29 September 1980 Ten poets performed polemical poems, romantic ones, inspirational, tedious, long-winded and frankly inane ones
According to its originator Michael Horovitz, the aim of the Poetry Olympics is to encourage a rebirth of the spirit of Poetry and of the public’s interest in it. By that criterion the first Olympics, held in the appropriate and splendid surroundings of Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, must qualify as a success. Ten poets performed (if performing is what poets do) and the pews were packed – a fact due in no small measure to the presence of Gregory Corso, the American Beat poet, and Linton Kwesi Johnson and John Cooper Clarke, whose work in reggae and rock music contexts has opened up poetry to an audience who might otherwise keep it at more than arm’s length.
The spirit of poetry aside, what the Olympics did show was the highly variegated and diversely shaped condition of the body. There were polemical poems, romantic ones, inspirational, tedious, long-winded and frankly inane ones. Russian emigre Edward Limonoz provided bitter-sweet comment on the state of the Russian Revolution; Dennis Lee from Canada, whose kaftan and beard actually gave him the impression of someone impersonating a poet, delivered whimsical nonsense about pixies; while the American Ann Stevenson gave us a poem called Swifts, perhaps the most quietly celebratory and life-affirming work to be heard all evening, in which simple truths surfaced with a natural and unforced elegance.
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