Where have all the poets gone?

At last night's poetry café, writes Anita Sethi, Esther Morgan was left to read alone as Glyn Maxwell had vanished and Robin Robertson, his replacement, was delayed on a train from London. Fittingly - given the empty chair beside her - hers were finger-tingling poems about "ghostliness", about the many ways in which we are haunted.

The beautiful poems from her collection Beyond Calling Distance are filled not only with the physical distances we have to cross, but the huge emotional and psychological distances between those supposedly closest to us. Morgan gave an exquisitely articulate disquisition on painful inarticulacy; people failing to communicate with each other, speaking and not being heard - or not being able to speak at all.

"I'm very sorry not to be Glyn Maxwell, and to have missed Esther's reading," gasps a breathless Robin Robertson, author of A Painted Field and Slow Air, who feels as if he has run the distance from London to Cheltenham. An impressively polished performance from him, nonetheless, of poems most of which are about "drink, sex and death -hopefully in that order".

Notable for its witty exploration of "sex and artichokes - neither of which you can find in Aberdeen", his reading was also tinged with sudden, unexpected moments of pathos; conjuring, for example, a startling image of a father watching his daughter going to a place where he knew he could not follow.

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Later in the evening, Chris Patten drew the largest festival audience seen so far to rant about how being part of the EU involves a loss of national sovereignty, how a United States of Europe will never really be united, never hold the same sway as the USA.

I was glad to escape from the long circuitous argument into a new short story premiered by Michael Faber, who also spoke powerfully of The Crimson Petal and the White and about how he himself has been damaged and is drawn to exploring the possibility of escaping the cycle of damage in those of his characters who achieve happy relationships, against all the odds.

Arthur Miller believes a play is never really finished, only abandoned; does Faber feel the same way about his stories? "No, I finish them," he laughs, speaking of how he sees the short story as an optimal form, and loves to rewrite to get it as close to perfection as possible.

The reading is part of the Festival's "MultiStory", in which leading writers read brand new commissioned work. Previous nights have seen an explosively energetic performance by Luke Sutherland, possibly the most refreshing performance I have seen here so far.

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The speakers and audience both got rather heated in "The Art Debate", which proposed to tackle to question: "What is the future for contemporary art now that Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and the Chapman brothers have arguably become the pillars of the artistic establishment?"

"What is the function of art anyway?", asks one audience member.

"Please don't ask me", huffs curator Sacha Craddock, "What do you think?"

Art critic Julian Spalding took a stab at the question, though, suggesting that art is there to heighten consciousness, to make us feel uplifted and energised, not exhausted and drained. An audience member from Leicester accuses Spalding of being a "shrinking violet".

The last word comes from another sharp tongue hidden in the audience: "It's ambitious to call the Cheltenham Art Gallery an art gallery at all if you compare it to what's in London". Ouch.