Last Saturday Sam Ward and myself drove up to Sheffield to attend the opening the new Banks Street arts centre. What would normally have been a municipal evening with predictable artistic fare was transformed by the fact the the organiser was Geraldine Monk. So the evening sparkled with jazz, performance poetry with music, and excellent straight poetry readings. The highlights for me were Harriet Tarlo reading the poem 'Love/Land', a musical duo with a woman on violin and a man on trumpet (I'll have to find out who they are), a reading by Alan Halsey of a poem consisting of vernacular phrases lifted from 'Tristram Shandy' and finally, Geraldine Monk herself. The latter's set consisted of poetry transformed into a sort of primal sound, with a guy on a synthesizer as backing. Wonderful stuff.