Clean pants, please

Last week I read at the Troubadour (she said casually), the most famous basement in English poetry. I was one of many voices there to launch the new edition of Magma, which I’m in (she said casually) so it was a feast of at least thirty poets.

This edition of Magma seems to have brought together everyone I’ve ever met in poetry world – Anne Caldwell and Clive McWilliams from the north, Alison Brackenbury and Lawrence Sail from the south west, Charles Bennett now of Northants. In the audience were friends including Daljit Nagra and Derek Adams. And there were plenty of  voices I didn’t know – Christopher James, the brilliant Imtiaz Darkher and others. I was chuffed to see how many people read from memory, and what a difference it made when they did. I can’t always remember my poems but I do try.

There was a warm and perhaps slightly too cosy feeling that we were all part of poetry world. It was a reminder of how damn small that world is. Here, in London at a well-established venue, the place was packed with about 70 bodies, but even so they were mainly readers and their friends – no non-converts as far as i could see. The audience for live literature is still small, and we need to keep broadening it by making every performance as good as possible.

One thing I was struck by is what people were wearing; even the most accomplished poets shambled up to the mike in scruffy t-shirts and trainers. I’m not suggesting that we should all shimmy up to the mike in a ballgown (though it always looks well on Sara-Jane Arbury of Spiel) but if we are presenting ourselves as an act on a stage, surely we owe it to the audience to look as if we’ve brushed our hair and put clean pants on?