poetry goes to college

As the last few entries show the weather around here has put poetry activities on hold. I would have liked to get to last Thursday’s Crossing the Line reading featuring Peter Philpott and Trevor Joyce but since the last train out of London for these parts left around 9.30 this wasn’t really possible (and since both readers were coming from elsewhere I’m not entirely sure whether or not the reading went ahead). Yesterday afternoon I was fortunate enough to get a lift in to Eltham College with Ian Brinton where he took part together with Will Rowe and Lee Harwood in a session devoted to Lee’s work. It’s immensely gratifying that a poet of Lee’s stature has finally made it onto the reading lists for the upper sixth. Lee read a range of pieces from forty years work then Will Rowe contextualised the work making the important point that modernism was by no means a finished project. Ian Brinton zoned in on a particular poem (‘For Paul/Coming out of Winter’). There was time at the end for questions and these, coming mostly from the students, were heartening in their openness to experience. Thanks to their own readings and to the efforts of their teachers the poetry world was not, for them, the closed shop it has become for so many others.