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This morning I wake in an old farmhouse in Cumbria with blue skies overhead and jackdaws cawing outside. Today is a day off, a day for striding up into the fells and looking out at the world below, hoping to hear curlew and lapwing, and revelling in the vast, majestic emptiness of the landscape.
After ten dates in fourteen days, it’s just what is needed. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve loved every minute of this tour – it’s reminded me just how much I enjoy being out on the road, taking my poetry to new audiences, meeting new people and hearing their stories – but it’s good to have a chance to recharge my batteries. And to do it in such a beautiful place on such a glorious day.
The tour has been an experiment, an adventure, a leap into the unknown. I’ve always believed that poetry is a conversation, an opportunity to engage with an audience and for them to engage with you. For you to share your take on things, to point their attention towards something – whatever it may be – and say Look at this! and take them with you. That was my conceit. The question was, would it work?
The answer has been yes.
Friends have directed me to bars and cafes which they’ve thought will be suitable venues, sympathetic to the idea of letting a poet they’ve never heard of come in, read his poems, and promise he’ll bring an audience too. They’ve invited their friends. They’ve put me up in spare rooms and on sofa beds. And I’ve had a ball. Venues have turned out to be beautiful, cosy, intimate spaces it’s been a joy to perform in, and I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve told me at the end of the night that they didn’t think they liked poetry, that they came along with no real expectations, but they’ve really enjoyed it, and thank you, and come back again sometime and read again.
I was going to say it doesn’t get better than that. But it does. I’ve done this tour on the motorbike, travelling from gig to gig with my books, a couple of changes of clothes and a toothbrush in the panniers, and that really has been the two-wheeled cherry on the cake. To ride north yesterday, buffeted by the wind over Shap, swooping through the landscape, with the scent of new-mown hay around me was a privilege and a joy. I grinned from the instant I fired the bike up to the moment I arrived. This machine moves poets.
I’m an incredibly lucky man. I’ve one more gig tomorrow, and a late-night journey home, where I’ll rest up and catch up on sleep, and then doubtless start plotting more gigs, further opportunities to point the bike somewhere I’ve never been, and see what I find when I get there. If you want me to come to where you live, drop me a line, we’ll sort something out, and I’ll turn up, a poet on his beloved motorbike. Today, though, I’m leaving it standing in the yard, and striding up into those fells. It’s a beautiful, beautiful day.
P.S. To my surprise, while I’ve been on tour, the Caffè Nero letter has gone viral once again, a whole year after I wrote it. I’ll be writing about that in another blog soon. But now it’s time for the fells.
