...meanwhile, back in January...

George Szirtes has the reputation of a lovely man. I said hi to him at the TS Eliot reading in January, which was packed like a tube train, but only because he was rapturously greeting my friend Roger, who has studied with him. I can tell Szirtes is nicer than me, because he has been far more circumspect in his description of the reading itself, which I discovered today while catching up with his blog. Ms Gossipfest here finds it almost cruel as Tantalus, though. Who? Who?

He writes:

"The T S Eliot readings are like a round-up gathering of everyone I have ever met in the field of poetry. So the foyer and the bar of the Bloomsbury Theatre is packed with poets I haven't seen for a while, with publishers (including my own), editors, students past and present, people from Arvon Courses. This is quite a pleasant jostle. In the seats, every third seat seems to be a familiar face...

"I remember my own reading at the Eliot two years ago. You have precisely eight minutes and you feel a little obliged to respond to the person you follow. You decide whether to talk - engagingly with a bit of luck - about the poems or just read them. Or somewhere between the two. Do you 'perform' the poems or say them? What sort of impression do you think you are making? I was following a poet who had decided to fling his reading at the audience in a kind of gesture. (A very good poet, of course, as they all are), so I read as straight as I could, minimal introductions, minimal 'performing'. That was fine. I don't think it makes any real difference to the discussions as to who wins the next day - it didn't when I was chair of the judges, since the winning book was clearly the best - but it is very exposing.

"This time? All the readings were different. There was one that irritated me intensely, one that entertained and put all its eggs into the performance basket, one that hit a certain rhetorical pitch, one that eased its way in as if entering a conversation in a pub, one that was a little like a sermon in an enlightened monastery etc etc. (No, I am not going to identify them, nor is the reading any reflection on the poetry, most of which was engrossing.) Paul Muldoon read a marvellous poem at the very end that both moved and amused, was bitter yet resigned and delightfully filled with his own characteristic music and tonal variations."

Why can't I be like that??