Don't say the word 'villanelle' to Don Paterson. He will have an apoplectic fit. This form of poetry – 'a pastoral or lyrical poem of 19 lines, with only two rhymes throughout, and some lines repeated' – has no right to exist, in his view.
A talk on the language of poetry had not promised as much laughter from the audience, who appreciated the Scottish poet's dead-pan humour. The self-deprecating description of his new book, The Poem – "far too long", "at least half of it is incomprehensible", "this book should be career-wrecking" will no doubt increase sales in the Festival Bookshop today.
Between the quips, he managed to slip in some fundamental principles about what defines a poem. Stating that most everyday conversation is a cross "between twitter and a bark", he said that poetry was created when we very occasionally utter "the speech of a live animal" and use words in original combinations.
"It's a trade secret," he confided to a packed pavilion, "that if you want to convey a subversive thought, you can get it past the reader by rhyming it".
A self-confessed prosody geek, he explained in a way that made writing poetry sound like a doddle, that 'sound' and 'sense' are two sides of the same coin. "If the words sound right, get them down and slap in some meaning afterwards."