Pushkin in Britain

Passing the Poet's Church (St. Giles-in-the-Fields, Covent Garden) yesterday, which Peter Ackroyd has described as 'the crossroads between time and eternity', I noticed a poster in Russian and was curious.
  Inside the temperature had dropped radically and it wasn't just the cool of the dark architecture. A Russian poetry tournament was in action affecting even the climate. 'Pushkin in Britain' the title, the tournament was a weekend-long contest to find 'the king of king's of Russian poetry.' Wow!
  From the pulpit a young guy dressed in black called up the contestants. One by one they emerged from the congregation to recite. A big screen ran fairly rocky translations, but good enough to transport the reader not only to a sense of difference in place and time, but to a sense of the historic legacy unique to Russian poetry. I sat at the back with my plastic bag of shopping and the Sunday chicken could just look after itself. I was being infused with Russian melody and images, and also with memories: samizdat and Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, the gulags, the great terror under Stalin and the noble part played by poetry in maintaining truth.
   'Reality,' Mandelstam wrote, 'is a continuum, and prose is a disjunct expression of it.' One of the contestant poets had a line about hiring a prostitute to listen to his poetry. There was a sense of disjuncture for this diaspora of Russian souls. Outside in the sunshine the streets were thronged with shoppers, the only imperative being to buy, buy, buy. But inside, behind the thick black walls of the poet's church, it felt like a fortunate, if counter-cultural, convergence. And then the thought suddenly struck me that perhaps I was witnessing the beginnings of something big - Poetry readings may be the next Rock and Roll!
  I don't know what the outcome of the contest was but here is a link to the site for further info.

http://www.pushkininbritain.com/