…of poetry! This weekend! Featuring me, as well as Roddy Lumsden and Barbara Marsh. Reading our poetry. And doing the Lindy hop.
Litera-Tea Dance
Saturday 25 July 2-5pm
CLR James Library
24-30 Dalston Lane
E8 3AZ
Dance away the afternoon to the sounds of Swing, or relax in the garden with a refreshing cream tea and live poetry readings by poets Barbara Marsh, Roddy Lumsden and Katy Evans-Bush. Let us show you how to make your own tea with freshly grown herbs, buy a book or two and enjoy Dalston-inspired artworks. Music by Russ Jones ‘The Hackney Globetrotter’ and The Bees Knees, readings by three contemporary lyrical romantic poets, book sale and artworks by Mossbourne Academy students and London College of Fashion.
Free entry.
(Note to self: I am lyrical and romantic, I am lyrical and romantic, I am lyrical and romantic…)
5 Comments
July 25, 2009 at 12:19 am
Sounds lovely! I wish I were in London.
July 25, 2009 at 10:15 am
Good luck to you all on the day. I suppose you are lyrical and romantic, although I wouldn’t have pegged you that way …
July 25, 2009 at 11:15 am
Barbara, well I am today! I’m even going to wear a dress, if I can get it to do up.
Miriam, awww. Yes.
July 26, 2009 at 1:38 am
Such a choice today; the Agnes Dene field of wheat and ‘functioning’ Dalston windmill, the African extravaganza (still going on as I write) at Rich Mix, and I chose you, at the Clr James Litera-tea. With consummate timing (!) I arrived as you were starting, poised Juliet-like on a tiny balcony, wearing, I noted in a glance, a typically boho variation of a twinset in indigo net, and a navy linen skirt with shepherdess gathers, sparkly silver bangles, and a diamante brooch (for once I didn’t notice your shoes). The balcony, at the top of steps which could be a fire escape from the upper level of the Library, looked onto a patch of garden barely big enough for one Tesco Value gazebo (identical to mine, stolen as we set up a picnic on London Fields last week), the garden itself overlooked by the dark satanic mills of Barratts (?) latest high rise, ‘destination’, development, for which the Four Aces, one time Dalston Music Hall, and various Georgian dwellings, were recently demolished . You were just telling the gathering that you would be reading from Me and the dead, including some poems with a Stoke Newington theme. Some Age Concern clients, all female, sat at tables, sipping tea and nibbling mini muffins. We had been invited to choose a cap from a cardboard box; I selected a pale blue one with ‘Scouts’ and the fleur de lis printed on it, and seemed to be the only person to don it, despite the glorious sunshine. I skirted round a table to find a chair, half sunk into the tiny lawn, next to a hedge of yew, and listened to your familiar, disembodied, voice, listening for clues, embedded. I was used to reading your poems when you lived upstairs, and this was different, richer, more resonant. The ladies clapped politely, and you demurred. Glittered, hand painted bunting made in Library workshops flapped in the breeze as I concentrated on the Angela Carter/magical realism of the later numbers. The ladies looked a little lost as one gently swirled her tea cup and another complained about the sun, but applauded enthusiastically as you finished, along with a beautiful, impeccably groomed and impossibly slender woman accompanied by an elegant gentleman in white, various ernest young men, a few women with children and the organic mint people in the corner. A brief interlude for more tea, and I was able to find you, clutching a mug of coffee (I need to arrange my outpatients appointments around my children, it said) and tell you how delighted I was to be there, to see you. What a lovely occasion! I was thrilled to buy the book, and wanted to catch up on news (OK, gossip), but the afternoon held many more thrills; the lindy hoppers, in slightly kinky aviator kit, tapping away on glorious little cream and black patent pumps with floppy yellow silk bows, then Roddy Lumsden (best poem: the one about a horse), and finally a Spanish accented author of another book on Dalston (aren’t Ian Sinclair and Patrick Wright enough?). At that point a small boy with a mop of black curls came tearing into the refinement of this particular delightful Hackney afternoon, howling like a tornado, and threw himself at me; he was mine and I had to deal with him. Apologies to all for the horrible interruption, but at least he got the timing right and it wasn’t during Katy’s reading. I bought the book and love it.
July 26, 2009 at 10:19 am
Trust you, Libby: I wouldn’t even have known to call them shepherdess gathers!
Fabulous (and thorough!) description of a lovely day, just what a library event should be like. Ypu had unfortunately missed the first poet, Barbara Marsh, who is the beautiful & impeccably groomed woman you mention.
I’d also like to thank the library people for their fabulous old-fashioned bunting, made of good old fabric triangles! The whole place was bestrewn with it. Between that, the swing music (really, I often think, my favourite kind of all) and the two girl dancers with their vintage-perfect hair, costumes and make up, there were moments when I almost thought it was 1945 and we were celebrating the end of the War.