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| At the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester From left to right: Iain Bamforth, Richard Price, David Kinloch, Peter McCarey |
As Iain Bamforth read poems about mines in Broken Hill I was eyeing the wormy beams that separated the pavement of Charing Cross Road from the basement room in the Phoenix Artists Club where he was reading – along with Richard Price (who had, the previous day, received the Scottish Poetry Book Award; congratulations, Richard!), David Kinloch, Dorothy LeHane, Hannah Lowe and myself. I had heard Iain read only once before, at Manchester two days earlier, in the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, where the four chaps, plus Lucy Burnett, had read to a quorum of poets and book people, including Okey and Alice of Carcanet, whom I was glad to meet at last.
The Burgess Foundation is across the street from the brickwork citadel of the India Rubber Company, and connected to it by rail tunnels. Another subterranean connection is Burgess’s early trilogy, set in Malaya, whose main commodity was rubber. I remember jacking in those novels at the point where the hero was disgusted at the impure vowels of Glasgow English. Burgess the linguist ought to have known that Glasgow vowels are remarkably pure, since there’s hardly a diphthong to be heard in them. Not that likes and dislikes need reasons. Still underground, the director of the centre let us into Burgess’s library before the reading; well worth the visit.
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| Photograph © Graham Foster |
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| David Kinloch |
In London, as well as taking in the poetry and wondering about the woodwork, I was trying to remember if I’d ever been at a worse-attended event and realized I hadn’t. With three golf umbrellas, we could have arranged it in and around a phone booth, dialling our reading to absent friends; with luck, the call might even have been monitored and recorded, doubling the audience. I went first, with dictaphone squibs and the latest bits of the Syllabary; LeHane’s work has an interesting combination of intellect and affect; Kinloch added Stevenson’s walking stick to the Orphic mix; from Lowe’s lively poems on her father a maxim stuck in mind: 'if you can’t win straight, win crooked' (we are warned); Bamforth contended with a sudden lurch of noise from next door that Price resolved by moving up close to the listeners. The two readings were sponsored by Makaronic, Geneva, which provided some funding for the tour events not covered by Creative Scotland.
The next reading was to be in Geneva, at the basement venue used for three annual 'Poésies en Mouvement' events organised by Makaronic.ch. When Jacques Demierre got wind of it he asked if we’d like to add a second Geneva reading; I immediately accepted, since his @PTT series is more for experimental music than for poetry, which would challenge us to present our work in a different way. The flights were already booked; David and Richard arrived on the Friday and we all had to be in Strasbourg on the Saturday. We were thus faced with three readings in 24 hours, at venues 250 miles apart.
I had completed a 75-hour working week just before the readings and had everything in place but the two essentials – choosing what to read and confirming the audience. I’d decided not to read the same stuff twice at any point in the tour, but I also wanted to pitch the content to the audiences I was expecting: a core of international civil servants at the 7pm reading, and francophone off-the-wall experimentalists at 9pm. For the latter I prepared a spoof scientific review in French about the recycling of sounds and poems. For the former – a medley on things that happen to alienated bourgeois internationals.
As to the audience, though I avoided advertising at my place of work since I didn’t want my cover totally blown, I had got the new English newspaper to advertise us in exchange for distributing copies on the night, announced the event on a network of Anglophone locals, contacted the Geneva Scots club, the UN Writers Association, the local English literature depts, the Geneva Literary Aid Society (essentially Irish, that brings in some big names for charity gigs), and information on the events was circulated by the writing school of the Haute école d’art et de design, by Infolipo and of course by @PTT. All of that attracted a total of two strangers on the night. No Scots, no academics. Nevertheless, since Mariarosaria Cardines and I had also written to everyone we knew who might by any stretch be interested, and since some of them brought friends along, there were good audiences for both events, and at Strasbourg we had a good forty people.
Richard led off with his 'it was the day after the day after Christmas', with its unfailingly bemusing croon 'are you sinister?' Bear in mind that quite a few people had never attended a poetry reading before. He was followed by Iain, who reached out with some of his far eastern work. David surprised me with a series of imagined monologues by women in the Bible; a rejoinder to The World’s Wife. We sold a lot of books, and as we belted up the stairs to the car for the second reading, I realised we had changed the meaning of 'poetry' for some.
At @PTT Richard’s slow, lilting, subtle reading struck a chord even with those who didn’t get the words. Musical repetition helps. I had trouble hearing Iain, who seemed to be reading to an invisible microphone; David mixed Orpheus with the Hebrews – not so strange: the local art gallery holds an ancient tapestry of King David as Orpheus…
Richard insists that after the reading a beautiful Latvian in the audience invited him to Riga. Be that as it may, he was in the car with us after breakfast on the autobahn to Strasbourg. Raymond Bach welcomed us, Cornelia Bamforth had made oatcakes to go with the whisky (in Geneva we had dispensed whisky at the intermission; that proved popular). Richard read a long poem on the etymology of his name, which could be either Welsh, meaning a prince, or Anglosaxon, meaning a weights-and-measures inspector. Typically he plumped for the latter. I found myself reading a truly miserable poem on infanticide under the Blake epigraph 'better murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires'. Also a poem after Paul Muldoon, entitled 'Eating the British'. David pursued the themes of Orphic grief and Talmudic mirth. Iain rounded off the reading with what he billed as a mock psalm (that sounded perfectly serious to me) and a few of his hair-raising prose pieces on creatures of the deep.
The audience had a lot of questions at the intermission, and we had a lot of good food at the Bamforths’ afterwards, with Raymond Bach and his wife Sylvie, whom David hadn’t seen in decades. We have to admit that the walk back to the hotel, which swithered between The Shining and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, made us wish we’d taken one for the road. Still, with only one more reading scheduled (Glasgow, 15 February) we were pondering a world tour.
The Glasgow event, at Iota on Hyndland Street, was a classic. As one of the poets I won’t comment on the quality of the verse, although the addition of Peter Manson to the line-up certainly contributed to the great variety that people remarked on. His two poems were one outrageous set of instructions on what to do with his cadaver, and a challenging piece that moved from language poetry in and out of logic and narrative. Iota is a small, protean gallery – protean because it is run by two architects who regularly redesign it. On this occasion we were flanked by a huge mural by Rita McGurn, and abetted by one of her life-sized crocheted sculptures, in case we were short of an audience. That turned out not to be the problem, as an estimated 60-65 people squeezed in and stayed. At one stage Duncan Scott, the architect, asked one of the audience to stand at the door and prevent anyone else coming in. The man’s day job is adviser on design to the City of Glasgow, but in his leather jacket he looked the part. Thus it was that the following exchange was heard from a couple who slowed down to see what was attracting the crowd: 'It’s a f*cking poetry reading. And they’ve got a f*cking bouncer!'
Peter McCarey was born in Paisley in 1956 and brought up in Glasgow. He has studied and worked in Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. In 1988 he moved with his family to Geneva. His major audiovisual work The Syllabary, a poem he has been composing since the mid-1990s, can be found at www.thesyllabary.com. Cleikit, a large audio visual collaboration, can be found on www.cleikit.com.
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| Collected Contraptions |
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For the next two weeks, we're giving you 25% off the latest books by the four touring authors: Finger of a Frenchman by David Kinloch, The Crossing Fee by Iain Bamforth, Small World by Richard Price and Collected Contraptions by Peter McCarey.
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