Occasionally I let my imagination go wild. Iām on stage, reading a poem that will change my life. The audience is rapt and when Iāve done, the applause is deafening. Itās the pinnacle of my journey. The poem appears in Zoom rooms as an example of a superlative piece of craft. The devoted few have favourite lines tattooed and then, on Graham Norton, a famous actor reads it out loud and professes they are a fan.
I realised quite early on that EVERY poem I read in front of an audience incrementally alters my existence. Itās not about the moment other people look at your work and decide it is noteworthy. Itās when you accept what matters more is the journey that brings you to that point and keeps fuelling the constant flow of creativity and progression to your door.
After that, picking a favourite becomes quite hard.
Reading Kimās post yesterday provided a fair few lightbulb moments. The main one was the idea of a āmoment of beingā: as humans, we are constantly taught lessons, but it can take some time before the significance of those moments becomes properly apparent. As a poet, I think it probably helped a bit that my first competition win was my first publication. It also made bettering that a bit of a hurdle going forward.
However, the more I have performed, the greater the belief becomes that this matters more than grading my own work. It is the importance to present than it ever is to pick favourites. Itās why I often refuse to answer āif you could be X or Y, which would you choose?ā questions because only having two possible options is ridiculously restrictive. Everything in the world can become a poem.
The key is how you choose to tell that story.
I have a gig next week that is hugely important because I will be performing in the same space as someone who has had a significant effect on my craft. If this were the old days, Iād pay reverence to them by performing one of their own works, to demonstrate I got what they were doing which could be seen in my delivery and presentation. Iām glad we donāt have to prove ourselves like that any more.
Iāve picked three poems which are vastly different to each other. All cover popular culture and world events and crucially none have been published. Iāve thought about reading work that others have decided was good enough to be printed in things but that seems a bit easy. That work was Old Me, before I learnt that my political stance is a powerful tool on stage. So, yet again, I will take a leap in the dark.
This is not necessarily the correct commercial decision either, which makes me happy.
If Iām forced to decide on one poem alone, it will be this one. It was when the use of white space in my work evolved past a gimmick and into vocabulary. It is the concrete form that one day I will use in an entire collection which nobody will buy but I will celebrate as a triumph. Crucially, for eight days, people I knew who donāt get poetry made the pilgrimage to the Waiting Room at Leigh on Sea Station to see it.
People went to see my work. That is never going to get old, and to be able to do so is the undoubted highlight of my journey thus far. This is the benchmark that everything else will need to measure itself against. To have such freedom creatively is such a rarity. To not fuck up the execution is a blessing. Most important of all though, is this poemās perfection in my eyes. It does what it needs to do.
That is all I can ever ask of my work for the rest of time.
That's one of my favorites of yours, too!