winter blues

Gimme a break
Or rather don't. I'm only five weeks into doing open mic slots wherever and already it's getting surreal. A month ago I had about 3 poems totally committed to memory. Now I can't remember a single one - all I have are fragments of a dozen pieces - some of which I haven't read in years. A month ago I had no sound problems and got applause in a student pub. Now my mic technique is fucked and I'm getting heckled - even though I'm more relaxed and funnier. And so it goes.

A night in the life
So I turn up at an open mic night and invariably the place is packed - except at the Star & Garter where all rules are banished. Depending on whether I've been there before or not I either battle my way to the night's organiser and book a slot - or hide in the toilets till my partner does it for me. Then we sit around trying to drink as little as possible while conning some students we're ever so boho and slightly messed up.

Meantime a succession of musicians have their open slots. One will be a sexist dick with nonetheless stunning musicianship, one will play the same ''comedy' song four times with a different title, one will be terribly earnest in a Nick Drake/Jeff Buckley kind of way, and one will make you think either 'Woah, this is good', or 'Woah, they wanna make a hat from my skin'.

Then I get up and the three poems I could remember perfectly ten times on the trot this morning are totally gone. But it's okay cos the moment I first yell the mic starts feeding back for the next five minutes. Halfway through the first poem someone starts to heckle. Again this doesn't matter cos I can ignore better than anyone. Besides I'm either going to win them over or make them look stupid. Then I finish and everyone's happier. Some more musicians play and my partner and I go home in the freezing cold, now so afflicted by memory loss I don't know who I am. I think I may be Iggy Pop, but probably not.

And that's it
An average of two nights a week [not for some time, I'm on a more relaxed schedule for the time being, but writing more], no reward [still true], late nights, my health shot and meeting more people each week than in my first 18 months in Manchester.

Well, that's not quite it...
Hey dude, last time you said you'd talk about artistic freedom, so what about it? Well, it's a little tougher than I may have suggested last time. My convictions and some of my experience suggest that you can have near total freedom - that blown down tree, shit smeared on a wall, a broken nose can all be beautiful. But even on this position the artists skill has to be a factor. Some things are harder to understand, to appreciate as art - as being beautiful - than others. You may only be receptive to them in the right mood, in the right location. The artist has to be able to persuade you otherwise - or con you into believing conditions are right. Which means you still have to freedom to do what you want, but you have to have some idea of what you're doing. The good news is that the more you do the more of a clue you'll have.

Still don't sound like fun
Oh come on. Take poetry for example. You can try to write verse that scans - is even vaguely metric - and perhaps rhymes every alternate line. Nothing too gruelling. Or you can forget it - ignore all the rules and try to make some random shit you've seen interesting. I mean; love poetry, nature poetry, poetry about your life in conventional, crafted forms - or mad shit about a tv in the road, how middle-class office trash get fat asses and whatever else you want. No choice. Go hog-wild.

H'm...
Still not convinced huh? Have you read any poetry lately? No, of course you haven't - see my last rant for details. Poetry isn't free enough. Even though it's shed all kinds of restrictive rules it still hasn't learned to dance. Most of the English language poets you can name are either dead (Eliot, Hughes, Auden), boring (Owen Sheers, Simon Armitage, Don Paterson), old and ever more pointless (Derek Walcott), smug (Wendy Cope, Carol Ann Duffy), or just plain shit. The people most worth reading are impossible to find while the shelves fill up with dull anthologies. Or celeb poetry by tossers like Barbara Taylor Bradford, Craig Charles and Billy Corgan. I shit you not.

You can only come to one conclusion. It's obvious that nobody knows anything about poetry. Therefore the field is free for you to what in the hell you like. And since bookshops seem to think Khalil Gibran (the Arabic Patience Strong + a comfort to slack-wit New-Agers everwhere), Barbara Taylor Bradford and endless fucking overpriced beat reprints are what we wanna read, you can probably con them into stocking anything. Besides, it's hard to sell any less than poets do now.

Okay, I get the point
Sorry, I got kinda carried away...

Comments

Popular Posts