From left to right, back row first: David Lehman, Stuart Bird, Todd Swift, Alison Gibb, Mariel Coen, Amie Caddy; middle row: Robin Thomas, Gillian Petrie, Tiffany Anne Tondut, Kwaku Amaning; front row: Mike Loveday; Kathryn Maris; Beppe Bartoli; Frankie Jones. Photo by Amy Evans.
David and I are in London this week while David spends time with students and faculty at Kingston University. On Monday evening, David and Kingston colleagues Kathryn Maris and host and organizer Todd Swift joined several of their MA/MFA students in a poetry reading before a standing room only crowd at the OXFAM bookstore in London's Marylebone neighborhood. The quality and variety of the poetry was astonishing, with readings of sestinas, centos, poems inspired by facebook updates, poems responding to other poems, and poems of invented forms. Even though there was a full card, the time flew by. As David remarked later, we'll be hearing a lot from these Kingston poets. When the reading concluded, we repaired to the Marylebone pub where H.D. scholar Amy Evans,Kathryn Maris and I had a lively discussion about how the poetry scene in England differs from ours in the U.S. (I'm not saying) and whether H.D. (for whom I share Evans's admiration) is on the verge of a comeback. Watch this space for work from the poets we're getting to know.
–sdh