Top 6 - Poetry Readings

I'm not in London tonight for Seamus Heaney's reading and it will serve as a lesson to me not to leave the internet unscrutinized for quite so long ever again but what can you do.
What I thought I could do instead is look back on the best poetry readings I've ever been to, as some sort of compensation.
In the early 90's, it must have been, Portsmouth actually had a literature festival or two and the highlight of them must have been Paul Durcan in the third floor room of the library building, holding his audience on an emotional tightrope between laughter and tears with the cliff-edge reading of his poems. That propellor he left in Bilbao became magical and you really wouldn't have thought that an unassuming bloke in a woolly jumper could be quite so spell-binding. Guilt and dysfunction seemed to be a part of the horror but detachment and irony meant it was an effort to question one's impulse to laugh out loud. I've never seen anything quite like it since.
Although last year's appearance by August Kleinzahler in the LRB bookshop was in many ways just as special, an opportunity to see the great man that I successfully searched out having doubted that I'd ever get the chance. Like Durcan, one appreciates the performance made possible by the voice and the added power of being in the presence of a real performer when one is so used to reading poems from the page often with no idea of the poet's reading voice.
The same might be said of Carol Ann Duffy who I eventually witnessed at the Larkin conference in Hull in 1997, the most memorable effect being the dark sarcasm of her World's Wife poems like Mrs. Midas.
Possibly all three of these readers almost scared one into appreciation of their meaning, with an intensity of performance even if it did seem relaxed and low-key in ambience and surroundings. You get precious little sense of the potential power and personality of such poems on paper and this is an entirely different thing to the pop, stand-up tradition of 'performance' poetry which isn't the same thing at all.
Which, already, leaves me with only three places to allocate to as many as a dozen candidates, not being allowed to mention near misses, so I must be careful.
Paul Muldoon appeared at the Poetry International in London in 1999 just after the publication of Hay. I waited for an autograph in the interval while he spoke to someone much more important than me. While he dutifully gave me a sample of his scrawl, I managed to stammer that I'd reviewed his book for the Acumen Poetry Book Review Competition and that he could read it when it won. He said he'd look forward to that so I hope he did when I was more shocked and stunned than anyone else to find that it actually had. But it isn't the anecdote that gets him into the Top 6, it's another wonderful, charismatic reader of word magic, something that I don't really believe in until I hear it done.
Since the last selection is ear-marked for a traditional sixth choice in this Top 6 feature, fifth place has a calamity of candidates all pushing their claims for attention but I'll avoid the claims of laureates past and future, heroes of mine who couldn't find the poem I had asked if they were going to read and go back to the school assembly where Linden Huddlestone read Sometimes a Lantern by Gerard Manley Hopkins in funereal tribute to our teacher, W.G.F. Bradford because, as spine-tingling moments go, it was an early experience, a tremendous poem and as gripping and moving a thing as a 16 or 17 year old could expect to hear.
But having taken the train from Lancaster to Cambridge in November 1979 to see Thom Gunn, I'm not going to leave him out now. He read Bally Power Play and presumably much else from The Passages of Joy but, honestly, now my memories of the reading are somewhat dispersed. But I was surprised to be the only one straight up to him to ask him to sign my copy of Touch. He commented that it was his favourite cover design of all his books but I was too overawed, aged 20, to engage in conversation. Isn't it ever the way.