UFO Info Week-End

The stock is extremely good and very catholic &ndash and the ancillary

The stock is extremely good and very catholic – and the ancillary services, such as quote-checking, are wonderful. Every time I went there,” he adds ruefully, “more water had gushed through the ceiling, adding to that heroic English feeling …”It is true that there have, in recent years, been a number of highly unfortunate floods, and precious stock has had to be whisked away and dried out. It’s also true that what Motion calls the “ancillary services” are largely what make this such a remarkable place Membership is free and so are enquiries. Many are requests for help in finding poems for weddings and funerals, but some are more eccentric. Prince Charles’s PA phoned recently, looking for a poem to include in a speech he was about to give on GM crops.The range of users is also extremely broad.

According to Charles Bainbridge, who has worked at the library for 13 years, it includes “cool, beatniky types”, who make straight for Charles Bukowski or Nick Cave; “dedicated readers of poetry who’ve been using the library for 20 or 30 years”; schoolchildren, academics, journalists and parents hoping to instill a bit of gentle culture into their offspring.”From time to time,” says Bainbridge, “someone will pop in saying, ‘I’m a bit short of money, so I thought I’d take up writing poetry.’ ” They will, he hints, be swiftly but gently disabused. A man came in a few weeks ago brandishing a poem he had just written. “I was on the astral plane,” he told Bainbridge, “and I met that bloke who wrote ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and he really liked it.” Poetry has always attracted more than its fair share of the seriously unhinged.”This is a pleasant library. I’d enjoy every minute/But for the danger of meeting other poets in it.” Wendy Cope’s succinct poem sums up one of the chief pleasures – or dangers – of the Poetry Library This is a place where the artists are also the users. Wendy Cope first started using it in the Seventies when she was still a full-time teacher “It was a wonderful discovery,” she declares. “I’d just got interested in poetry and couldn’t afford to buy the books I wanted to read.” There were no cheap local eateries, so she would smuggle in her sandwiches and munch on them as she browsed. Roger McGough offers Liverpudlian understatement: “It’s all there and it’s a nice place to work …

Last time I went the lift wasn’t working.”Poet and novelist Lavinia Greenlaw was the South Bank’s Reader in Residence in 2000. “Most people who read poetry,” she says, “are poets of some sort or another, so it makes a pleasant change to set aside ourselves as writers and just be readers.” In the years before his death, Ted Hughes could often be found sitting at the back of the library, reading, on every visit, the same book: The Everyman Book of Narrative Verse Ivor Cutler is now almost part of the library’s furniture. “Is that man a tramp?” one of the Festival Hall’s stewards was heard saying loudly.According to Poetry Librarian Simon Smith, the library is also used as a meeting place, a place “for poetry enthusiasts to exchange ideas, poems and news”. What about romantic encounters? “Well,” he says coyly, “I couldn’t really comment on that.