Back in York, we have been having the York Literary Festival, which is definitely not a festival anything like Edinburgh, though I understand some Edinburgh Fringe events also get audience numbers in the negative if you discount grandparents, WAGS. Highlight of that sort was the Exhibition pub open mic on tour — first to York Central Library at 9.30 am on Saturday, where we had perhaps 7 poets and an audience of 4, beaten only by attendance at the Acomb Learning Centre (aka Acomb Library) on Monday night where we had 7 poets and no audience at all.
In case we should have thought that this was the audience for poetry in York, it was encouraging /depresssing to note that Carol Ann Duffy filled the Lyons Concert Hall to bursting on Thursday night and that half of the audience were undergraduates ! Many of whom laughed in the right places. C.A.D. was great, though she didn’t read anything very new — excerpts from the Laughter of Stafford Girls High (?) and some from the Worlds Wife and Rapture. An excellent hours worth. And she reads professionally and well — with some well practised pauses and sharp glances to point up some particularly waspish observation.
Normality was restored on Monday night at the Black Swan, where some mostly drab and mediocre performances (some of them by people who can be sparkling) attracted a spiffing audience of 10. (I was audience for this one, not performer). Mind you, they did have competition from the York Pagan Society meeting downstairs. Someone, not a pagan, was the second personin 48 hours to recommend I listen to early Bjork — must be something in the air.
I did go to a very interesting talk(not part of the literary festival) at the Railway Museum by Christian Wolmar, who wrote the excellent history of railways in Britain which I was given and had recently read. His main thesis is that it’s mostly governments that have screwed up the railways, never more so than currently, and he loathes the effects of privatisation as much as I do. He doesn’t think there was ever a golden age of railways, but that the final years of British Rail came pretty near it — I tend to agree.
[ I understand that many York Literary Festival events have been excellent — but Sean O’Brien’s dictum about poets and poetry is borne out again — unless you’re C.A.D.].
