Poetry. Food. Style.

Last Thursday, October 7, was National Poetry Day here in Great Britain. The theme for this year's NPD? Food. Now, I have a sizable appetite for food and poetry both: if anyone ever forced me at gunpoint to choose between the two, I would cry for reasons having nothing to do with the gun pressed against my head. So to find the two sharing a special day of their own, and a chilly, windy day in October at that, was great fun for me. To celebrate, I ate a hearty lunch at a vegetarian Chinese buffet in the afternoon, and went to a reading hosted by the Poetry Society in the evening. Called "The Magic Ingredient" and held at the Magic Theatre -- literally, a swanky theater just for magicians, those lucky bastards -- it featured three readers I had never heard of, because during my education at the University of Pittsburgh the contemporary poets I read were mainly American. Well, there's so many of them!

First up -- Michael Rosen, a writer of poetry for children and adults who, if he were a food, would be a chickpea. Feel free to analyze that one. In his human form he is tall and lanky, with that basketball belly that many thin men grow in middle age. Rosen writes mostly prose poems, although he said, as way of apology to those who dislike the term, "If that makes you unhappy, you can call them 'things.'" His "things" were mainly autobiographical, short, and witty, and he read them in the dry, self-deprecating tones of a true Brit. I think fans of Billy Collins would enjoy him very much. Here's a short one:

The cat's ignoring me. Which means that I'm ignoring the cat. Which
means that I'm not.

Precisely.

Next, and the star of the evening as far as I'm concerned, was Jean Binta Breeze. She's tall, buxom and has a killer Caribbean accent. Several times, while she read, she would begin to sing the words of the poem, caught up in her own rhythm, and she closed her part of the reading with a song. Her poetry paints a vivid picture of life in the Caribbean and in the West Indian communities in London, using rich imagery: "His hands were working hands. Spread out on the table, they became maps."

Finally, Andrew Motion came up to read. It's clear why he is the poet laureate -- he's articulate, thoughtful, and writes a very respectable, academic poetry. Quite a contrast, though, after the two previous colorful readers. Perhaps, in the metaphorical meal of this reading, you would call him the after-dinner cup of tea. He read several poems from a short series written within the last year, called "Twitching," about different kinds of birds, often exploring the importance of conservation. Hang on, it wasn't that heavy -- in fact, his language is very precise and delicate, and he is quite capable of writing naturally in forms like the sonnet. "Stone slabs scored like the palms of our hands." Almost sounds like a very pretty tongue-twister. Altogether, I'd say the reading was just as satisfying as a full meal and a glass of wine, although sadly, there was no food at the reading itself. Maybe someday I'll host my own version.

*

Saturday was a full day of gallavanting about town with my flatmates. In the morning we headed up to Camden Market, which is in Camden Town, an area just north of central London where lots of students live. Consequently it's noisy and a bit run-down, and the weekend market itself is like flypaper for tourists, but once you pass all the "Lousy t-shirts" and London Underground underwear, not to mention the twelve billion Johnny Depp and Scarface posters, you can find some good stuff. For instance, my flamate M. and I purchased lovely matching headwrap/headband thingies for a fabulous £2 each. Yeah, okay, it's all crap you don't need, but it's fun -- and there's some great curry for cheap by the canal, which is even better on a brisk autumn day.

After lunch and a bit more walking around, we made our way back towards Bloomsbury to a pub called Scream -- not nearly as interesting as it sounds -- to catch the England/Wales football (soccer) game. And we lasted about ten minutes. It's fun to watch everybody in the pub, men and women alike, stare entranced at the huge flat-screen and scream or moan at every goal made, but it's not that fun, especially if you yourself couldn't care less about soccer. And by you, I mean me. So where did we go instead? That's right, a museum. This time, the Victoria and Albert Museum, a museum for "art and design" in South Kensington. At this point it was late afternoon, so we took a quick spin around the South Asian section -- quite an impressive collection of Indian painting, textiles, and stone- and marble-carved deities -- and then headed upstairs to check out the new exhibition, "Black British Style." (October is Black History Month in the U.K. Also, it's not Columbus Day here today. It's fun to rediscover the arbitrary nature of holidays.) For anyone with even a slight interest in fashion or hip hop or black history since WWII, this exhibit is worth the £6. All of the clothes are donated by people associated with various movements or moments -- the mass postwar migration from Africa, the Nation of Islam, church communities, hip hop, and so on. And the people at the V&A are smart -- they know that at the end of an exhibit, everybody wants to sit down, so to close theirs they show a short film, which had in particular some great footage of the Notting Hill Carnival, held in high summer. We didn't catch all of it, because we were pretty much chased out of the museum by some very tired employees.

Frankly, we were pretty tired ourselves at that point, so we headed home for some stir-fry, a bottle of cheap red wine from the off-licence (that's "liquor store" to you Yanks), and an old episode of Poirot. I'm in the land of my favorite television mysteries! It's amazing. I spent the whole of Sunday reading in my house. Some traditions I won't break, no matter where I live.