Well, I went and read at the O2 Wireless festival in Hyde Park yesterday, on a stage run by The London Magazine and Trespass. Catatonic with fatigue as I was – having been to see a Terence Rattigan play the night before, don’t you know, dahlings, in town, and having been drinking in a back alley in Covent Garden afterwards, staring at some large woman’s completely ill-advised aquamarine satin-acetate dress and mismatching royal blue leopard-print shoes, and then had dinner at Joe Allen’s at 11.30pm (it really does not get any better than this! and who was sat at the next table but Alan Hollinghurst* and about seven other utterly impeccable guys), and finally to bed at 3am – it was very fun.
And the night before that I had been in Lower Marsh in a funky little place called the Scooterworks Cafe, reading my poem West Virginia, and listening to 23 other poets read their poems about American states in honour of the Fourth of July…
(Here is a hint. If you are ever commissioned to write a poem about something and read it in public, please don’t introduce it by saying you know nothing about the subject – and, if it’s a place, that you’ve never been there and know nothing about it – following this up with “Did you know,” and reciting two random quirky facts about your subject that could only have come from Wikipedia**… and then, please try to source the poem from something inside yourself, rather than something you read on Wikipedia, or saw once in Thelma and Louise… okay? It can be America even without the pickup truck, is what I’m trying to say.)
The prize for the evening – and there were several great turns, actually, some very imaginative, funny and good poems – but the prize for the evening goes to Inua Ellams, who used this commission to spur him on with another one – for the Battersea Arts Centre – that wasn’t working, and he stood and recited the first five incredibly vivid minutes of a forty-minute memoir of (I think – it was all kind of fast) Zimbabwe via Washington State or somewhere, which contained the line “spiced juice of diced moose”, which caused me to gasp aloud with shocked delight so that someone five feet away heard it. And after that – after the vicissitudes of the Scooterworks white wine which was bright yellow – I know, I know – there was an exceedingly fluorescent-lit kebab in the Cut, and then to bed very late… many thanks to Roddy Lumsden for organising this event, and for the jelly beans I have been eating all weekend. My dentist will love him.
Before that I remember nothing, except that I’ve only had one proper lunch hour in about a month.
And people keep saying what am I going to wear for my book launch on Tuesday. My only answer is that I will be there and I will no doubt be wearing clothes, so there will be something. But what. Feck knows. Knowing me I will spend Tuesday rushing around town trying on impractical shoes, and tops that gap over my bosom, and getting in a sweaty lather, when I should be having my nails done and going to the Hammershoi exhibition at the Royal Academy.
My books are ineffably beautiful, they have arrived chez moi and are just lovely, lovely things, and I love them. I have been selling them. The little darlings.
So, O2, well, it was strange, I’ve never “done” a festival before. I’m not sure that the atmosphere if electronic boom is quite right for a small person on a small black stage reading out mere words… there was a wind whistling down the microphone, and much catastrophic noise from all corners, and there were many gaps at the tables around us in the beergarden, but there was one guy sitting at the edge of a table staring at me intently as I read, which was mildly gratifying. I hope he was listening to the poetry.
The most interesting thing about the day, which I was too exhaustedly catatonic to take advantage of besides being solicitous as to seats, bags etc, was meeting the poetry legend Eddie Linden. He is over seventy now, the ex-publisher of Aquarius magazine: small but important. Like his magazine I guess. He is very small, and sort of worrying-looking, in a checked jacket that’s much too big, prompting fears that he may be getting smaller. But it probably never did fit. (His glasses, famous for being oversized, give the same impression.) He arrived stressed-out and anxious and in need of a seat, having been trying for ages to find the pub with his wheeled shopping trolley thing, and seemed jumpy all afternoon (except when talking to his friend, the laconic and rather sour, but very funny, poet Paul Birtill). But my God! Get the man on the stage and let him read! Bloody hell. Those beer-drinkers were paying attention before too long, let me tell you. A few of them were even standing there videoing him with their phones. Shouting and spitting and waxing very – well – just waxing, really. From him I bought a copy of Eddie’s Own Aquarius, a special edition of the magazine put together in honour of his seventieth, with contributions from over 100 writers – including a beautiful poem from Michael Donaghy, whose idea the issue seems to have been. Of course. A surprise for me on the Tube home. I shall keep it very safe indeed.
The other nice thing is that my contributor’s copy of the London Magazine hadn’t yet arrived – so I saw it for the first time with my Keats poem in it, The Life Mask. It looks lovely. A sonnet in amphibrachic hexameters. (Ha!) You should buy it.
Today I was too tired to go to the supermarket.
* I have given this post the category “The Line on Beauty” in honour of Hr H, because I stole it from his book The Line of Beauty. See? A bit lame. It’s a good book. And it was nice to see him in the restaurant, rather like when a friend of mine went into some quintessentially London little pub and saw Peter Ackroyd propping up the bar. Sometimes you just know that all’s right with the world.
** or, as was pointed out to me today – from your third grade class project, if you were American. All those state flowers and unlikely famous people. And yes, Virginia, the capitol of West Virginia really is Charleston. Apparently there are two.
