Roundabout Review of the London Poetry Scene
Thursday, February 14, 2008 Bluechrome Poets – The Poetry Café, Covent Garden – 19th November/Oxfam Winter Poetry Reading 2007 – Oxfam, Marylebone High Street – 6th December
Live poetry readings in London are a strange business. The audiences are small but attentive, from student age upwards but mostly middle-aged, and the atmosphere is slightly uncomfortable. This is in no small part due to the fact that poetry, on the page, manages to be simultaneously private and universal. When you’re reading it, it could be a secret missive to you, stating your mission instructions, or a broadcast to the world that you are experiencing through your own personal handset. There is also a lot of emotion and urgency in good poetry; it should feel like what’s being said is being said because it has to be said.
All of these traits fail utterly to translate to the environment of a small venue packed with plastic chairs. The poet is speaking neither to you nor the whole world, but to a disappointing in between. The words aren’t coming out because they have to, but because the poet is performing. Any emotion, except perhaps a sense of nervous excitement, is simulated. The poet himself is neither desperate nor sagelike, but someone a lot like you. As for the poetry having an impact, at the end of the day the audience who have arrived are well-adjusted, middle class people with things to get on with, and they will leave the event the same people, not one item on their itinerary altered. No emergency manoeuvre is triggered. Poetry that, on the page, has the potential to change everything, palpably changes nothing.
It was with these thoughts weighing in my mind that I went to attend two key readings over the last couple of months – the first ever bluechrome event in London, helping to launch four of their new poetry books, and the last ever event of the Oxfam Poetry Series, hosted by Nth Position’s Todd Swift, which has raised over £30,000 for the charity since it began – to see how a variety of poets tackle the problem.
Bluechrome’s first night in London is a free event with a quietly adoring crowd. It gets off to an odd start, with compere Anthony Delgrado confessing he’s not very good at compering, and first poet Mike Hogan admitting he thinks his poetry is really meant for reading from the page. They’re being overly modest though; less is more and there is something very disarming about getting right down to business with no bullshit. Hogan is also aided by the nature of his poetry’s protagonists, who tend to skulk around moodily rather than flash their worldly wisdom at us. In the course of his poems, he ‘has’ about three different girls, one a prostitute, and even if he doesn’t seem the type, the surliness of the encounters do raise a grin.
Leah Fritz is one of those older ladies you get in Studio Ghibli films, who turn out to have quite a bit of bite to them. After taking her time to find a comfortable spot, she reads a sonnet sequence that she’s been “touching up for the 40 years” called Women in Parks and set during Vietnam. Sonnets, thankfully, don’t feel like sonnets when they’re read out, and Fritz’s mild American accent makes them easy to digest. Her poem about Brecht is simultaneously frustrating and compelling; lines like “free isn’t free until it’s fair” and “We didn’t see the wall behind the wall” resonate (although I’m not sure if they were nicked off Brecht himself) while the general sentiment of ‘if only old Bert were alive today he’d really show ‘em’ rings false. Her best line of the night though is: “I kiss your mouth, hoping your sleep is contagious.”
After the interval, Ruth O’Callaghan does her best to put a sense of druidic sorcery into her reading. The repetition in her villanelle works well, as she almost chants, “Pour me wine the colour of straw” again and again. The fact that wine comes up quite frequently, coupled with her swaying from side to side like a cobra, does bring her perilously close to looking a bit woozy, however, and there is the odd laboured or overly precious line here and there.
Last up is Nigel McLoughlin, who has sat broodily at the back of the room until now and seems at first like he might be quite gruff. This impression quickly melts away, however, as he goes on to engage the audience on his own terms in a very comfortable and genial manner. He’s fun because he reads as if the poems are curiosities he has dug up and he enjoys giving us little insights into their workings.
The Oxfam Poetry event has a bigger audience and runs for an hour longer, managing to jam in ten poets and a wine/fag break, during which there is a car accident outside. The event is free, with a suggested £8 contribution to Oxfam. Something’s not right though. Slick compere Todd Swift quickly drops the line, “I know that many of you are poets …” and introduces every poet on the bill with a reverential enthusiasm not seen since the days of Top of the Pops. The word ‘wonderful’ comes up a lot. Most of the poets tonight are ‘wonderful’. They write ‘wonderful’ poetry. Many of them have met and worked with other poets who are also ‘wonderful’. Ruth Fainlight, who one of them had dinner with the other night, is ‘wonderful’. Truly, there is a whiff of the clique, but worse still, who cares if poets are wonderful or not? When they’re expected to keep an audience rapt for three hours, what they have to be is interesting.
Standout performer is Luke Kennard, who bucks the trend for reading poetry in a hushed and steady tone by belting through his pieces unceremoniously, sometimes in the manner of someone reading aloud a preposterous letter they’ve been sent, sometimes reminiscent of John Hegley. He also starts by saying, “The latest Amazon review of my book says that there’s only one line of genuine, heartfelt poetry in this whole collection. I’ve been trying to work out which one it is so that I might excise it.” They think he’s joking. Kennard is funny though, and his poetry works when performed because he seems more like the fall guy, the victim of his poems, rather than the mastermind behind them.
Also there is Hollywood director Stephen Gyllenhaal, father of Jake and Maggie (and yes, he does look like them). Among many seasoned poets, he is, rather alarmingly, easily the most assured and natural performer, joshing with the audience like they’re a bunch of his best friends and pedalling back and forth in the space afforded to him like a sozzled uncle. His poetry is perhaps a little indulgent, like he’s still overcome with the effect and the relief of giving voice to innermost thoughts, the kind that don’t fit into polite conversation. There’s an interesting one about Maggie stripping. You knew I’d pick that one out, but then so did Mr. Swift.
David Morley, one of the editors of The New Poetry, suffers from telling anecdotes that are at least as curious and entertaining as the poems. When he talks to us, it’s engrossing; when he recites, it’s harder to stay with him. He stands out in my memory because he discusses his intriguing background as a son of Romanic gypsies, not because of the poetry, and it’s a similar situation with the other poets. Barbara Marsh is in a pop group with a good name (much better than Simon Armitage’s) but I later struggle to recall a single line she read out. T.S Eliot prize nominee Tim Liardet strikes out in a slightly unsettling direction by reading poems that aim to “recreate or create for the first time” his deceased brother. It strikes me as an odd kind of arrogance to suggest that poetry could go so far as to fill in for a life not lived, but that’s the strongest impression I am left with. I have even encountered Alistair Noon’s poem about seeing the sphinx in China somewhere before, but still can’t quite get into it when he reads it aloud. Part of this is perhaps the perils of having a large line-up, part of it is that there are an awful lot of poems focusing on ‘place’ (by which I mean holiday destinations for questing Brits) but most of it is simply that the work loses a lot of its impact in the space between eye and mouth, or mouth and ear.
After being presented with a leaving gift, Swift finishes the night with a passionately worded request for poets everywhere to help each other, to not battle each other from the fortifications of their respective stables but to band together to make the world beyond care more about poetry. He seems sincere, but I am not convinced. Will the outside world like poetry more or less if we seem to be one big, chummy, back-patting cabal, calling each other ‘wonderful’ all the time? Surely, I think, a great deal of artistic vigour comes from the new generation’s dissatisfaction with the old, from tiring of what is acceptable and contented with itself. Why should we have to pretend to like what we don’t?
Swift himself might even agree with me, on reflection, seeing as he is, according to Al Alvarez, “blessedly, unashamedly elitist”, and a confirmed “unruly literary rebel”, going by the blurb to Winter Tennis. And there isn’t a much more obvious group to rebel against than the wine-quaffing, high-achieving, global backpacking, charity fundraising crowd. But then you could say, “Hey, what’s more important in the world today: avant-garde upstartery or raising £30k for Oxfam? Maybe it’s time we all read from the same hymnbook.” Guys, guys – that’s exactly what the happy-to-be-here, kids-done-good middle class is there for. But art is for everyone else as well.
Nigel McLoughlin’s Dissonance is reviewed in this issue of the roundtable review and is available for £12.99 in hardback, or £8.99 in paperback from www.bluechrome.co.uk
Leah Fritz’s Going, Going, Mike Hogan’s American Voodoo and Ruth O’Callaghan’s Where Acid Has Etched are also available for £8.99 each from www.bluechrome.co.uk. Todd Swift’s Winter Tennis, published by DC Books, is available on Amazon for a fluctuating price. Luke Kennard’s The Harbour Beyond the Movie is available for £10.39 in hardback from www.saltpublishing.com.
JS
From http://www.roundtablereview.co.uk/roundtable/article.php?Code=180
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Leah Fritz