It's well over a month since I last mentioned it. And, given that all this time has since passed us by, perhaps I'd better provide a bit of an update. Of course, the fact that I have to fill 30 posts this month has absolutely nothing to do with this sudden openness on my part.
I'll be doing a lot of this in November; interspersing the vaguely creative stuff with general ramblings about things that are happening to me. Don't judge, you're not the boss of me. If I was Stephen Fry you'd be calling me a frickin' genius.
At the end of September, you may recall, I said that I'd been asked to contribute to a charity evening at a local pub. The basic premise was that I would stand up in front of a room of complete strangers and read things out to them. This caused me the odd moment of worry. You may remember be weighing up the pros and cons.
Not because of any anxieties about getting up in front of a crowd. I am, truth be told, a colossal show-off. But it was the potential for poetry that was causing me some concern. I don't do poetry. Or, at least, on 27 September I didn't.
The pros won. And it was marvellous.
I was helped by a sympathetic audience. Any crowd containing members who, when presented with a guy with an acoustic guitar offering to do a cover of Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues, call out "Right on!" with no sense of irony, aren't going to get at all precious about poems.
There are poets who write sensitively about beauty and truth. Who weave words, painting verbal pictures. Who touch on the rawest of human emotion. I am not one of those people. I write about what's in my fridge, drinking wine from the box and the number 50 night-bus from Birmingham City Centre. Romantic poets? Sod that for a lark.
My allotted ten minutes seemed to fly by, I got plenty of (intentional) laughs and I was applauded back to my seat. A very good friend who was there told me how proud Dad would have been. Beer was consumed.
What's that? You actually want to see some of these poems? Well, I do have 30 days to fill....
1 comment:
"Right on!" Looking forward to reading some pragmatic poetry in this space during NaBloPoMo!
I have to submit some of my stuff to the University "literary magazine" as part of the creative writing class I'm taking. Should be interesting to see if they publish the poem about my cat, the one about a box of hand-me-downs or the one about getting drunk over an old boyfriend.
Eat dirt, Byron.
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