Performance
(The dust has settled and back I slink like a penitent drunk, birthdays and tasting nights having kept me away. Also a reading, the main inspiration behind this piece).
Last Wednesday I stood up in front of a roomful of people and read poems that I’d written for twenty minutes or so. Not in itself an unusual occurrence for me, though far enough out of the ordinary to cause me a couple of nights of broken sleep wondering what on earth I was going to do.
I felt a fraud, to be honest. My writing habits are slow, and over twenty years I’ve managed to amass a grand total of two chapbooks. The upshot of this being that, when reading from my “latest” book, I may be reading a piece that’s up to sixteen years old. Fair enough, the audience may not have heard it before, but it still feels slightly like one of those sad eighties revivals tours, with multiple acts coming on, doing the hit, and fucking off. It reminds me of how little I have actually got done, thus far. But, with such a paucity of material to draw on, I ploughed on regardless.
I have a slightly odd relationship with readings. I find it difficult not to perform. Not that this is a bad thing per se, I’ve been to too many gigs where a quiet bloke, head bowed, mumbles and rushes through something which would work better on the page. What I mean is I find myself doing the crowd-pleasing ones*,the funnier ones. Possibly to the detriment of the more serious aspects of my work. The self accusation of fraud rears its head again.
*inasfar as poetry can be regarded as crowd-pleasing, yes, yes, ho ho, very good.
(The dust has settled and back I slink like a penitent drunk, birthdays and tasting nights having kept me away. Also a reading, the main inspiration behind this piece).
Last Wednesday I stood up in front of a roomful of people and read poems that I’d written for twenty minutes or so. Not in itself an unusual occurrence for me, though far enough out of the ordinary to cause me a couple of nights of broken sleep wondering what on earth I was going to do.
I felt a fraud, to be honest. My writing habits are slow, and over twenty years I’ve managed to amass a grand total of two chapbooks. The upshot of this being that, when reading from my “latest” book, I may be reading a piece that’s up to sixteen years old. Fair enough, the audience may not have heard it before, but it still feels slightly like one of those sad eighties revivals tours, with multiple acts coming on, doing the hit, and fucking off. It reminds me of how little I have actually got done, thus far. But, with such a paucity of material to draw on, I ploughed on regardless.
I have a slightly odd relationship with readings. I find it difficult not to perform. Not that this is a bad thing per se, I’ve been to too many gigs where a quiet bloke, head bowed, mumbles and rushes through something which would work better on the page. What I mean is I find myself doing the crowd-pleasing ones*,the funnier ones. Possibly to the detriment of the more serious aspects of my work. The self accusation of fraud rears its head again.
*inasfar as poetry can be regarded as crowd-pleasing, yes, yes, ho ho, very good.
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