RODDY LUMSDEN - A TRIBUTE BY BENJAMIN MORRIS

Warm tributes have been paid to Roddy Lumsden, lauded poet, critic, editor, mentor and tireless reader, promoter and advocate for poetry, who died on 10 January 2020, aged just 53. 

Roddy Lumsden

The idea was ridiculous from the start. Find four dozen poets, have them each write new poems, pay them nothing at all, and corral them like a crate of mewling kittens. Would it work? We had no idea. But we knew just whom to ask.

A decade on, I still remember our first conversation about it. In 2008, Roddy had organized the 50 States multi-poet project, to great acclaim. Smitten with the notion, Helen Mort, Isobel Dixon, and I—all living in Cambridge at the time—approached him to ask if we could nick the idea, try it out closer to home. Roddy listened, sipped his pint, gazed at us with that mesmeric twitch of the eyes which always made me feel as if I were under scrutiny from some Merlinesque arch-wizard of the art—which, of course, he was.

Then, quietly, he asked: “How can I help?”

So it was that in May 2009, forty-eight poets descended upon two pubs—the Maypole in Cambridge and the Camden Head in London—for the St. George’s Day Poetry Project, to read new poems inspired by each of the English counties. The great and the good, covering the country in poetry, reading all the way from Berks to Yorks—even tiny Wight got a poem.

Others have already offered their tributes; here is what I will remember. How, faced with an upstart young poet (a Yank, no less!) who offered him precisely zero gain, Roddy chose to encourage, to uplift, and to abet that poet, at the cost of no small time and effort to himself. He spread the word. He found us readers. He brought not just his own poem to the night (addressing Bristol) but poetry lovers and advocates as well. He made us feel like we had done something that truly mattered: convening a novel conclave of poets, creating a conversation where none had existed before.

Nor would he accept any credit for the work— though the concept was his from the start.

Kindness is a currency that creates more of itself each time it is spent. In this respect Roderick Chalmers Lumsden was one of the richest men I have ever known, and devoted much of his life—when not casting his own poetic spells—to making others richer still. To a young poet starting out, trying to make his way in the world, it is simply not possible to say how much such a gift can mean. A decade on, I still wonder: is there any other way to live? Onward we search, bereft at our sudden loss of light.

A native of Mississippi, Benjamin Morris earned an MSc in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh in 2005, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2010. The author of several books of poetry and nonfiction, he lives in New Orleans.

Benjamin Morris