Event Information

Wendy Cope

Date: 16 June 2009   Drinks: 18:30   Talk Starts: 19:30 OPuS Event

Review - Post Event

What better combination could you wish for? A fine summer’s evening networking with friends and colleagues, accompanied by Pimm’s and cool wine, plus some delicious refreshments, followed by readings from Wendy Cope, one of our best-loved poets, and a lively discussion with Will Atkinson, sales and marketing director of her publisher, Faber & Faber.

It was a magnificent occasion attended by around 100 people, and Wendy read engagingly from her wide repertoire of poems – The Flowers You Nearly Sent Me, Bloody Men, How To Deal With the Press – and many others. In discussion with Will, who proved a gentle, even self-deprecating companion, but with a sharp witty streak, Wendy said how difficult it could be for her to write commissions – to order, so to speak – and how much she sympathised with the role of the poet laureate (a job she had specifically ruled herself out of) given commands for performance.

Wendy had some strong words for those who found her poems on the internet and then shared them indiscriminately with friends. As a passionate creator (and one who earns her living from writing), she was a stalwart defender of creators’ copyright.

Asked which poets had influenced her, she cited Emily Dickinson and A.E. Housman in particular, and some of the early works of Sylvia Plath. The question of her relationship with Faber came up, and the inevitable topic of cover designs. She readily admitted that the standard brand image of Faber’s poetry list did not do all that she wanted, and showed us the example of her most recent collection Two Cures for Love, which seemed to combine serious content with a lively consumer-angled impact.

As she said, she wanted to have her cake and eat it: she enjoyed being popular and appealing to people who normally considered poetry remote and difficult, yet wanted to be taken seriously. ‘I want to appeal to the Pam Ayres audience, but I also want to be considered on the same level as T.S.Eliot.’

Her dry sense of humour, her refreshing honesty, and her willingness and capacity to sign so many books (nearly 100 were sold during the evening) – all this combined to make a terrific conclusion to OPuS’s 2008/9 season of meetings and talks.

We look forward to seeing as many of you as possible in the autumn. Two super events for your diary: • Wednesday 7 October: ‘The Google Settlement’ – implications for UK publishers and authors • Wednesday 25 November: ‘The Future of Journal Publishing’ – joint meeting with SYP

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Wendy Cope, celebrated poet and author of acclaimed collections of her poetry ('Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis')joins Will Atkinson, Sales and Marketing Director of her publishers, Faber & Faber