Yesterday I was busy choosing poems to read at an event at the local bookshop, so didn’t get round to updating the blog. I had a reading slot of between 15 and 20 minutes and spent all afternoon trying to create some kind of coherent ‘set’.
I love doing open mikes and readings but, despite all the learning by heart I did as a child, I am hopeless at remembering my poems and have to have them written down. So I printed out a sort of long-list of thirty or more poems and then shuffled the papers around on the kitchen table until things began to take shape.
Finally it came together, with a sequence of love poems, rounded off with a short selection of poems set in Spain, about a dozen in all.
As I was reading and re-reading, trying to re-familiarise myself with the chosen pieces so that I’d feel confident and be able to look up and connect with the audience, it occurred to me that there is one poem I can remember perfectly: a poem I’ve written about before, which I wrote in the Sixties.
I’d really like to know what that piece has that makes it so hard to forget, and then perhaps I could make my current writing memorable, too.
