What I've learnt from my gold medallist friend

(about work, art and life)

Mimi and me in a sunny cafe garden

When Benjamin Zephaniah died, at the beginning of December, I kept bursting into tears. He was a titan and a sweetie. When he walked down a street, people just wanted to tell him what he meant to them. He made people feel happy. He made me feel happy. He was passionate. He was charismatic. He was gentle. He was kind. He was generous. He was brave. He was funny. He was sweet. He brought an electric energy to everything he did. It just seemed impossible that he was dead.

I was honoured when the Sunday Times asked me to write about him, but when I saw the headline, I felt sick. “My friend Benjamin Zephaniah”, it said.

I had known Benjamin professionally for more than 30 years. I was deeply fond of him and deeply upset when I heard about his death. But I would never claim a professional acquaintance as a friend.

I emailed the editor straight away and she was happy to change the headline online. It was too late for the print version, of course.

A friend, I wanted to tell the editor, is someone who knows your birthday, who takes you out for a drink or buys you flowers when you’re feeling down. A friend is someone who cackles over your bad haircut or romantic disasters, but only when you’re ready to cackle, too. A friend laughs with you, cries with you, props you up, cheers you up, mourns your losses and celebrates your successes.  A friend is someone like Mimi Khalvati, who last week was awarded the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

I’ve known Mimi for more than 30 years. We’ve been near-neighbours for 25. When I was ill, she brought me her delicious Persian rice. I wear the scarf she gave me for Christmas and the gloves she gave me for my birthday. I put my coffee cup on the beautiful stool she bought me from the Chinese shop down the road. Mimi is a wonderful poet. She has been compared with Wallace Stevens and praised for "some of the finest sad poems since Tennyson". She is also a wonderful friend.

Mimi already has her portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. Now she’ll have her name on a medal that has been given to John Betjeman, Philip Larkin, Stevie Smith, Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon.  The King’s head will be on one side of it and on the other there will be an image of “Truth emerging from her well and holding in her right hand the divine flame of inspiration - Beauty is truth and Truth Beauty”. That’s a reference to the last two lines of Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. " They’re lines I’m constantly quoting and as near as I get to a motto. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Imagine getting a medal from the King quoting my (and Keats’s) motto! When Mimi told me the news, over cup of tea in my sitting room, I was, as footballers say, over the moon. That, by the way, makes me think of Wordsworth’s “At once, the bright moon dropped”, from his poem “Strange fits of passion have I known.” When I interviewed Mimi for The Independent in 2007, she told me that Wordsworth is her favourite poet. The title of one of her collections, The Meanest Flower, comes from his “Intimations of Immortality” ode: “To me the meanest flower that blows can give/ Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears”.

I think we can all agree that “Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears” pretty much sums up the enterprise of poetry, of art, of life.

After Mimi left, I tried to think about why I was so thrilled with her news. So here, in no particular order, are some thoughts:

1)    It was Gore Vidal who said: “whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies”. That, I think we must all admit, is sometimes true. But sometimes it isn’t. When you care about someone deeply, and they are brilliant at what they do, and you don’t feel they’ve had the recognition they deserve, then you’ll want to sound the trumpets when they triumph. Which I do.

2)    Mimi didn’t start writing poetry until her early forties. She was an actor and theatre director when she was younger and decided to write poetry after going on an Arvon course. As a single mum working as a part-time secretary she had her hands full, but that didn’t stop her from knuckling down and learning her craft.

3)    And boy, did she learn that craft. She went to four or five poetry workshops a week and studied poetic form with rare and deep attention. “Whatever I do, I like to learn to do it properly,” she told me in that interview, “like playing tennis. I love learning to do something well. It's my natural instinct to be the apprentice.” Yes, if you want to be good at something, you have to serve an apprenticeship. Whatever Instagram gurus may tell you, there are no shortcuts. It’s a bummer, but there we are.

4)    It soon became clear to her that many poets, and aspiring poets, didn’t know much about form. Schools weren’t teaching it and the fashion, in any case, was for free verse. Did she, as many people do, sit around moaning that no one learns things properly these days? She did not. In 1997, with her friends and fellow poets Jane Duran and Pascale Petit, she co-founded the Poetry School, which offers creative and professional development for poets, including an accredited Master’s degree. It has served hundreds of thousands of students and, more than a quarter of a century on, is now the UK’s biggest provider of poetry education.

5)    Even when she left the Poetry School, Mimi continued to work as a mentor and teacher. In her 80^th year, she still works as a mentor and teacher. She has taken part in poetry festivals and run poetry workshops around the world and still hosts regular workshops at her flat. She has mentored some of the biggest names in contemporary poetry. And she has done all this while continuing to write.

6)    Mimi is a very polite person, but she’s a tough critic. She won’t say something is good if it isn’t. I sometimes hear people say things like “my opinion is as valid as yours”. No, it isn’t. You’re entitled to think that, say, an Instagram ditty is a great poem, but that doesn’t make it one. Mimi knows her poetic onions and she will say if something stinks.

7)    I have never been to any of Mimi’s workshops, but she once gave me a piece of advice about writing that I’ve never forgotten. The reader will feel, she said, what you feel when you’re writing. That simple insight lodged in my heart. After that, when I wrote my column, I could always tell if I was going to get emails from blokes in Starbucks telling me that I had made them cry, or smile, or laugh. After that, I knew that if I was bored when I wrote, I was in trouble. The reader can always tell when your heart isn’t in it.

8)    Mimi was born in Tehran but sent to boarding school on the Isle of Wight when she was six. She didn’t see either of her parents for years on end. She felt like an exile here in the UK and she felt like an exile in Iran when she went back. She lost her country after the revolution, but she had pretty much lost it already. None of her three marriages worked out. Her son has suffered from mental illness. Her daughter has a degenerative disease. But when I interviewed her for my book The Art of Not Falling Apart, this is what she said: “I’ve always been aware,” she told me, “of how much luck I’ve had in my life. So, on balance, I’ve been incredibly lucky to have such gorgeous kids. They’re both very beautiful, they’re both very bright, they’re both very talented. And best of all, they’re both really nice people.”

9)    And that, in the end, is it. Some artists are good because they have a ruthless focus on their art. Others feel that it’s also important to be a decent human. Mimi is a loving mother and grandmother, a dedicated teacher and mentor and she’s a great friend. Oh, and she’s very funny. God grant me funny friends because yes, the planet is burning and Putin is on the march and the Middle East is exploding, but I can’t do very much about any of this and nor can you.

10) A final word about social media. Mimi is not on any of it. No posts, no reels, no tweets, no “stories”. She hasn’t devoted great chunks of her time to boosting her profile and building her “brand”. It’s not bad to do this, of course, but it’s strangely reassuring to know that people who just get on with the work, and don’t shout about it, can also get the prizes. At least, sometimes.

In her most recent collection, Afterwardness, Mimi has a poem called “September”. “Everything seems too beautiful to grasp,” it starts. Yup, that’s it. Too beautiful to grasp. Thoughts too deep for tears. But this is what we have and we must try.