Years ago when there were still printers' pubs I went to the upstairs room of one of them in London to hear saxophonist Lol Coxhill performing with poet Bob Cobbing. It was an evening of sounds more than words and could have been a clash of cultures if Coxhill and Cobbing hadn't been so willing (and able) to take flack for their experiment in the interval and turn around the mood at the bar.
I was reminded of that night when Ian McMillan, another consummate performer, brought avant garde jazz into his final poem as he opened the Winchester Poetry Festival this Friday. For an hour, McMillan held his torch up to what a lifetime of writing means, showing us the family that has always loved words and his fascination for how we speak to one another, for what he describes as the battleground of language. Funny, high energy and wise, McMillan's enthusiasm is infectious and what his jazz poem said to me was that poetry is where we can all take courage but it's nothing without love.
Family was at least part of the soundtrack to the later evening reading, Taking Blood, featuring Gillian Clarke, Paul Batchelor and Leontia Flynn. Clarke read one of my favourite poems of hers, Blue Hydrangeas which flashes back to a childhood memory of her mother. Flynn's astonishing poem, The Radio, interlaced her mother's experience with childhood, when the soundtrack was Belfast, bombs and shootings. Batchelor's beautiful poem Pit Ponies drew on a memory of his father's, but he was also evoking the power of Edward Thomas. And it's right, isn't it, that dead poets should take their place in the family album, Clarke summoning Waldo Williams, Wilfred Owen and Hed Wynn, the shepherd poet from north Wales, Flynn reading August 30 2013, her tribute to Seamus Heaney and as well as Thomas, Batchelor revealing his respect for poet Barry McSweeney?
The festival's themes are identity and sense of place, so let's go back to McMillan for a moment, chronicler of Barnsley and way beyond, comparing the quiffs of Elvis and Ted Hughes in a fantasy that imagines Elvis didn't die, but caught a boat to England and became Ted. As Winchester Poetry Festival chair, Stephen Boyce says in his introduction to the programme, contemporary writing and performance represent a "deep well". All the festival readings are at the Winchester Discovery Centre.
I was reminded of that night when Ian McMillan, another consummate performer, brought avant garde jazz into his final poem as he opened the Winchester Poetry Festival this Friday. For an hour, McMillan held his torch up to what a lifetime of writing means, showing us the family that has always loved words and his fascination for how we speak to one another, for what he describes as the battleground of language. Funny, high energy and wise, McMillan's enthusiasm is infectious and what his jazz poem said to me was that poetry is where we can all take courage but it's nothing without love.
Family was at least part of the soundtrack to the later evening reading, Taking Blood, featuring Gillian Clarke, Paul Batchelor and Leontia Flynn. Clarke read one of my favourite poems of hers, Blue Hydrangeas which flashes back to a childhood memory of her mother. Flynn's astonishing poem, The Radio, interlaced her mother's experience with childhood, when the soundtrack was Belfast, bombs and shootings. Batchelor's beautiful poem Pit Ponies drew on a memory of his father's, but he was also evoking the power of Edward Thomas. And it's right, isn't it, that dead poets should take their place in the family album, Clarke summoning Waldo Williams, Wilfred Owen and Hed Wynn, the shepherd poet from north Wales, Flynn reading August 30 2013, her tribute to Seamus Heaney and as well as Thomas, Batchelor revealing his respect for poet Barry McSweeney?
The festival's themes are identity and sense of place, so let's go back to McMillan for a moment, chronicler of Barnsley and way beyond, comparing the quiffs of Elvis and Ted Hughes in a fantasy that imagines Elvis didn't die, but caught a boat to England and became Ted. As Winchester Poetry Festival chair, Stephen Boyce says in his introduction to the programme, contemporary writing and performance represent a "deep well". All the festival readings are at the Winchester Discovery Centre.
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