Another frenetic couple of weeks have passed since I last posted, that have left me without the time or inclination to write anything much beyond a few dull emails. I tell myself that this is because I've had so much on; trips to London to celebrate my sister's birthday and help my girlfriend move house, meetings, gigs, friend's shows to see; but I know these are excuses and if I was into my writing I would have stolen back some precious moments for my work and myself.
I had four gigs last week, which I think must be a personal record, and for each one I'd hoped to have something new to perform. Predictably, I ran out of time to write or learn anything new so ended up performing the same well worn pieces. The freshest poem to have made it into my performance repertoire is the bullets one (published on this blog), which is a good four months old. I'd never tried it out at a slam though, so I thought I'd give it a go on thursday when I entered the Manchester Literature Festival Northern Slam Final. It went down well enough to get me into the second round where I pulled out an old(ish) favourite to clinch victory.
I'm really pleased I won of course (the champagne and the money didn't go amiss either!), and I enjoyed hearing some of the other contestants' work; Dennis just Dennis' political rant through the alphabet was amazing, Ben Richards' Otter poem was hilarious and Martin Daws' hip hop infused poem about being a white man in Chicago was engaging and intense; but in some ways it felt like a hollow win. Partly because I felt like a cheat having not entered any of the qualifying heats and just breezing in on a wild card. Partly because winning slams doesn't mean much anyway (or shouldn't) - slam was created to make more people interested in live poetry, the scoring is often arbitrary and, as Pete Kalu said to me on friday night (more of that conversation later...), what makes an audience tick isn't always what makes the best poetry. But mostly, until I write some new material on which I've spent enough time to be really proud of, I'll continue to feel like a sham any time anyone praises me for parading my old, immature work in public. But at the same time I can't stop entering things and saying yes to gig offers because I need the money (when it pays) and you learn something every time you perform, even if the lesson is negative. That, and the fact my ego needs regular applause to keep it inflated.Â
I think the answer to all this, as I've discussed with Pete and my mentor Steve Waling, is to maintain a writing practice in private, where I can say what I want to in the way that I want to and be as crap as I need to be, without the pressure of worrying about public expectation and satisfaction. Seems strange that in order to create more public work I need to make more work in private, but the more I think about it the more it makes sense.
Meanwhile I'll keep up the blogging in the hope that constantly having to read myself moaning about not writing will force me to do it more often!