Outgoing Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, is coming to Dulwich this week to speak at the festival.
Fresh out of his ten-year tenure as figurehead of the nation’s poetic life, he’s one of the hottest tickets on the speaking circuit. He’s now promoting a new book of poetry, The Cinder Path and his most recent collection of essays, Ways of Life: Places, Painters and Poets.
He will be speaking at the Dulwich Festival on Friday 8 May at 7.30, at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Come and hear him read from these new titles and his 2006 auto-biography. If you’re going along, be sure to think of difficult and penetrating questions to ask him. What’s his favourite picture in the Gallery? What does he think of his successor as Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy? Who’s his favourite member of Girls Aloud?
There’s more information about this and other events this week on the Dulwich Festival website.
Motion has recently co-founded The Poetry Archive, a web-based collection of poets reading their work online. It’s aimed at general readers as well as teachers and students who are using poetry in the classroom. He’ll perhaps be talking about that too.
Compared to many poets, he seems quite rational about the place poetry can play in our lives today. He says:
“The best poems are those which speak to us about the important things in our lives in a way that we never forget. Any heavier definition than that begins to collapse under its own weight and exclude many forms of poetry. But we live in a very diverse culture and the great opportunity that poetry has now is to make sure that all its various voices have an equal and proper space given to them.”
Photo: Johnny Ring
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