1 00:00:00,540 --> 00:00:07,620 Ladies and gentlemen, fellow intelligence artists, poets and scholars. 2 00:00:09,360 --> 00:00:20,700 Thank you very much for being here to support the archipelagic cause so remarkably taken up by the Pavilion Library at the 3 00:00:20,700 --> 00:00:30,299 inspiration of Chris Fletcher and with unstinting encouragement from Richard Ovenden and Sarah Thomas of Enslaved Bodies, 4 00:00:30,300 --> 00:00:34,590 Librarian and Unfailing Support from Kate Longworth. 5 00:00:35,410 --> 00:00:45,040 To all four of whom I'm deeply grateful. I'm very sorry indeed that Dr. Thomas cannot be here as I know she wanted to be. 6 00:00:46,110 --> 00:00:49,170 Little did I think when it came into my head. 7 00:00:49,680 --> 00:00:53,100 Not so long ago. To attempt this project. 8 00:00:54,470 --> 00:00:59,090 That I would find myself here today in such company. In such a place as this. 9 00:00:59,810 --> 00:01:03,200 So resonant with history. The heart of Oxford. 10 00:01:04,860 --> 00:01:10,620 No one would want to go the full distance in the footsteps of Charles the first. 11 00:01:13,130 --> 00:01:20,000 Or even Oliver Cromwell, both of whom held parliaments here in this room. 12 00:01:21,080 --> 00:01:25,580 But I'll settle for the story this fall very happily. 13 00:01:26,360 --> 00:01:29,990 In fact, Archipelago story began in Barcelona. 14 00:01:30,200 --> 00:01:37,040 I just stepped into the street from a Basque bar there and was a little tipsy after lunch. 15 00:01:38,570 --> 00:01:41,780 Next thing I knew, I hurt myself. 16 00:01:42,260 --> 00:01:50,360 You know the way you do. Declaring to my daughter's partner that I was going to found a new literary magazine. 17 00:01:51,350 --> 00:01:54,440 It would be called Archipelago. We could do this. 18 00:01:55,800 --> 00:01:59,850 It would do that. It would have black and white artwork and photography. 19 00:02:01,070 --> 00:02:04,910 I seemed very sure that I knew what I was talking about. 20 00:02:07,150 --> 00:02:15,100 I don't know what it was those [INAUDIBLE] put in that cheap yorker, but the idea didn't fall away when I got home. 21 00:02:16,000 --> 00:02:21,070 Once I set to and wrote my manifesto and fired it off to friends and others whose work I admired, 22 00:02:21,760 --> 00:02:31,330 asking if they had anything that might suit a literary magazine intended to be extraordinarily preoccupied with landscape, 23 00:02:32,050 --> 00:02:35,950 with documentary and remembrance, with wilderness and wet, 24 00:02:35,950 --> 00:02:40,240 with natural and cultural histories, with language and languages, 25 00:02:40,840 --> 00:02:49,030 with the literal and vestigial the geological and topographical climates in terms of both meteorology, 26 00:02:49,030 --> 00:02:57,070 ecology and environment and all these things as metaphor, liminal and subliminal at the margins. 27 00:02:57,340 --> 00:03:01,900 In the unnameable constellation of islands on the eastern Atlantic coast, 28 00:03:02,320 --> 00:03:08,920 known variously another millennia the Great Britain, Britain and Ireland, etc., and so on. 29 00:03:10,250 --> 00:03:17,420 Further, I proclaimed that in spirit and letter archipelago would assert in an unrepentantly 30 00:03:17,420 --> 00:03:22,600 secular sense that praise or celebration are as worthy as perhaps even more of Islam. 31 00:03:22,970 --> 00:03:30,980 Prayers of petition and the magazine would be committed to hearing, both quietly composed with thoughtful craft. 32 00:03:31,790 --> 00:03:39,680 Above all, Archipelago would be a literary magazine with literary values for the common reader. 33 00:03:40,690 --> 00:03:46,570 Not a scholarly or agitated political one in the ordinary senses of such terms. 34 00:03:48,650 --> 00:03:53,900 So I shot my net and the resulting catch was an abundance of riches. 35 00:03:55,100 --> 00:03:58,820 I have to be something to the idea. After all. 36 00:04:00,500 --> 00:04:05,060 I think it was Oscar Wilde said that all art is a collaboration. 37 00:04:06,530 --> 00:04:10,610 A magazine. Once the government goes farther like a theatrical production, 38 00:04:11,030 --> 00:04:21,350 it is all collaboration and even some high drama in the unsure and uncertain hope that it will be all right on the night. 39 00:04:22,010 --> 00:04:25,700 And no typos in mourning yet. 40 00:04:25,700 --> 00:04:34,010 Such a venture must add up to something more than the sum of its contributions before introducing the poets and scholars you've come to hear. 41 00:04:34,490 --> 00:04:40,250 I would like to acknowledge the vital part played in adding that more to the sum of parts. 42 00:04:40,730 --> 00:04:45,230 My three backroom people, my daughter Gail Neely, who lives in Barcelona and couldn't get here, 43 00:04:46,760 --> 00:04:50,330 and Adrian and Andrea lack of sinecure press who are here. 44 00:04:50,630 --> 00:04:54,220 I'm delighted to see. Without the three of them. 45 00:04:55,210 --> 00:05:00,040 Together with Julian about his artwork I commissioned to the cover of the magazine Archipelago. 46 00:05:00,340 --> 00:05:05,340 Would not it not be the truly beautiful object it is? 47 00:05:06,130 --> 00:05:14,800 And a gift, if I may say. At £10, there will be copies for sale after the readings. 48 00:05:15,510 --> 00:05:20,340 And you can sign up for the second issue now shaping up to be at least as good as the first. 49 00:05:21,670 --> 00:05:29,620 It will, I hope, appear early next spring. And you could also pick up an order for, say, for a new book, a new work, 50 00:05:30,070 --> 00:05:36,580 The Camouflage School by Tom, in which I took delivery from cynically press only last night. 51 00:05:36,850 --> 00:05:40,420 Now the Order of service is as follows. 52 00:05:41,350 --> 00:05:48,940 Mick Himmler, poetry editor at the Times Literary Supplement, will open with his poem Muck Out in the Isle of Muck. 53 00:05:50,380 --> 00:05:55,090 Paul Abbott will read from his post apocalyptic poem Flood. 54 00:05:55,930 --> 00:06:00,430 For one, the new ticket price in his first year at Oxford is now in his final year. 55 00:06:01,760 --> 00:06:06,880 Plutocrats will publish Flood in its entirety in the coming year with illustrations by Gail McNeely. 56 00:06:07,450 --> 00:06:10,780 Mark Williams, a young scholar attached to Jesus College, 57 00:06:11,080 --> 00:06:19,510 will introduce and read a poem in Scottish Gaelic so that we have some kind of idea of the languages of the archipelago. 58 00:06:19,810 --> 00:06:29,860 At least one gesture at those languages. Andrew Conn, fellow of this indictment Hall will introduce a poem by Osip Mandelstam. 59 00:06:30,810 --> 00:06:34,020 From The Gulag Archipelago and read excerpts from it. 60 00:06:34,960 --> 00:06:45,160 In Russian. Greg Berlanti, who hails from Cork and Natalie from America, will read his translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer, next. 61 00:06:45,580 --> 00:06:51,400 Oxford's very own Bernard O'Donoghue, also a cork man living through poems. 62 00:06:52,240 --> 00:07:03,280 And finally, Seamus Heaney, Nobel laureate and Bodley metal holder will read his two contributions to the first issue of the magazine. 63 00:07:03,360 --> 00:07:07,900 But before that, I think he's going to say a few words about the magazine. 64 00:07:08,770 --> 00:07:14,140 So thank you all very much. And now here is Miller.