Ladies and gentlemen, fellow intelligence artists, poets and scholars.
Thank you very much for being here to support the archipelagic cause so remarkably taken up by the Pavilion Library at the
inspiration of Chris Fletcher and with unstinting encouragement from Richard Ovenden and Sarah Thomas of Enslaved Bodies,
Librarian and Unfailing Support from Kate Longworth.
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.
Little did I think when it came into my head.
Not so long ago. To attempt this project.
That I would find myself here today in such company. In such a place as this.
So resonant with history. The heart of Oxford.
No one would want to go the full distance in the footsteps of Charles the first.
Or even Oliver Cromwell, both of whom held parliaments here in this room.
But I'll settle for the story this fall very happily.
In fact, Archipelago story began in Barcelona.
I just stepped into the street from a Basque bar there and was a little tipsy after lunch.
Next thing I knew, I hurt myself.
You know the way you do. Declaring to my daughter's partner that I was going to found a new literary magazine.
It would be called Archipelago. We could do this.
It would do that. It would have black and white artwork and photography.
I seemed very sure that I knew what I was talking about.
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.
Once I set to and wrote my manifesto and fired it off to friends and others whose work I admired,
asking if they had anything that might suit a literary magazine intended to be extraordinarily preoccupied with landscape,
with documentary and remembrance, with wilderness and wet,
with natural and cultural histories, with language and languages,
with the literal and vestigial the geological and topographical climates in terms of both meteorology,
ecology and environment and all these things as metaphor, liminal and subliminal at the margins.
In the unnameable constellation of islands on the eastern Atlantic coast,
known variously another millennia the Great Britain, Britain and Ireland, etc., and so on.
Further, I proclaimed that in spirit and letter archipelago would assert in an unrepentantly
secular sense that praise or celebration are as worthy as perhaps even more of Islam.
Prayers of petition and the magazine would be committed to hearing, both quietly composed with thoughtful craft.
Above all, Archipelago would be a literary magazine with literary values for the common reader.
Not a scholarly or agitated political one in the ordinary senses of such terms.
So I shot my net and the resulting catch was an abundance of riches.
I have to be something to the idea. After all.
I think it was Oscar Wilde said that all art is a collaboration.
A magazine. Once the government goes farther like a theatrical production,
it is all collaboration and even some high drama in the unsure and uncertain hope that it will be all right on the night.
And no typos in mourning yet.
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.
I would like to acknowledge the vital part played in adding that more to the sum of parts.
My three backroom people, my daughter Gail Neely, who lives in Barcelona and couldn't get here,
and Adrian and Andrea lack of sinecure press who are here.
I'm delighted to see. Without the three of them.
Together with Julian about his artwork I commissioned to the cover of the magazine Archipelago.
Would not it not be the truly beautiful object it is?
And a gift, if I may say. At £10, there will be copies for sale after the readings.
And you can sign up for the second issue now shaping up to be at least as good as the first.
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,
The Camouflage School by Tom, in which I took delivery from cynically press only last night.
Now the Order of service is as follows.
Mick Himmler, poetry editor at the Times Literary Supplement, will open with his poem Muck Out in the Isle of Muck.
Paul Abbott will read from his post apocalyptic poem Flood.
For one, the new ticket price in his first year at Oxford is now in his final year.
Plutocrats will publish Flood in its entirety in the coming year with illustrations by Gail McNeely.
Mark Williams, a young scholar attached to Jesus College,
will introduce and read a poem in Scottish Gaelic so that we have some kind of idea of the languages of the archipelago.
At least one gesture at those languages. Andrew Conn, fellow of this indictment Hall will introduce a poem by Osip Mandelstam.
From The Gulag Archipelago and read excerpts from it.
In Russian. Greg Berlanti, who hails from Cork and Natalie from America, will read his translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer, next.
Oxford's very own Bernard O'Donoghue, also a cork man living through poems.
And finally, Seamus Heaney, Nobel laureate and Bodley metal holder will read his two contributions to the first issue of the magazine.
But before that, I think he's going to say a few words about the magazine.
So thank you all very much. And now here is Miller.