Bolton festival organiser Dave Morgan celebrated a splendid week of Live From Worktown events by introducing this gig with “welcome to Write Out Loud” - a nice inadvertent plug for us which made WOL maestro Julian Jordon sitting next to me laugh out loud.

Morgan had every right to be as pleased as punch with a great week of events behind him, and this Patten/Coe evening ahead. Mandy Coe got it off to a gorgeously warm and tender start with ‘Soft As The Blanket’  before the lyrically enchanting ‘Hare and Crow – Ribble – March’, written after watching two animals taunting, chasing and playing in a field: “If both had faces, they’d be grinning.” ‘If Francis of Assisi lived in Dingle’  warmed us up nicely for ‘Blue’ and ‘The Tree That Walks”, a thoughtful, clever poem, and the glorious ‘Protecting His Round’, inspired by a window cleaner “rinsing his chamois, his hands were so clean”.

Coe is a multi-award-winning writer whose skills working with children and adults, in workshops and in collaboration are renowned. This “sharing” writer’s asides between poems are unaffected and funny, including the good advice not to go speed dating with a good-looking friend, something we could all do well to remember. She half-sang her poem ‘First Lines of Songs’ before reading a beauty of a children’s poem with its touching refrain, “Good morning to us”. She has been inspired by an exquisite classical mosaic, a quote from Auden, and by looking at the glorious sky – everything is a poem in the making.

And if the Hadron Collider project wants a poet in residence (and why not) Coe’s up for it, illustrating her interest in quantum mechanics and particles with ‘Skin Bound’. She ended by thanking everyone who had been on the workshop that afternoon, with, appropriately enough, ‘Thank You’. Coe ended each poem with a smile, as if hearing the words for the first time, and left us smiling, too.

Brian Patten – greyer but still luxuriantly curly haired - came on to rapturous applause and a muttered aside from my companion: “Look at his hair, I used to have hair like that.” He has such as a deceptively easy manner about him – hunting for his glasses, changing his mind about what to read and with a warm greeting for all, especially for the 11-year-old fan in the audience who greeted each poem with a barely-contained yelp of joy.

‘The Race to Get to Sleep’ is a must for any parent at bedtime and “Curtains For Gran” is both hilarious and bittersweet. He mused on his schooldays - his primary has become an Aldi, he went to the famous Quarry Bank to sit and fail his 11-plus, went back to fail again at 13 - and crowned his real life story with “The Minister for Exams” which should be in every education secretary’s in-tray. It ends: “Question1: How large is a child’s imagination? Question 2: How shallow is the soul of the Minister for Exams?” He remembers a great geography teacher with an imagination he shared with his class and for whom he wrote a heartfelt poem after his death, which choked me up.

Patten nowadays lives in Devon and spends much of his year in Morocco, absorbing the atmosphere and writing, writing, writing – not bad for a school failure, eh?  His poem remembering an evening spent drinking, thinking and talking with the wraith of his much-missed friend Adrian Mitchell, 'In the Orchard after Midnight' - with a "ghost glass" of whiskey - was simply glorious. He also read a lovely piece written after the death of another friend, musician Kevin Ayers, called ‘Expats’.

But he effortlessly leavened the darker pieces with a gigglingly witty run of pseudo-limericks which the crowd loved, before addressing ageing in the touching ‘That dress, this shirt’; a moving poem. ‘The Armada’, about his dying mum; and finishing with what he called a rough draft of a poem, ‘A Rainy Day’. Some rough draft. We were in the presence of a legend, and it felt good.

Judy Gordon

 

Background: Write Out Loud interviews Brian Patten

 

PHOTOGRAPH: JULIAN JORDON / WRITE OUT LOUD