A Tuesday Six Pack

Tuesday Evening

The "overnights" are never easy - those first cut reviews of the night before's "show" - but at least with this week's events they're delicious one-offs, be there or its gone. With 3 poets tonight in Norwich Millennium library our accompaniment this time was a jazz band tuning up. Libraries used to be built with walls as thick as castle keeps, but in our "open plan" present, everything runs into each other. Never mind, for another packed audience came along for C.K. Williams, Gwyneth Lewis and Adam Zagajewski, each given a rounded 20 minutes. There's all kinds of poetry readings, of course, but twenty minutes, just poetry, with three poets of intelligence and reputation, is perhaps an unbeatable model. They all commented wryly on the theme of "nature", since poets, good ones at least, don't write to theme - but it's rare to find a poet who hasn't seen something in the natural world to admire. Zagajewski read in translation, except for a short poem he read both in Polish and English, and the value of having a regular translator could be seen when he gave us a very recent poem, freshly minted, freshly translated. Williams half name-checked his Polish friend in one of his new poems; the opportunity to read something new - as well as something old - one of the advantages of the "twenty minute set." The last poem he read was a parade of his personal saints - yet, these saints were poets, a reminder of how art itself can have the power of the spiritual. Whilst Lewis gave us a mix of poems, some sad, some funny. Norwich is lucky indeed to have so many poets and other writers passing through its doors, and nipping out for a quick reading, such as this one. Before we moved on to a show at Norwich Arts Centre, everyone sat down for pizza. A pizza of course is very like a poem, From the outside it always looks rather familiar, a mix of dough, tomato, cheese and toppings. You need to bite into it to find its essense. I'm pleased to say, the pizza was delicious.

Norwich Arts Centre is in an old church, and as a result has both a grandness and a quirkiness to its layout. Tonight's show, "Turning up the Temperature" was a livelier, lighter kind of event. Performance poetry has sometimes been the bane of my artistic life living in Manchester, but arriving to find Ben Mellor sat on an exercise on the edge of the stage, was a surreal start. A one-man show, (albeit with audience assistance), Mellor gave us a performance, not just perfomance poetry, which generated its own energy (literally). He was followed by the Jamaican writer Kei Miller, who read both his poetry and fiction, to much acclaim; humorous, confident and orginal. I've been a little allergic to bands/artists singing in front of films ever since seeing the Beta Band many years ago, where all their musical genius couldn't quite hide how awful their student film backdrop was. Art students, eh? So apologies to Samia Malik, completing the evening, who sung and performed her set with confidence, if it took me a while to shake off my post-Beta Band aversion to film backdrops.