A lot to catch up with as I continue to juggle an over-ambitiously packed timetable with erratic online access and chronic constipation, so here we go...
The good news is that both Annie Freud and Roger Robinson gave stunning performances during Saturday's Emerging Voices session. But then there were two sessions where the audience vibe was definitely split between the love them and hate them camps. Geoffrey Hill gave a bravura performance of his latest writings – all previously unpublished and never-before read in public work. He also revealed himself to have a pawky sense of humour and the ability to control the audience in a way many younger performers can only dream of. (More about performance techniques in a later posting.) But... was he being serious or most-Modern ironic with his introductions, which included explanations of various rhyme schemes of the "this is written in an ABBA pentameter" variety. Talking to audience members afterwards, there was a distinct split between those who thought they had just seen a reading by the most important English poet today and 'WTF'. Hill, incidentally, revealed himself to be a movie fan and believes he cuts his poems, rather like film editors working on a movie in the cutting room.
And then there was Albert Goldbarth, whose poem about Stephen Hawking read in a cockney accent of the Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins variety caused a collective jaw dropping that measured on the Richter Scale in Southwold and probably caused a security panic at Sizewell B. We're still pondering that performance.
Other nuggets: Jo Shapcott, a last minute substitute player in one of Saturday's readings, remarked that one of the challenges for all poets is 'latent inhibition' – the self-censoring process whereby part of your brain says "you can't say that" when you try to move outside your own comfort zone or belief system – in her case writing about fur in anything but a negative light when she is a lifelong opponent of the fur trade.
Late night saw the Open Mic session with 30 performers in just over an hour – there was no nakedness this year – and we even had Penny Shuttle reading her poem about postal filth.
At this point I wimped out for the night but the stalwarts were still going strong in the bar at 3:00am – all of which made the turnout of nearly 200 people for a session at 9:00am on the Sunday morning, show true dedication to the cause of poetry. This was the much anticipated discussion on the female poem by Jo Shapcott, Maureen Duffy, Annie Freud and Pascale Petit – and follows in the wake of the now famous letter of complaint earlier this year by a number of poets about the apparent gender bias in the reviews in Poetry Review magazine.
This was another parson's nose session that didn't deliver the killer blows that might have been hoped. Was it preaching to the converted? Some people thought so. Did it mean you can't win if you are a man – you're either a chauvinist or patronising – as some male poets subsequently commented? There was definitely agreement that many male poets have a different voice to female poets – and that female poets are requenty 'more emotionally open' than men. However Maureen Duffy made the point that it was bizarre that we were still raking over a debate that started with Aphra Behn in the 17th Century and which still results in a situation where the liberal Guardian newspaper almost exclusively has male poets reviewing male poets, female poets reviewing female poets and ethnic poets reviewing ethnic poets. As Annie Freud concluded, the poetry establishment still has a problem with women poets writing things "women shouldn't say".
This debate looks like running and running – but hopefully this session has helped light the blue touchpaper. The (woman) poet I was sitting next to certainly left the Jubilee Hall feeling inspired "That's it," she said "from now on I'll just write what I want to write – and not what I think editors will publish or won't unsettle the men in my writing groups..."
Still to come... more reports, more pictures and some video clips.
