This April the Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room on the South Bank reopened at last after extensive renovations.
I arrived there early, after a lovely lunch and chat with a writer friend, Carmen Bugan, who was over from the US for a series of readings and lectures in Oxford and Liverpool. To my delight, in the foyer I got to tap along to school jazz bands taking part in a national competition.
As part of these celebrations there was a rather fantastic poetry reading: ten poets reading fifty poems offering a picture of roughly 50 years of life in Britain since the original opening of the music and poetry venue in 1967. Over the years poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Seamus Heaney, Anne Sexton, Anne Carson, Sharon Olds and many others have read in this building. And now it was the turn of established poets such as Fleur Adcock (who has translated a lot of poetry from Romanian, so a big thank you to her), Simon Armitage, Malika Booker, Imtiaz Dharker, Lavinia Greenlaw, Peter Finch, as well as relative youngsters, Jay Bernard and Caleb Femi, whose mellifluous readings belied their hard-hitting words and topics. Additional delight: Welsh poet Ifor ap Glyn and Sudanese poet Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi reading in their original languages (with translations being projected on the screen behind them).
The poems were mostly on the lighter and more colourful side of the spectrum, capturing certain moments in time (Imtiaz Dharker – ‘1977 (I am quite sure of this’ or Caleb Femi’s ‘Man of the People: Labour 1997 & 2017’) or the colours, sounds and smells of a particular place (Malika Booker’s ‘Brixton Market’ or Peter Finch’s ‘Spending Money in Soviet Russia’, Fleur Adcock’s ‘Summer in Bucharest’). Best of all, I liked seeing the joy in the other poets’ faces when one of them recited a particularly good verse or finish a challenging poem. Love of words bound all of us and a representation of the multicultural Britain I always admired and believed in.
Of course, I forgot to take a picture of the actual poets at the end, bowing. I was far too busy clapping!
Oh, it sounds like such a lovely time, Marina Sofia. And it’s great to hear that the Southbank Centre opened those rooms again. Lucky you to have been able to be there.
Sooooooooooooo jealous. I love the Royal Festival Hall at the best of times and with all those poets too….
When I first came to London, I thought it was such an ugly set of buildings (unlike the Brutalist architecture of the Barbican, which I was actually quite attracted to). But it was just across the river from my college, so I would end up going there most evenings… and it is a joyful place for all kinds of events and meetings of minds.
I just have a thing about the Festival of Britain!
Sounds a wonderful evening!