Dear Jenny Diski,

I contacted you earlier today to draw your attention to a very critical profile of your partner Ian Patterson. At the time, I had no knowledge at all that you're suffering from inoperable cancer. I'm much the same age as you and I'm very, very saddened to learn that the prognosis is what it is. If I'd known then what I know now, I wouldn't have posted that message. I contact people often who have views which I oppose to a greater or lesser extent, but I never lose sight of the fact that they are people first and foremost and opponents, or people with views very different from my own, only to a lesser extent.

Ian Patterson is a poet as well as a routine propagandist (and the author of the more than adequate 'Guernica and Total War) - and he has a stipend at Queen's College, Cambridge.

This is very much supplementary material. I can't claim that his poem 'Iron Letters'  has anything to do with the topics of this page. I can't see that it has anything to do with any of my experience. I don't respond favourably, or unfavourably for that matter, I don't respond at all. 

Utter received
& savage verse
streaming in 
once written
told as much
as ever breathed
I was in the sea
but will be too
much more than life
the greatest anxiety
quite in itself
in letters
nor desire no
phrases nearer
than it show any
balance in
your hands
writing neglect
the flames I have
no claims to be
prose not yet finished
as you meditate
sheets of a life
and afterwards
tell my remaining rags

The best line by far is the last, I think, but unfortunately this isn't the last line of the poem. This is only the first section, and there are seven more sections, followed by a coda. This is the coda:

CODA

Mind to read between
what I have written to the Wind
in fragments of proper hours 
in every sense what it wants 
has been hit on the style
but no fine phrases for you to read

The last line really does elicit real emotion. It's an immense relief to have reached the last line of the poem 'but no fine phrases for you to read' is surely superfluous. Anyone reading the entire poem wouldn't need to be told that.

An email he'd sent me, a dry as dust but very brief diatribe, didn't contain any fine phrases either. I'd drawn his attention to the material on this page and he described my writings as 'unappetising' and urged me to 'desist.' A 'wherefore' or a 'therefore' inserted in an appropriate place would have been a nice touch, accentuating the quaint gentleman's club associations. A pillar of the local Palestine Solidarity Campaign wrote to me and used the same word - he urged me to 'desist.'