Poetry is revelation, yet poets do not necessarily reveal themselves or tell their life-stories in their poetry. Often we assume they are the ‘I’ or ‘he/she’ in their poem, because the ‘reveal’ is so real.  

 At one level, it doesn’t matter whether they are telling the autobiographical truth or not. It simply sounds too confidential not to be true. We are impressed by a compelling difference between them and us in how they live and think. Reading them can become, too, a masterclass in being alive and saying so. Often, they tell us things we didn’t know we already knew as W H Auden said he hoped his poems would. To that extent, these poems mirror us. The poets may be more accurately reflective, better at speaking their joy or sadness than we think we are capable of, but we recognise a common humanity in much of what they say. While talking of themselves, they are bumping into us.

I remember a conversation with the Czech poet Miroslav Holub in which he said that he had been meaning for some time to write a poem about the British Museum. This was because every time he went there, he was struck by the same thing. The truly imposing exhibits like the great stone-headed lions, the mythological wonders, did not attract children or adults anything like as much as a mummy or Peat-Bog Man could. Was there skin under the bandages, they wanted to know, was that funny brown shiny surface stretched over the skeleton of Peat-Bog Man still skin, the same as ours ? In other words, an exhibit is wonderful to behold not for its exotic difference, but because of its resemblance to the spectator. This sense of a common lot is what makes the connection.

Poems from Adcock, Coleridge, Frost, Gluck, Langston Hughes, Machado, Millay and Seth.

These sessions are always focussed and informal. Everyone can feel free to express their thoughts and feelings about the poems as they want to. A lot of ground gets covered, poems and readers come alive, and friends are quickly made of the poets and each other.