Brighton-in-Wonderland

Caxton Arms, Brighton

 

I only recently discovered that the raised tables they have in bars, at a height appropriate for barstools, are called "poseur" tables.  I thought of this last night, when I went to Brighton for a meeting of the Stanza Poetry Group.  This takes place each month, in the basement room of the Caxton Arms, near the station.  We push together tables of the kind mentioned, then perch on bar stools round them, read our poems to each other and comment on what's read out.  It can sometimes be a bit bruising, when you realise that your carefully crafted verses are in fact rubbish, but so long as you don't think you're a direct literary descendant of Shakespeare the process is useful.

 

Our leader Jo Grigg being away, last night's meeting was chaired by blogger guru and accomplished poet Robin Houghton.  The male/female ratio was unusually high, at seven men to two women.  It was also different from other meetings in that two performance poets came along - i.e. poets who write verse intended to be spoken in public rather than read.  But the most unusual contribution came from the man who distributed a beermat-sized card to each of us.  Each had a separate poem hand-written on it, rarely longer than a few lines, relating to an unhappy love affair.  We landed up reading them all out, in sequence.  It was a surprising and rather emotional experience.

 

I travelled back on the train with Robin, who lives in Lewes.  We were chatting about the evening and the poetry world in general, when a woman in a nearby seat, who had a fake fur coat and a slightly slurred voice, suddenly intervened and said "I've been listening to your conversation and wonder whether you'd be interested in this book", proffering a copy of a paperback entitled "Be Glad You're Neurotic" by one Louis Bisch.  She then got off at Lewes herself, leaving me wondering whether I was the odd person, rather than anyone else, and vaguely questioning whether the bizarre events of the evening had been linked to the name of the tables we'd been sitting at.  Nothing had been pose-y about it all, but perhaps that's just my perception.  Anyway, you always get surprises in this part of the world!

 

Antony Mair