I want to be the sort of person who wants to go to poetry readings

"There should be a word for the things we do not because we want to but because we want to be the sort of people who want to" --e horne and j comeau

Ah, poetry readings. They're one of those things cultured people claim to enjoy. It's right up there with jazz4--or opera or classical music, or visiting art museums, or wine tastings where there isn't an open bar.

I want to be the sort of person who enjoys poetry readings. I should be; I'm a creative writer and ergo want to be the sort of person who wants to be involved in the local creative writing scene. In actuality, all I want is to get published. Unfortunately this would be greatly helped if I really did enjoy the local creative writing scene, because then when I went to open mic nights my heart would be in it, and I would probably try to make friends with the other participants instead of sitting in a corner without making eye-contact so that I can think up really nasty ways of criticising anyone who has the guts to (read: is self-important enough to) actually go up there and read something out loud, and eventually I could make good connections with people who know publishers and also can maybe give me tips on how to actually write a novel that doesn't suck. But I digress.

On the first Tuesday of every month, Aqua Books has an event called Speaking Crow. It is an open mic night, the sort of night where anyone who thinks they are anyone (regardless of who they actually are) is allowed to go up and perform their original pieces of poetry, provided it is under 3 minutes*. Some of the poetry is rather good. Some of it is notably bad. Aqua books always schedules a Feature reader**, presumably to guarantee that there will be one reader with at least professional-grade material, if not actually enjoyable material. But I'm being uncharitable. I must direct your attention back to the middle of this paragraph, where I conceded that some of the poetry was 'rather good'. Even this description must come with a disclaimer, though, which is this: when it comes to poetry, I am rather bad at enjoying it.

Appreciating poetry is either a skill I have not acquired or a gift I was not born with. When a poem begins, my mind begins to float in and out of consciousness. It can generally be found squatting in an alleyway on the other side of town when the most beautiful of poems reaches its crescendo. If I list a poem as 'one of my favourites', this means I regained awareness of my physical surroundings at a time when one profound line of poetry was being read, and I clung to that, spawning an appreciation for the entire poem from that one little scrap of poetry. "But my mother's voice was rain rich with lilacs, her look a field of brown oats, soft bearded."1 "and the days are not long enough, and the nights are not long enough, and life creeps by like a fieldmouse, barely shaking the grass" 2***

The fact of the matter is that I was at Speaking Crow this Tuesday, not because I wanted to be but because I wanted to want to be. The parts of it that I enjoyed I did not enjoy because I wanted to be the sort of person who enjoyed them****, but the parts I turned my nose up at I definitely scorned because I am NOT the sort of person who actually wants to be at poetry readings. The thing with poems is they generally occupy more than one line, and my mind can't often handle more than one or two. Ergo, I managed to catch about 20 little lines of poetry, ranging from "The heart is not a beating thing for you" (by Robert Hays) to "will you be part of the generation who turned the water black" (by Gag Me With a Spoon and Hypocrite).

Ergo, a poetry reading for me is one fairly brief poem with three-minute pauses between sentences:


Poetry is all about punishing people.
His eyebrows are white. His hair is black. He is 15 years old.
When you need something from him, you'll remember his name;
the heart is not a beating thing for you.

The pavement will grow no softer if you jump on it,
and the Earth produces a disaster to scratch at every irritation
will you be part of the generation who turned the water black?
When I looked at the sky, I saw clouds forming chains,
but we keep the heart to a perfect sound.


*And if you have ever had to sit through an open mic night where the limit was 10 minutes, you will appreciate how mercifully short Speaking Crow is.

**This week's feature reader was Jonathan Ball, who read from Ex Machina--a book of poetry arranged like a choose-your-own-adventure novel where if you actually follow the page directions the book will never end and you'll never read all of the poems inside it. He followed this with a few excerpts from Clockfire, a collection of plays that are impossible to perform. Personally, I would say Ex Machina is notable for the idea behind it though not for most of the poems within it, whilst Clockfire is actually worth reading (though I've been warned that the excerpts he read that were hilarious become terrifying if you read them to yourself)

***these were of course drawn from vague memory and I cannot guarantee accuracy.

****Or, put more plainly, I actually did enjoy them