Poets are wonderful creatures. There’s a marvellous subversive element to our collective consciousness, and when we feel threatened or taken for granted, as we so often do, we rise up and make our voices heard. Yesterday’s new poetry festival held in London’s Exmouth Market was a fantastic example of such a poetic uprising. This was the brainchild of Charles Boyle of CB Editions, and was conceived as a response to the funding cuts last March.  Charles said it best in the festival’s program:
    Writing is not being cut — and the job of making the most interesting, innovative, inspiring writing available to readers is still largely that of the smaller presses. They are flexible; their overheads are minimal; they are run, most of them, by people who are mad — which is in fact their strength, because their madness is a form of obsession not with money but with the use of language, which is where it all starts. This book fair celebrates the variety and vitality of contemporary poetry by bringing together…twenty-two independent presses.


In a large church hall, these 22 presses set up tables offering their wares — books, pamphlets, competition information, and hours worth of literary chatting and hobnobbing. Two flights up, 30-minute readings were presented every hour or so, and Ward Wood, the newest kid on the block I think, was given the first slot. I was thrilled to be able to read from my collection alongside Peter Phillips who read from his newly published collection, No School Tie.

Michael Horovitz

After our reading, the fair was officially opened by the visionary, inimitable Michael Horovitz, who sang, read, harangued and kazooed his way through a mesmerising thirty minute slot. I was thrilled to have noticed him sitting in the audience and smiling during my reading, and then when he mentioned “Sue from Ward Wood” in his talk, I was completely gobsmacked. It gave me the courage to go up and chat with him, and we exchanged poetry books. A personal high of the day’s events. But I know lots of people had lots of similar exchanges all day long, re-meeting old friends, coming face to face with people we had only known (though intimately) on Facebook, shaking hands and chatting with people whose books we have loved, whose work we have admired from afar, whose vision we have shared. Other than Michael, I was also thrilled to meet for the first time Tom Chivers of Penned in the Margins, Chris Hamilton-Emery of Salt, and Tim Love from HappenStance. It was also great to meet up again and chat with Katy Evans-Bush, published by Rack Press (though also by Salt and Penned in the Margins and probably others I’m forgetting to mention).  And now as I’m reading other bloggers’ reports on the event, I’m kicking myself over other people whom I would  have loved to say hi to, but didn’t get the chance.

Thanks to Adele Ward for asking me along and being her usual inexhaustible self. Let’s hope this becomes an annual event. Free Verse really did show that, in case anyone was wondering, contemporary poetry is still very much alive and well on these shores, not only among poets themselves, but among readers as well.