Ledbury, Cornbury, Glastonbury and now Ty Newydd. A week with Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke. By the sea ... miles from anywhere.

 

This will be a change from Friday Night: a gig where Annie Freud organised a rip-roaring evening of poetry and belly-dancing at the Scooter cafe in Waterloo where they live in a delicious time-warp and really DO serve motor lube and/or Southern Comfort behind the bar. It took me a while to recover from Annie’s introduction: ‘Jacqui Saphra, a mistress of erotica’. Of course I did share the stage with some fantastic poets, a singer, an actress reading Auden and a belly dancer.

 

Too much to do really, with the editing of the new Magma,  trips to various ‘Bury’s’ and trying to do the final edits on my pamphlet from Flarestack due out in September after two years of waiting. I sent a panicked email to Charles Johnson the editor, saying I’d omitted one poem I really wanted to put in, and got a charming response: ‘Whoah there, are you getting in a state?’ Of course I WAS getting in a state  and of course the poem was there, I just hadn’t seen it.

 

I hope that Ty Newydd will provide a chance to hunker down, think about pure poetry and my own work, and challenge myself. But forget about organising poetry events, doing readings and poetry admin and just get on with the business of writing.

 

I can’t let the week go by without mentioning the gorgeousness of Leonard Cohen at the O2 centre: ‘Last time I was in London was about 13 years ago when I was sixty, just a young kid with a crazy dream’.

 

Sublime moments with Lennie, three hours-worth. Genius lyrics:

 

‘Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in’