On Talking at a Poetry Festival

I cannot imagine that I will have another day this year as enjoyable as speaking at the first E-act poetry festival yesterday. There is a pleasing juxtaposition of arriving (too early as ever) at the grand Holt End of Villa Park to talk about poetry at the beautiful ground of a great club.

I was the first ‘act’ on a bill with four poets and Faz, another younger and rather better presented teacher of English. I scuttled through ambiguities (with my picture of a tortoise crossed with a burger going down well), thematic dichotomies, identifying the theme, separating the textual from the subtextual, verse forms, rewardable nonsense, why looking for rhyme in free verse is always a good idea, varieties of rhyme and would have got onto syllabification and metrical analysis, why the word ‘trochee’ is a spondee and ‘iamb’ is actually a trochee had time permitted.

Following the speech and having previously absolutely assured the poet Roger Robinson that we had definitely not met before, we realised that we had and that he’d taught one of my classes poetry at Eastlea twenty years before. I remain amazed and grateful that he still recognised me and wonder if perhaps our own apprehensions of time’s damage to our appearance are rather more acute than others’. He was also unbelievably kind about the speech, describing it in his poet’s idiom, as “Boom!” I liked him very much indeed.

There followed a day sat around a table along with my friend, Steve, who is the head honcho of Impress the Examiner, chatting to four brilliant poets. I had the lovely experience of meeting Imtiaz Dharker, whose work I very much admire, shyly introducing myself as “Phil” and her saying she already knew my name. It was an honour and a delight speaking to her. It tuns out that my technical analysis of her poem, ‘Tissue’, is pretty well spot on but my thematic guesses as to what the poem is about are too far influenced by readings of her other works and are, therefore, minorly askew. She was charm personified, her presentation was captivating and she used a concept I’d presented by way of explanation of what the poem was doing.

Another highlight was chatting with John Agard. Steve also shared a heartfelt, emotional chat with the brilliant and beautiful Grace Nichols.

John was the final act and how utterly brilliant to hear how we was received by the students. Many of the male students in a certain section roared when he came on. It was almost a tearful moment as hearing that level of enthusiasm for an admittedly awesomely cool seventy-five-year-old poet from an audience of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds gave me some small hope for the future. They behaved brilliantly all day and were massively generous with their applause.

John’s performance was stunning: an almost jazz-like presentation style followed by half sung, half intoned versions of four of his poems, including ‘Half Caste’ and ‘Checking Out Me History’. The latter was presented in a combination of calypso and reggae toasting. It was terrific. He departed the stage to a thunder of applause.

Throughout the day, I pondered why I’d not encountered this model before. Having the poets on-stage and then having teachers interpret how we might use the information they’ve presented when we come to write about the poem strikes me as being potentially incredibly valuable for students. And the fact that the young people were so utterly enthusiastic about the day and the poets tells me that something’s going right somewhere.

I had a brief chat with the marvellous Rachel (whose class I taught last week), then Steve gave me, Grace and John a lift to New Street, and I undertook the seven-hour journey back to where I currently live. If I have a better day this year, it will surprise me. Thanks to everyone concerned.