Swindon Literature Festival

Reporting live from Swindon.

I'd done well, I thought, was well ahead of schedule, to have finished the Times crossword by the time the train got to Warminster. 13 Down, Artist outlining second capital city, a fine thing to hang (8,3), begins with M and N, answer at the bottom. So I had to look through the rest of the paper for some more entertainment.

As it was the obituaries provided an account of James Kirkup's colourful life which is worth looking up, as well as news of Derek Walcott's withdrawal from the Oxford Professor of Poetry election, which is on Saturday. The slightly dubious circumstances of this late surrender cast a shadow over what small topic of conversation one might make with Ruth as she signs a book for my collection. One could hardly ask if it was friends of hers that had brought to light again the allegations against Walcott at this most inconvenient juncture.

Swindon Arts Centre is a pleasant little venue within walking distance of my sister's house and so a trip up for the evening on which two poets are booked to do their separate shows is becoming a new fixture in my calendar. I have thought previously of Simon Armitage as a sort of yardstick among contemporary poets. Honourable, fine and user-friendly without being a spectacular favourite. His best stuff is good and any poet better than him is one that I would usually buy at least some of their books but those falling below the Armitage standard are in danger of being regarded as ordinary.
His performance here changed that perception quite radically, though. He is genuinely funny in his deadpan, Northern way, much more 'intelligent' than I thought and the poems are more consistently deeper than the hip cleverness that one might think of in the younger Simon. He is a practised, almost elegant performer with a nice stock of stories and chat. The only downside is the baggage that comes with his latest book, Gig, the theme of which is how poets are really frustrated rock stars. Well, we are much better than that, thank you very much, and by the time we are in our mid-40's we should have got over it. But Armitage is a good lad, reading some time-honoured older pieces, like You May Turn Over and Begin, an extract from his translation of Gawain and newer poems, including a fine one that conflates the characters of a giant panda and Ringo Starr to considerable effect. He exceeded my expectations, is much better than a yardstick poet and so now I need a new yardstick. I might try to do that job myself for a while.

During the Q&A, it looked for a moment if the audience were tongue-tied or unable to think of a suitable question and one doesn't want it to get embarrassing so I considerately saved the day by asking if he thought it was about time we had a bloke for poet laureate. Luckily, several of the audience realized the droll intent of the question and Simon wisely played a straight bat to it and just said, 'no.'

Ruth Padel's presentation was a guided tour of highlights from her new book about her great, great grandfather, Darwin, a Life in Poems. Interesting enough as biography, it was tempting at times to wonder if the poetry didn't suffer for having been written to order in such a way and at such length. Without the low-key chat in between poems that Armitage had benefitted from, it came across in comparison as rather serious and scholarly. Ruth Padel is not really a forbidding figure but her reading here was unwittingly more in the form of an illustrated lecture.

I have long been fairly keen on the idea that there is no such thing as 'women's poetry', that the idea is a construct of women poets but that in fact nouns, verbs and adjectives function in exactly the same way whether assembled by ladies or gentlemen. But I wonder. Darwin will no doubt be reviewed here in due course when I've done more than flick through it. But there might be a case for resurrecting some old gender stereotypes to suggest in some vague way that some women write more intuitive, emotionally descriptive, intangible poetry while men, in Virginia Woolf's phrase, wield a more 'arid scimitar'. I hope it isn't so and any differentiation is likely to be so vague and circumstantial as to be meaningless but who can tell.

The Swindon Literature Festival is a worthy event, not quite as famous as Ledbury or Hay-on-Wye, but convenient for me and I can now start looking forward to seeing which poets they book for next May. It's been well worth it so far.

Crossword answer- Mosquito Net.