22/09/2024
I had a fun day at the Ripon Poetry Festival yesterday. I was going mainly to hear my friends Joe Williams and Ian Clarke read at events, and to read a poem of my own that’s been published in the festival anthology. As chance would have it I discovered Joe & Ian were both on the same 36 bus when I boarded in Harrogate. I thought all the scheduled readers were very good but Joe was certainly the star of the day, performing a good half hour of wit and pathos completely from memory. I also paid a surprise visit to a long-lost cousin in Ripon, whose address I had discovered in one of my mum’s address books when I was clearing out her flat last year. I’ve only seen her a couple of times since she was a baby and not for over 20, years, but she’s a really nice lady now and we had a coffee and a catch-up on news of our wider family, with her husband and teenage son. Another bonus of the day was when I popped in for quick look around Ripon Minster between events, and I discovered the Royal Northern Symphonia were in there rehearsing for a concert in the evening, so I sat in the pews and enjoyed 10 minutes of Tchaikovsky for free. I’ve posted my poem here - I don’t normally do that with anthologised poems straight away because the idea is you buy the anthology to read it, but it strikes me as the kind of book that will never be read by anyone except the people in it. It’s a poem I once had high hopes for as a potential prize winner so it’s been entered into countless competitions over quite a few years, but it’s the first time I’ve read it in public. It’s at the obscurest extreme of my oeuvre so I’m not sure if any judges have fully understood it, but I’m glad Lily has found a home now!
