You tread on thin ice with a modernist poetry reading. This is a community that is so frequently parodied that if you’ve not been thoroughly inducted the presence of the cliché is felt like a spectre in the room. This art teeters perilously on the line between profundity and complete obscurity, and there’s a lot at stake: if it falls on the wrong side the whole exercise acquires the unflattering whiff of absurdity. That’s why it’s so important that integrity of the work is unimpeachable, and that it’s very, very good.

At the seventh Cambridge Reading Series, the thoroughly inducted assembled to hear Sara Crangle and Timothy Thorton read their poetry. Sara Crangle had had to cancel, so we opened with her new volume Wild Ascending Lisp, as performed by three readers. It was a shame to have the beginning verses diluted by the accompanying effort to evaluate and acclimatize to the speakers, but although mediated through their various idiosyncrasies, the effect was to shift the emphasis to the poems’ great credit. The room became highly sensitive to the possibility of a ‘mistake’ in their reading, and this made for an interesting dynamic where the work itself began to appear hostile to the speakers. It became almost like watching three people being assaulted by this very assertive poetry.

Although this was productive, the expectation from the start was that Timothy Thorton’s reading would be the pillar of integrity that the Reading required to hold together. He was ushered onstage precisely as someone who has access to a secret truth that the rest of the room could only appreciate. It was a beautiful contrast, then, that his gentle self-effacing manner should be the source of such impacting work. He read from his Jocund Day with a simple reverence for his own poetry that did nothing to demystify the conception that the precious speakers had generated of it as containing a life external even to its creator. This time it’s effect was to imbue the work with an authority that silenced all distractions and reminded anyone that needed reminding why they were there.

The reading was organised as part of the ongoing Festival of Ideas running at the University. More info here.