Set list

Toddington Poetry Society are a lovely bunch of people to read to, engaged and responsive. Thank you for asking me.

There's a vogue for recording set lists, so this is what I read last night:

To Paint a Bird (Jacques Prévert, trans AB) - on account of its being 14 July
Holdall (Aircrew)
Yellow Sun, Green Grass
Revesby
The Boasts of Jim McKay
Small Arms
Russkis
Downstairs
Nav Rad
Co-ordinates
The Men from Praga
Britannia
Chamber of Horrors £2 Extra
Chattel

All but the Prévert come from The Men from Praga. The Prévert translation is available on Frank Parker's site here, and the first five TMFP poems are downloadable from the Salt site (pdf file). Nav Rad was featured on small change, and Britannia on peony moon. The title poem is on poetry pf. That still leaves plenty of other poems to read in the book.

At the organisers' prior request for "background" to poems I interspersed plenty of what Bernard O'Donoghue deprecatingly calls "gab". The audience needs a breather between poems, they said, anxiously. Well, of course - and I wondered whose poetry blitzing they'd suffered in the past before it dawned on me that they were probably worried I'd try a one-woman Joy of Six blast. What J6 are doing is something different altogether: the philosophy behind that merits a separate post some time. In the more conventional poetry reading, it's important to give the poem a bit of aural space, but without betraying it. When Bernard does it, it's an artform in itself. It was while listening to him, years ago now, that it dawned on me how good it was not to keep hearing that phrase "this next poem". I've never heard it on his lips, and resolved forthwith to try to banish it from my own.

At the other extreme was a nervous poet I heard at Aldeburgh a few years ago. Much praised and garlanded, she'd flown half way round the world to read at the festival, but some freak of nerves had caused her to write out all her intros and ad libs and read from them as if they were poems themselves. It was horribly embarrassing.