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Anyone for tennis? Winchester's first poetry festival gets off to flying start

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The focus was on fun and laughter on Friday evening at the inaugural poetry festival in Winchester. The festival aims to establish itself alongside the likes of Stanza in Scotland, and Ledbury and Aldeburgh in due course, and is also taking seriously the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war in its events. But despite this overall gravitas, it was impossible for members of the packed audience at Winchester Discovery Centre to suppress smiles or indeed, to avoid regularly laughing out loud at many moments during the performances of Brian Patten, Matt Harvey, pictured, and also Imtiaz Dharker on Friday night.

Matt Harvey, in particular, is the funniest poet-performer I’ve encountered. Whether listing the linguistic possibilities of the potato for a campaign against food waste, examining the potential of rustling up recruits for a London sperm bank – “We’re different from other banks” -  or delivering an absorbing sound poem about tennis written during his stint as poet in residence at Wimbledon, the BBC radio star had the audience rolling in the aisles.

Brian Patten, too, brought plenty of playful moments, particularly with his shortened versions of Arabic stories, and an amusing poem about a Liverpool funeral.  The Merseysider, who with Adrian Henri and Roger McGough made poetry and accessible to a brand-new audience back in the 1960s, has a well of love and goodwill to draw on, and retains a wide-eyed way of looking at the world. Imtiaz Dharker, who was born in Lahore, grew up in Glasgow, and eloped to Bombay, is also very skilful at playing with words, and in ‘Speech Balloon’ she explored with mock seriousness the hackneyed phrase “over the moon”, complaining that “there’s no one just satisfied”.  

But there were sombre moments as well. Both Harvey and Dharker responded to a challenge the festival had set them, reading out a first world war poem, and then giving their poetic response to it. Harvey, who maintained that this was outside his usual “comfort zone”, read ‘I Tracked a Dead Man Down a Trench’, by WSS Lyon, who didn’t survive the war, with soft reverence, almost in a whisper. His own poem referred to a photograph he had seen in a library at the age of 11: “The soldier in the photograph … laughs the laugh that isn’t a laugh, the joke that’s not a joke.”

Dharker read Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem For Doomed Youth’, and then her poem ‘A century Later’, one of the final poems in the new Bloodaxe anthology The Hundred Years’ War, about the heroic schoolgirl Malala Yousafrazi, who survived a Taliban attempt on her life; and two others, ‘The Right Word’ – “Outside, the door, lurking the shadows, is a terrorist. Is that the wrong description?” - and ‘Disappeared’. Patten, who is still remembered for his youthful love poems, read a resigned yet resilient poem about older love: “Let’s get used to the raw material we are … Held together by love, and by the faith that we are buoyant enough to see the final darkness through.”    

But the overall mood of this Friday reading was jollity, so much so that the celebrated poet Michael Longley, due to take part in a special first world war event later in the festival, felt obliged to warn a companion as he left: “I’m afraid there aren’t many jokes in my poetry.” 

 

 

HAMPSHIRE has a wealth of talent and breadth of achievement among the poets living and working in the county. Included among the seven reading at Friday teatime at the Winchester poetry festival were Maggie Sawkins, current Ted Hughes award winner for her multimedia live literature production ‘Zones of Avoidance’, former Costa poetry prize winner John Haynes, and Nick MacKinnon, a Forward prize winner in 2013 with his poem, ‘The metric system’.

MacKinnon, a teacher at Winchester College, had a story to tell about his prize-winning poem, concerning a primary schoolteacher who “perched on my radiator, bra-less / in her flower power sundress”.

“Poetry is a minority art, so that you can write anything about anybody, and they’ll never read it,” he asserted. This turned out not to be true in his teacher’s case, who no longer lived in Britain, but happened to be here on a visit, read the poem when it was published in the Independent newspaper, recognised his name and herself, and promptly wrote to him. Luckily she took it in good part, in fact saying it was “the crown” of her career, although also wishing to point out that “I never went to school without a bra”.

Maggie Sawkins, who works with people in recovery from addiction, and teaches students with specific learning difficulties, read three poems from ‘Zones of Avoidance’ – “We reach her room where her new boyfriend’s hiding. / He has tiny ears and a face carved in old wounds” – and ‘Things to do around  Southsea’, a list of possible activities regularly rounded up by the refrain “Go for a curry”. She added that this poem owed a lot to one by Gary Snyder.

John Haynes, who spent most of his career in Nigeria, and has written about that time, was once stage manager of the Theatre Royal in Portsmouth in his youth. He read a long, poignant and melancholy poem about the various jobs he had to carry out – “sweep stage, eat up the bread … empty the glasses of cold whisky tea” -  a poem he was still working on, he said afterwards.

Julian Stannard read a poem about his interest in Jerry Hall, and her interest in poetry, saying he had met her at workshops. In ‘Jerry Hall meets Salvador Dali’, the former long-time partner of Mick Jagger says: “I just can’t write poems /when I’m happy. // I love cooking. I love gardening. / I keep chickens. Mick’s an alley cat.”

All the poets at the ‘Hogwords’ reading, curated and led by Hampshire Poet 2014 Joan McGavin, had been asked to contribute a poem about the first world war. Stannard came up with one about the second, ‘September 1939’. He said he had not been thinking of Auden’s famous poem at the time he wrote it, “although maybe at some level it was percolating through”. Haynes also read one about the Great War, somewhat reluctantly, insisting that any such poems were “doomed to failure”. Stephen Boyce, the co-artistic director of the festival, read a moving poem called ‘The Lone Tree of Loos’ – “a range-finder they took potshots at over the barbed wire” – which concluded with the words: “This one, wild cherry, loveliest of trees.”

Robyn Bolam’s poem, ‘Cacti and Love’, was linked to her mother, “difficult to touch without injury to each other”. But the poem also asserts that “hope is everywhere in a desert - / cacti bloom; light lifts us into its space.” Joan McGavin concluded the reading, with a series of haiku about Hampshire, a poem about a 14-year-old who had never heard the word “orchard”, and a first world war poem about her mother’s long-lost elder brother, who died on the Somme: “My mother forever saying, how much I reminded her of him.”  

 

PHOTOGRAPH: GREG FREEMAN / WRITE OUT LOUD 

 

Saturday at the festival - events 

Sunday at the festival - events 

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