5 or 6 ageing transvestites
Went to The Maze on Monday night and read 'Marathon' and the first three stanzas of 'Serpent', as part of DIY Poets. Seemed to go down well. There was an excellent jazz band, just female voice, drums and bass, doing fifties-ish, funky, swing music. The woman commanded attention and was at the same time swooning with the bluesy taste of the notes which were leaving her mouth. She was skilfully entertaining us, yet occasionally 'lost', enraptured. I'm jealous. I want this too. I'm told I command attention when I read out poems. I think, sometimes, I entertain. But I don't take the audience - or me - elsewhere with it. I suppose it's harder to do this when I'm reading, when I'm flapping bits of scrappy paper around the mic - this immediately alerts the audience to the fact that I'm relaying something to them second-hand. Doesn't it? That the poem's primary existence is there in my hand. I should make an effort to lose the script and see what happens. But as for going elsewhere... It's possible. Certain images can haunt, transport... Certain rhyme patterns can be incantatory...
Last night I saw Catherine reading her poems at the 'Comfort' Hotel on George Street, with three other poets - Mark Goodwin, Allan E Baker and Helen Johnson, all part of the Leicestershire collective 'Inky Fish'. It was an enjoyable evening. Definitely a few moments of magic, though lamentably attended. Fifteen tops. Which, for poetry, is highly respectable. I just wonder where the other poets and readers in Nottingham are, where the poets on the MA at Trent Uni are, where the literature lecturers and teachers are, where the performers are...? Where are they? Can't they be arsed to turn out on an early Autumn evening? Must the poetry audience always be so tiny and cliquey, like a puddle full of tadpoles. Maybe better to say several puddles - and the tadpoles don't always jump from one to the other.
Jane, R and I went to the Lord Roberts pub afterwards. R had found Catherine's poem about breastfeeding TOO emotional. It had disturbed her because she is particularly vulnerable, apparently, when it comes to the subject of children, fertility etc. But that wasn't Catherine's, or Inky Fish's fault. Jane and I were trying to argue that poetry SHOULD disturb, but that it should, paradoxically, be taken with a pinch of salt because at the end of the day it's fictional. We discussed all this, heatedly, through the nicotine smoke. Ages since I've been in this pub. On the next table were five or six young lesbians discussing relationships in a flushed, half-drunk, animated fashion. Over in the corner were five or six ageing transvestites with grey jowls and bad wigs, looking a bit ill-at-ease. I wonder why, if they felt compelled to abandon masculinity, they sought asylum in such a bathetic, uninspiring parody of its opposite??
I walked Jane to bus stop, both of us complaining how, even in this puddle full of tadpoles, some people still don't know our names or that we're doing this bloody PhD, and promising ourselves that things have got to change. We're gonna have to be a lot more selfish and aggressive!
