Just back from poetry night at the Lansdown, Bristol. Like all gatherings, there were exactly the right number of people there. Poets of every shape, gender and size, all shot through with the enthusiasm that afflicted every poet from Homer to Ginsberg, all sharing the delusion that is is poossible to make sense out of noises emitted from the human larynx. A dizzying melee of images, a welter of thought words sound pictures and feeling, all free of charge, all charged with freedom. Edward had a mermaid dissected before our horrified and fascinated eyes, a philosopher found time frozen in a piece of wood, Peter took us from the very depths of interstellar space to the breakfast table and back again, Helen Gregory reminded us that Winnie the Pooh and Piglet had been kidnapped by the Mob. Living structures of language, some finely shaped and polished to the last degree, some still covered in blood and meconium; once a fine long period of extended silence, zipped with the monotone of the refrigerator behind the bar.
As Shakespeare said,
"The poet, lover and the hanglider
are of imagination all compact"
But that's all right because, as Pink Floyd said, we're mad, we know we're mad, we're supposed to be mad.
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