, every word is an opportunity to make a poem special. One of the best reviews I received for ‘Pattern Beyond Chance’ complimented a particular verb in one poem. The poem dated from my year learning with Michael, and the verb in question was Michael’s suggestion. Michael’s poem ‘Laughter’ (from Between Ourselves) does not require any elucidation from me, though I learn something every time I read it. I simply want to note the insightful, alliterative expression “warming to oneself / for one’s wit”. The use of “one” is surprisingly formal within such a natural register, but perfectly appropriate for that remoteness of the self-critic, the slight dissatisfaction with his personality that even a contented man might sometimes feel. It’s a poem, surely, about Michael’s conversations with his wife Kay, but I like to imagine Michael warming to himself as he made another witty suggestion for one of my poems, brightening the day for both of us.
SHEENAGH PUGH
I met Michael at Aldeburgh and came away with his book Thinking of Happiness. There was a poem in it called “Firelighters”, about a woman whose marriage has ended and who is learning to cope with everyday jobs her husband used to do. It was a very useful poem for students, because it was all concrete, no abstracts, showing the change in the woman via what she does and how she does it. So I used it a lot in workshops. One day, when we’d just been reading it, one of my students remarked. “That’s my mum”. I thought at first he was being metaphorical, that his mother had 76 had this same experience, but no, it turned out she knew Michael and it was in fact her experience that had inspired the poem. It was the perfect answer to those students who sometimes wondered what poetry had to do with real life and I think it helped convince them that seemingly commonplace aspects of real life are just waiting to be transmuted into poetry. Best wishes to Michael for many more birthdays.
CHRISTOPHER REID
Even before I got to know Michael as an excellent poet and all-round mensch, I admired him for his performances at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. Quite simply, he was, in that context, the best introducer of poets at readings that I have ever heard. It was not just that he was well-prepared, had read the work of the poet in question thoroughly and critically, or could find trenchant and illuminating phrases by which to sum up that work and make it approachable to listeners. Above and beyond all that, it was the warm, earnest and gracious manner in which he fulfilled this function that made one listen, first to the introduction, then to the poet’s reading, with a buoyed-up attentiveness that was rare. There may, too, have been a touch of schoolmasterly sternness about it, as if Michael were saying to the audience, ‘I’ve done my job, now you do yours. This is a serious business. Listen carefully!’ Of course we listened carefully.
PHILIP RUSH
It is a bit of a cliché to say that poems can make the ordinary extraordinary; what Michael’s poems do, more often than not, I think, is to celebrate the ordinary simply by recording it, and in ordinary language. This is a dangerous game to play and it is to Michael’s credit that he pulls it off so well. The poems end with humble flourishes. “Softly you close/ the up-and-over garage door.” “… head down, holding the music”, “a whole/ day of snow nobody’s trodden.” They deceive, of course. The journey itself is “up and over”. How can anyone “hold” music? With a moment of stillness such as the pianist exemplifies? The other day I found myself looking over some of my old poems. The ones that had been included in Smiths Knoll remain fringed with joy. Michael’s personal support has been a blessing. In getting my recent book through the press (Camera Obscura), his work and help were generous and exemplary. Happy Birthday, Michael, and thank you.
JACQUELINE SAPHRA
In the early 2000s I would often go to the Poetry Library in the Southbank Centre to browse the magazines. I always looked for Smiths Knoll. Here were engaging, emotionally connective, crafted poems. Smiths Knoll became my first port of call when I was submitting new poems, largely because I felt it was a natural home for my work but partly because the turn-around was astonishingly quick. Whereas some magazines could take up to a year to respond, Michael would come back within three or four days. In my case it was invariably a ‘no, but …’ and occasionally ‘we loved it but …’ followed by a paragraph of analysis and yes, praise. These were rejections that felt both useful and affirming. After years of trying, however, I finally achieved my dream although I almost fainted when I opened the envelope fully expecting the usual warm rejection and found an acceptance. I didn’t have to implement his suggested changes, Michael told me in characteristically generous style – the poem was in either way. But of course I did pay attention and the poem was better for it. Devastatingly, this gem of a magazine was closed very soon after that, so I never had a chance to try again. But it was a beautiful endeavour, Michael Laskey was its presiding spirit and I learnt so much from him. I’m tempted to say they broke the mould when they made him, but that’s a dead metaphor I daresay he wouldn’t appreciate. They don’t make editors like that any more.
PAUL STEPHENSON
Michael taught me so much about the poetic line when I was starting to send out, and about the ordering of ideas in narrative poems. I would submit to Smiths Knoll, those brown envelopes coming back within 3-4 days, always hoping to feel the envelope thinner, a poem accepted. I was told once that he writes slowly, perfecting each line before proceeding to the next one, but I am not sure whether to believe that and wonder if he ever goes in for overall edits of the whole. His landmark collection Permission to Breathe (Smith|Doorstop 2004) came out 20 years ago and did what it said, giving me a way forwards in my writing. I was so privileged to be accepted onto the Aldeburgh Eight with him and Peter Sansom as tutors at Bruisyard Hall, to have a pass for the incredible Aldeburgh Poetry Festival at Snape, and even Naomi popped in for some writing exercises that year. In my time helping programme Poetry in Aldeburgh, it has been a joy to have events showcasing Garlic Press and hear the wonderful Suffolk poets he has encouraged and published. Always thrilled to see Michael in Aldeburgh, beret or no beret, and to hear him read his poems so beautifully. I am so grateful for his early influence, the attention to my poems, and encouragement he has given.
ALICIA STUBBERSFIELD
Twenty-five years ago Michael drove Neil Rollinson, Angela McSeveney and me around Suffolk for a week. Those who know Michael’s driving might consider that quite an adventure but we had a wonderful time on that Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Tour. We read at nine events and after each of our readings (all twenty-seven of them) Michael had something constructive, rigorous but kind to say about our performance. I still hear his voice when I read my work to an audience, or I’m listening to another poet – any poets reading this make sure you have a set list, stick to it and don’t go over time! That was my first visit to Aldeburgh Poetry Festival and I went every year after that. Founded by Michael, the warm, welcoming atmosphere and creation of a poetry community free of rivalries and cynicism was absolutely him. There’s no-one in the poetry world like Michael. No-one with his generosity, his authentic love of poetry and his enthusiasm for encouraging the poetry of others. His tutorials, on an Arvon Schools Course I tutored with him, were a joy. At the point where any other tutor would have shut things down, Michael said something like ‘and what about this word here…’ and the conversation with the teenage girl or boy would begin again. To be in one of his workshops is to feel the same intense pleasure we felt when we began to write poems. To read Michael’s own poetry is to feel a sense of wonder at his ability to create accessible poems, often about everyday things or experiences, that are beautifully crafted and have that controlled ambiguity found only in the best writing. Michael’s humanity and self-deprecating humour give hope and delight to all of us lucky enough to know and love him.
EMILY WILLS
I love Michael’s poems for their clarity, how they hold their truth lightly, and for the way they make such skill appear easy. It’s impossible to choose favourites, but the poems I’m thinking of now are ‘Home Movies’, ‘Between Ourselves’, and the unforgettable self-portrait ‘Nightingales’. I have ‘The Last Swim’ by heart, having read it at my mother’s funeral where it was quite simply perfect. Thank you, Michael, for the brilliant Smiths Knoll. And for your extraordinary generosity in commenting on submissions, always spot-on. Thank you for Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, that ear-opening invigorating buzz of a weekend. I’m still in awe at the vision and sheer work of creating and sustaining it. Special mention to those mass workshops, hordes of us crammed in, surprising ourselves with high-speed 78 78 and surprisingly half-decent drafts of poems thanks to Michael’s wizardry and calm. And now we have Cut Loose online, with the incomparable pairing of Dean and Michael, hilarious and inspiring. Another poetry treat you’ve brought us. Happy birthday Michael! May you go on swimming.
ANTHONY WILSON
Michael Laskey’s listening. Connie Bensley and I had given a reading at the Peter Pears Gallery in Aldeburgh and were now being driven by Michael through dark Suffolk lanes to drop Connie off at her digs. If memory serves, it was raining and Michael had to swerve to avoid hitting a fox. This did nothing to stop the torrent of words which at that moment were pouring from him on poetry, poets, art, music – and the wretched weather. In something of a fight-or-flight reverie, which reminds me now of how I spent most of my time at school, I seemed to join him midway through his theme, alerted, as at school, by mention of my name: ‘… but I have to say to you, Anthony, that I don’t really want to hear that your monologues are ‘amalgams’, as you put it, of different people, I want to know that they are one person … .’ Suddenly awake and trying to find something to say about nearly killing the fox, it dawned on me that Michael was reporting back words I had used not an hour earlier in introduction to one of my poems. Words I had not planned on saying, words I found myself saying to fill the space, words I now knew (and knew then) were not true. Like a human lie detector, Michael had picked this up. I knew it was useless to argue with him. In my experience, feedback like this, honest feedback that is not designed to crush you but help you do better next time, in whatever sphere, let alone planet poetry, is rare. Difficult to hear, more difficult still to practise, he set me a standard for transparency. Do I meet it? Somewhere in the darkness, I can feel him listening.
TAMAR YOSELOFF
Over the years, Michael Laskey has created a vital and important hub for poetry in his home county of Suffolk, championing local and UK writers in the pages of the wonderful Smiths Knoll magazine, which he edited with Roy Blackman, and then through his Garlic Press, a small but mighty independent publisher. His popular writing workshops have inspired a whole generation of new voices, many of whom found their way to the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, which he founded and kept running with Naomi Jaffa and Dean Parkin for 25 years, bringing the most significant and engaging poets – national and international – to the Suffolk coast. The current iteration of the poetry festival is incredibly indebted to him, and his tireless (but always generous) spirit – we wouldn’t be here, continuing the tradition of poetry by the sea, without him – he’s still cutting a dash in his trademark beret.