Poetry Breakfast, August 2026

There was a good turn-out. It was an August moment in the traditional industrial shut-down, and in hot weather. The twenty-plus who had journeyed to hear Kate Innes and others – had made an effort. For which they were well rewarded. The theme given to us by the guest poet was The Myth I Live By. I noticed how many of us drew on poetry written in the past that in turn drew on deep personal experience. I have heard Amanda Browne read There’s a Buddha in my Garden, a decision to defy public expectation, even to try a new path. As also with personal aspiration, framed around what could be, as in Beth Williams’ memorable opening line, ‘I am in love with a woman.’

One’s own myths, hopefully supportive ones, are sometimes defied by the myths that others invent. The recurrent suspicion that disability is a ruse was the subject of Laura Jane Round’s Mobility Aid. Laura’s poem of course goes much further than the annoyance this causes: it is a plea to be taken, and believed in, as we are – just as her second poem, about being recipient of care, of a sort that disregards all other motives, whether high or low, but is given ‘because you are kind’.

Love may or may not be a myth, but it is something to live by, as in Shona’s open declaration; we were all caught by it. Katrina is welcome as (I think) new to the event. Rob’s writing crackles with wit and opinion and it’s time we had it in print.

Humour was as always key to the Poetry Breakfast particular atmosphere, beginning with Mogs’ carefully-rhymed send-up of memory-loss, to Annette’s narration of Black Country dialect and the incomprehension met with in Cornwall. There was Matt Eccles too and John’s use of the ‘Doctor Doctor’ refrain. In sharp satirical vein, presenter Jay Lewis closed the second half (B-side as he terms it) with No Such Thing as Society, a foundational viewpoint of the 1980s now-discredited neoliberalism.

Kate Innes picked up the warmth of the gathering and ran – even flew – with it. We for our part recognised a person who was like us and even liked  us! This is a poet whose writing searches the depth of our own selves in the materiality of the universe, in the geologic and biological forces that shape our lives, in the vastness of human history and in the myths that evolve over millennia which we continually rediscover. Coming to the reading already immersed in The Matter, and since the event her earlier work Flock of Words  I had a head start on getting the fullness of the poetry. But on all of us, the beauty of the verse was never lost. It washed over us, just as Soheila Javheri’s reading of Rumi in her native Persian has done in the past.