More poetry

The picture above may look a little bit like a primary school, but that's how the world of poetry is: everything pared down and minimalist - usually because there's no cash for anything grander.  The Poetry Café is tucked down Betterton Street, in a virtually unknown hinterland of Covent Garden, and is the ground floor of a building occupied by the Poetry Society.

The Stanza group I've been attending in Brighton for a little over a year now is an offshoot of the Poetry Society.  Earlier this year I'd taken part in a "Stanza Bonanza" in the windowless basement of the Poetry Café, where two Stanza groups fielded six members apiece to read their poems in slots of just under ten minutes.  Then it was Brighton and Walthamstow.  This week it was Brighton and Barnes.  I'd originally volunteered to compère the event, having read before, but then one of the participants dropped out at the last minute and I found myself reading again.

Reading your poems to an audience of unknown people gets easier the more you do it.  This was my fourth time, and I can now see the way it needs to be done - though I'm a long way off doing it right.  The last thing an audience wants to hear is someone droning on in a monotone, not engaging with the listeners. This creates a whole new level of boredom.  Also, I used to think that poems could stand on their own two feet and didn't need an introduction.  But in a reading they do: it's nice to hear the context - what led to them being written, for example, and where you were at the time.  A sense of humour helps as well.  Contrary to what a lot of poets seem to think, people have come along for a good time, not just an earnest bout of severe mental concentration.

Last night three members of our Brighton team recited their poems off by heart.  Two of them - Tommy Sissons and Sue Evans - were admittedly "performance poets", which means that their work is intended to be performed rather than read.  The third, Andie Davidson, just felt that her poems were more effective when delivered that way.  And they were.

Yours truly wasn't sure he could trust his memory sufficiently to equal this.  I adopted the solution of reading three poems, of which two were not too serious.  It's great when you get a laugh from an audience.  You feel somehow that you've not only got their attention but they're on your side.  That's the moment when you give them a poem that's a bit tougher - but not one that's too long, because you'll lose them.

The other pleasure of these events is hearing others read whom you don't know - it's a thrill to hear a poem that's fresh and original.  There were several of these from the Barnes representatives, which I could happily mull over on the long train ride back to Hastings.

Antony Mair