;){kind=link}
Friday ~ Poetry
18.07.2008
Though the all-bloke collective Aisle 16 share compere duties via the irrepressible Luke Wright and Ross Sutherland, the female poetry talent at Latitude is thriving and Friday’s line-up more than testifies to it.
Caroline Bird is a precocious teen who had her first collection published by the prestigious Carcanet Press when she was just fifteen. But her performance skills are razor-sharp too: cutting, witty poems on love, loss and the melodramatic trials of adolescence set-off with a wry sarcasm. Her set is followed by Hannah Walker, a rising performance poet whose insights and subject matter range from men’s underhand chat-up lines to a surreal re-imagining of Big Brother featuring Narcissus as a strangely apt housemate. Only Tall-Lighthouse poet Aoife Mannix can top it, her imagery-rich and metaphorically charged verse combined with a distinctive Irish lilt that has the audience captivated, not least when she launches into a post-punk piece on the virtues of drawing attention to oneself, pace Jenny Joseph’s ‘Warning’. ‘It’s not a crime’, says Mannix, and after her impressive performance, you can’t help but agree.
The highlight of the Poetry Arena today, however, is Carol Ann Duffy, that rare combination of a living poet who is also a household name with oodles of talent to boot. As the tent fills with eager listeners, Duffy reads predominantly from two of her bestselling collections: the post-feminist and brilliantly comic The World’s Wife and her most recent publication of love poems, Rapture. Her style, wit and flair are effortless, but you don’t expect any less when hearing such an experienced writer and reader perform. When she reads ‘Prayer’, her renowned sonnet that offers faith to the faithless, the feeling is of poetry’s ability, in the right hands, to combine profundity with a hard-hitting relevance to everyday, modern life. After Duffy’s set finishes, Luke Wright is gushingly thankful, and in other situations, this might seem like mere pandering or falsity. But Luke Wright knows the importance of Duffy’s work and genuinely respects it, as well as the impact it has had on the poetry of younger writers like himself. Language as common property; poetry as language’s most thought-provoking form. Latitude’s Poetry Arena is something special. Tell me that ain’t beautiful.
Ben Wilkinson
Caroline Bird is a precocious teen who had her first collection published by the prestigious Carcanet Press when she was just fifteen. But her performance skills are razor-sharp too: cutting, witty poems on love, loss and the melodramatic trials of adolescence set-off with a wry sarcasm. Her set is followed by Hannah Walker, a rising performance poet whose insights and subject matter range from men’s underhand chat-up lines to a surreal re-imagining of Big Brother featuring Narcissus as a strangely apt housemate. Only Tall-Lighthouse poet Aoife Mannix can top it, her imagery-rich and metaphorically charged verse combined with a distinctive Irish lilt that has the audience captivated, not least when she launches into a post-punk piece on the virtues of drawing attention to oneself, pace Jenny Joseph’s ‘Warning’. ‘It’s not a crime’, says Mannix, and after her impressive performance, you can’t help but agree.
The highlight of the Poetry Arena today, however, is Carol Ann Duffy, that rare combination of a living poet who is also a household name with oodles of talent to boot. As the tent fills with eager listeners, Duffy reads predominantly from two of her bestselling collections: the post-feminist and brilliantly comic The World’s Wife and her most recent publication of love poems, Rapture. Her style, wit and flair are effortless, but you don’t expect any less when hearing such an experienced writer and reader perform. When she reads ‘Prayer’, her renowned sonnet that offers faith to the faithless, the feeling is of poetry’s ability, in the right hands, to combine profundity with a hard-hitting relevance to everyday, modern life. After Duffy’s set finishes, Luke Wright is gushingly thankful, and in other situations, this might seem like mere pandering or falsity. But Luke Wright knows the importance of Duffy’s work and genuinely respects it, as well as the impact it has had on the poetry of younger writers like himself. Language as common property; poetry as language’s most thought-provoking form. Latitude’s Poetry Arena is something special. Tell me that ain’t beautiful.
Ben Wilkinson
