Since I first learnt to read and write at the age of five, I have, unconsciously at least, wanted to be a poet. Language has always been an object of creative wonder for me, from the rhymes in ‘Rupert Bear’ to headlines in discarded newspapers vociferating TRUEMAN IS TEST MUST! On arrival at Saint James’ Choir School, we were required to copy out our surname, which seemed rather boring, so I wrote it backwards, and ‘RETUS’ became my first poem, soon to be followed by a prose piece about an engine-driver who ‘repaints’ his locomotive with glue and paper before he goes ‘down the line a bit’.
Being in France for part of my life has, together with my teaching experience with students there learning about the English poets and Modernist writers, heightened my sense of the value of language. W.H. Auden said that a poet’s duty is ‘to defend his language’. I have fostered and fought for my native tongue since the time of the word ‘RETUS’. The word is also spoken and I frequently give readings, sometimes semi-staged, of my own and other poets’ works, both in the UK and in France. I write to the tune of my own speech and hopefully for others so they can, to quote Dr. Johnson, ‘better enjoy and better endure life’.
Anthony Suter, a Grimbarian and an old pupil of Saint James and of Wintringham, is the author of several translations between English and French and has published four collections of poetry and directed plays by Beckett at the Avignon ‘Off’ Festival. He worked for many years at the University of Toulouse, where he organised poetry and theatre workshops and introduced authors such as Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Simon Gray, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Tom Gunn, Craig Raine, Tony Harrison, Ken Smith and Malcolm Lowry onto the syllabus. His collection, When You Get to “G.Y.” (Redbeck Press, Bradford, 2004), is an evocation of his childhood in Grimsby, where he returned at the invitation of Gordon Wilson and Driftnet Poets to launch the book. He has produced a new collection, ‘A Gathering of Leaves’ and is currently working on two cycles of poems, ‘The Keeper of Words’ and ‘The Teller of To Lose’