Alight touch and laureates

In the car: The Stranglers, Giants

On the page: Brian May:The definitive Biography, Laura Jackson

Where I'm at: Poetry Alight and Staffs Laureate Inauguration

Onscreen: Avengers Assemble

In the ether: Litter magazine

Poetry Alight at the Spark Cafe at Lichfield is one of my personal favourite events. The quality of the invited poets is as good as any I have attended, the open mic slots are filled by many of my favourite poets from East and West Midlands, but the atmosphere is open, friendly and supportive enough for new readers not to feel intimidated.

This Tuesday was no exception. There was a diversity of styles, ages and experience that retained and revitalised the listener's interest across the whole evening.

In reviewing the evening I will attempt to give a flavour of this, any mis-quotes, mis-spellings or other mistakes are entirely mine.

Our host, Gary Longden, kicked the night off in style with From Stretford to Stratford, a well balanced piece about his Olympic journey from ambivalence about the event to enthusiasm. He was followed by incoming Staffordshire Laureate Mal Dewhirst with an extract from his epic All sides of the shire, which will be performed in full at his inauguration on 4th October at Lichfield library. Mal also explained a little about his ideas on the role of the laureate.

Jayne Stanton, a regular at many events in the Midlands and recently returned from a poetry exchange visit to Cork, gave us two short pieces. The first, a slightly surreal piece about holes, gave us the wonderful view that "If holes cannot exist without a host/then that makes them parasites

The next two readers, Dwane Reads and Mark Anthrobus are from opposite ends of the experience spectrum, but both gave us social commentaries. Dwane's Druggie on the roof is a well observed slice of estate life based on a real incident, while Mark gave us poems on food additive addiction and social ostracism. 

Known for his gothic fantasy pieces, Ian Ward initially gave us a lighter piece Meeting Mr. Neville, with a very literal interpretation of the Faustian deal that TV talent show competitors enter into, before returning to his darker roots in the second piece.

The first guest poet of the night was Roy Marshall, who read mainly from his collection, Gopagilla. His set was a tour de force of short snappy slices of life, eleven poems in ten minutes. Favourites? Gopagilla, Rose, Dandytime which contains the wonderful lines "His gift to me,/ the long forgotten tempo/ of a boy's life", Relic and No signals available which begins with the phrase "The sky is unmanned". 

Closing the first section, Deborah Tyler-Bennett managed the difficult task of following Roy with aplomb. Tahiti is a poetic travelogue and more; Tell Me, from a sequence about London's ghosts, paints a misty and evocative picture of the city and Jimmy and Steph - a reunion of the couple from Quadrophenia many years after the events in the film.

Deborah also showed her lighter side with Horse and himself about the 19th century's "maddest man in Britain", Me and Mr Smith based on an 18th Century "Gentleman's Annual" about London whorehouses and Cheerful revisited which is a tribute to Ian Dury's song; a rhyming list poem with many references to Dury's other song lyrics.

Paul Francis kicked off the second section in style with Screws, a wonderful and satirical piece about Sunday scandal sheets and the Leveson enquiry. First timer Lucy Beth followed with three untitled angst filled poems, the last of which had the memorable lines "We are 60% water. Mine has been salted/ and pushed from behind blackened lashes". 

Experience again came to the stage with Penny Hewlett, whose second poem Bostar beach was a beautiful sonnet set on the Isle of Lewes, which became a meditation on aloneness at the turn.

Chesterfield poet Tony Keeton, introduced as a master of the surreal, did not disappoint. His first poem, Fly tipping, was a study of drunken student spiders on a night out, tipping a fly onto its back. His second, a tribute to Neil Armstrong, contained one of the most vivid images of the night "the stained-glass Earth turning, solid as a thought, against the sun". Tony is one of the best kept secrets of the Derbyshire poetry scene and deserves a much wider audience.

David Calcutt had requested a slightly longer spot than the normal three minutes to perform Tears for Achilles. Lichfield poets duly obliged and we were treated to a five minute meditation on, in order, the extacy of killing, the metamorphosis of death, destruction as a measure of godhead and the vulnerability that drives the ultimate soldier. A beautiful and well crafted poem and performance.

David was followed by the final two guest poets. On first, Emma Purshouse, organiser of Bilston Voices open mic. Emma gave us comedy of a quality that reminds an audience the abbreviation lol has a real meaning. Introducing herself with the short, sharp observation of Welcoming the poet  and continuing with The art school and your picnic is always the same faces a list poem of artists "William Blake had baked a special kind of cake", observing that there were no women amongst the artists taught at school. No subject was too odd to be tackled, from Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway on Jeremy Kyle, using only quotes from the bard, through how picking up butts can get you into hot water, to Jumpers for frogs.

Final guest Paul McDonald, a lecturer in creative writing, also picked on Shakespeare. Shakespeare is barred, is a list of the imagined problems he might cause, "I managed to shut him up before the skinheads closed in". He followed this with Tall story, about a girlfriend who starts growing at an exponential rate until "I live in her navel, now", continued with Catch a falling tortoise and finished with Loft Insulation about giving cold callers the order of a lifetime, including "... border seals, electric eels dreaming of hell".

The final section was a short finishing blast with just three poets. Janet Jenkins gave us two poems from her Dig the Abbey  set, Off to the past and A nun's anguish. The latter a story of a buried nun disturbed by the digging and modern life's "iPods and ice cream, webcams and wellies".

Penultimate reader Tracey Owen runs an event in Stone, but was new to the Spark. Tracey read two poems, Look into your soul and a rousing Big fish, little fish, about a heavy night out in Stoke. Finally, Lichfield poet Tom Wyre gave a moving performance of his remembrance poem 11/11/11 and Timeslip, a love lost, or perhaps never found, poem of missed meetings.

The next Poetry Alight will be on 19th February 2013 at the Spark Cafe in Lichfield.