Private investigations
It's still raining poets here: two bright young stars appeared at today's Poetry Cafe, both published in the Tower Poetry's new anthology which showcases seven young writers. Frances Leviston unfolds ideas about disembowelment, guilt, how falling in love remakes the world anew; about whether any idea is worth dying for ("a man on a pyre burns clear of any particulars"). She questions if it is "world empowering me or me empowering world". Olivia Cole's is an intense, haunting voice, perfectly capturing psychical and physical states in some astonishing imagery; breaking the ice, taking a shower, blood seeping through a black and white world.
From there into an altogether less introspective world with PD James and Ian Rankin and their offspring, the nation's most intriguing detectives: Rebus, with his "mind like a scalpel", his "headful of demons" and Dalgleish.
Here is a distillation of some of their ideas:
"Does fiction make order out of chaos?" asks the chairperson.
PD James: "All fiction attempts to make order out of disorder and make sense of personal experience"
Ian Rankin: "To an extent, crime fiction attempts to provide answers ... there's a sense of closure at the end of a good police detective novel that's not necessarily found in a literary novel."
PD James: "Creativity is the successful resolution of internal conflict."
Where do their characters come from?
Ian Rankin: "Rebus began in a student flat one cold night ... but they also come from inside my head - where else can they come from? That's why we're such well-balanced individuals. It's the romantic novelists you have to watch out for."
Is there a life for Ian Rankin beyond Rebus in terms of writing?
Ian Rankin: "I might do what the guys in the bar keep telling me to do and get a real job. Rebus won't be killed off though: he'll retire."
To what extent is your writing autobiographical?
PD James: "A great deal of autobiography is fiction and a great deal of fiction is autobiography."
Chairperson: "And on that note, we are going to end."
"Thank you very much for de-stressing me," gushes one audience member. "Reading about murders calms me down." I rapidly make my escape.