Why must poetry be so scuzzy? I love the Poetry Cafe, dilapidated and in need of an overhaul though it is. If you leave the air conditioning on downstairs, you can’t hear the poets. If you turn the air conditioning off, you get into a mutual sweat situation. Sometimes all the lights don’t work, and the sound system is a bit hit an miss. If you put the microphone stand below a certain height, it gradually droops like a ... like a ... no, I won’t say it.

 

Upstairs, one man runs the cafe; sometimes there’s food and sometimes there isn’t. You can never tell.

 

Oh, and the entrance to the reading space downstairs doesn’t have a door, it has a curtain. So if people are chatting upstairs, you can hear every word.

 

But the Cafe is a brilliant resource and their cappuccinos are not bad. You can sit in there and play Scrabble, or read periodicals, or meet friends. You can lease it at a very reasonable rate for readings and workshops are successfully run upstairs. So of course we are glad it’s there, we’d just like a little upgrade. If only some kindly millionaire would donate a couple of million, think what we could do. My current favourite daydream is that I have say fifty million squids at my disposal and I open an Arts Centre. Imagine.

 

Poetry really is the Cinderella of the arts - a minority interest of course - a weird aberration. But a young woman came up to me in the pub after The Shuffle and asked if she could send me some poems, just starting to ‘get excited’ about poetry, wanting to get involved. If poetry does grab you by the throat, it’s gorgeous, it’s miraculous, it changes your life in ways you might not anticipate; you can never quite shake it off, which is both a blessing and a curse. I wanted to tell her that, but by the time I thought of it, I was halfway home. I gave her my card and maybe she’ll look at my blog sometime and see this. Isn’t technology wonderful?