The real thing and the bar room manoeuvre

I went to hear John Burnside read in Ely the other night. We were upstairs at Toppings, a real bookshop. I've been meaning to go there for ages: they have an excellent programme of readers. Twenty chairs just about packed the place. It's a welcoming den to idle away a few hours, in case you haven't already got enough books in the house. I was racking my brains to recall what the shop had been when I lived there back in the 80s. A bakers, a gentlemen's outfitters perhaps? There's no trace; Toppings have made it completely their own, and it feels as if they have been there forever. Fabulous! I shall be back.

I wish them every success, and they seem to have both the curatorial sense and the critical mass for it. A much smaller bookshop opened in our village in the 90s and flourished until Amazon and Tesco killed it off. The proprietor was keen on poetry, and knew someone at OUP (remember when they published poetry?), so we had a succession of readings: Michael Donaghy, Peter Porter, Anne Stevenson, Stephen Romer - and others who weren't on the Oxford list, like Katrina Porteous and Kevin Crossley-Holland. There was even wild talk of getting Anthony Hecht over. What days! It could seat about a dozen people on various chairs, tables and bar stools. Much wine was consumed (and Michael played the whistle). It closed last year, the poetry-loving proprietor having long since retired.

It's the first time I'd heard Burnside in person, and found him engaging, thoughtful and unpompous. It was interesting to hear him talk about his work as well as read from it. His publicist won't want to know that he read from his latest poetry collection, The Hunt in the Forest, as well as from the second volume of memoir he is really supposed to be promoting, Waking Up in Toytown. But if she's reading this, she should know he was worth travelling for. I'm reading The Hunt in the Forest right now. It's good to have heard his voice so I can put the poems to it.

At the reading I found myself sitting next to G, whom I hadn't seen in twenty years. We went for a swift half to a pub I'd never set foot in during all the years I lived there, as back then it was a bit too spit & sawdust even for me. It's under new ownership, so G wanted to check it out. He stepped through the lobby to the glazed inner door, and couldn't open it. Push, push, this side and that. Standing behind him, I could see what he couldn't: below his eye level, a sign that said Pull. Who ever heard of anyone pulling open the door to a bar room? That's no way to start a brawl.

It's elf and safety, you see. If there's a fire (even less likely now smoking is forbidden) then the panicking customers must be able to get out quickly. But that oddly placed handle should have been a warning.

Everything had been ripped out, every surface levelled and sanitised. There were some low armchairs and there may even have been a potted plant. Perhaps the imagination supplies that, because it resembled nothing so much as the foyer of a modern mid-market commercial hotel. While we stood at the immaculate bar supping our Adnams, reminiscing about the livestock market and trying to ignore the smell of paint, several other punters batted at the door, finding it as baffling as G had. What sort of pub was it? It was near enough. It served decent beer. It was smoke free and there were places to sit down. There was no canned music, no slot machine (but neither, as far as I could tell, dartboard, pool table or jukebox). No ugly behaviour brewing. But all the while, I felt there was something I was not getting about it. I enjoyed my beer, and was in good company, but what was this pub for? It was almost empty. There was a group of young women talking quietly in the corner, one of whom G knew slightly and nodded to. They were subdued and respectable. It didn't seem to be the sort of place where you should raise your voice.

Like a poem that evinces all superficial properties of a poem apart from actual motive, this called itself a pub, and it sold beer. It certainly provided somewhere out of the rain to yarn away with an old acquaintance. But it didn't feel like a pub. The men confounded by the door finally entered, trailing tobacco smoke, and looked round bewildered. You could tell they wouldn't be stopping long.

Salt Cellar Reading: The Punter

Salt begins its tenth anniversary celebrations with an evening of poetry, prose and conversation at The Punter on Thursday 28 January.

Readers: Anne Berkeley, André Mangeot, Leo Mellor, Rod Mengham, Drew Milne, Ian Patterson, Simon Perril, Andrea Porter, John Saul and Padrika Tarrant.

Come and find out what Salt has planned for 2010 and where you might fit in…

The Punter
3 Pound Hill,
Cambridge,
CB3 0AE

Personation

Just back from the TS Eliot readings. This isn't a post about that, though. It would be boring if I opined on who read well and who less well, and anyway no one would agree with me. Some fine poets didn't read their best poems, or read them well... But it was a vintage evening. Last year was a strong one: if anything this was even stronger. People can argue about whether it was really as diverse as Armitage claims, but it's an impressive sampling of the mainstream (whatever that means).

Not for the first time Sharon Olds was an anomalous American on the list. Not for the first time the work of an absent poet was read by someone else. There were mutterings that it should have been an American voice reading the poems, the English cadences were all wrong.

I don't agree. Jo Shapcott read with controlled passion. It was very English, yes, but she was engaged with the poems. She really cared about them. It surprised me. Although I admire Olds for her skill in shaping experience and sense of drama, I've long had misgivings: about portentousness inclining to bathos (eg Connoisseuse of Slugs, Animal Crackers - and if that's wit I don't get it), about incongruities of vocabulary (eg, how she slips that "gold endorphin light" into The Ride as she shifts gear) - oh, and other things but this isn't a post about Sharon Olds either - and above all her personal involvement with the material. Even as artifices, the poems insist on their fidelity to experience. I'd almost started to think of her as the Tracey Emin of poetry: that what mattered most about her work was that it (sc. the raw material) had happened to her. I ran a thought experiment where the poems were written under a nom de plume by one Shaun O'Leary, a former English major at Iowa, now a lawyer forced by unexpected literary success to perpetuate his fraudulent identity. Nonsense, but I was trying to explore how much a reading might depend on assumed biographical knowledge, even though we know the poems are fictionalised if not complete fiction. (I'm not going to pursue this line of argument into Ern Malley territory tonight.)

What Shapcott's voice did wonderfully for me was to distance the work from the Olds persona. It distanced it (riskily) even from North America - and the poems survived. At last I can hear the words separated from the voice that first spoke them. The poems are released. From whatever cage I've been locking them in.

Another thing: if it had been an American reading the poems, would it have seemed like an impersonation?

And a couple of observations:
It's fantastic to see such a large audience for serious poetry. It gets larger every year, and they'll have to move to the Festival Hall soon at this rate.

And kudos to the sound engineers. We were in the back row, and the sound was fabulous. Music venues don't always work well for spoken word, but this was delicate and crystal clear.

London and the Provinces

NASA: Snow across Great Britain 7 January

This picture was on the front page of at least four daily papers this morning. They are full of how difficult it is to get to the office, and occasional complaints that compared with last February the London snow is frankly a bit disappointing.

Back in the seventies I was an articled clerk in Lincolnshire and set out after work one Friday to catch the train from Grantham, 30 miles away, to join my boyfriend visiting his big sister in London. The roads were thick with snow and I was dubious about making the journey. Oh don't be silly, Rosamund said on the telephone, there's no snow here. We're expecting you and it's roast lamb. From my small market town office window I looked at the tyre tracks neatly laid out in the street below and realised she thought I was a wimp. Snow is evanescent. There was no snow in London so the snow in Lincolnshire didn't really count. I drove carefully, staying in the tracks. Twenty miles out from home, coming downhill near Ancaster, I collided with a road sign warning of the bend.

The front end of the car crumpled.

It wouldn't start.

I was rescued by a policeman who took me to his house where his wife cleared the toys from the carpet and made me tea. The snow walloped down outside. When he'd finished his paperwork, the policeman gave me a lift to the station.* Rosamund was annoyed that I was late for supper, but amused that I'd pranged my car.

Lesley is a Devon farmer. Read her account of working through snow, if you think this latest lot is frankly a bit disappointing.

Seriously.

As I write the farmer is trying to dig the milk tanker lorry out of the lane a mile away so he can get to their tank and take milk to the processors. It’s currently 19.30 and that lorry has been on the road since 6am. Apparently only 40 out of 400 hundred dairy farms in the region have had collections in the last few days. There has been no lorry taking animals to the abattoir. Beef and sheep are not going to market either. Three people including us have not had a requested visit from our vet – also without a 4 wheel drive car. Fortunately my sick goat is stable but I need a blood test on her to assess what is going on. Others with animals needing immediate caesarians for example will have to watch them die.

Let's hear it for the farmers.


*Crikey, that policeman and his wife were wonderful. Would that happen now? Do village policemen live in police houses any more? Is there even such a person as a village policeman?