Reading at the Poetry Café

Stanza poets reading at the Poetry Café

 

Jo Grigg, who runs the Brighton Stanza group that I go to each month - she's the happy smiling face second from the right in the front of the picture - kindly sent me this today, following our reading last night with poets from Walthamstow's equivalent group.  Looking at it objectively, I can safely state that - Jo apart - poets do not go in for chic (I'm not singling anyone out in this comment, tempting though it is).  Also, as you can see from my being half-hidden at the back, not only do I not go in for chic but I never enjoy having my photograph taken.

  

But the happy smiles are an indication of the cheerful good nature that characterised the event.  Poets of very varying gifts in both groups read their poems admirably to a sympathetic audience of friends and poetry-lovers in a rather cramped basement of the Poetry Café, a blink-and-you'll-miss-it building in a little-known sidestreet on the fringes of Covent Garden.  What's good about the poetry world is its generally inclusive nature: rather like painting, there's room for everyone.  In this way it's perhaps less like the music world, where you at least need to play or sing in tune before getting off the ground! 

 

Reading one's own poems is a pretty daunting experience, and there's that usual detachment between what you hope you're conveying and what the audience is actually receiving.  So the opportunity to read is useful, since - like so many things - there's a skill needing to be learnt, which you can only do with practice.  All thanks to Jo and the Poetry Society, without whom it wouldn't have happened.

 

Antony Mair