Oxford Sunday Times Literary Festival, & other delights

Apologies for being so silent this week. I've been very much occupied with non-internet business, including a few days away from home at the Oxford Literary Festival.

I had a great time in Oxford and am still recovering somewhat. I stayed one night in Christ Church itself, which is a beautiful and stately - though rather sinisterly imposing - college. I had the devil's own job getting through the gate on arrival, security there being tighter than at Buckingham Palace. But their cooked breakfast was good!

On the Festival front, I attended several live literature events around the town, including an important ClimateX collaboration with poetry performers from Hammer & Tongue. The night before that, I witnessed the best live act I've ever seen: the magnificent Chloe Poems, whose powerful delivery and emotional range I cannot praise highly enough. (This interview does not do her justice as an artist.)

Later I had the amused pleasure of listening to three Grumpy Old Men read their poetry, i.e. Tom 'Troubles' Paulin, Jamie McKendrick and the admittedly not grumpy but rather lovely Bernard O'Donoghue. A very different act to that of Chloe Poems!

Plus, I spent many happy hours bent over books in the Radcliffe Camera, researching an article I'm writing for PN Review on the relevance of Old English to the world of contemporary poetry.

On returning home, I found sick children and a sudden inspection of our rented house pending. Since I'm the sort who likes to hang up her clothes on the floor, this last has proved particularly wearing on the soul.

I also had to go straight back out again that night to hear Mario Petrucci read in Coventry, a poet I've known since we met on an Arvon course in 1995, when we were both still unpublished. A few of us went for a curry afterwards in a backstreet balti house, which worked out at roughly a fiver per head. Astonishing value, and a fabulous poetry evening to boot.

No time to relax though once this dreaded inspection is over. I'm now reviewing another book for the excellent Tower Poetry, plus a few more for Poetry Review, and I still have a novel to finish this summer.

Not that I'm complaining, not a bit of it. As the lovely Penny Lane (played by Kate Hudson) says in Almost Famous: 'It's all happening!'


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Now playing: Various Artists - America
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Light & Shade

Tonight I attended a lively poetry night in Coventry at the Liquid Cafe Bar. Colin Dick, local artist and poet, was one of the readers, even though he's now experiencing serious problems with mobility. Jane Commane read too, graduate of the Warwick Creative Writing Programme and heavily involved in Heaventree Press in Coventry; she was also MCing the event in Jon Morley's absence. Various other local writers came to the mic. Myself included.

It was a good evening. The next one is being held on April 3rd, when Mario Petrucci will be the guest reader.

Then, on my way home, luckily only a mile or so from my house, my car abruptly and spectacularly died.

The exhaust started smoking as I left Coventry; twenty minutes later, there was a strong smell of burning, steam billowing about the car. Then the engine died as I slowed for a corner and wouldn't restart for a few minutes.

I had driven maybe another hundred yards when the needle spiked dramatically into the red. The stench of burning was incredible, steam pouring from under the bonnet and out of the exhaust. It was after midnight by then. I pulled onto a rough track and rang my husband, who turned up some fifteen minutes later armed with oil, water, a tow-rope.

Turns out the head gasket had blown, there was a leak somewhere and the cooling system was completely empty. And the car had only been back on the road for six weeks after a spell of some five months on SORN, due to too-expensive repairs to the exhaust and the heater matrix. So once again, Jane is without wheels.

However, checking my emails when I finally stumbled in, I discovered that a piece of short fiction I wrote for the US market a few years ago had been shortlisted for some American fiction award in 2007. It didn't win, unfortunately, but it's always nice to know you were shortlisted for some prize or other. Something nice and something nasty to round off a complicated week.

Looks like the kids and I will be walking to school for the foreseeable future.

Ecopoetics and Beyond: Can Poetry Make Things Happen?

Today on the Guardian website, the editor of Bloodaxe Books Neil Astley has some pertinent and uncompromising remarks to make about the infamous WH Auden quotation that 'poetry makes nothing happen'.

Describing an RTE radio programme last year in which he discussed poetry with leading Irish politician Trevor Sargent, Neil Astley tells us of Sargent's favourable reaction to ecopoems, including one which the former leader of the Green Party in Ireland felt should be required reading in Irish schools.

Astley writes:

"If our own politicians spent just a couple of minutes each day reading these kinds of poems, they might be better fitted to carry out their duties more responsibly. We might even be able to trust some of them then to act in our interest in what they do to tackle the problems of environmental destruction and global warming."

This article appears in the wake of a new anthology of ecopoems edited by Neil Astley, entitled 'Earth Shattering', and in promotion of a London Word Festival debate at the Bishopsgate Institute this Friday evening, when he'll be taking part in a discussion on 'Making Nothing Happen', chaired by Roddy Lumsden, alongside poets Mario Petrucci and Melanie Challenger, and Caspar Henderson.

You can find the full text of that article here and learn more about the London Word Festival here.

Personally I think poetry has every chance of making things happen, if by that we mean sinking it deep into the psyche of a country so that it emerges in other ways and places: in our politics, our relationships, our methods of child-rearing, our attempts to look after the planet, our attitudes towards foreigners and foreign wars.

Poetry can be propaganda - see much of Rupert Brooke's output, for instance - but the more complex it is, the greater its mental, emotional and political ramifications, the less likely it is that poetry will sink to the level of mere jingoism or eco-rap.

As we move out of the nebulous noughties, we may be entering a great age for political poetry. Unfortunately it's unlikely that we'll be certain of that until we're at least halfway through it, and maybe not even then. Which means that those of us who wish to write politically, who feel the need to address issues which extend beyond the home or immediate working environment of our lives - assuming we're not already living in a war-zone, that is, where politics rapidly becomes part of the daily structure of life - must press on regardless of criticism or fashion.

The proof of the poetry may well be in the way of happening, as Neil Astley's article suggests, rather than in any immediate changes brought about by individual poems.