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Published: 8 January 2009

Stevie Smith

An audience with
Stevie Smith

FORGET all your spoilt-brat men poets (Stevie regarded some of them as such): your famous Seamuses, your Hugheses, your Audens and your Spenders. For my money, Stevie Smith was the greatest 20th-century poet. Unknown to many of her admirers, she was also a dab hand at the Stock Exchange.
Stevie Smith was emotionally literate in a way that challenged most self-brutalising poets down to their navels.
That is one of the reasons I have organised a celebration of Stevie’s poetry, songs, life and drawings at the Magdala pub in South End Green next Wednesday.
For entirely selfish reasons, I want to hear poets Cicely Herbert and Dinah Livingstone and BBC producer Piers Plowright performing their Stevie favourites, and Gerard Benson “The Galloping Cat” which Stevie wrote for The Barrow Poets, of which he was a founder member.
Audience favourites are crucial to the success of The Stevie Smith Roadshow.
It is hoped that the event can be repeated next month at the Claremont Project for over 55-year-olds, at 24-27 White Lion Street, N1, near the Angel.
These events cannot take place without you bringing your favourite Stevie poem or anecdote along with you. The sky is the limit – it is all grist to the mill if “Not Waving But Drowning” and “Bog-Face” are performed as many as six or sixteen times!
After a horrible time unfavoured by the likes of writer and literary critic Cyril Connolly throughout the repressed 1950s, Stevie developed a special relationship with the BBC. I know something of this from the times I met her in the foyer of Broadcasting House in Portland Place in the 1960s; she called it “our club”.
It is hoped that Piers Plowright will speak of this relationship – and bring with him some of the recordings of Stevie performing her poems in her own inimitable way.
If I am allowed a favourite, it is “The River God” (it can be found in Stevie: A Motley Selection of Her Poems by myself and Chris Saunders, in a limited edition of Greville Press Pamphlets, £10).
John Horder

• The Stevie Smith Roadshow is at the Magdala pub, 2A South Hill Park, NW3, 7.30pm for 8pm on Wednesday January 14

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