Tag: Aldeburgh Poetry Festival

THE POINT OF POETRY FESTIVALS

There was a time when I couldn’t have gone, and I haven’t forgotten it.

There was a time when I couldn’t have gone, and I haven’t forgotten it.

But last weekend I went. I was part of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, part of the Aldeburgh audience, and it was a pleasure and a privilege.

Not everyone feels like that. More than one practising poet has told me how scary they find poetry festivals: they have tiptoed in to find themselves an outsider in an ‘in’ crowd. Some never get there at all: apprehension (or suspicion, or poverty) prevents them trying.

But others make it, and you can see the exhilaration in their eyes. It’s a restrained sort of exhilaration: no shrieking and bounding; not even much sign of alcoholic excess.

It’s the exhilaration of intent listening, nodding, murmuring – even arguing. It’s the excitement of applied intelligence and delight – the Aldeburgh hmmm.

This festival is generous and it is welcoming. Here is a crowd of people who embrace words, and love using them (but not exploiting them). A festival is for celebration, and these are the celebrants. It is quite a cerebral celebration, of course, but no less exciting for that.

And it is welcoming. It isn’t a set of punters all assembled to marvel at the feet of the GPs (Great Poets). The GPs – the people you pay to get in to see and hear – are there marveling too. They are wandering through the streets of the village marveling and talking and meeting all the others. They are out in the playground, playing.

What are they all marveling about? What are they all talking about out in the playground? Poetry.

What is Poetry? Nobody knows. And it doesn’t matter. Here, Poetry’s a way of reading.

You come away with snippets, fragments, musical sentences trailing round your ankles. Here’s one from Peter Sansom: “You start off by writing, don’t you? And then you get over that, and start to learn to read.”  And another from Kay Ryan, talking about the dark and sad: “Poetry never adds to your burden. It never weighs you down.”

What is Poetry? It is a kind of reading. It is reading like no other. It is listening like no other. It never adds to your burden. It never weighs you down.

I worry about one thing. When I was younger (in my twenties and thirties and forties) when I wrote alone and didn’t speak of it, when writing, for me, was a secret affair and blogs did not exist – I could never have gone to a poetry festival. It was all I could do to pay for the books I bought, and in those days, I got a huge number of them out of a library. Yes, I even ordered books from the library, which cost £1.00 per book, and I thought that quite enough.

I could not have paid for train tickets to run the length of the island, for tickets to get in, for places to stay, for food. I had obligations, and not enough money to meet them.

Now I am old(ish) and my children have left home and are much taller than me. They are even employed! So I can get to a festival, if I choose to, though the most precious thing in the world to me is no longer money, but time. And I can’t help noticing a huge proportion of the Aldeburgh celebrants are in my sort of age group and my sort of colour and even my sort of gender…. (the same cannot be said of the GPs).

But festivals are running out of money, Arts Councils have run out of money, culture is competing for your cash. My cash.  Dear me – I am even one of the competitors. I want you to buy HappenStance publications with the same money you might spend on going to a Festival or a reading.

But I want festivals to continue. I want the money to be found. The money pays for brilliant organizers and lovely venues and wonderful GPs. But I’d like there to be a way of sponsoring readers too: the practising readers, young and old, who can’t afford to get there, and need to get there. The people who don’t look like me, or at least lots of them don’t. They need poetry; poetry needs them.

Perhaps there should be Readers in Residence? No, that won’t work. At Aldeburgh that’s precisely what every single member of the audience becomes.

How can we keep these celebrations going? How can we share the intelligence? How can we make this exhilaration of reading accessible to all, even the totally skint? Could those who can afford to go, but can’t – for reasons of illness or indisposition or needing to be elsewhere – sponsor someone else who is desperate to be there but can’t? Could there be some sort of scheme for that? Am I just a dreamer?

The great advantage of the inter-world is at least you can read about it hither and thither and all over the place. Here are some links, most of them with splendid pictures. I took my camera but it stayed at the bottom of my bag. . . .

TOO OLD TO START WRITING POETRY?

Keats was dead at 25, Shelley at 29, Dylan Thomas at  39, Sylvia Plath at 30. Chatterton didn’t even make it to 18.

Keats was dead at 25, Shelley at 29, Dylan Thomas at  39, Sylvia Plath at 30. Chatterton didn’t even make it to 18.

But Fergus Allen, who reads at this year’s Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, didn’t start the poetry business seriously until after retirement. His first book-length collection was published when he was 72.  There have been three others since, and now, at ninety, he  will be conversation with Peter Blegvad about all of this in November.

People, including poets, are (with unforgettable exceptions) living longer. Many of them have time and opportunity in their sixties to do things they’ve never done before. For some it’s sky-diving or cycling across India. For others, it’s poetry.

Moss Rich, now billed as ‘Britain’s oldest poet’ launched his first pamphlet publication with PigHog at the age of 95. HappenStance’s oldest poet is Cliff Ashby. Cliff didn’t start writing until he was 40, but once he started, he kept going.

During my reading window in July, the ages of the poets sending work varied widely. The young ones were older than Chatterton and the oldest ones were younger than Fergus Allen but there was an incredible range. The one thing writers significantly over 60 have in common, as it seems to me, is an increased sense of urgency.

But it’s all very well being welcomed into a writers’ group and then placing a few poems in magazines after a lifetime of reading and loving the stuff. It’s another thing to find a publishing outlet, especially if one prefers paper to keyboard, bookshop to online emporium.

On the other hand, older poets sometimes have a bit of an income and they have that commodity so hard to find in the world of work — time. They can often get about to festivals and readings and meet people. They are shrewd and worldy-wise. They make it their business to secure a future for their poems.

W H Davies self-published his first brief collection, The Soul’s Destroyer, when he was  33. He felt he had started late, so he worked like a demon to win himself a place among the poets of his day.  He was intensely prolific to start with, though as the decades went on, he began gradually to reduce his output. And here’s what he had to say about it.  He is addressing one of the garden birds he loved in this poem: I have a dim memory it was a robin, though this may be my own invention.

…….Late Singers

…….The Spring was late in coming, so,
…….…….Sweet bird, your songs are late:
…….Have you a certain number, then,
…….…….Of verses to create?
…….If late to start means late to end,
…….You comfort me, sweet friend.

…….It was the summer of my life
…….…….Ere I began to sing:
…….Will winter be my summer, then,
…….…….As summer was my spring?
…….No matter how things change their hue,
…….We’ll sing our number through.

 

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