National Poetry Day

http://poetrysociety.org.uk/events/event/1383

National Poetry Day. Well, why not. It's been going for quite a few years now and has managed to organize some worthwhile events or happenings locally here in Portsmouth in that time.
At the Poetry Marathon at the good, old, now no longer Arts Centre in Reginald Road, it might have been circa 1999 or so, I did a slot or two and was approached in the bar by a journalist from the Portsmouth News who was keen to interview a poet who had performed and I was one. It was quite remarkable to see my answers to her questions noted down on one of those spiral-bound pads and she did me no wrong in the feature that appeared. She also wanted to know if I would be around in a while because they were going to get a photographer along to take a picture of an actual poet and wondered if I might be prepared to be that poet. Well, okay. But the photographer wasn't there by the time I wanted to go and so I found the newshound and pointed out a couple of other poets who might like to have their picture in the paper and Denise looked fine and lovely in her hat in the paper when it appeared.
I blame this lack-lustre attitude to publicity for my failure to become a household name, as well as the terrible poems, but now appreciate the benefits of not being famous. I don't know why anyone would ever want to be.
There were other years that Portsmouth had fine events to mark the occasion, readings in the library cafe and once when they took the trouble to cover a building in Fratton with poems written on sheets that billowed slightly in the wind like some thought-provoking, post-modern installation.
This year, why not take advantage of the free event on the South Bank (above), where Simon Armitage will, no doubt, be his usual boy-ish but accomplished self. Ian Duhig is a poet worthy of respect, too, and Dalgit Nagra is a performer worth seeing and might do something in Punjabi for us if we're lucky. It is worth a cheap train ride, a day off and lots of good-natured enjoyment. And if you see a git in a hat, the rule is you must buy him a drink.
Poetry Day always has a 'theme' but it is usually a theme that can be so liberally interpreted that almost any poem can be made to fit it. Once it was 'identity', for example, and I was led to wonder if there had ever been a poem written that hadn't been an attempt by the poet to express their 'identity'. And, having read a few poems in Portsmouth Library with no regard to the theme of 'food', I realized afterwards that I had read Longpig, a poem with an extended double-meaning one of which was cannibalism, and (possibly) also Wine Appreciation and, if wine isn't food exactly, it is surely at its best, food for the soul.
'Home' makes me think firstly of Yeats' Lake Isle of Innisfree and then Auden's About the House and also Andrew Motion's poem that ends on the word but I'm not as well-read as I should be. It also reminds me of my early effort, called Mr. Home, which didn't celebrate the place but pictured a man stuck at home, wishing he was elsewhere. Home is just what you make it. It's also an excuse to go and try to find a little piece of almost 'juvenilia'. I'll post it if it doesn't make me too ashamed to have been its author.