Poetry Reading

I did the reading on Wednesday and it went very well. Although, having kept myself free from nerves for the entire day, I fell nervous to the point of being sick as we walked to the building. I sat near the front of the Everyman Bistro drinking water, and I'd been unwell for a couple of days (this being the day before I went on antibiotics) I thought I might either vomit on stage or collapse. I didn't, I stumbled over one word and hate the sound of my voice in microphone, but it went down well. And because they thought I'd still be in class (I'd left early) they put me last. But I'm glad I did it, it's like breaking down a barrier for myself, and I'll feel a little more comfortable doing it again.

I read out Explosion #1 and #2 but I made crossings out on it while in class.

Explosion #1


If we rummaged here in the bedroom,
We from earthquakes –
Would feel the explosion,
As black smoke blacks out the black sky,
A red to the left of the window
Embers like fireflies dance in the moonlight,
And you'd say: 'my heart is beating really fast in my chest.'



Explosion #2


Black night had wrapped its fingers round your neck,
Almost beside me, the fire burns outside,
Stockings now boil in a teapot
Beside an old, frail towel-hook,
In the shape of a clawed hand –
We are rustling like leaves in the dark,
Only as eyes and the occasional tooth-shine,
Or a golden onlay, broken on one side –
I imagine you: “Don't be so pregnant,”
Which then swells and bursts, or explodes,
And your other-side saying: “I'm getting married,”
As your heart beats in your chest
That is the same sound, or throbbing feeling,
In my neck or throat –
A woman who has dirty blonde hair,
Is taken away for the embers of the exploded
Car outside, that rumbles us in shifting earthquakes –
Crossed in the air, Hail Mary full of Grace,
Written all over your face,
A red to the left of the window,
Your heart was beating really fast.

Poetry Reading and Starting a Magazine

I've been asked to read out a poem next Wednesday following a prize giving for a poetry prize I didn't win, so it was good of them to let me read out, though I'm terrified at the thought of reading in front of people, I get stage fright easily, but I think I've gained some confidence in my writing recently. The main problem, other than panic (which I haven't been doing) is deciding what to read. Most of my poems aren't really good enough to be read aloud, though some of my new ones are, yet I don't really trust those news ones as much as I trust the older ones, which I grow tired of. I got it down to Three Men With Suitcases, Explosion #1 and #2, and Modern Life, the latter a much older one. Though today I've decided I could do Streets in Liverpool (title to be changed) and I'm in the middle of editing it so it's much more audible. I shall post the final edit.

What I find annoying going through my poems like this is that I'm looking through the ones I thought were my best and I'm thinking "Hmm, no, that's not good enough," and so I know I need to write a lot of new poetry and stop relying on a bunch of old ones I wrote one or two years ago.

I was told by my tutor, after having trouble defining myself to a genre, to start a magazine. I'm going to get my friends involved and first have an online magazine and gain content without really any set issue, then I'll do a print version and publish content received. The problem is, I don't really know how to go about doing it.

I began Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace in the Summer (June or July) and I had to put it back down not only because it is such a difficult book, but that I had other things to read, I still do, but I feel like I should. I'd only read 24 pages, though of the massive 981 of the Abacus 2009 edition I have, with the print tiny and pages thin like a bible.

The thing is I was talking to someone in work today about myself and my friends who have been, in some way, influenced by David Foster Wallace, which began with one friend who was already a fan and each of us now reference him as an influence, bringing about us as these new writers using Foster Wallace as some precursor to our own writing.

But the thing is that David Foster Wallace died in 2008. He was only 46. It was tragic, and such a damn shame. Here's us with our new writing styles, having Foster Wallace to thank for some of it, and the poor guy is dead.

He writes with this formal/informal postmodern technique, which, emerging from that, is this comedic voice so distanced from anything it can say anything - I think it;s better than the traditional god-distanced narrative, becoming this god-like voice that is sprayed out everywhere and sounds so funny (though you do have to pay attention, or else it's gone).

Writing Poems - Meeting Carol Ann Duffy and Billy Collins

I don't think it's quite worth saying how relevant it is to write poetry from one point of view of the world, where the single purpose for said writing is that single and actual functions; though every time I write poetry - it will come about like some kind of celestial or biological function - I'll write about five or so "good" poems, and what I mean by good is that I choose not to throw them away and believe that with the one good line in them they'll be forever remembered as that poem he wrote, and thus I cannot throw them away anyway.

But I've always been one to read Sylvia Plath, I love her use of language and I've seen it in no other poetry so I subsequently mimic that causing me to have written something totally cryptic that even I don't know what I have written (this happened in 2007 after reading Virginia Woolf for the first time, I didn't know what I'd written, I've not read her since). So the polar opposite to Plath I believe is Charles Bukowski, whom I also adore, and they are actually similar in that they both write confessionalist poetry (which I've written in an essay before). Bukowski made me write gritty and often vulgar language, but together I see my influence from the two. But I don't think it's quite worth saying that I read only these two poets, since I do try to read others, and one recent influence is now Billy Collins.

I saw him give a reading with Carol Ann Duffy. I met Duffy and spoke to her, told her I was doing a Masters and she signed her book Rapture for me, which I still have, but I went and got Collins' Sailing Alone Around the Room because I like his use of language, very slow and meditated like his voice, and the message/story that I neglect to put into my writing.

I wrote a poem I've posted called Three Men With Suitcases. I wrote it after I came home one night and three men with suitcases where in my way, but I was thinking to myself about a short story I wanted to write which I never got around to (it was going to be called Conversations with the Vicar, and was to be quite violent). My thoughts then moved onto these men in front of me, they were very strange, like tourists at night. In my tired state of mind I began describing smells as colours. The poem I wrote switches from outside and inside; with three men in suitcases in the way and getting past them, and inside with a man seeming to be freezing to death somehow.

I wrote this:

The best thing I ever knew
Was not yourself or what you do –
It was that time you got the flu,
Sat and said achoo achoo,
Covered in a dangerous heat
A swelling down to your feet
Skin white as a sheet,
Tongue a lump of meat –
The best thing I ever knew about you –
Not your eyes (that were blue)
Or your left foot (with it's tiny shoe)
Or your presence (which sticks like glue) –
It was your sickness inside of you
That made you want to sneeze
To explode or pop
And fall at your knees –
It was you and the time you had the flu –
It was always you and the things inside of you.

This was just something that came to me after reading some Collins and the idea that, with being sick at the time and most other people too, we're more sick than alive. And the result being, I more likely fell for the sickness than the person.

Another one:

The heat of me burns,
I glow a shade of red,
Maybe crimson or rose,
I swell and fill with dread;
Then numb to the knee
(and numb to the arm);

My skin is dried fruit
Or rotten apple skin –
Eyes are heavy,

A shadow is slit along
White wall like yin yang –

I then burst into confetti
As I drift into sleep.

This was a small thing I did to get me to write when I couldn't think of anything. When this happens I just describe my physical feelings. The confetti bit was an interesting image that came to me, the reason I haven't included it in my "good" pieces is because the first part is too weak and the end is paradoxical since 'burst' is the opposite to 'drift into sleep.' It's one of those poems that can't really be edited since a change in the metaphor will be a change in the entire thing, which isn't really worth it in the end.

Three Men With Suitcases

Inside: bathroom yellow smell swells
Around cracked tiles against him,
And five pieces of silver smash
From his fist that fall pink pink pink
The same colour of the disinfectant –

Outside: three men with suitcases
Walk like Disneyfied dwarves,
Humming hi-ho with diamonds
In their eyes, which is to be seen,
With one of them smelling either brown or green –

Inside: he sits on the floor that freezes his body
He is just tired and angry like many others,
And cannot find strength to move
And cannot love a woman who loves a woman
For that woman is in love, and loves not him –

Outside: they stop and start like little ants
Building something far away,
He turns and sees you, and lets you go past
You keep walking, he smells grey,
He hates you with a smile, deep from within his heart –

Inside: momentary waves of non-sound like hummm
Or precisely aaahhh from his throat echo
A weird vibrato or an almost booming electro-magnetic pulse
Through him, which carries on in his skin
Above a soft-ish smell of ochre,

Outside: You are going home
You think you are in love
As three men with suitcases are now behind you,
Their lives safely and neatly packaged
In cases, which smell of black and white and maybe purple.