I.m. John Whitworth

I'm sad to learn, from the introduction to Poetry South East 2020, that John Whiworth hads died. He was someone I always felt I would like to meet. I thought we would get on really well. I 'met' him when we both had poems in New Poetry 2 published in 1976 by the Arts Council of Great Britain. Only on re-reading do I realise what distinguished company John and I were among in that volume, and that our work was selected from nearly ten thousand poems submitted. As a poet he was much more successful than me. He went Oxford, which I would have done if I hadn't wasted precious time on physics. But I'm not going to devalue my own modest successes by comparison. And I'm still alive. Anyway, farewell, John, and thank you again for 'Jenny'.