Weirdo at the Jam Cafe
Hail and sunshine outside on this blustery spring day.
The 'Oxjam' gig at the Jam Cafe last Sunday went well. It was hot, packed and airless and we had to stand up most of the night. Lack of oxygen is meant to aid sexual arousal, isn't it? (So the ghost of Michael Hutchence keeps telling me). The audience were particularly attractive, so perhaps that explains it... I was very nervous as I waited for my late 10.15pm slot and had pins and needles and lightheadedness, but once I actually started I clicked into performance mode and had an excited, comfortable feeling that these poems were mine and mine only and I was jolly well going to deliver them as best I could!
Using a stand to put my poems on, thereby freeing my arms and hands has made a significant difference. It's allowed me to try and inhabit each poem bodily. For example with the first prose-poem 'Farmer's Wife, 1955' I wanted to exhibit nervous energy, centred in the fingers. When I talked about 'unwinging' bluebottles I wanted to mime, with my fingers, the plucking out of their wings. In 'After Michelangelo' I wanted to hint at the contrapposto of his figures by twisting my torso a little. I'm not sure how much of this was communicated to the audience and I'm not sure what was going off in my eyes (How much was I looking at the audience? Were my eyes dead?) But I'm almost certain that I can afford to emphasise these sorts of things a good deal more. But I've made a start. I feel that I'm starting to come into my own as a performer. I've finally realised that embarrassment and self-consciousness have no place on stage. It's inhibiting. And it's certainly not cute. Not from a man hitting forty this year it ain't....
I feel that 'embodying' my poems in a live situation like this should be an essential component of what I do. It is, of course, a component whose success entirely depends on a good poem being written in the first place. I'll always write for the reader, not the spectator, but the text is always a kind of performance, isn't it? One that unwinds to its completion inside the reader's head? And I sense that my best poems might have - ought to have - a certain dramatic and corporeal energy which will always lend them to being done live. Perhaps I'm admitting that a lot of my poems are 'theatrical'!
Theatrical, and also weird. Certainly my selection of my prose-poem 'Farmer's Wife, 1955' to open was in some sense a kind of admittal that I can and should do weird if I want to. I think I've been partially suppressing the weirder currents in my artistic practice. "Anyone can do weird," I've been telling myself, implying, superciliously, that weirdness requires no skill and is for the childish and the insane only. But as I get older I realise more that 1. This is not true. And actually there are very few of us who can do weird! And 2. the world needs weird. It badly, badly needs its boat rocking. So hey, now I'm coming on like a genetic hybrid of Bono and Dali and that's really not a pleasant thought...
I was listening to Laurie Anderson on my walk home last night. I feel a lot of affinity with her homely/unhomely tales. I have far more in common with her than with, say, John Cooper Clarke who everyone seems to rave about (why? What's he got? I can't see it yet! Someone enlighten me! I genuinely want to know!). And she has such a mesmerising voice....
Thanks for reading,
Richard
