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It was another warm summer’s evening as we gathered in the Poetry Room for our last session of the season. The readaround of everyone’s current favourite poems was wide-ranging and impressive, covering an 18th century diatribe against slavery, an attempt to articulate the violence in Ulster, a defiantly illicit interlude from a hotel room, and a poem in praise of poetry itself. We all enjoyed hearing some pieces familiar to us as well as being introduced to new poems and voices.

It was a wonderful, inspiring night. All the poems were striking, bold and extremely relevant, reminding us why poetry matters and what good medicine it is. We even made a poem of our own, a compilation of found texts plucked at random from three books on Blackwell’s shelves – a beautifully surreal contribution from one of the group. That’s one of the charms of the Poetry Room – every single month is so different – we never know who will come or where the conversation will take us but we always go home with plenty to think about. Thank you to everyone who’s come along and made this last year such a success – so friendly, nourishing and stimulating.

Here are the poems we read:

To Sir Toby – Philip Freneau
Literary Evening, Jamaica – Mervyn Morris
the school Christmas (haibun) – David Cobb
Belfast Confetti – Ciaran Carson
What if a road – Sheenagh Pugh
Post-Surrealist Round – choreographed by Angela
Poetry – Pablo Neruda
Sweet Darkness – David Whyte
Story of a Hotel Room – Rosemary Tonks
An Appeal to Cats in the Business of Love – Thomas Flatman

We’ll meet again in September – Tuesday 7th, 6.15pm-8pm – when we’ll be reading Simon Armitage’s new collection, Seeing Stars. And for all you networkers out there – Blackwell’s in Newcastle is on Facebook and you’re more than welcome to become a friend and generally circulate news of the Poetry Room far and wide. Enjoy your summer!

Due to crossed wires and closed doors, last night’s Poetry Room reconvened in the convivial atmosphere of The Crow’s Nest (I hope any late-comers saw our note!)  After a few flourishes of our poetry books we soon had a quiet corner to ourselves and got on with the matter in hand – discussing Hugo Williams’ most recent book West End Final.

Name-dropping is the order of the day in many of the poems (inspiring the title of this blog entry!) We started with Heavy Father which describes the speaker watching his actor father in old films (Williams’ father was the actor Hugh Williams and the poems encourage a reader to make a biographical connection).  The father is disguised as playing a series of stock characters until ultimately his role as a father is also portrayed as an act (‘the father as the father’ as one person put it).   The absence of the father’s own character in this poem was discussed as was the son’s identification with him in age.  The ingenious half rhymes for father throughout (fedora/mascara/operator) were admired.

We moved on to Ghost Town – a spare poem, devastating in its conjuring of children on a train being sent to boarding school.  The passengers are described as ‘out-staring’ their tears in ‘third-class carriages’.  The descriptions gain weight through the brevity of the piece.  One person, a boarding school alumnus, particularly identified with this poem.  And God Created Woman is a poetic recreation of a child’s letter home from school.  The poet suggests a child on the edge of adulthood through his use of precocious language juxtaposed against child-like pleas to his parent.  The child’s desire to see the film And God Created Woman set against the school’s more hearty choice of Scott of the Antarctic was enjoyed.   A Suitable Cane was our final foray into the public school world.  The poem describes a ritualistic and surreal caning.  The repetition of ‘cane’ suggests strokes of the implement.  The speaker describes saving the expression of his pain ‘for later use’:  this could be seen as the poem itself.  There was some discussion about the poet’s return to his subject matter across this book and previous collections.  One person found it indulgent while others felt that this was what all poets did and that Williams mined his own experience through new angles.    

No Disrespect returns to the thespian world for a biting monologue by an embittered colleague of the father’s.  An actor in the group gave us an insight into the profession which backed up the material in the poems.  Finally we just had time to look at some sections of A Pillow Book – a remarkable and inventive twelve poem sequence- describing a couple preparing for bed.  One person aptly described it as twelve director’s cuts of the same scene.

Back to Blackwell’s  (as Amy Winehouse nearly sang) for our final Poetry Room of the season next month.  We will be meeting on Tuesday 6 July at 6.15pm-8pm.  Please bring along a poem you love and some photocopies (about ten) and we’ll read around (or someone else can read for you if you’d prefer).  The more the merrier.  Even if you haven’t been before, do give us a try! Hope to see you there.

It was a full house at the Poetry Room this month as we entered the strange and beautiful world of Paul Durcan.  Many thanks to everyone who came along and helped make such an interesting evening.      

We started by looking at ‘Sport’.  The poem describes a young man, watched by his father, playing football for Grangegorman Mental Hospital.  Heartbreaking and funny was the general consensus.  The son’s pride at impressing his father is tempered by the rarity of the praise and the location of the match.  However, the father’s effort in travelling to see his son and the gruff ‘Well played, son’ was also noted.  It was felt the short lines of the poem added to the impact of the narrative.  It was discussed that the poem, originally published in a collection called Daddy, Daddy, had echoes with Sylvia Plath’s famous poem ‘Daddy’.

Next, Durcan entered the building as we listened to a recording of him reading ‘The Kilfenora Teaboy’ and ‘Hymn to a Broken Marriage’.  The poet explained how he didn’t ‘do’ introductions to poems.  The relish and authority of his voice was much enjoyed.  Discussing the second of these poems, some of the group felt sympathy for the narrator while others felt he tended towards self-indulgence, perhaps knowingly so. ‘Raymond of the Rooftops’ continued the marital theme and the delicious wit of this poem was much appreciated.  The poet’s use of repetition and everyday language was noted.  It was felt that the portrayal of the sexes was not straightforward and that the long-suffering wife in the poem was also an agent of her own misfortune. 

From there to ‘Death in a Graveyard:  Pere Lachaise’ which describes a wife falling into her husband’s grave having been knocked out by a chestnut.  The laugh out loud lines had us doing exactly that.   ‘A Spin in the Rain with Seamus Heaney’, like ‘Sport’, describes a ball game – this time between two poets.  Like many of Durcan’s poems, the narrative of the poem becomes increasingly outrageous as events move from the ordinary to the extraordinary.   The ending of this poem with its full rhyme was particularly admired.  Our final poem of the night was ‘The Virgin and Child’, one of Durcan’s many poems triggered by visual art.  A couple of readers drew attention to its juxtaposition of religious language with fresh unexpected lines such as ‘A brief trout of a frown/Jumps up/The brief weir of her face.’

For more on Durcan, don’t forget the man himself is coming to Newcastle on Thursday 10 June <www.ncl.ac.uk/ncla>.  Next month at the Poetry Room we’ll be looking at Hugo Williams’ collection West End Final.  For one month only we’ll be meeting on the second Tuesday of the month on Tuesday 8 June at 6.15pm-8pm  in Blackwell’s bookshop, Newcastle.  Keep an eye on this blog for details of the poems we’ll be looking at.  In the meantime, happy election day!

Last night we gathered in the Poetry Room to look at a small film about rain, two trees, together and apart, two sons and a poet ‘as pale-skinned as the moon’ (not quite finding time for ‘the one hand’s kindness to the other’, in Correctives, or The Lie, ‘his drip changed and his shackle all secure’). The group were pleased to have been introduced to the work of Don Paterson, both before and during the session, admiring his craftsmanship, rigorousness and precision, his honesty and wry humour. The cunning arguments his poems spun in the air gave us plenty to talk about, tracing, with a mixture of horror and wonder, brave forbearance and chilly nihilism.

Right from the first poem we read – the last poem in the book – we were impressed with his filtering of the real through the lens of the cinematic/emblematic, his simple but charged vocabulary, his formal tightness and the almost mythic power, at the end here, bringing together the repeated tripartite structure in ‘the ink, the milk, the blood’ that the rain would wash away, proof that ‘none of this, none of this matters’. The poem, the whole book, life itself or all three – we couldn’t decide. One of Paterson’s recurring motifs is the negative, the invisible, the hidden; we mentioned one poem, Unfold, which is presented as two blank pages. As he is confounded, Paterson chooses to confound us, disrupting complacency, dissecting motive and sincerity. Even though he knows full well it’s a fool’s game, he can’t resist going in search of the truth (like poor Du Fu, his face ‘cut with rain’) turning the lights on to see the dark. His poems often work like fables, small narratives with conclusions that more often than not undercut themselves in the telling, serious and playful at the same time.

The two poems for his twin sons were further opportunities to enjoy his elegant and persuasive versions of the truth – in Why Do You Stay Up So Late?, on the art of reflection and transformation, and in The Circle, on ambition and imperfection. These poems, although differing rhythmically, shared a couplet-based rhyme scheme (as do many in this collection), always subtle, never predictable. ‘The dream is taxed’ he tells Jamie – whatever we do comes with a price; a sentiment that in For Once (after the group had unpicked the practically weightless syntax) we see Paterson’s longing for blamelessness and freedom.

By the end of the session folk who hadn’t already bought Rain were hurrying off to buy a copy and those who had were going home eager to read more. This was an evening that showed us perfectly what the Poetry Room is for and best at – sharing the scintillating experience of reading great poems, getting to know them and ourselves better, in good company. Thanks for that.

And what’s more, next month, we can do it again, when we keep the Celtic connection, visiting Ireland this time, in Paul Durcan’s sterling collection A Snail in My Prime. See you at Blackwell’s on Tuesday 4th April at 6.15pm-8pm.

With many poetry laurels already to her crown, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy received perhaps the ultimate accolade this month:   the Poetry Room treatment!  New faces and old friends gathered at Blackwell’s bookshop – this time in their business department (!)- to discuss the Selected Poems. 

We started with Standing Female Nude.  The setting of the poem was discussed – it was noted that the Georges mentioned in the poem might suggest the artist Georges Braque, although this is never made specific.  A visual artist in the group commented that the lot of a contemporary life model is a happier one, thankfully, than that described in the poem.  One person found Duffy’s exploration of power clichéd but generally the poem was felt to be ground-breaking and beautifully achieved.  Its short effective lines were noted.  It was discussed how its themes were explored throughout Duffy’s work and how well the poem would have fitted into her later collection, which looks at issues of gender and power, The World’s Wife.  

Warming Her Pearls was warmly received for its tenderness and subtle eroticism.  It was suggested that the two women in the poem could also be considered as two halves of the same person – the real woman and the ‘made-up’ one.  Originally provided a change of pace from the persona poems.  The description of the narrator’s tongue ‘shedding its skin like a snake’ was much admired as was the poet’s clever use of line-breaks.

Our penultimate poem was In Mrs Tilscher’s Class which like Originally depicts a rite of passage.  The opening stanzas with their descriptions of windows being opened with long poles and skittles of milk took us all back, despite our varying ages, to a familiar infant classroom.  Someone noted the poem was a list poem.  Another person suggested this form was a natural progression from the poet’s use of short punchy lines.

Time – a preoccupation of Duffy’s was against us.  We had a quick look at the wonderful Away and See then we were gone into the night keen to ask the man holding the future his name.

On Tuesday 6 April from 6.15-8pm at Blackwell’s we will be looking at Don Paterson’s award-winning collection Rain. Do keep an eye out on this blog for the poems we will be looking at.  All, as ever, are very welcome.