And this was one of the 2 main things that struck me on the day. In spite of that renowned poetry critic, Gordon Brown PM saying how poets, through their words, are so adept at making us think about events, there seemed to be little of real substance, nothing that really challenged here.


And a lot of it was either out of date, or not relevant – there were a couple of people who read poems about 9/11 – “that other disaster” – but I felt these did not really suit the occasion – 9/11 not being a natural disaster, after all. Having said that, I did find Imtiaz Dharker s four poems about 9/11 to be amongst my favourites – or it may have just been something about the way she read them. I suddenly imagined that if the hall represented the universe, she was at the centre of it as it spun around her…but then I blinked, and jolted myself back to reality!


Perhaps I’d just started getting bored. The other thing that struck me about the event was the lack of poets willing to entertain the audience. Yes, the seriousness of the situation in Haiti had to be respected, but I think so did the patience of the audience as well. With 20 odd poets it was going to be a long old afternoon if they were all just going to insist on boring us to tears. Andrew Motion summed this up – he felt he had to tell us in advance how many poems he would be reading, as if anticipating that we would be looking forward to them finishing. There was a musical interlude during the first half, and it almost felt that this was the “entertainment” in between all the boring stuff – why should this have to be the case?


The second half was definitely livelier. We had the 2 Liverpool poets, Brian Patten (who I’d been looking forward to seeing following an email correspondence) and Roger McGough, who did his inevitably whacky Python-esque thing, with a poem set to music – surprising how often this can work well. John Agard got the audience singing, and went down well. Possibly my favourite poem of the day was from the first half


though. In Other News was a subtly satirical poem, read with dry understatement, but I can’t remember who read it!


Overall, despite things being a little slow and stuffy at times, I did enjoy the event. Carol Ann Duffy did not in fact read one of her own poems in the end, but perhaps she saw herself as organiser. And given it had been put together in such a short space of time, it was a success – although I would have liked to hear more up-to-date/relevant poetry, and to have seen more performance poets on the bill.


I had hoped to sell a few copies of the mag there, but in spite of the fact that I’d planned to donate some of the money to the cause, I kind of felt people weren’t too keen on the idea of this little Welshman scuttling about selling his wares, so I put them away and just enjoyed the proceedings.


Ra n eotr, Egeut Brfs vig rpre nlbr atat 12


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