Poetry: invitations
autumn haiku
.CrispAutumn.
Dead leaves hang from tree
like brown butterfly cocoons.
Seasons of nature. ©theboywyatt
This week sees National Poetry day come around again. I have a love/hate relationship with this day ever since I was asked to be part of a team delivering ‘poetry on the buses’ with mixed success. Our carefully picked mix of contemporary and classic poetry, read out between stops (by myself, an actresss, an actor and a storyteller) as we circumnavigated the citys’ bus routes, was more than once met with rage and fury. This was before i-pods and mp3 players and I often wonder how people would respond now (if at all). It could have been because we were butchering their favourite poem with our interpretation but I think it was about the invasion of their headspace, the precious time when they shut off and allow the bus to carry them, alone with their thoughts from A to B and not to be cruelly interrupted by caterwauling thespians! I still remember the look on the persons face who insisted the driver stop to let them off, so indignant where they, or maybe it was fear that they might be asked to join in? Either way – tough audience. I declined when invited to repeat the event the following year.
But I do love poetry. It started at school, by writing and swapping really, really bad song lyrics with friends in my class. By the fifth form it had evolved into poetry and our group had expanded - we became an ‘unofficial poetry club’. I wrote tons of the stuff, not much of it good. Although my English teacher did compare a poem I wrote about a ‘deer’ to Ted Hughes work once, which I grew to appreciate having gone off to find out who Ted Hughes was. And many years later, I met a man who recognised me because his daughter had been one of those ‘poetry enthusiasts’ and he told me how miserable she had been at school until she joined our ‘group’, how it had saved her. I had no inkling at the time but I knew what he meant. Something about expressing yourself through poetry and indeed reading other people’s poetry that goes beyond the depth of a play script, cuts through, creates a bond, a sense of place, of being.
At drama school I used to write people poems for birthday presents and each year I was entered in for the annual ‘Poetry Cup’, usually two days before the event because no-one else had volunteered. I never won. I rarely got through the whole poem without forgetting the words because unlike plays (in my head, at the time), performing a poem demanded a degree of skill and utter command on a far higher plane than simply inhabiting a character, and just like plays required far more rehearsal than I found time for. Hey ho. It got me and some peers invited to tea with a lady called Morag from Surrey Unversity who regarded us thespians as suitable fodder to showcase her students work, by putting us together for evenings of poetry, so we would look bad and her students would shine (sorry Morag, I’m sure it wasn’t your intention, it just felt like that). Which was funny because her students read their work like thespians and we read the poems like ‘shared truths’ which I think had more impact.
So back to National Poetry day, we’re seeing some inventive celebrations of it this year and I have two favourites; both invitations. Firstly on ‘Spoonfed’ http://www.spoonfed.co.uk/spooners/lowri-257/national-poetry-day-1555/ you are invited to share your favourite poetry, or write your own ‘off the cuff’ (just my kind of challenge) and the other a more daring sortie by The Southbank Centre, http://gps.southbankcentre.co.uk/ who are running *G.P.S Global Poetry System* subtitled Poetry. Find it, map it, share it – an excellent suggestion and I urge you to do so.