Tracy K Smith reading at the Bristol Festival of Ideas

In these days of sweeping funding cuts, the chance to see top poets reading locally come along only a couple of times a year, yet I can think of no more valuable a way for poets to learn and be inspired than to listen to the best of their peers reading their work in person. So when I learnt that Tracy K Smith, the US poet laureate, was coming to Waterstones in Bristol as part of the Festival of Ideas, I seized the opportunity of seeing her.

Most poets tend to write about a corner of their own experience or a particular interest - for example, you might think of yourself as  an eco-poet, or someone who is especially good at capturing what it means to be a survivor, or a poet suited to political declamation. Smith herself is known for poems about the body, focusing on intimacy, love, and sexuality, but her work also encompasses, apparently effortlessly, political poems of enormous sensibility and empathy, such as the sequence she read from her second collection, 'Duende', which gives voice to Ugandan women kidnapped by rebel commanders, and such vast subjects as ... well, the universe.

'I don't have a great brain for science,' she claimed, to a frankly disbelieving audience during her reading of her sequence 'My God, it's full of stars' from her 2011 Pulitzer-prize winning collection, 'Life on Mars'. But in case you're starting to think her work might be altogether too rarified, the quote about stars is from Arthur C Clarke's novel, '2001: A Space Odyssey', proving that Tracy isn't afraid to tangle with pop culture either. She even writes affectingly about that ultimate starman, David Bowie.

And as you wing out across the universe of Tracy's poems, you are being lifted on the most perfectly pitched reading of them. I would urge any poet who wants to improve their delivery of their work to listen to her read. There are lots of videos on line, or you can buy a CD of Duende. Better still, go and hear her read in the flesh ... though now her book tour has ended, you might have to fly to America for that.

The Romantic Poets and Bristol: A New 'Lyrical Ballads'

Since I broke my leg, I've only got out of bed - or at least off the settee - for poetry.  A marathon 12 hours yesterday at Bath Poetry Cafe's annual event, Voices In The City, was preceded the night before by a remarkable gathering of poets at @Bristol, under the auspices of the Festival of Ideas.  

Both Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth had links with Bristol, and so to celebrate Bristol's year as European Green Capital, 23 of the UK's most prominent poets were invited to respond to poems from Lyrical Ballads, for this reading and a two-part Radio 4 documentary.  

The evening began with a series of introductions including one from Mayor George Ferguson, who spoke about how the evening would celebrate Bristol and the richness of its urban wildlife.  He also mentioned the city's commitment to promoting and developing poetry, especially for children.   Then it was the turn of the poets, the great majority of whom had been able to travel in person, to read their particular poem, each introduced by honey-tongued Ian McMillan, who also read a poem of his own.  

Gillian Clarke, the National Poet of Wales, remarked that it had been a long time since she had taken an entire reading from her pocket, and indeed it was odd to see such luminaries as Makar Liz Lochead, Sir Andrew Motion, Don Paterson, Alice Oswald, John Burnside, Paul Farley, Fleur Adcock, Jean Sprackland, Ruth Padel and Sean O'Brien shuffle on and off the stage as if they were at school assembly.  As much as I was delighted by the opportunity to hear so many of our best contemporary poets, I wished the event had been divided into several throughout the year, so that the poets had a chance to introduce us to some of their other work, to give these new poems some context.  My guess is that it was done like this partly to create a one-night extravaganza and partly to facilitate recording, but after a while I began to feel slightly sick, as if I'd opened a big tin of Quality Street and eaten all the orange and strawberry creams, one after the other.

My favourite poem was Alice Oswald's elegiac description of a dead swan, which she'd passed on her daily walk for a month earlier this winter, as a counterpart to the rotting albatross strung around the neck of the Ancient Mariner.  It was a beautiful, startling piece and I am in awe of her fearless nose.

Other quibbles - no, actually, these are complaints - include the description of the evening as a celebration of Bristol and its urban wildlife.  In fact, the city was largely overlooked, and when it was mentioned, it was in reference to the natives' 'somnolence' or as being a place where its inhabitants 'slur their words like drunks'.  Of all the poets present, none were born in the city and only one lives locally.  As for Thomas Chatterton, our own Romantic poet, Wordsworth's 'marvellous boy', he was completely ignored.

Finally, that far from promoting poetry, as the Mayor claimed in his introduction, the city council has this year ceased its funding for Poetry Can, the lone poetry development agency for Bristol and the south-west, thus jeopardising not only its programmes of work with school children and resident, council tax-paying poets, but also the biannual poetry festivals and the agency's very existence.  I saw quite a few seething local poets exit the reading, their faces almost as red as Mr Ferguson's infamous trousers.  

  Bristol urban wildlife

Photo montage © Dru Marland

Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer : At War and Peace, Bristol Festival of Ideas, November 11, 2014

Here's a short review I wrote for the local rag about the above lecture at Bristol University.  

Swan Upping at Cookham : Stanley Spencer 1915 - 1919

The first time 17 year old Stanley Spencer made what would become a daily commute between his home in Cookham and the Slade School of Fine Art, his father, William, accompanied him to see him safely across Euston Road.  

Within a few years, Spencer turned his half-finished painting, Swan Upping at Cookham, to the wall and enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps, serving first as an orderly in Beaufort Hospital, Stapleton (‘that vile place’) and later with the 68th Field Ambulance Unit on the front line in Macedonia.   

Under the Hill : Paul Nash, 1912

In the latest lecture in the series entitled The Artist at War, put on by the Bristol Festival of Ideas to mark the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, Paul Gough sought to explore the visual language of conflict by contrasting Spencer’s work with that of his friend and peer, the landscape artist Paul Nash, who enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles and served on the Western Front before becoming an official war artist in November 1917.  
                                        
Both artists were profoundly affected by their experience of battle.  ‘I am no longer an artist interested and curious,’ wrote Nash to his wife, ‘I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.’ 

We Are Making A New World : Paul Nash, 1918

Nash went on to produce some of the most iconic and searing images of the battlefields of Belgium and France and, in Gough’s words, ‘introduced a new language of devastation to the genre of landscape.’  

Having returned to Cookham at the end of 1918, Spencer managed to finish Swan Upping but struggled to assimilate his recent past into his work, often stating ‘It is not proper or sensible to expect to paint after such experience.’  It was only when he received the commission from his patrons, the Behrens, for a memorial chapel at Burghlere to Mary Behren’s brother, Lieutenant Henry William Sandham, that he had the opportunity to undertake his astonishing and moving ‘re-membering’ of war, based on his time in Bristol and Macedonia. 

Alice Oswald at the Watershed, Bristol, Saturday 11th May 2013

Photo by Antonio Olmos

I can't really tell you how excited I was at the prospect to seeing/hearing Alice Oswald read at the Watershed last Saturday ... nor how livid I was when, ten minutes before I was due to leave the house, my border collie, Ted, made a run for it up the park.

Now, when Ted's had a good hurtle after the ball, he's fairly biddable and easy to catch, but I could see from the expression in his eyes exactly what he thought as he barked peremptorily at me - Well, we're here now, so let's have a bit of fun for half an hour. Let's face it, you could do with the exercise.  In the end I hung the ball - which happened to be on a handy piece of elastic - on the branch of a bush and as he leapt for it, rugby-tackled him to the ground and hauled him home, thus getting to the poetry reading by the skin of my teeth, albeit flustered and earringless.  

I'm sure if I thought hard enough I could find a way of seguing from this image into a description of the reading, but I'm a busy blogger today so I'm just going to post the review I've written for the local rag.  

The last time I had a ticket for an Alice Oswald reading, ten years ago in Bath, she fell ill and was unable to attend, so I was delighted finally to catch her sell-out performance of a selection of her work at the Watershed, put on by the Bristol Festival of Ideas in association with the Bristol Spring Poetry Festival.

I use the word 'performance' advisedly, as Alice Oswald, one of our most intelligent and imaginative poets, learns her poems by heart and is thus able to summon an intense and dramatic delivery that grabs the attention of the audience from beginning to end.

I first encountered Alice Oswald's work when her long dream-like poem Dart was published in 2002.  At the Watershed, the focus was on her most recent collection, 2011's Memorial. Subtitled An Excavation of the Iliad, Memorial departs from the usual telling of the stories of Achilles, Paris, Helen and the rest to focus on the individual, named heroes whose fates are mentioned on in passing.  By providing the reader with sufficient telling detail, she brings them to life only to confront us with the pathos of their deaths.  The resulting work is a haunting exposition of the insanity of war, the enormity of its cost in human lives.  

Apart from Memorial, Alice also read from A Sleepwalk on the Severn, a long poem for several voices which was published in 2009, and earlier poems including Hymn for Iris, a prayer for bridges and connections.  Perhaps the most riveting of all was a poem about her village in Devon which described in the present inhabitants from generations ago, and which, despite its repeated exhortations to the reader not to be alarmed, was decidedly eerie.  

The reading was followed by a fascinating question and answer session chaired by the Director of Poetry Can, Colin Brown. 

The Bristol Festival of Ideas continues until the end of August; Bristol Poetry Festival will be back in the first week of October with an exciting line-up of poets and performances.