James Fenton

• Name — James Fenton • Honorific Suffix — FRSL • Born — 25 April 1949 • Birthplace — Lincoln, England • Education — Magdalen College, Oxford • Occupation — Poet, journalist, literary critic • Partner — Darryl Pinckney • Parents — John Fenton

Born in Lincoln, Fenton grew up in Lincolnshire and Staffordshire, the son of Canon John Fenton, a biblical scholar. He was educated at the Durham Choristers School, Repton and Magdalen College, Oxford. He graduated with a B.A. degree in 1970. While at school Fenton acquired an enthusiasm for the work of W. H. Auden. At Oxford, his tutor John Fuller, who was writing A Reader's Guide to W. H. Auden at the time, further encouraged that enthusiasm. Auden became perhaps the most significant single influence on Fenton's work. In his first year at university, Fenton won the Newdigate Prize for his sonnet sequence Our Western Furniture. Later published by Fuller's Sycamore Press, it largely concerns the cultural collision in the 19th century between the United States and Japan. It displays in embryo many of the characteristics that define Fenton's later work: technical mastery combined with a fascination with issues that arise from the Western interaction with other cultures. Our Western Furniture was followed by Exempla, a poetry sequence later published in The Memory of War. The poem is notable for its frequent use of unfamiliar words, as well as commonplace words employed in an unfamiliar manner. While studying at Oxford, Fenton became a close friend of Christopher Hitchens, whose memoir Hitch-22 is dedicated to Fenton and has a chapter on their friendship. Hitchens praised Fenton's extraordinary talent, stating that he too believed him to be the greatest poet of his generation. He also expounded on Fenton's modesty, describing him as infinitely more mature than himself and Martin Amis. Fenton and Hitchens shared a house together in their third year, and continued to be close friends until Hitchens's death. Fenton read his poem 'For Andrew Wood' at the Vanity Fair Hitchens memorial service. His first collection, Terminal Moraine (1972) won a Gregory Award. With the proceeds he traveled to East Asia, where he wrote of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and the end of the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia, which presaged the rise of Pol Pot. The poems featured in his collection The Memory of War (1982) ensured his reputation as one of the greatest war poets of his time. Fenton returned to London in 1976. He was political correspondent of the New Statesman, where he worked alongside Christopher Hitchens, Julian Barnes and Martin Amis. He became the Assistant Literary Editor in 1971, and Editorial Assistant in 1972. Hitchens had formally recruited Fenton to the International Socialists and earlier in his journalistic career, like Hitchens, Fenton had written for Socialist Worker, the party's weekly paper. Fenton was an occasional war reporter in Vietnam during the late phase of the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975. His experiences in Vietnam and Cambodia from summer 1973 form a part of All the Wrong Places (1988). The publication of the book revealed some of Fenton's second thoughts about revolutionary socialism. Between 1978 and 1980, Fenton spent a year in West Berlin as a reporter for The Guardian, sharing a flat with Timothy Garton Ash. In 1983, Fenton accompanied his friend Redmond O'Hanlon to Borneo. A description of the voyage can be found in the book Into the Heart of Borneo. Fenton won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1984 for Children in Exile: Poems 1968–1984. He was appointed Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1994, a post he held till 1999. He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2007. The American composer Charles Wuorinen set several of his poems to music, and Fenton served as librettist for Wuorinen's opera Haroun and the Sea of Stories (2001, premiered in 2004), based on Salman Rushdie's novel. Fenton has said: "The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation." In response to criticisms of his comparatively slim Selected Poems (2006), he warned against the notion of poets churning out poetry in a regular, automated fashion. Fenton has been a frequent contributor to The Guardian, The Independent and The New York Review of Books. He once wrote the head column in the editorials of each Friday's Evening Standard. In 2007, he appeared in a list of the "100 most influential gay and lesbian people in Britain" published by The Independent on Sunday. Fenton's partner is Darryl Pinckney, the prize-winning novelist, playwright and essayist perhaps best known for the novel High Cotton (1992).