Some thoughts on reading at Over the Edge next week- and a poem

In ten day's time I will drive to Galway and join Breda Spaight and Afric McGlinchey as featured readers at the Over the Edge reading in the city library. I am thrilled and rightly nervous at the thought of this reading. Moreover, I am  proud to be doing it and glad of the validation of my writing. There is always this nagging question with me, how much of a writer am I really? Do I spend enough time and energy at writing to justify a claim to the title poet? On good days I see the progress I've made, other days I only see the rejection emails.
I don't have this kind of insecurity about my job, I'm good at it and I can say so. I know how to gauge that, how to up-skill and reinvent, reinterpret, keep fresh. I am inspired by my students and my colleagues in the English department and rarely too tired or otherwise turned off to make most days a good day at the office. There is an element of  performance in teaching and of course a script in the form of a syllabus and prescribed texts.

What is mostly different about writing then is that to be in any way relevant and worth bothering with, honest exposure is demanded. There is nowhere to hide once a poem is out there. I write to see what happens to a poem when I write it, to be read and listened to. The interesting thing then is how the resulting poems will be received. When someone says they like a poem, or they want a copy of a poem I know I've done something right, if something doesn't go down that well I need to put it and myself through our paces again.
Having poems accepted for publication in journals is the biggest indicator to me that I'm not kidding myself. An editor believes his or her journal will be better with my poem in it. That never ceases to delight me. Reading at Over the Edge is a big next step, a chance to gauge live feedback from an audience outside the parish, to try out some new poems and feel part of something shared.
And I'm very glad of the opportunity it affords me to feel entitled to be called a poet for the night!

Wordilicious

The house is full of words-

bundles of them sit on the stairs,

in the smudges on the windowpanes,

others are lifted on the draught

when a door is closed too suddenly.

Tonight we are all plans,

colluding in the beginning of something

that might be massive.

Scrabble tiles in their box turn,

rattle toward the sound of our voices,

drawn by some magnetism

that pulls and repels the best of us,

the worst of us.

There is poetry on the bedside locker

and at the end of the bath

and slumping on the window sills in the study.

By the table is a pile, two foot high,

of newspapers

(some two months old)

and the hope, if not the certainty,

that by week’s end we will have read them.

For there is hope in all these words

in the lyric of chatter and jokes and opinion

in the Here, listen to this we read each other.

And there is Summer, all twenty months of her,

threading words together like coloured beads

Sincerely, intently she tries them on

surprises us all, tells her brothers Yes,

I get it, pretty girl, pretiful girl.

And I need to get it all down

all this wordy worthy chatter. All the gaps it fills,

the way it expands to fit around us.