anything goes in poetry

Poetry readings again. George Szirtes writes, on his blog:

"There is the history of reading aloud as entertainment for a small circle, an act of intimacy, as it might be to children or to a lover or as a couple reading passages to each other in bed or over the table, or maybe a small group of friends. I hesitate to call this entertainment simply because entertainment suggests amusements and distractions and this is the opposite. It involves trust and close attention, because the material read might be of the sort that starts thoughts, memories, feelings and ideas, and the level of communication is such that one might say to the other: Wait a minute! Read that bit again! The noise is quiet and low, capable of being broken, the whole moving like a fugue in chamber music, returning, reiterating, nothing detachable."

I think he's got something here. And as far as the intimacy analogy goes, I can say I long ago became aware that my style, in reading to an audience, owes more to my years of reading aloud The Runaway Bunny or My Naughty Little Sister than anything else. This is probably a good thing: if you think about it, you realise that in reading to a child you are more than anything trying to get, and keep, the child's attention, and make the child happy.

George talks about three traditions that feed into poetry readings; the above is only the first. The experience he describes might be an ideal: I've certainly been to enough readings where nothing of the kind ever happened - but that may be partly the reader's fault, in not addressing the audience properly - not being intimate enough, not allowing the spaces to open up where the listener can sit.

Now, I must have missed something in the Guardian while I was in America in September. In the letters page on the 22nd, when I was back and landed enough to read the paper, Laurence Inman wrote a letter about a reading Auden had given in 1971:

"He explained at the beginning that he would be taking breaks to get his breath back. 'I have been a heavy smoker all my life.' He took four such breaks, sitting on a chair at the side of the stage, staring at his feet, which were shod in carpet slippers."

It's not exactly Anything Goes, is it.

Maddy Paxman, in the next letter, describes her late husband Michael Donaghy's famous readings very, if you'll excuse me, tellingly - saying he managed "both to convey the shape of formal structures within which he wrote and to give the poems meaning and sense. His performances were often described as though the poems were being told into your ear."

Michael had a beautifully modulated voice, never mumbling and never shouting, and with no pretentious poetic pauses. He could read blank verse for both line and sense. And he memorised everything. I'm not sure I ever even saw him hold a book on stage.

Maddy continues: "This must have been especially so when, one night in America, the lights in the auditorium failed and he continued with the 'reading'."

I think Michael's model for reading - if mine is bedtime stories - was the pub raconteur, or someone more urgent than that but certainly no more removed from the context of daily life: poetically his model may have been an ancient mariner but in terms of delivery, he was far more low-key: the intimacy George Szirtes is talking about. Donaghy's poems are certainly often narrated by people with a story they have to tell you. Any poem can, of course, be that story.

Certainly, if the reader gets this aspect right, and the reading is working, even poetry that might not be up to all that much on the page is forgiven, because the connection that's been made - the space created by the reader in which the listener can situate himself, as if in a bubble - creates another space, which is for the words, which become hyper-effective.

On another note: if you're going to go check out George's place, do make sure you catch the video of WC Fields playing ping pong. I feel able to face even a grey November Monday morning after that... God I love WC Fields.*

thanks to Tom Gauld for my utterly unauthorised scanning of his wonderful picture - one of my favourite things ever

* Scrap that: make it "a grey, soaking wet, rainy November Monday morning." I think I'd need to rewatch It's a Gift from start to finish. But I'll settle for the ping pong. (And I do have some extremely nice new tights on.) Thanks, George.