On Thursday, realising I had a free evening, I took the opportunity to see some performance art. This was hosted by my pal Luke ‘Luca’ Cockayne, who was reading a series of autobiographical pieces over the span of 12 hours. I only had time to see around two hours.
I don’t want to focus on the performance itself, particularly because the aftermath is still on for the next five days. Rather, I want to look at something I did during that performance.
One of the organisers handed out pens and paper to the tiny audience with the intention that we could draw if we felt inspired. Much as Luca has tried to teach me some art, I’m still far more inclined to write by default.
I enjoy the challenge of improvising poetry on the spot, so my rough plan was to compose a rough version based on the performance I could see in front of me, and then extract a polished version from that. Yet after writing my so-called polished version, I felt it didn’t quite work, so I tried another.
I ultimately ended up with a total of seven poems. Put together, they form a cycle of sorts, each of which approaches what I want to say without being able to cut to the heart of the matter.
I feel there are diamonds to be dug out of the mess here, so I’m going to keep these drafts for the moment until I find some sort of home for them.
Gavin Cameron 