dumbfoundry

Any poetry aficionado will have had more than their fair share of evenings straining to catch the words, and drift, of the figure hunched over the lectern. During a reading by Auden at the South Bank in the 1960s, Patrick Kavanagh even fell asleep on stage. In my own years of presenting and promoting the stuff, I've developed a polite smile that friends tell me later can, at times, look rather fixed. There was the poet who spent the entire reading jangling the change in his pockets in a metallic symphony that drowned out all the words. And the one who, after too many vodkas, lurched up to the microphone and launched her reading with a loud burp. And the Aboriginal poet who, if I hadn't started clapping and leapt up to thank him, would clearly have gone on all night.

"It would be very odd," said James Fenton in a lecture on poetry a few years ago, "to go to a concert hall and discover that the pianist on offer wasn't any good at all, in the sense that he couldn't actually play the piano. But in poetry this is an experience we've learnt to take in our stride." No wonder there are pleas to hand the whole thing over to the professionals. If poets can't be trusted with their own work, the argument goes, then actors must take over. [...]

This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy on Thursday, June 10, 2004 at 11:28 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.