Musings of a Performance Poet - reading between the airlines
The Poetry Café in Covent Garden also has regular readings which are held in a downstairs salon under the café. A crowd of about 70 was crammed into the place the night I was there, an international mix of students, travelers, refugees and Irishmen. The master of ceremonies introduced me as "a famous poet from Australia", which was only slightly less embarrassing than what had happened in Kentish Town the night before where the MC had thanked "Billy Stonehenge for his palpably exotic pieces."
I should've known - London was too closely connected to Australia for me to ever find respite there. So I didn't feel all that bad cutting short my stay. On my way to catch the train to Paris, I had the misfortune of getting a cabbie who was a born-again Christian and who spent most of our 45-minutes together telling me why I should have Jesus in my life, if not in my poetry. Part of me said he had a serious evangelical side to him; another part told me he was a murderer. It was a big relief when he finally dropped me off safely at Victoria Station.
My presence in Paris coincided with the 15th annual Marche de la Poesie in Place St Sulpice - a four-day, open-air poetry market where poets and poetry lovers, editors and critics, publishers and translators, gather to hear, read, sell, argue and celebrate poetry. There are scores of bookstalls, poster and postcard vendors, little-magazine people, calligraphy artists, discussion groups and performances of poetry from midday until midnight, most of it housed under canvas in a virtual tent-city.
Eventually, I made my way to the outdoor bar, strategically erected next to where the poets were reading. Black poets, feminist poets, jazz poets, anti-poets. There was a remarkable variety of styles, and not only French poetry, but French translations of Chinese, Bosnian and Latin American poets as well. The only Australian poetry I saw was a single, thin volume by Mark Henshaw in French translation. I sat at the bar and pretended I understood everything that was being said. Some of it I actually did understand. But overall I was beginning to feel more the idiot than the poet - language was suddenly something I no longer had access to. All my eloquence lost, reduced to phrase book. On the way home, it began to rain and I stopped under the canvas awning of
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