Of poets and spilled champagne

Poet Charlie Dark. Photo / Supplied

Well, well, the things one finds out in a Michael King Memorial Lecture: Lord of the Flies novelist William Golding enjoyed not only great literature but Carry On films, and he found Jilly Cooper's Polo "not half bad - anatomically correct, like Leonardo da Vinci's drawings".

John Carey made Golding wholly human with such ordinary but intimate details, and tales of Golding's vulnerability were very moving. His mother's ghost stories left him with a fear of being alone at night, even in a brightly-lit room, but he felt safe lying in bed listening to his sleeping wife's soft breathing. Seeing a sea "full of broken and drowning men" during World War II led to a "religious convulsion" - Golding's words.

Carey, an Emeritus Professor, read his lecture with a slight, aristocratic-like lisp, looking every inch an Oxford don: upright carriage; stiff collar; bony, brainy forehead. His old-school focus on Golding's parents was illuminating: Golding found that his socialist parents' questioning of the Establishment was annoying, yet Golding himself "made novels out of disagreeing" as Carey put it. A satisfying hour.

Incidently, Carey noted that Golding once spilled champagne over TS Eliot's trousers - and Eliot is the favourite dead poet of affable East London poet Charlie Dark, who gave a charismatic afternoon performance in front of a large audience. Eliot is a surprising choice for Dark, as their poems are very different - Dark's are accessible, loosely-worded narratives of everyday life. He reckons he's going to write a poem about Auckland traffic lights.

A great stand-up comic who'd have been just as at home in the comedy festival line-up, Dark unabashedly pulled out every dirty trick in the entertainment book - microphone effects, harmonica, cute children on stage, audience participation, stories about his Ghanian mum - and we lapped it up. This was a real event in its own right, not a book plug.

Small children contributed to the happy communal hum before Short Takes, in which one Chinese-American and four New Zealand writers read from their own work, proving all to be absorbing storytellers. Sarah Laing opened with a comic and well-observed example of what she called the "Manawatu sexually-frustrated adolescence genre". In a thin, nasal voice, Charlotte Grimshaw read her tale of three children lost in Waitakere bush which shifted perspective at just the right time to keep up the tension.

Damien Wilkins' non-fiction, guess-which-celebrity story about a New Zealand writers' tour also included danger at the beach, which he described casually and nonchalantly - a lifesaver/writer was "a nice guy plus with skills". Paula Morris' description of a monied New York party had political undertones - to the guests, September 11 doesn't seem as long ago as Hurricane Katrina - while Yiyun Li's lyrical passage on a woman's isolated life in Beijing was intriguing.