We had a few big events in the early 1990s: MacCaig's 80th birthday,
MacLean's 80th the following year, and a 24 hour 'poethon' (I kid you knot,
that's what it was called). Lots of performers at each: 144 took turns to
recite and perform for ten minutes each at the poethon; although non-poets
participated, the majority were poets, performing -- for the most part --
their own work, though they were free to read their own work or the work of
other living poets; the catch was that they were asked to recite from
memory.
I fondly remember the headline event, where a more than usually nervous
line-up (MacCaig, Sorley MacLean, Douglas Dunn, Edwin Morgan, Liz Lochhead,
Wendy Cope, Craig Raine and Blake Morrison), entered the spirit and
performed from memory as bidden. All apart from MacCaig, that is -- he read
from the page as usual. I like to think of it as pulling rank.
I spent the evening with Tom Scott once, who had spend an afternoon with
Eliot. That was in the course of preparing the former's collected shorter
poems. I gather Tom and MacCaig had fallen out about something or other. Tom
was reputed to have had a marvellous reading voice, but he'd been through
cancer therapy and I didn't hear him read.
P
> Also in the mid60s I heard Norman Maccaig - ('Mr Maccaig,
> what do you think of Philip Larkin?' Maccaig:'Six feet of dandruff.')
>
> And my old teacher (Auckland), Thomas Crawford the Burns
> scholar, took me to the Borders village (name? Biggar?) to
> ply the very old Hugh McDiarmid with whisky and Mrs Grieve
> with chocolates.
> Conversation? no memory...
>
> best from Max
>
>
>
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