News

October 31, 2009

Poetic Licence

Filed under: General News — Charlie @ 10:15 pm

Let’s not thump around the shrubbery:on the face of it, spending an evening listening to twenty-four amateur poets reading their own work wouldn’t be high on most people’s list of ideas for great Saturday night out.

Last weekend I was in Loughrea, Co Galway, having been invited to speak at this year’s Baffle Poetry festival. I was, I confess, surprised to be asked as, as anyone who has read anything I’ve written will point out, there ain’t nuthin’ poetic about what I do. Now, I’m a massive fan of poetry, and some of you will probably have heard the programme I made for Radio 4 last year about Noel Coward’s poetry, but I really am no poet. Not even close. One look at my twelve-year old’s Emu poem confirms this. Could they, I wondered, have mixed me up with someone else?

But the organisers reassured me it was me they wanted so last Saturday I headed down to Galway on the train and found myself in a small and crowded pub waiting to hear the second heat of the competition.

The standard was amazing. Utterly amazing. A whole range of people passed in front of the microphone to read their work, and there was not one stinker among them. A whole range of styles and subject matter were covered under the broad umbrella of the competition’s theme ‘turning a blind eye’ and I was absolutely blown away by the quality of the pieces.

In addition, the quality of the performances was immense. There is probably no more personal form of writing than poetry. There’s nowhere to hide in a poem; it’s very nature exposes the creator in the most human way possible. Committing a poem to paper is a personal enough achievement: to stand up and read it out to a room full of strangers even more so. As someone who’s done more than my fair share of talking to rooms full of strangers, I still find it initmidating; many of these people were doing it for the first time - with their own poems. The confidence and accomplishment with which they all, without exception, pulled it off left me dumbstruck with admiration.

The following day I spoke at a brunch as part of the festival, and thank goodness I went on before Vinnie Capaldi’s moving, personal and emotional account of his friendship with the half-blind local boxing champion Michael Farrell -who inspired the ‘turning a blind eye’ theme - because nobody could have followed that.

That evening the sixteen finalists read their poems to a massive room full of people at the Loughrea Hotel. Again, the performances were outstanding, and how the judge, the wonderfully gifted poet James Harpur, was able to pick a winner I’ll never know.

But pick one he did, and you can read Peter Goulding’s winning poem here. It displays terrific wit and rhythm and is the work of someone who thinks about words a lot - their sound, their meaning, their rhythm and rhyme, and adapts them wonderfully well.

A terrific, enlightening, educational and humbling weekend. All hail the Baffle poets.

News

October 31, 2009

Poetic Licence

CATEGORIES

ARCHIVES

SEARCH