>Can somebody please explain what this is or was and its importance/interest.
>Perplexed of Sheffield
It was a gathering of about 15 poets who read their poetry to each other in
a stone cottage on a fellside (property of Barry MacSweeney's mother) at
the top of Allendale, in, when was that? 1967? for three or four days. A
lot of time was also spent in the Allenheads pub and roaming the shattered
landscape.
It wasn't important. It wasn't interesting. Well it might have seemed
either at the time but it's neither now. I can't remember anything about
it worth telling. Did Jeremy Prynne read aloud? Yes he did. What does it
matter? He also got blind drunk. What does that matter?
My only clinging and endearing memory of Sparty Lea is of John Temple
playing the piano in the Allenheads pub for community singing. Now that WAS
something worth remembering. All the old folk of the village singing their
heads off while John vamped away, having very politely ousted from her seat
a village dame whose playing was minimalist... What did they sing? I
guess it was things like Down at the Old Bull and Bush... but also some
north-east numbers I think, maybe "Come ye not from Newcastle" or, is there
one called "Geordie Boy?" Perhaps John himself could be more informative
on this repertoire. And so the evening passed in choral merriment while
the foreigner-poets looked on from the area of the bar, smiling benignly
or maybe weeping into their brown ales for the loss of communal feeling in
places like Cambridge....
Actually you can have all your experimental poetry for a thing like that,
you can have it and stuff it whever it belongs.
/PR
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