An exhilarating evening. Poetry ID, the Letchworth Garden City poetry group that I joined a few months back, organised a reading by Wendy Cope. I doubt if she has any following outside the British Isles: she has too distinctly British, even English, a voice. But within Britain her poetry outsells even those whose reputations have diffused around the English-speaking world. Seamus Heaney, for example, has a readership that has his decidedly Northern Irish themes & contexts absorbed & appreciated throughout the States, Canada & Australasia. But in this country Wendy Copeís quiet, ostensibly simple, apparently naÔve but actually sharp & worldly-wise verse has sold, & continues to sell, in thousands of editions a year.
The reading was in the school Drama Studio. It was an ideal venue: comfortably seating 100 listeners, intimate yet still theatrical enough an environment to ensure a performance dimension to her reading. The audience laughed loudly at the funnies, murmured solemnly at the serious ones & cooed over her at the book-signing table in the interval. Afterwards we took her to the appalling but strangely fascinating Letchworth Park Hotel. Itís a vast, brand new but carefully distressed set of buildings up a country lane, designed to create the perfect synthesis of Tudor grandeur & 21st century designer zeitgeist. Sir Francis Drake at the bar wearing a ruffle over a Ralph Lauren polo shirt. Wendy Cope nursed a glass of white wine & raved about Pop Idol & Big Brother & not a word was uttered about iambic tetrameter or the art of enjambment. I had two large whiskies & my first late night in months. The dual tides of late middle age & baby fatherhood receded briefly. La Vie BohemeÖ
12:30:55 AM 
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