poetry reading – Page 3 – don't confuse the narrator

a little light poetry

Last Thursday was National Poetry Day in the UK, so I am feeling very guilty that I haven’t got around to posting a poem to mark the occasion.

It wasn’t simply that my head has been too full of wispy clouds to focus. Even on Saturday, a day when I usually post, I was busy, not just with the usual domestic nonsenses, but also preparing to present the guest poets at an evening of readings at the local bookshop and community centre.
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new year, new thoughts

A few years back, I wrote the post what’s in the poem, where I said that I didn’t like how poets tend to use an explanatory “blurb” between pieces at readings to tell the audience how they should understand the poem rather than giving listeners the chance to respond for themselves.

This week, though, I attended a poetry reading by Michael Hulse and saw just how well that inter-poem blurb can be used.
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modern manners

I’ve been to several poetry readings in the last couple of weeks, including an anthology launch where I was among the readers, and one by the elderly New Zealand poet C.K. Stead.

The launch lunch for The Apple Anthology (published by Nine Arches Press) was a fairly casual event, with a number of readers, and a varied audience eager to sample the cider, sandwiches – and inevitable apples.

The other events, though, were more formal and I was disconcerted to see people in the audience tapping away at their smart phones and laptop keyboards when I thought they should be listening. (That’s why I chose the photo of the owl, an eminently educated bird, with those marvellously disapproving eyebrows I can never hope to match however much I frown on modern youth.)
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of shoe-cleaning and elephants

I’ve been back in the DCTN archives discussing narrators – first person and third person – and what’s ‘real’ in my poetry, and have just written that the inspiration for a poem is almost certainly something in my life, but it isn’t necessarily something real that actually happened to me.

The trigger may be a personal experience, or it may be something I read or overhear, or something from today that I connect through to something half remembered from the past etc. I then take that kernel of an idea and extrapolate it and link it with other images and ideas to create a poem. The same trigger can inspire different poems in different styles or forms and with different protagonists, and the information that fleshes it out may come from personal experience, research or imagination.
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right to read

One thing I try and do when I’m in London is get to the Poetry Unplugged open mike at the Poetry Café on a Tuesday night. It’s usually packed, often inspiring and always fun, not least because of the skill and wit of the host, Niall O’Sullivan. Each participant is allowed up to five minutes at the mike, so it’s possible to perform several short pieces or one longer one.

I was there this week and dithering about what to read as I haven’t been writing much recently – at least not finishing much in the way of poetry. Sitting and listening to the readers in the first half, I was reminded how the poems that are best for reading aloud to an audience are not always the ones you are proudest of, or that are likely to get published or win competitions.
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