LUSU Online
Printed 9:33pm Monday December 8th 2003
http://www.lusu.co.uk/scan/arts/litfest.html
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Litfest
Sunday 9th November
David Morley first met Roy Fisher when Roy visited David’s school as a writer when David was sixteen. Since then the two have become friends as well as fellow writers which was obvious and made for a friendly reading atmosphere.
David Morley’s poetry was both interesting and vivid with strong description and analysis of human behaviour. It seemed to deal also with connected-ness of objects to events and people. In particular I found his use of run-on description intriguing.
Roy Fisher was genial, witty and highly amusing. Humorously told, Roy’s work was entertaining and engaging. The last part of his reading formed a selection of letters that people have written to Roy and could write about his poetry. Roy took a playful and perhaps slightly satirical look at some of the more absurd questions posed in the letters. I left the event chuckling on a high.
Sunday 9th November
Of the numerous poets within Lancaster’s Literature Festival, only two have special significance to the University. Jacob Polley obtained an MA in Creative Writing from the university, while Whitbread Award-winner Paul Farley now lectures for the same course. Fittingly, the two read together, an eclectic selection of poems both old and new.
One presumes Polley hadn’t performed many public readings, but his apparent inexperience worked to his benefit as his nervous, self-effacing style banished any hint of pretension from his work. His poetry specialised in fresh perspectives, taking fairly mundane rural memories from his childhood in Cumbria and re-imagining them with an evocatively lyrical beauty. ‘Saturday Matinee’ is a case in point, with Polley taking a typical trip to the cinema and restoring the exhilaration that youth once bestowed upon the experience. The poems he chose for the reading were mostly along this vein, with some weightier topics thrown in for good measure such as ‘The North-South Divide’, an amusing yet challenging juxtaposition of England’s poles.
Paul Farley, by contrast, carried an air of confidence about him, and this lent his
poems a greater authority. Starting with ‘The Opposition’, an extremely powerful piece commissioned by LitFest for Remembrance Sunday, Farley varied his selection to a greater degree. Never failing to provoke thought yet often possessing a sly wit, his poems ranged from recollections of schoolyard misery to musings on how the Tate & Lyle treacle tin symbolises a bygone era. Farley always kept the audience enraptured, particularly with more esoteric poems such as ‘Keith Chegwin as Fleance’ and ‘Relic’, a recording of his dentist’s examination of his teeth.
In addition to providing an enjoyable evening, it made me want to read further work by both poets, and I highly recommend you looking them up.
3:30pm, Sunday 16th November
I hadn’t heard either of the names above before reading the Litfest 2003 brochure and so went blindly to the readings last Sunday evening, not sure whether I’d enjoy them at all. And yet before leaving I bought two books and had them signed. The poetry itself was captivating enough but when read out by their architects, captivating became powerful!
Poets Nii Parkes and Ainsley Burrows share the same publisher and so have worked together before, which meant that their recital flowed forcefully towards its conclusion. Instead of reading one after the other they spoke in alternate fifteen-minute slots, which gave the hour a poetic mobility such that you weren’t overwhelmed by the same themes. I could’ve sat for another hour at least listening to their work.
And what honest work it was! Parkes and Burrows take inspiration from memories so personal that I would feel wrong typing them in this review and yet they shared them with such a brutal pride during their readings that, for a brief moment in between the poems final line and the subsequent applause, the room fell silent. They both read with such raw emotion and physical enthusiasm that you felt involved, consumed even within the poetry.
And perhaps the reason why it was absorbed on such a personal level was because the theatre in which Litfest 2003 takes place is such an intimate one: simple lighting, no more than 70 seats (of which barely 30 were taken!), a single lectern and a glass of water on a table… all so close together that you could almost read the poets' notes. The recitals, therefore, were conversational, chatty almost… performed in such close proximity that you couldn’t help but fall inside the words.
It’d be unfair to compare the two poets because, alike as their styles and honesty might be, they were coming at it all from different angles, striking distinctly individual poetic voices. What I would say is that, read together, their work bounced off one another fantastically and in doing so struck an intensely proud ambience.
There’s a passion and emotion in poetry that might not be self-evident in its written form but that flows by intensely when read by it’s writer. Poetry readings seem to lubricate this fluency and so the 8 days ‘celebrating literature’ at The Dukes this year have been (if Parkes and Burrows reading are a standard upon which we can judge) a definite success. Be sure to look out for Litfest 2004.
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