Poetry Breakfast, November 2024

Rob (RM) Francis, poet, novelist and senior university teacher, wows the crowd at the Poetry Breakfast (photo by Jay Lewis)

Saturday Books Poetry Breakfast
16th November 2024

New Venue, New Faces – but Rhythms Continue to Quieten the Mind

I HAVE LEARNED to make the most of these monthly events – simply by latching on to the rhythm of the work, and forgetting everything else.

That’s been difficult. The Saturday Books Poetry Breakfast began in earnest in 2021, in a pub’s sunny outdoor, when pandemic rules forbade indoor gatherings. Two separate licenced premises would, thereafter, rather grudgingly, opening their doors a ten a.m. gave way to a golden period of two years of Brooke’s Bar and Bistro, sadly no longer trading.

My joy in Spoken Word was always eclipsed by anxiety – would the p.a. work, would we go on too long, what would I say at the end – though the greatest worry however was attendance. Well, you can have a Poetry Meeting of four, but a Poetry Breakfast with an invited guest would seem to demand more. I would count heads fearfully, then gaze hopefully at the door. Some latecomer, please, to make up the numbers. Or just anybody, stumbling in off the street, to peer around bemusedly. I’d hope they’d stay.

I discovered that most, if not all, those who came, wrote. It may be in the nature of creative people to observe routine, their way of staying on course and completing their projects. And for a solid twenty, the mid-month Saturday show has settled to habit: they will get there if they can.

So the nagging disquiet began to fade, and finally to leave me completely. Making the bookings, doing the promotion, dealing with venue management – but others seized responsibility for the event’s enactment. I could become invisible, like furniture. And so began my recipient relationship with spoken poetry.

Soheila Javaheri

Perhaps the clue was in the Persian recitals of Soheila Javaheri, an artist, who has been customer at the Bookshop for several years now. An artist, she was adept at sounding her language in all the fullness of the words. But it was more than their unfamiliarity that had such an arresting effect on her audience. She knew the ancient incantatory power of verse. She gave us, not Rumi’s intended meaning, but the complex interrelated patterning of the syllables beneath.

An artist over many art-forms, Soheila knew the mesmerising power of rhythm. Whether by words alone, or by a guitarist’s repeated riff, or by placement of marks on a canvas – it is rhythm that breaks down the habitual channel of our thoughts and forces receptivity upon us. We choose it though. And a pub in a Midland town, quite early in the morning of a weekend, is as good a time and place as any.

Versifiers and humourists understand how the simplest rhythm can attract the ear. Mere doggerel can always find an audience. It is artists however who can use it, subtly in the case of some poetry, to achieve their effects that are the blinding sudden perception, the runaway beating of the heart.

Clockwise from top left: Jane True, Maddy, Rob Simmons, Claire Willetts, Mike, Laura Jane Round (photos by Jay Lewis)

So it is with the Poetry Breakfast’s open-mic performers. Whether reflecting on the defeat of the Spanish Armada, a bus journey across Birmingham, or the backwash from a relationship ending/death of a loved one/denaturing of surroundings, they intensify their work through rhythm.

So – I have learned to listen. It is not the same as concentrating, because there the effort is all in interpretation, a literary-critical concern. It is about attachment. To rhythm, and therefore the magician’s power to cast a spell, to enchant, or as Seamus Heaney wrote in Personal Helicon, ‘to set the darkness echoing’.