It transpires Waterstone's expansive premises on Manchester’s Deansgate have the kind of room it’s pleasant to imagine all bookshops might have: a sparsely-but-comfortably furnished and quiet space tucked cleanly away behind the scenes, in which – the imagination runs on – an interested party might feel happily above and away from the crowds madding through the city centre, and – the imagination winds down – steal away to read with one or other of the shop’s wares. Or, indeed, host an evening of poetry readings from writers and editors associated with Carcanet.The pleasantness of the space is roughly equivalent to the pleasantness of the thought of the room’s existence, and heightened so much further by the presence of Evan Jones, Helen Tookey, Carola Luther, Grevel Lindop, Eleanor Crawforth and Michael Schmidt, who on this World Book Night spent an evening reading poems of their own and their fellow writers from the Carcanet list.
The event’s lasting impression is one of intimacy; of writers floating their intricate works on the appreciative air – down the corridor, meanwhile, in the bookshop’s main space, the prose-fans are raucously cheering their writers, swigging from cans of cheap lager and carelessly knocking piles of books to the floor. Or not quite, but the difference between the two simultaneous WBN events at Waterstone's is great enough to bring into sharper focus the importance of the intimacy, quietness and relaxation to the poetry event. Most, if not all, of the poets reading rely on a subtlety – of emotional shading, of reference, and (frequently) of humour – which could be lost at a brisker or brusquer reading.
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| from left to right: Helen Tookey, Carola Luther and Grevel Lindop |
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| Paralogues is available now. |
The interesting question, really, is whether events such as World Book Night, and (in the USA) National Poetry Month, (as well as the European National Reading Week, or NaNoWriMo and the newer NaPoWriMo) can meaningfully interact with the essentially lonesome – focused, meditative, isolated – experience of reading. There lingers (not, in my view, wrongfully so) the impression that huge national initiatives don’t sit quite right with poetry. ‘Public’ poetry isn’t faring particularly well at the moment in this country. Practically, we have the continuing curse of the laureateship and the poems thereby produced (along with the deaths of poets such as Peter Reading and Adrian Mitchell), but the situation also has its theoretical aspect in the crisis of confidence post-modern poetics have in authoritative statement. Hence the idea of thrusting a poetry associated for its readers with a fairly private experience so forcefully into the rapid and unsavoury waters of mainstream discourse might seem a regrettable lapse of restraint. Should we want to import the publicity and glamour of Live Aid or Red Nose Day into literature? National initiatives might seem to be a means so divorced from their intended ends as to render the whole process fatuous, a mere vacuum for funding which could more valuably be used elsewhere.
But this is to overstate the case, and the Poetry Corner event at Waterstones on WBN works as a fairly effective rebuttal to this kind of argument. These readings indicated just how possible it is to engage with national programmes while retaining the senses of modesty, quietness and intimacy which can be so valuable for poetry. If we must have the grand, top-down force of a National X or an Annual Y, its force might be modeled on the natural world’s idea of strength, in which plants are held in their proper places by a hugely interconnected mass of individually minute fibres. We can pass over the bulldozing pan-enthusiasm for reading, that ludicrously various act; we don’t need to homogenise the pleasantly-surprised Saturday Poem rubbernecker and the professor poring over Prynne and the wag trespassing on Waterstone's back room with Berryman’s Dream Songs; but we can recognise and celebrate the connections between them. It’s possible to step away from the hyperbolic rhetoric of WBN (“you just can’t wait to read and think about the places it will take you”) and into a multiplicity of small events and occasions – occasions extending right down to the individual resolutely sparing an extra five minutes to read, instead of looking at the admittedly swish promotional material of national literature initiatives, or doing the damn laundry.
Joey Connolly lives in Manchester, where he edits Kaffeeklatsch, a journal of poetry and criticism. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals, including PN Review, Agenda, Stand and The Rialto, as well as on Radio 4. He is 25.
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