Hi Albert,

It was super to see you the Eliot awards, sorry for dragging you away from your chat with William Sieghart (thanks for introducing me)! I was talking to Paul and Ron and they mentioned you were looking to expand your list. I had a lovely note from Frank about my new piece in the TLS and he was also saying what marvellous things you’re doing. After your talk in Chichester you know that I moved to do a Masters at Warwick, isn’t that your home town? Lucy was so impressed with your list when I last saw her (she read in Rugby recently). I’ve just been lucky enough to win a prize with my poem “The Storm Council” and I came second (boo hoo) in the Bridport with a little poem call “The Undue Lesson”. Hermione is working with me on a revised manuscript that George has seen, they both think it’s nearly there, we’re just working on the sweeps and tangents, it’s called A Readymade Bed. Would you be interested a teensy bit in seeing this? I know when I was talking with Rupert that everyone thinks I would fit the list and Claire has said I should just contact you. I’ve taken the liberty of putting five pieces in here, one was published in The Review last month (yippee). I hope you like the work and whatever you think I look forward to seeing you at Sheila’s party!

Yours as ever
Lionel x
Sudbury-on-Thames

15 May 2002

Dear Lionel (if I may)

Thank you for your informative, highly-connected, if rather opaque note. Have we actually ever met? I think I’m vaguely aware of half the names you drop here like horse shoes in a steel bucket. I suspect I publish several of those listed, though they’re clanging around so much in my head (or is it my heaving stomach) I can barely register any interest in your polished or is that highly-processed work. You can write though it’s all the “Alistair McGowan school of impressions”. I think the forty-seven Arvon courses you have attended may well be having a peculiarly negative effect on your talent. It’s all Polyfilla and no content.

The poems are simply a triumph of emulation and mimicry, yet they smack of professional banality. My god, Lionel, you must have workshopped them to death.

If these poems had a soundtrack, Lionel, it would be Enya on Mogadon. If they were food they would be lard butties. They're stodgy. They're inert. I must confess I’ve read 150 submissions today and have written 96 postcards to The Unworthy to pass a few hours before squandering my bonus in the Colony Club, I've certainly earnt my crust from The Boss reading your shite and I deserve a bloody flight of wine this evening — I would rather stick forks in my eyes than read another line. There’s not a word out of place, it's just that place is Hades: they all deserve to be in The Review, the happy home of Dr Death and the Zombies.

If memory serves, you spilled that decent Burgundy on my linen suit at the Eliots? I feel sure you’d find a happy home elsewhere, Lionel, perhaps with Almada up in Northallerton. We’re not taking work from creepy stalkers just at the moment.

Not quite ingratiated

Albert D Sump
Deputy Poetry Editor
Castell & Castell