Also read Akin Jeje’s tribute to Reid Mitchell.
I wrote two sonnets for Reid Mitchell (1955-2023); one a couple of years before he died and one, at Reid’s own instigation, some fifteen years ago. Reid had told me a story about his relationship with his wife, whom he had recently divorced. She had asked him what had become of the wedding ring he had worn for the twenty-five years they had been together. Reid had shown her that he now wore it on his right hand instead of his left. He had no desire to forget her. His wife had shown him her right hand, which also containing the wedding band as was, and they had quietly parted, not to see each other again for many years.
“Well, if you can’t get a poem out of that!” I had said. Possibly insensitively.
“I’m too close to it. You do it,” he had challenged me.
When, many years later, he read the poem I wrote for him to his wife, they both cried.
Happily, I like to think.
Reid came to watching Breaking Bad a few years after the series had finished. He thought it the best thing he’d ever seen. It scared him. He related to it absolutely. The story of a man of great but thwarted capability, living in pain, waiting for that chance to arrive that would let him exploit abilities that had lain dormant for too long hit home. I always hoped that Reid’s blue meth was going to be the written word, the story. For there were stories there, and an ability to tell them, and a track record in youth of some quite extraordinary academic achievements.
The reason behind Reid’s affinity with Walter White was not hard to imagine. Reid saw himself as underutilised because he was underutilised.
Paul Theroux once wrote, about V.S. Naipaul, that “character flaws seem to inspire the sympathy that lies at the very foundation of friendship”, and Reid was flawed. Man, he could be hard work sometimes!
Reid was also, I think, a man devoid of malice. He liked, no… loved conversation; the dispute of it, the emotion of it, the performance of it. He was also often disappointed, and easily bored. He was a very well-read man. And he loved, loved the written word. It is difficult to explain in brief just how perceptive he could be. He was one of those people you bounce ideas off in emails or over drinks in bars to check if your forming thoughts are robust enough to stand the confrontation.
He often found other people frustrating.
He was not always good at hiding this frustration. As Philip Roth once wrote, “Writing got me into this. Writing is going to get me out.” I really hoped it would.
His book Scoundrel was interesting, but written under extreme pressure. There would, I felt sure, be more to come. Ill health, failing hearing, failing eye-sight! Difficult for a man to keep his good humour under these conditions.
I wonder what stories we will now have been deprived of. I wonder what stories there may be to be found. I hope there may be some happy ones written in those times after our decade-plus long communications finally ceased.
Here are the two memories of Reid Mitchell I put into verse.
The first is my call for him to write those so long promised tales. The, (I have to say, rather poorly titled), second one is the poem written as Reid speaking to the woman who was, till the very end, I believe, his best friend.
She was not the only one.
Time to Write Your Stories.
– for Reid Mitchell –
“To be dead is to stop believing in the masterpieces we will begin tomorrow,” Patrick Kavanagh.
The clock’s indifferent tock possesses us,
The fragments shored against our ruins crack,
Our bones are placed on special offer as
Our stolen rings, loves, health will not come back.
This full-ishlife came forced in part by fate,
Geography and history and time
And preference, and decisions, (not all great),
But ours, and owned: to this we stand resigned.
The consolations of the passing years
Are needed; art-provoking music plays
Half heard, but (full remembered), full aware
That what’s been seen must now be paraphrased.
……….Though future set-lists never go to plan.
……….I’m proud to say, I know thee still old man.
The Assessor.
– as Reid Mitchell –
On my right hand I wear my wedding ring,
As you once showed me you were doing too.
When marriage lasts a quarter century
So much is worth remembering. I do
Believe you are the great love of my life
Believe that it was right that we should part
Believe, though age extracts unequal price,
You’ll keep a home for me inside your heart.
There is so much that I fear to forget
And, if it helps, I still want you to know,
These days I live with all that I regret
And something I first found so long ago:
……….The love you take, is just about, my friend,
……….Equal to the love you make . . . in the end.
Sell Your Bones: A Launch Reading & Sharing. Monday 19 August 2019. From L to R: Chan Lai-kuen (Dead Cat), Michael Ingham, Reid Mitchell, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho and Andrew Barker
How to cite: Barker, Andrew. “Two Sonnets for Reid Mitchell.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 16 Jan. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/01/16/two-sonnets.
Andrew Barker holds a BA (Hons) in English Literature, an MA in Anglo/Irish Literature and a PhD in American Literature. He currently teaches at Hong Kong University, Lingnan University, and Chinese University. His poetry has been published in Asia Literary Review, Fifty/Fifty, Outloud Too, City Voices, Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine and Cha. Snowblind from my Protective Colouring, his first book of poetry, was published in 2009 with the villanelle-sequence Everything in Life is Contagious performed at the Fringe Theatre as part of The Hong Kong Literary Festival. His books, Joyce is Not Here: 101 Modern Shakespearean Sonnets and Orange Peel: Modern Shakespearean Sonnets 102-203 are available on Amazon, with the third volume Social Room: Modern Shakespearean Sonnets 204 to 305 arriving shortly. He is the operator of the poetry lectures website mycroftlectures where readings of his work can be found. [All contributions by Andrew Barker.]