First past the first post

My first post. Got to start somewhere.

This blog is intended to be about the interactions between poetry and everyday life, as I live it. How poetry gets squished in the gaps between being a full-time teacher and fully-participating member of Team Family. How poetry has become an antidote to boredom during repetitive housework tasks, a form of mental entertainment to counteract more mundane or stressful thought processes. How it can also sometimes become a compulsion that sends me hiding in a quiet corner with a notebook or laptop, just trying to get the ideas down, trying to get the poem finished when I really should be doing something else. Poetry gets me out of the house occasionally, and provides my necessary dose of ego-driven adrenalin at monthly open-mic nights. It brings me lovely human interactions and friendships. It's a funny thing, poetry.

I’d also like this blog to provide a space to share my poetic work, in audio and written form, with friends, family and anyone else who may be interested. The need for this is accentuated by the fact that I live in a different country to many of my friends and most of my family, and in a place where English is not the first language of poetry or anything else. I am an ex-pat poet who dreams of one day being heard back in Blighty, or on an Anglophone stage anywhere*, and I imagined this website as the first step towards promoting my work and making this possible.

So why a blog? Why not stick to the Youtube channel and unavoidable Facebook page? Why impose my self-therapy musings on the wwwweb? Well, I confess I’m interested in practicing writing for a medium other than poetry, to refine my style, find my voice and avoid rhyming at least some of the time. I’m also hoping that writing about the interaction between poetry and everyday life will help me to better understand it, and thus make the relationship more productive and mutually beneficial. 

I have some difficulties applying the word “creative” to myself, as to me it sounds terribly pretentious, as if I am presuming my work to have some form of “creative” value for which I cannot really be the judge. But I have been obliged to come to terms with the fact that I need a “creative” outlet in my life: I need to be “creating” something “creative”, something so-called “artistic” - as opposed to just useful, convenient, organized, edible or all the other requirements of my “everyday” productions. This intriguing tension between artistic and everyday is a recurring theme in my poems and indeed, in my life, and thus will hopefully make an interesting theme for a blog. Who knows? Perhaps I can kick-start an online community for others negotiating similar creative conflicts in their lives. Please feel free to comment, share experiences or just tell me to get over myself (actually no, don’t do the last one, it’s called trolling and it’s not nice).

So here goes…


*Please understand I have nothing against French spoken word stages. I have always been received with kindness and acceptance – but also, it has to be said, an appreciable amount of incomprehension. My fault for being in the wrong country, I know, but I can’t help hankering after a little more… understanding.