Fleur Adcock

isa and I heard Fleur Adcock read some of her poetry last night. She concentrated almost entirely on one small corner of her work: her various relations. Much of what she read concerned the apparently trivial, and was written in a simple style that must have taken considerable effort to achieve. It took me a while, therefore, to catch on to the frequency with which just a few words, often in the last line, would dramatically widen a poem's significance.

I have no idea what other topics Fleur covers, but I'm convinced that the minor details she records in those few poems last night are just the sort of things that would be lost to our collective memory if she didn't write about them in such an interesting way. There are so many words written each day now, in print and on the web, that it's easy to believe that nothing will ever be forgotten again. The sheer number of words is precisely the problem, however. Between the sheer quantity and the low value of many of them, I fear that we won't make sufficient effort to keep what's valuable, and we will lose much that we will later miss.

The event was one of a series at Keele University. The next one is Hugo Williams, on 28th February, and we'll be going to that too.