Project Number One!

Do A Poetry Reading!

Yesterday I went to The Moon where they hold the Perth Poetry Club each week. I have been receiving emails from these people for months and months, but was too daunted, or maybe too disorganised to get there. One time I was even in the city on a Saturday and brought some poems just in case I mustered up the courage to pop in, but instead I met a friend. Something about the spirit that I am in lately, where things just seem less daunting, where most change feels positive and encouraged and positive change is so much more accessible. My mind feels a lot clearer, and is seeking more clarity still. It is good.
So yesterday I just popped down there, it was held in the back room of the Moon, and there was such a motley crowd. It was strange, and it was sweet, and I really enjoyed that. For some reason I envisaged something youthful and pretentious. This suited me much better, and totally assuaged my nerves. As strange as some of the people were, this was about expression.
The first person to get up and speak was a very old, hunched woman in a red matching tracksuit. She spoke about coming home after a holiday. There was a very large man with long hair and a beard wearing a garish hawaiin shirt who's poems were replete with 'fucks', but still, quite intelligently expressed. There was a European woman who kept forgetting the words to her slam poem, an asian girl in a doctor who jumper who spoke effusively about Vincent Van Gough, a few sensible looking men in sensible pants and sensible shoes who got up and did slam poetry that I did not expect, or beautiful poetry that I did not expect. There was a short bald man with glasses who walked through the audience loudly proclaiming his rhythmic poem, I think that was my favourite moment. Or maybe it was the new guy who wrote a rhyming poem about a lonely man in outback australia who built a tin effegy of a woman and got spade, and tetnis from his rusted steel companion. The two special guests were an interesting dichotomy. An older woman who had an interesting selection of poems, all of different forms, and she would tell us before she read them, a lot of them I had never heard of before which inspired me to do some research about form. (Mark Treddenick had planted that seed a few months ago, about the importance of form in poetry). And the other guest was a man in a hat and sunglasses who's sonnets were called 'death and vaginas' - about creation and voids. He also did a lot of rhythmic poetry which was interesting. I decided at half time that I would get up and do one. Sophie had just gone to a sketching course, and Sarah said 'Its the day for doing new things'. I had brought my books along just in case, so I was prepared. I decided to read Alpheuis and Arethusa, one of my greek mythology series.
I was hardly nervous. It did not feel like such a big deal. Not in the sense that I was unaffected or indifferent. not at all, it just felt right. It felt good. It felt natural. I did not feel the need for any grand expression of nerves or delight or accomplishment or breaking down of fear barriers. Even though I felt all of those things somewhere inside my brain. I think what dominated my mental landscape at the time though, making all those other thoughts quietly diminish, was a calm sense that this was good and this was right. I felt calmly thrilled, calmly confident, calmly like I was born to do this, to get up and share stories that I had crafted with my words.