What?  Two posts in a row, I can hear you ask. Yes, well, I know it’s very unusual, but I did want to have a little chat about yesterday’s celebration of National Poetry Day and the 100th Anniversary of The Poetry Society at the Royal Festival Hall

I had no idea what to expect.  I suppose I thought it would be a closed room upstairs somewhere with people taking turns at the mic while the audience comes and goes (“talking of Michaelangelo”…sorry, how could I resist? He was just chosen Britain’s favourite poet, after all).  So I enjoyed the autumn sun and took a leisurely stroll across the Hungerford Bridge (thanks to freefoto for the image). By the time I got there, I found the huge foyer filled with people of all ages and descriptions, the largest being a group of schoolkids in the front rows.  Carol Ann Duffy was already at the mic, reading some of her funniest poems in her most deadpan, sardonic way.  She read one of my favourites, “Mrs. Faust” from her

collection of “The World’s Wife.”
I’ve heard her read that before.  It’s always a crowd pleaser.  Once she had finished I found a seat and realized that I was watching a sort of poetry burlesque, with mc’s talking fast and loud, introducing “acts” like Lemn Sissay and his rap/poems, Anjan Saha and Lost Luggage with their jazz poetry combos.  This was not really a poetry reading.  This was not meant to be a serious look at poetry today.  This was meant to be fun.  And it was.  I thoroughly enjoyed myself and I especially loved seeing both John Hegley and Roger McGough doing their best stand up routines.
     But I did leave feeling strangely dissatisfied.  I don’t want to criticize because the organizers clearly had the aim of showing young people that poetry can be meaningful to their lives and that they themselves can participate in it.  And that is a subject dear to my heart and at the core of all the teaching that I’ve done.  There was even the opportunity for everyone to take part in the Global Poetry System (GPS), the world’s first user-generated map of poetry launched by the Southbank Centre.  It’s an amazing project that you can read about here.  So what was my problem?  Maybe because it all felt just too light.  Yes, poetry is fun, must be fun.  But it is also important, and not only as a way to keep kids engaged with language.  I guess, for all of yesterday’s laughter, what I missed were those “a ha” moments that a poem can give you, that moment when someone else’s words reach into your own heart and take up residence.  There was none of that yesterday, and I would hope that people new to poetry would have a chance to understand that, at its best, that is what poetry can do for you, namely help you to understand yourself and widen your world through language.
     But the Poetry Gods must have heard my silent ramblings as I sat on the tube mulling all this over.  With two stops to go, I looked up towards the tube map on the train wall and saw one of the Poems on the Underground.  Clear, crisp, right there waiting for me.  Earlier in the week I had gone to a reading celebrating the launch of  the new collection, “Best Poems on the Underground.”  Szirtes, Cope, Shapcott and others reading their own contributions plus other favourite poems from the past 25 years that had been chosen for the anthology.  That was a wonderful, inspirational evening, and as I’ve ridden the tube over the past few days I’ve been on the lookout for one.  Then there it was, yesterday on the District Line Train, on my way home from Poetry Day.  The selection was perfect, a poem seemingly simple, fun, mundane but also beautiful and, dare I say, important.  Here it is:

This Is Just To say

I have eaten

the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

       William Carlos Williams