‘Silence is the unbearable repartee.’ G.K. Chesterton
While on a recent trip to England to promote a new book of my poems, I was presented with a rare cultural opportunity. I was invited to join the British Poet Laureate (I like to insist on the capitalized form) in a video link-up to a literary festival in Aberdeen. Not only would the two Poets Laureate – the preferred plural – from Britain and the United States be brought together for the first time to read their poetry and discuss the poetic issues of the day, which were bound to range interestingly from the aesthetic to the political, but our poetry and opinions would be presented in a truly high-tech fashion. The plan was that on a Friday evening, Andrew Motion and I would meet in a studio in London and through the magic of satellite whatever, our images would appear on a huge screen in Aberdeen before a crowd of eager poetry lovers who would see the occasion not only as the highlight of the literary festival they were attending, but as a chance to be a small part of something truly historical. A thing unprecedented in the chronicles of British – American cultural relations, a tale for the grandkids on a winter’s evening.
I was personally excited at the prospect and grateful to our host in Aberdeen who had concocted the idea and made all the technical arrangements. Earlier that week I had given a few poetry readings and been the subject of a number of interviews, but such events were familiar rituals in what had become my life in poetry. In fact, I had been performing so often that I had lately begun to feel that I was on display, a bit like a go-go dancer only without the cage and the white boots and, of course, the dancing itself. But this – an intercountry video link-up with the only two living national Poets Laureate – this was a thing quite out of the ordinary.
Looking back on it, I see that my expectations had been pitched somewhat too high. That the building to which I was escorted by a very attractive publicist was known as the ‘Cruciform Building’ was the first hint that a measure of pain might be involved. The studio itself was a small, fiercely lit room with a long news desk which faced two television sets atop which sat the large, glassy, monitorial eye of a camera. One screen would show our faces in the studio, and the other would show the crowd at Aberdeen. In the room there were posters advertising our books and actual books displayed on the desk but no Andrew Motion. I sat uncomfortably behind the desk examining my tired-looking face on one television while a discussion ensued among the publicists and technicians about whether to display the books in a neat stack or a casual sprawl. Assured by one technician that we were on ‘mute’ so the Aberdeen audience could not hear us, I uttered a few potentially disastrous, ugly-American things like ‘Say what part of Wales is Aberdeen in, anyway?’ just to pass the time. Finally, my fellow Laureate arrived, just in the nick.
Hands were shaken, seats were taken, and then there appeared on the second screen the face of our moderator/host in Aberdeen, the warm and enthusiastic Alan Spence. The link-up was at last linked-up. Trouble was that the quality of the video picture was awful. The image was very fuzzy, reminiscent of a TV picture from the 1950s when the rabbit’s ears required constant readjustment. Plus, the image was often broken up into segments like pictures from a space capsule. At one point in the camera’s explorations, the moderator looked like a fully dressed, male version of ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’. And there was no sound, just his lips moving. When the sound did come on, he offered to give us a video-look at the venue. Somehow, I had expected an outdoor scene, like Woodstock or the Monterey Jazz Festival, or Slane Castle, but the scene was a huge classroom auditorium – a classroom that had every appearance of being empty.
‘We’re going to let the crowd in any minute,’ the moderator said, and I pictured them pressing against the doors, being restrained by heavy-set ushers. But when ‘any minute’ arrived, we were again given a long shot of the venue. A few people were making their way very slowly down the aisles, very slowly and very few. The rough count that I made in the course of the broadcast was twenty-three. They seemed to be mostly elderly women, though that impression may have been the result of all the fuzz. They were sitting as far from one another as the room would allow – as if there had been a terrible falling-out in the mini-bus that brought them all here.
Well, I read some poems, then Andrew Motion read some poems, but because we were reading to an absentee audience, to a television screen really, a dead feeling pervaded the experience. It was as if Mr Motion and I had decided to spend the evening together watching television – one for each because we could never agree on a programme – and then we suddenly broke into poetry. Never had I experienced such an absence of feedback. Then our astronaut/moderator called for questions from the audience. Pause. No questions. ‘Surely, one of you …’ A silence descended, the kind of silence that Scotland may be said to be famous for. But after some genial words were traded back and forth between the Laureates in London and the moderator floating in outer space, two of the more curious audience members had questions. For Mr Motion. None for me. A final exchange revealed that it was now raining in both London and Aberdeen.
What I will never forget about the evening is staring at the fuzzy screen about halfway through the programme and noticing a figure in black getting up and walking out, right up the middle aisle of the auditorium and out the door, reducing the audience by l/23rd. The figure in black seemed to be a woman, and I was sorely tempted to yell out from the big screen like Big Brother, ‘Hey you! In the black! Get back to your seat or you will be taken to a room not of your liking.’ I was restrained only by my suspicion that the figure could be my good friend, the novelist and festival-goer Todd McEwen, passing silent judgment on the whole affair and, for that matter, the very purpose of poetry.