It's always a good week when I get out, leave the computer, the current draft and deadline, in order to enjoy other people's words.
Saturday 7 June - To the Betsy Trotwood for the launch of poet Cath Drake's Sleeping With Rivers, which won the 2013 Mslexia Pamphlet Competition, now published by Seren. The book was also the PBS Spring Pamphlet Choice.
Congratulations to Cath who gave a wonderfully animated reading.
The poems draw on her life growing up in Australia, they are witty, wise and inventive. Cath invited her key mentors to guest read. So it turned into a poetry feast with sets from Mimi Khalvati, Roddy Lumsden and Pascale Petit.
Monday 9 June - to The Troubadour to hear Paul Muldoon in conversation with Cahal Dallat. Muldoon says he first wanted to be a painter, which is, perhaps, why his work has a strong engagement with the image. He’s recently been inspired by the paintings of Rita Duffy. He admires the way a painter can explore an idea, distil it so you 'see it in an instant.'
There is also his passion for film, in particular the Western. He often tells his students to treat the first draft of a poem as if it were a shooting script for a film – ‘what are we looking at?’
On rhyme: ‘I don’t think of using it, rhyme is what the poems want to do.'
On fashions in poetry, the Poetry Editor of The New Yorker says, he doesn’t see that any ‘single view is to the fore.’
Wednesday 11 June - To Tunbridge Wells for the launch of Digging Up Paradise, Sarah Salway's book of garden stories, poems and much more. It was one of the most warm and welcoming launch parties I have attended in a while. On a hot June evening Sarah did a reading outside, much to the delight of guests and passers by.
Comments