The Peacock Wobbles
That time of year when you reflect and remember, and look ahead. And over-indulge.
I went to the last Stanza of the year at Lakeside Arts Centre last Saturday morning, this time to chat about Gregory Woods' 'Quidnunc'. I've really come to love this group. It's a poetry reading group, though one person's nominated to read one of their poems at the following meeting. It's totally relaxed and convivial and we're scurrilously passionate in our opinions. We don't pussyfoot. Yet we're informed and generous (at least I hope so, most of the time!) What I like is its unpretentiousness. No one is so proud that he or she can't admit NOT understanding a poem, or so stubborn that an initial opinion can't be dislodged, or at least tempered. Over the last year we've covered the following collections:
Matthew Sweeney 'Black Moon' (Jan 08)
Sarah Maquire 'The Pomegranates Of Kandahar' (Feb 08)
David Harsent 'Selected' (Mar 08)
Sophie Hannah 'Pessimism For Beginners' (Apr 08)
Ciaran Carson 'For All We Know' (May 08)
Margaret Atwood 'The Door' (Jun 08)
Alice Oswald 'Dart' (Jul 08)
Daljit Nagra 'Look We Have Coming To Dover' (Sep08)
Tamar Yoseloff 'Fetch' (Oct 08)
Selima Hill 'The Hat' (Nov 08)
Gregory Woods 'Quidnunc' (Dec 08)
and in January we'll be talking about Mark Doty's 'Theories And Apparitions'. Got the feeling I may have missed one out, or got the chronology wrong - so if any Stanza members are reading this, please leave a comment and put me right!
Last Sunday afternoon, in the freezing upstairs room at The Peacock pub in Nottingham, DIY Poets brought local performance poet Steve Carroll in to conduct a 'performance' workshop for local poets. My last entry asserted that my poems' performance, by me, was an 'integral late component in their life or development'. It ended by recounting how local performance poet 'Mr Jones' had, for a few seconds, forgotten his words - and how the audience loved this, as they might have loved looking at the wobble of a tightrope walker. I also mentioned how during my performance at GFest 08 I'd had a few revelatory moments. The key word here is 'vulnerability'. I think to be 'good' you have to allow yourself to be vulnerable - which means stepping away from (out of?) the words you've written. Which means not hiding behind them. Which means knowing your words so well, being so confident in your material, that some part of you, perhaps some kind of shamanic, imaginary part of your self - the performing 'persona' perhaps - occupies a space between you and the audience, able to meet their gaze, listen, take risks, wobble....
Does any of this make sense?
Steve asked us to recite a story, on the spot, spontaneously, little knowing that I used to have recurring nightmares about being thrust onto stages without scripts. Inside, I almost felt sick at that point. I had to sit it out. So the vulnerability I'm talking about is, for me, a point I have to work very hard to get to.
Have a good Christmas
Richard x
