Category: Events

Events/

Dannie Abse, Alwyn Marriage and Rosie Bailey at Keat’s House

Dannie Abse & Lynne Hjelmgaard
Dannie Abse & Lynne Hjelmgaard

Great evening last night at Keat’s House for the Poetry Society AGM (brief) and three excellent readings. I was very pleased to sit with poet friend Lynne and hear about “that” royal reception last week (and no, I wasn’t invited – boo!) and also have her introduce me to some people I didn’t know, such as Cheryl Moskowitz.

Only just now I googled Rosie Bailey and discovered that as well as being an experienced academic and poet in her own right she was also the collaborator/partner of U A Fanthorpe. Now I feel rather ignorant for not having heard of her. I really enjoyed her poems and delivery, even the painfully sad one about a lady in a hairdressers trying to stay chipper about Christmas.

Alwyn Marriage came to the mic with her phone apparently ringing, and in answering it it became clear this was part of her act (together with donkey, bleating lamb and cow hats for another poem about the nativity). She and Rosie had been briefed to read poems on a Christmas theme, a direction which apparently hadn’t been given to Dannie Abse, but I got the impression nobody minded, least of all him. Dannie read from his T S Eliot-nominated book Speak, Old Parrot… I wonder if he was expecting the ‘Happy Birthday to you’ singsong and the cake when it was brought out?

Hard to imagine Dannie Abse is 90, or what might be going through his mind when he contemplates the Poetry Society today and it’s allegedly tumultuous past. (By the way, check out this biog and wonderful photo of him when he was young.) Fascinating to talk with him, and lovely also to run into Hilda Sheehan (Hilda, you’re everywhere!), Tessa Lang of Clapham Stanza, Kate White, Shanta Acharya and others.

As usual, I managed to make an idiot of myself. I marched up to someone who had been pointed out to me as being Paul McGrane of the Poetry Society, who I’ve emailed with but never met, introduced myself very confidently, only to discover it wasn’t him at all. DUH! I had to then avoid eye contact with the poor man all evening as he clearly had me down as a numpty.

Books/

Anthology launch, plus Hilda Sheehan at Tunbridge Wells

A busy couple of days: Monday evening saw the launch of the Brighton Stanza anthology, a labour of love for editors Antony Mair, Miriam Patrick and Andie Davidson. Andie’s company, the Bramley Press, published the book and it looks excellent, though I say so myself. Twenty six poets are in the anthology, and nine of them read at the launch event at the Lord Nelson in Brighton.

The room was packed and we heard a good variety of poetry (performance, page, mystic), basically I think everyone had a good time. I had a nasty headache creep up towards the end of the first half which thankfully disappeared after I’d stuffed a bag of crisps. (This slightly did for my ‘fast’ day but what the heck.) What a lot of poetry love. The much-missed Jo Grigg would have been thrilled. I’m proud to be stepping into her shoes as Stanza Rep, but what a loss.

Then yesterday what should I see on Facebook but an alert that Hilda Sheehan was in Tunbridge Wells last night reading at the Kent & Sussex Poetry Soc. So how could I not hot-foot it along? I first met Hilda at a Swindon workshop, one of so many events and projects she organises and is involved in. The indefatigable Hilda has a lovely reading style and her poetry is clever, entertaining and just a tad surreal. You can’t help but get pulled into her orbit of warmth and goodwill.

Hilda Sheehan & Robin Houghton

Hilda read from her latest collection The Night My Sister Went to Hollywood (Cultured Llama) and shook up the good poets of Tunbridge Wells with her tales of hornets with men’s heads, loaves of bread slicing up women and seals living in the bath. Nice one!

Events/

Poetry bombing

Came across this – Poetry Bombing – sewing poems into charity shop clothes – how much fun is that??

Except I think I’d be spotted in a jiffy in our small, local St Peter & St James Hospice charity shop, plus you’d need super-quick sewing skills. Knowing my luck I’d be fumbling about looking for my reading glasses then drop the needle as someone elbowed past me to the paperbacks.

But it got me thinking – you don’t need to sew a poem (as in, with a needle) when you can sow one (geddit?) on other ‘stony’ ground – for example, little pieces of paper can be slipped into books in bookshops or libraries, or magazines, and no doubt you can think of lots of other targets, retail or otherwise. (Although it reminds of the plot of a rather rude book by Nicolson Baker, where the main character slips erotic messages into unlikely books and then lurks to watch how some unsuspecting victim is affected by them.)

OK perhaps it’s not a new idea, but I’ve never come across a ‘guerilla’ poem, and I’d love to! Have you?

Events/

Riordan & Share on ‘100 years of the don’ts’

Don Share & Maurice Riordan

Yesterday evening I was at Keats House in Hampstead listening to a Poetry Society debate on the subject of Ezra Pound’s enormously influential article ‘A Few Don’ts’, first published a hundred years ago.

As the respective editors of Poetry Review (UK) and Poetry (US), Maurice Riordan and Don Share could be said to represent the behemoth of the poetry establishment from both sides of the Atlantic. And both magazines published ‘A Few Don’ts’ when it first came out. Fascinating though the evening was, I guess this was never going to be a platform for a radical re-working of the ‘don’ts’.

Riordan in particular expressed fondness for many of the ‘rules’, and also argued that they were more discretionary than they are usually given credit for. “Go in fear of abstractions” isn’t the same thing as “don’t use abstractions”, for example. He also pointed out that Pound did say the ‘don’ts’ were not to be considered as dogma, rather that they offered guidance – “cautions gained by experience” and were up for debate.

There were some questions and observations from the floor and the talk was less about whether we need a new list of don’ts, but the bigger question of whether in this century we will see a new poetic movement to take us away from modernism, whether we need (or have) another Pound in our midst to reinvent poetry in the way that he did, “from the doughy mess of Romanticism”. Someone said that in order for a new movement to take off, enough people need to hate what currently holds as fine poetry.

Another important point made by Don Share was that there is far greater access now to poetry from around the world, and new ideas spread quickly via the internet. It’s hard to imagine anyone having the influence and power of Pound over today’s poetry scene, with its myriad different artistic movements, sub cultures and niche followings.

I first came across ‘A Few Don’ts’ in a brilliant book called Strong Words, an anthology of essays by poets on poetry, edited by W N Herbert and Matthew Hollis. I think it’s one of those books that’s on the reading list of any Creative Writing MA, but if like me you’ve never done one, it’s a revelation. Highly recommended.

audio/

Faber Social: Sam Riviere, Joe Dunthorne, Luke Wright, Ruth Padel

It was a arts-studenty sort of scene last night at the Faber Social in London: a narrow basement room, concrete floor, a sweaty mix of music and conversation growing in volume, a parade of pretty, thin girls in dresses with cinched waists, ponytails and fifties make-up and fresh-looking lads with pale skins and serious glasses. 80% of the audience was probably under 26, judging by the slightly nonplussed reaction to poems about fatherhood and childcare by someone who looked like a student himself (Luke Wright). Meanwhile Ruth Padel held court on a table with various bright young things. Fascinating to watch the milling and mixing.

Luke Wright is very funny. As well as compering, he performed the last set and pulled the audience along with the sheer pace and energy of his poems – ‘The Drunk Train’ on its slow stagger back to Essex on a Saturday night, Wright’s imagined showdown with a sadistic French cop ‘Jean Claude Gendarme’ – fantastic.

Before Luke we’d had a set from Ruth Padel, who seemed slightly out of place in this company but the audience was quiet and respectful (a sure sign this was a serious poetry event, I guess). She read from a new work ‘The Mara Crossing’. I confess I struggled to engage with all the poems – they were quite long and dealt with big issues of migration, human rights and the environment, and Padel’s voice is warm but slight.

The performer whose name had attracted me to the event was Sam Riviere, whose 81 Austerities I love, or rather I should say I found compelling, even though some of the poems were actually repellant.  Interestingly enough, his ‘double act’ last night with Joe Dunthorne was based on the theme ‘Battle’ and was concocted around the idea of two people meeting to collaborate on a poetic work, hating each other but at the same time not being able to let go.

The whole thing was brilliant. I took some video snippets but the visuals were just backs of heads, so here’s a 30 second audio extract of Joe Dunthorne reading, an imagined scene which refers to the fact that Sam Riviere’s poems have no punctuation or capitalisation…