It is no exaggeration to say that a minor outbreak of Beatlemania occurred on Sunday night in an upstairs room within the normally sedate confines of Cheltenham.  Members of the older generation in the audience were transported back to their youth by Beatles songs delivered by a young poet on the second day of the eight-day Cheltenham poetry festival. Joy-Amy Wigman is not only a performance poet but some singer, too. At the Newspaper Taxis event, celebrating the newly-published anthology of Beatles poetry, with Tom Gordon on guitar she tore into Come Together, Here, There, Everywhere, Back In The USSR, and While My Guitar Gently Weeps,  and rounded off the evening with an marvellous, unaccompanied In My Life. She confided to an audience that included a number of misty-eyed oldies that as a teenager back in the 1990s she had pictures of John, Paul, George and Ringo on her bedroom walls instead of Take That. Local poet Chris Hemingway provided more fine musical moments with some catchy, self-penned compositions inspired by the Beatles.

Earlier poet, anthologist and Liverpudlian Phil Bowen told of how the Beatles had originally been seen by some in their home city as soft, grammar school boys, and certainly not the best group in Liverpool, never mind the world. He added: “John Lennon used to act tough, but he wasn’t tough. Woking Class Hero just doesn’t ring true.” He also had his own take on the rise of Beatlemania: “1963 was an extraordinary year, with seamy stories like the Profumo affair in the papers. The Beatles were hyped up as a good-news story.”  

What about the poetry, I hear you ask? Well, Bowen and festival director Anna Saunders read poems from the Newspaper Taxis anthology by Kim Moore, Nathaniel Blue, Simon Armitage, and Susan Conway, with Bowen winding up with his own love letter to John Lennon, In My Life.

Also in the anthology is poet, translator, novelist and biographer Elaine Feinstein, who told her own audience at Cheltenham earlier in the evening that she was “a very unlikely person to have become a poet … I was too old, for one thing”. She also maintained that “when I started, people didn’t take women poets seriously”. Feinstein captivated her listeners, particularly with her poignant and clear-eyed poems about the desolation of widowhood after a 50-year marriage that had been full of battles. A poem about the Jewish tradition of placing a pebble on a grave included the observation:  “It’s easy to love the dead … they don’t argue.”  She was supported by Flarestack pamphlet prize winner Nichola Deane.

Sandwiched in between these two events on Sunday evening was one other, on the poetry of travel, headlined by Scottish poet James Knox Whittet, who delivered poems about the Hebrides, female poets who were persecuted after death, existential angst at 3am at Newport Pagnell service station, and Wittgenstein and the Teletubbies, in an eerie, haunting voice. Among the open micers at this event was an old, bearded bloke who read a lot of poems about trains. In the afternoon there had been a sell-out film show and reading, Severn and Somme,  on the life of Ivor Gurney.

ON this first weekend of the festival Phil Bowen was everywhere, extolling the virtues of Bob Dylan, though not necessarily as a page poet – “even Desolation Row is full of mixed metaphors and cheesey rhymes” -on Saturday, and the Beatles on Sunday, and helping to judge the Saturday night slam contest as well. In 2011 Bowen, with colleagues Damian Furniss and David Woolley, edited The Captain’s Tower, a celebration by 70 poets of Dylan’s 70th birthday.  On Saturday he read poems by Roger McGough, Matthew Sweeney, Linda France, his own ghazal, and Woolley, mused on how Dylan’s career has turned out to be longer than Sinatra’s, and told of a play he had written years ago imagining a meeting between Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas. 

PERFORMANCE poetry is alive and kicking in Cheltenham, if the quality of the 12 contestants at Saturday night’s War of the Words slam is anything to go by. Amid poems about mum and dad, cocaine, disgusting fast food, Jeremy Clarkson, and what seemed like 101 euphemisms for male and female genitalia, Ben Norris’s richly inventive poem about gravity – “We need gravity, to defy it” – took the £50 cheque. As one of the judges from the audience, my wife  – “I may not know much about poetry, but I know what I like” – concurred with the choice of winner. Phew.

FESTIVAL director Anna Saunders, while interviewing  Phil Bowen at The Captain’s Tower event,  reminded the former pub manager that he had once fired her as a barmaid for being cheeky. Bowen was somewhat taken aback by this revelation, and temporarily lost for words. “I just thought I’d mention it,” Anna said. She mentioned it again on Sunday, funnily enough.

PHOTOGRAPH:  DAVID ANDREW