This month at the Poetry Room we’re asking people to bring along a poem. It can be comic, serious, rhyming, non-rhyming, famous or not, in form or … you get the picture. The only qualifications are that you should love it and want to share it, and it should be written by someone other than yourself(!)
Looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday 6 July at 6.15-8pm in Blackwell’s bookshop, Newcastle. If you can, please bring along ten photocopies of the poem as well. You can read the poem yourself or someone will read it for you. The main thing is to come (even if you’re a first-timer) and enjoy what promises to be a fantastic night and the last Poetry Room of the season.
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.
