the poetry cafe

Just got back from a poetry reading in Covent Garden, put on by a small London-based publishing company called the tall-lighthouse.  It was in a small cafe, aptly named The Poetry Cafe.  Went in and sat down at a table; the room was full of grey-haired, balding men drinking bottles of beer and glasses of wine and popping outside for smokes.  Eventually everyone filed downstairs and the reading began.  There was a university student, a girl, who had a sultry voice.  She read a poem in an American accent about a porn star.  All her poems were super sensual, and it made me laugh a little to realize the predominate age-range and gender of her audience in relation to her subject matter.  There was a man with wild curly hair from Wales who read a poem involving a bicycle in a narrow hallway, and a man in a cheesy checkered shirt who was over-the-top theatrical, not very poetical, who read a poem which was a riddle and the answer was The Oldest Man in the World.  My favorite was the man who went last.  He seemed so young, maybe a couple years older than me, and he had a distinctive accent--I'm going to try to replicate it for my flatmates so they can tell me where it's from.  His poems were very personal.  One of his poems, I think he said, was "written" by his young son: he simply shaped his son's words into a poem.  I liked it--the words were full of the unintentional wisdom of a young child. 

I ended up buying a poetry chapbook instead of a glass of wine, and striking up a conversation with someone on the tube ride back, which is a rare occurrence, in London.