the cost of selling

I go to one of the bookshops with a rather late batch of the magazine and a delivery note. It is late, and I am apologetic, so instead of just leaving the package at the information desk, I go in search of D, who is responsible for the poetry section. He's a poet himself, and we have published poems of his occasionally. We gossip about what's about, what people are buying. Cat Haiku, obviously. It's an opportunity for me to riffle through what he has new in stock ... There are magazines I haven't seen for a long time, such as The Journal (formerly ~ of Anglo-Scandinavian Poetry). He starts telling me about new books in; we get to talking about the Costa list, the TS Eliot list, which he regards as "predictable". We agree that John Burnside might have been included. He shows me Moya Cannon, Kenji Miyazawa. I buy half a dozen magazines I don't actually subscribe to (though I should) and when my purchases are totted up, they are over £50. D isn't even on commission.

Poetry and audiece

How often have you heard poets wish for the sort of audiences that the visual arts command? How often have you heard poets complain that Guardianistas will flock to any exhibition, will engage in the quite abstruse language of art appreciation, but will run a mile when confronted with the prospect of listening to a line or two of concatenated words? Even if penned by the Poet Laureate himself?
(Um, well, perhaps that's not the precise superlative I was looking for.)

Well, be careful what you wish for. The incomparable Ms Baroque has a post (no, dammit, it's not that post - which post is it? Anyway -) which castigates quite even-handedly both the lumpen proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

But look again at her castigations. Which one of us can honestly claim that we have never been guilty of any of the following, mutatis mutandis:

• Considering the poet's clothing, his habit of scratching his nose each time he tells a joke
• Wondering if he's making out with that pretty young poet sharing the platform, with whom he's exchanging knowing glances as the middle-aged, heavily maquillaged female poet (with whom they are both sharing the platform) relays dithyrambic sexual confessions
• Wondering if you will get to the pub before it shuts
• Seeing X over the room, a publisher whose attention you've been hoping to attract
• Seeing Y over the room, a poet from the next parish who's always trying to get you to read his manuscript
• Seeing Z over the room, with whom you thought you were good friends until the day you had a blazing row about Bukowski, and who has never spoken to you since
• Wishing the poet's subject matter were more varied
• Wishing the poet told more jokes
• Wishing the poet's poems were shorter
• Wishing it were a different poet altogether?

blond balladeer

So Boris is writing verse? Perhaps he has been studying Stephen Fry's How To book. All of this is so depressing.

God's plaything

Ted Hughes put in a dramatic appearance at Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. The "Poet on Poet" lecture was Christopher Reid reading from the Letters, which he's just edited. The event opened with Huge himself, his dark brown voice out of the ether growling the opening verses of Crow. With extraordinary sangfroid CR stood alone at the podium looking self-deprecating, took a draught of water as God was being challenged, then owned that the more alert of us would have realised that he wasn't engaging in some extraordinary act of ventriloquism. He wanted us to keep Ted's voice in our head when he read the letters.

Terrific stuff. He started with the first letter in the book, an extraordinary teenage love letter in which the poetic imagination was stretching its wings. Then there were letters from Cambridge, the letter to Olwyn where he tells about winning the poetry competition (p 93), a letter to Olwyn about America (p 106) where everything is wrapped in cellophane and transported great distances...

It was while he was reading part of a letter to Ben Sonnenberg (pp 586-589) where Hughes is talking about his jaguar, and how he tried to capture that curl of the lip, like a dog bothered by the fly - and in fact the whole passage is about work, revision, and the inspiration that comes with work and alertness - that the surely by now famous visitation occurred. Reid was reading:

The image that came to my head, to give the idea, was - memory of a fly landing on a dog's nose

and something rose across my vision from bottom left to top right, and I tilted my head a few times to try and get it again, thinking it was a trick of the light on the inner surface of my glasses. CR read on for almost half a minute, describing how the dog might react to the fly, and how he was trying to get the description right, and now:

To intensify my idea and make the point of irritation more of an impossible, inaccessible fixture...

and we realised there was a butterfly onstage.

Probably: as if it had a fly up its nostril [laughter from the audience] while I was actually writing these words...

For now the butterfly was in full view, under the spotlight, fluttering over Reid's head. Still laughter

...an average size bluefly came straight acorss that very cold room - where no fly could have moved since November at the latest -

more laughter -

and went straight up my nostril, where it lodged.

The butterfly landed on Reid's head, to general hilarity. He felt something and brushed at it, so it left again and fluttered around, and he saw it, but not before he'd read:

I extracted it, and pressed it in my Shakespeare.

And as he finished the sentence, he was laughing too, and pointing at the butterfly, and said what we were all thinking, if only in jest: "He's here!" After a bit it fluttered onto one of the cardboard boxes bearing the legend "Words", where it stayed until the end of the lecture.