{"id":1253,"date":"2010-11-04T16:04:51","date_gmt":"2010-11-04T15:04:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=1253"},"modified":"2012-07-02T18:39:34","modified_gmt":"2012-07-02T17:39:34","slug":"aldeburgh-poetry-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=1253","title":{"rendered":"Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Friday"},"content":{"rendered":"

Friday late:<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0 It’s an attractive opening bill<\/strong>: the narrative directness of JO Morgan’s story about a wild boy on Skye;\u00a0\u00a0 Matthew Caley’s louche rock ‘n’ roll take on Illinois, breast-feeding and Yeats (and claim that Ezra Pound used to lie at languorous angles on chaise longues so that his semen could seep down to his brain and improve his poetry);\u00a0 and then, to round it off, Don Paterson.<\/p>\n

Writing one-line descriptions of poets for a programme is a bit like a wine critic\u2019s job.\u00a0 Sooner or later you run out of adjectives.\u00a0 Once we\u2019ve had thoughtful, acute, rigorous, playful, incisive <\/em>and that old stand-by prize-winning<\/em>, \u00a0you have to start reaching for the unexpected.<\/p>\n

Not quite redolent of hay on a mid-summer evening<\/em> (though I can think of a few poets who would fit that bill) , but something ambitious.<\/p>\n

Hats off then for the description of the wonderful Don Paterson who according to the programme shoulders the responsibility to live and write the fully-examined life with wit, courage and exemplary formal skill.\u00a0 <\/em>That\u2019s some day-job!<\/p>\n

These days, Don hardly needs a strap-line under the billing, such is the impression that recent collections like Rain <\/em>have made.\u00a0He even has an ‘official website’<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If this were a rock gig it would be the Proclaimers, followed by the Dandy Warhols, followed by Tom Waits.\u00a0 Not a bad line up.<\/p>\n

Indeed the night showcases all that is best about the Poetry Festival: poets reading well and with engagement to an audience excited to hear them.\u00a0 The Jubilee Hall as a space always has a sense of occasion.\u00a0 It’s big enough to make the performers onstage seem both vulnerable and intense; small enough for a sudden and surprising intimacy with them when the poems start.<\/p>\n

It’s also a good moment to step back and appreciate what a formidable achievement the Poetry Festival is.\u00a0 Without now receiving a penny of Suffolk County Council money, it manages to keep an impressive wave of energy beating each year against Aldeburgh’s shingle shore.<\/p>\n

But as Naomi Jaffa, the festival director, announces (“I’m going to do something very un-English:\u00a0 I’m going to talk about money”), with the current cuts on the horizon, it will need all its\u00a0 many supporters to rally round if it is to keep going.<\/p>\n

All three poets read tremendously well.\u00a0 Don Paterson has learnt his by heart, and his reading brings out both the underlying emotion and rhyme in equal, carefully weighted measure.\u00a0 While apologising for the fact that he feels so much of his last collection dealt with ‘death and divorce’, he also reflects ruefully on the ageing process:\u00a0 \u2018 one no longer appears in one’s own poems – one’s presence is more of a heraldic affair.\u2019\u00a0 And he now takes siestas, although as a longterm hispanophile, we would have expected nothing less of him anyway…..<\/p>\n

He reads several more recent, unpublished poems, including some from a sonnet sequence that he is beginning (he is at number eight or nine out of a planned 48),\u00a0 He also reads \u2018The Day\u2019, \u00a0inspired by the DVD box set of Battlestar Galactica<\/em>, no less, with a conversation between two aliens who have just got married:\u00a0 it’s engaging, direct and funny, although the insistent little six-year-old boy inside me taps me on my shoulder at one point and asks, \u2018 did that man just say the earth was a star?\u2019<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

Friday 19.00<\/strong>\u00a0 John Glenday gives a modest and intriguing Craft Ta<\/strong>lk, on the art of revising, for which he is well qualified, \u00a0running often to 30, 40, 50 drafts of his own poems.\u00a0 It has taken him 15 years to fine-hone his most recent book, \u2018filling the white grave of the page with words\u2019.\u00a0 Over the years he has come to recognise which early drafts will never respond to treatment, remaining \u2018ghost poems\u2019 and those which it is worth pursuing down the corridor.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a fine-honed talk as well, with not a word wasted and some fine aphorisms (some quoted from other poets):\u00a0 inspiration is an inclination to take notice;\u00a0 poetry is a river that widens into silence; the poem as a balance between craftsmanship and intuition.<\/p>\n

One question though.\u00a0 Why is it always easier to sound modest if you have a Scottish or Celtic accent?\u00a0 Something to do with the dying fall at the end of each inflected sentence, of which the great and under-rated Glaswegian comedian Arnold Brown is a master.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

Friday 17.00<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0 I enjoy giving a class on the crossover between poetry and travel writing<\/strong>, using Elizabeth Bishop’s \u2018Questions Of Travel\u2019 as a central text, from her book of the same name.\u00a0 Writers in both prose and poetry when they travel can constantly criss-cross the borderline between detachment and engagement, observing the strange phenomena of a new country and taking part in them if they so choose.\u00a0 It’s a process we all do in our daily lives anyway, but somehow heightened in a foreign country, and fertile territory, with its own tensions and ambivalence:<\/p>\n

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
\nWhere should we be today?
\nIs it right to be watching strangers in a play
\nin this strangest of theatres?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0(Elizabeth Bishop \u2018Questions Of Travel\u2019)<\/span><\/p>\n

.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Friday 11.30<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0 my own turn to get locked away comes around<\/strong>.\u00a0 The festival has the use of an old lookout tower on the beach, and poets are encouraged to go up there for some silent meditation or even (and the organisers phrase this delicately) “possible writing”.<\/p>\n

Writers can be both fussy and stringent about the conditions for perfect writing – not least because it is the perfect displacement activity for actually doing any.\u00a0 Finding it hard to face that blank sheet of paper?\u00a0 It’s all the fault of background noise, or stains on the wallpaper, or those bills elsewhere on the desk that need attending to.\u00a0 No wonder writers need their sheds.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I’d noticed this just earlier in the morning when I realised that my small back bedroom in the eaves of the Poets House was, while perfectly clean and adequate, impossible to write in — all bed and no table.\u00a0 In short, the perfect excuse.<\/p>\n

But the lookout tower offers no such escape.\u00a0 There are nine biros beside a block of paper.\u00a0 The view is magnificent.\u00a0 The waves break with a soft insistency.\u00a0 The bleached wood is restrained and tactful.\u00a0 Even the temperature is ambient.<\/p>\n

I’m reminded of the problems I experienced at a Buddhist retreat last winter:<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Bad Pupil\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When I went to the Buddhist Centre retreat I found myself being continually distracted<\/span><\/p>\n

by the soft, smoky runs of the boiler igniting\u00a0 its regular puffs of disbelief<\/span><\/p>\n

and by the distant catcalls of children<\/span><\/p>\n

playing in the garden, while we sat inside,<\/span><\/p>\n

in postures of graduated discomfort and in complete silence.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0.<\/span><\/p>\n

The practice of mindfulness is not one that comes easily to me.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0.<\/span><\/p>\n

There is a ticking clock in my head, counting down the days, the hours, the minutes<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0.<\/span><\/p>\n

and never quite reaching the present tense.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0.<\/span><\/p>\n

But then the Zen Master explains that it is like being at a drinks party<\/span><\/p>\n

and only talking to the one person, yourself, rather than being distracted<\/span><\/p>\n

by others.\u00a0 \u2018Make eye contact with yourself,\u2019 he suggests.\u00a0 Or \u2018I contact\u2019,<\/span><\/p>\n

as I understand him to say in a moment of rare connection<\/span><\/p>\n

that blows away when someone else speaks.<\/span><\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

Friday <\/strong>08.30\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Can\u2019t quite believe I\u2019m blogging before breakfast<\/strong> but clearly a stream of consciousness blog will demand a dedicated approach.\u00a0 Let alone all that stuff about Trollope knocking off a few thousand words before even having a cup of tea, and then doing a full 9 to 5 as a postie.<\/p>\n

Now ensconced in the Poets House on the seafront where poets were gathering last night for a bit of pre-match banter and limbering up (over several bottles of excellent Chilean red) \u2013 The first person I see when I walk off the street is \u00a0J O Morgan at the kitchen table talking enthusiastically about Ted Hughes.\u00a0 But then the man\u2019s been locked up in solitary confinement for a week in Thorpeness as part of his winnings for last year\u2019s Aldeburgh First Collection Prize (\u2018a week of writing space\u2019), which would make anyone want to hold forth a bit.\u00a0 Wonder what they do to you if you lose?\u00a0\u00a0 (Joe is reading this evening with Matthew Caley and Don Paterson.)<\/p>\n

Topics on the agenda over dinner are:\u00a0 whatever happened to (\u2018For Lizzie and\u2019) Harriet Lowell after all those poems about her;\u00a0 was Lowell patrician and snobbish about his Irish servants;\u00a0 what mobile signal works here?\u00a0 And a brief foray on Iraq, but as everyone was in complete agreement, we moved on…….\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
(c) Peter Everard Smith<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thursday <\/strong>15.00\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Just off to the <\/strong>Aldeburgh Poetry Festival\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>\u2013 sadly not in the Oldsmobile on the right, as suggested in the festival e-letter, but a more sedate beemer \u2013 so watch this space as the Festival begins on Friday for posts, musings and comments over what promises to be a long and intriguing weekend: as well as giving a\u00a0talk and class on the \u00a0relationship between travel writing and poetry, I’m to be their official blogger….<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

The Aldeburgh Poetry Festival blog is sponsored by Writers\u2019 Centre Norwich, a literature development agency for the East of England running workshops, competitions, events and more. <\/em>www.writerscentrenorwich.org.uk<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Friday late:\u00a0\u00a0 It’s an attractive opening bill: the narrative directness of JO Morgan’s story about a wild boy on Skye;\u00a0\u00a0 Matthew Caley’s louche rock ‘n’ roll take on Illinois, breast-feeding and Yeats (and claim that Ezra Pound used to lie at languorous angles on chaise longues so that his semen could seep down to his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,76,1],"tags":[77,131],"class_list":["post-1253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-festivals","category-poetry","category-uncategorized","tag-aldeburgh","tag-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1253"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1253"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1834,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1253\/revisions\/1834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}