So yeh, that feeling when you re-discover a whole website and blog that you had literally… forgotten you had ever created. Not just put aside, not just left in the past, but its existance had literally fallen out of my head. It was only when randomly deciding to seek out another, even older blog that I once tried to start, failed to keep up and somehow did not manage to completely forget, that I re-discovered that I had once attached a blog to my poetry Google account. Guess it could happen to anyone huh?
So what has happened since my fourth and previously-last blog entry, in September 2018? I mean, apart from all the obvious stuff, like Brexit, global pandemics, several new or ongoing terrible wars, political upheavals, and millions of people tragically dead before their time due to any of the above? (I have always maintained that Brexit would end up killing people, but I guess I can’t declare on that one just yet).
Well, although one wouldn’t think so from the evidence of this sad attempt at a website, my personal poetry journey has very much continued and evolved, more-or-less shaped by events, world-changing or otherwise. I continued to post on writeoutloud.net (where the poems linked to in the “texts” section of this site are still posted), learning a lot from interactions with fellow poets and discovering a knack for pointless and clichéd comic rhyming. I discovered Instagram mainly by accident, setting up an account with the intention only to read the poetry of others, then falling into a trap of needing to “produce” as people started “following” me, whatever that meant. Through this platform I have made some poetry friends, learned even more from interactions with interesting people, and fallen in love with the intellectual puzzles of obscure form poetry (anyone for a quick clogyrnach?) I started attending the IG transmissions of various poetry-sharing groups and gurus, setting alarms for 3am to join in a “live” from a different time-zone that might possibly include the reading of one of my texts. I even attempted a couple of “lives” of my own, carefully planned for occasions when there was no one in the house to hear me and wonder what the hell I was doing. I don’t see much of any of that kind of thing happening any more on IG; I think COVID killed off that part of IG amongst so many other things (and people).
I went to quite some lengths to keep attending open mic nights for a while, then suddenly lost my mojo and stopped – even before COVID brought all that to an abrupt halt. I’m not going to go into the traumas of the 1st lockdown (the sudden, chaotic conversion to online teaching, the massive explosion of an already-heavy workload due to (my own) bad management of the tools and requirements, in parallel with the obligations of home-schooling…). Nor the 2nd lockdown and its surroundings (obligatory hybrid teaching, or presence v. distance teaching in alternation, masks, contact cases, queues for COVID tests… blah blah). Oh, I guess I did after all. Now we’ve survived all that, I’m not quite sure how, all I know is that even just the mention of online teaching has the potential to bring on symptoms of PTSD (diagnosis unofficial but reliable).
BUT the COVID lockdowns spawned one amazing and positive thing: the Zoom poetry open-mic/slam scene. I do not know if COVID prompted the discovery of the possibilities of video-conferencing for poetry performance, or just pushed it necessarily to the forefront, but for the likes of me – stuck poeming in a language that is non-native to my location, remember – it was a total revelation, and liberation. Suddenly I could easily share in an ENGLISH-SPEAKING, international poetry community! There are too many events and communities now in existence to even begin to mention or attend more than a tiny proportion: I can just say I became a regular at Oooh Beehive and Blot from the Blue, and also participated in various events by the Gloucester Poetry Society (including having a couple of poems published in their 2021 Trawler anthology). I even participated in a couple of international online slams – AND qualified as a finalist in them – and had the immense pleasure of being invited to do a headlining set for the open mic of Oooh Beehive in September 2022. Through all of this, I have once more learned such a lot from amazing interactions, and met lovely poets who I now count as friends, real friends, although I have never encountered most of them in person. And a few of them I have; I made a crazy trip to Morecambe Poetry Festival in September 2023, to meet some lovely zoom poetry ladies in the flesh, and have the immense pleasure of getting to perform live in Blighty for almost the first time (although the open-mic nights were scheduled between midnight and 2am, so the audience was rather limited… I guess world-wide acclaim will have to wait a little longer).
So where am I at these days? I have to confess that the “continued and evolved” poetry journey mentioned above has distinctly slowed down in recent months. I’m down to 2-3 new slam poems a year if I’m lucky, and my comic or form poetry flow has trickled to almost nothing. My Instagram account is pretty much dormant except for occasional non-poetry-related posts (I am sooooo bad at managing my presence and prominence on social media – as I guess this blog proves!) I’ve attended a grand total of one live scene ouverte in Grenoble since lockdown, although I did also have the amazing opportunity to do my first ever live, full-length slam sets at the “Speak It, Sing It” festival of English language held at Grenoble Atelier du 8 in July 2022 and 2023. Worst of all, I’m simply not taking the time to attend Zoom open mics these days, to maintain contact with those amazing and supporting poetry communities that have already given me so much. I could blame life, just the plain old overwhelming pressures of balancing work, parenting and trying to stay alive, before creativity even gets a look in. But by “life” I mean “me”.
I’ve written about creativity before. I tend to write about my need to create more than I get on with actually creating – or I should say, practising creating: learning by doing and all that. The online expedition that led to the accidental re-discovery of this blog is part of yet another, misguided flurry of determination to once more chisel a space for the elusive “creativity” in my life. I WILL WRITE. For better or for worse. This year, I WILL find time to put words down, properly and carefully, and try to learn from the process, so that I get better at combining them, manipulating them, and using them in my own miniscule attempt at making the world a better place.
Will someone please, PLEASE hold me to that?
