Poetry Revival

I have just returned from a wonderful poetry evening at the Troubadour Café on Old Brompton Road.  Take a right out of Earl’s Court Station, down Earl’s Court Road and take a right at the bottom of the road where you will find a fabulous red patterned medieval door.  Various lutes, guitars, violins and stringed instruments hang from the ceiling, generously laden plates fly past; a happy buzz of conversation fills the different caverns.  A sip of wine, a sigh of relief.  How wonderful to be in London in this place! 

Downstairs is the poetry café, a raised platform with a man playing the accordion sets the scene.  The crowd is an interesting one: older, eccentric, from all parts of the country, all classes, all types.  This is my second Monday night at the Troubadour in the last couple of months; eight poets take ten minutes each to read poems of their choice from their various collections (they are newly published poets and experienced ones), there is a break after the first four.  It is needed.  I find I can only absorb a bit at a time but I love the experience of hearing new work, words flowing, ideas, emotions.  I tend to remember one poem from each poet and it is usually one about something emotional which touches me: tonight my favourites were about a man going to visit a friend in a psychiatric ward and not having the normal social parameters of conversation to go by; a woman imagining her friend meeting her lost loved ones in heaven and how they would greet her and a woman grieving for her husband and their sleep together. 

Looking round the audience tonight though I wondered why poetry was rather an extinct art form in our generation. Yes, there are poetry circles and evenings like this around the country but it is so far from the main stream.  I was the youngest person there by at least a decade.  Poetry is what was once learnt at school, often rather painfully (apologies, apologies) and maybe what can be found in song lyrics.  It is a small shelf at Waterstones, probably behind a pillar in an unobtrusive place, it is a present from a loved one that has rarely been looked at or a great book for the toilet, for those precious few spare moments you have in your day.  The poet may wince to think of their carefully crafted words being mulled over during a …. but no more need be said on that, at least the poems are being read! 

There is something about the freshness of experience of poetry that hits me (perhaps a longer paragraph break needed here after the last paragraph!)  A novel you have to plan, agonize over, draft and re-draft and try and finish for an eternity.  A poem can be spontaneous or struggled over but it can exist without the need for publication, it can meet that creative need to use words to express yourself instantly.  For the slightly fickle-minded character like myself, poems allow that space, that variety, that satisfaction.  You just have to like playing with words.  A poem can be a friend for life, a line remembered can accompany you in times of distress or happiness, it can help you to realise something you hadn’t quite been able to express or it can just make you laugh.  When memories start to go in old age, it is often those poems learnt by rote at school which stay in people’s minds and still they are recited. 

I wonder if anyone out there would like to share poems they enjoy with me?  We could have a poetry appreciation section. 

I had an experience this Saturday which reminded me or Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Days’.  I had Saturday afternoon wonderfully, wonderfully free: no school work, no house work, no visits, no phone calls to be made, no nothing, yes there were hundreds of things I could be doing but I just decided to stop all those list-ticking exercises which are duly renewed every weekend and maybe … write something.  As it turned out, I stared at my blank piece of page in wonder and thought, I have nothing to say.  It was a strange feeling.  It made me wonder if I fill up my time to stop this feeling, this anxiety, this emptiness.

 
Days by Philip Larkin

 
What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

 
Although not the happiest of Saturday afternoons, perhaps it was fruitful to realise this and to take the time ‘to stand and stare.’ 

 
I await your poems…