Tag Archives: terra cognita

On Saturday afternoon I sat in the balmy sunshine of the Southbank listening to poetry and tweeting as the planet continued to heat to the point of expiration.

Damn fine poetry it was too. And no poetry damner and finer than Rhian Edwards.

What made Edwards utterly compelling and captivating was that she recited every word of every poem. Not a single word read, and so not a single word retrieved by eye from the page a distant-distancing two feet away before making the 10cm journey into her visual cortex, then pumped out of word-hole to the audience where only then we begin making sense of it all with our auditory wetware.

When you learn a poem by heart, the cells of all your body become marinated with that poem. It seems as if the distance between audience and speaker is reduced too.

If that poem is “yours”, then you are no doubt becoming even more marinated in yourself, more YOU, in a Whitmanesque, Singing-The-Body electric kind of way. Every lung-sponge, stomach-sac, bowels sweet and clean in service to that poem. Every armpit, breast-bone, jaw-hinge, freckle, heart-valve consorting to make you feel what the poet felt in the writing and now reciting of her thoughts and sentiments.

It’s altogether special, and I can’t really get enough of it, this marinating of my own cells in poetry. Particularly other people’s poems. I am already far too stewed to add self-expressiveness to the mix, but others people’s “stuff”, learnt by heart dovetails in extraordinary ways with to how I feel, think, and sometimes even act. It’s alchemical.

I also get a kick out of witnessing this alchemy in others, as one rarely can these day, unless you’re a Slam Poetry fundie. And even then: do you always want someone’s inner world microphone-slammed into you? (That is not a rhetorical question. The answer is no.)

This year’s theme for National Poetry Day is ‘Stars’, and so rather cleverly (unintentionally cleverly), a bunch of us have decided to gather together under the stars in the not so sweet and not so clean bowels of gothic Abney Park chapel to recite our favourite poems from the last couple of centuries.

We won’t be reciting work we’ve written (there’s enough of that about), but rather the poems we love, the poems we’ve ingested and set to work within us.

Tickets are £3 and all profits go to one The Reader Organisation‘s Care Leaver Apprenticeship programme.

Do join us: http://byheart.readmesomethingyoulove.com/events/

This piece was written for The National Poetry Day website.

Seven million anti-anxiety prescriptions are doled out to us UK island dwellers every year.

That’s a lot pills just in order to quell the exclamatory voices in our head that yelp things like:

“I’m out of control!”

“I can’t deal with this!”

“Oh, shit!”

“I don’t want this feeling!”

[Add your favourite Anxious Thought here]

Anti-anxiety pills, as we know, work on two levels. There is the chemical substance which slooooows down the transmission of information between nerve synapses tricking the brain into thinking that slow-motion equals “calm” (and in some ways it does). And then of course there’s the placebo effect: I am doing something (taking a pill) to help me with this other thing that I just can’t stand. Or think I can’t stand. No, but really, I can’t.

I am not against taking anti-depressants or anxiolytics, but might I be able to do something to reduce or tolerate my anxiety whilst at the same time being more alive to those bulletins from within - often arriving on the crest of the anxious wave?

I’ve always found the focus of meditation and exercise useful, combined with some sort of broadly “spiritual” word-balm^[1] but I’m wondering if learning poems^[2] might work equally well.

I might experiment with this in the next couple of weeks in which I’ll be doing a certain amount of anxious waiting. Waiting for an operation in my case^[3], but of course we’re all waiting, for something, almost constantly. So anytime is a good time to be doing this.

Rogan Wolf‘s wonderful Poems For organisation commissions work from leading contemporary poets which are then offered as wall displays on screen and in Anxious Spaces (GP surgeries, hospitals, dentists).

In the next week or two, I will be “equipping myself” with some of these Poetic Pills, specifically poems about waiting^[4], and reporting back to you until my operation as to how effective the learning and reciting of the poems have been in keeping my nerves at bay.

OK?

Only a month in, and already I’m moving the goalposts.

My original side-bar description read:

A year of living (and learning) by heart a poem a week - with reflections on memory, poetry, and other “stuff” as I go along.

It now reads:

A year (June 2012 - June 2013^[1]) of living and learning by heart the poems I love - with reflections on memory, poetry, and other “stuff” as I go along.

The poem-a-week idea went out the window because, as you can see, I am still memorising and think-feeling my way into ‘What Is The Language Using Us For’, and it’s turned into a relatively slow process.

The hectoring part of me says: “The deal was 52 poems, Steve. One a week! Where’s the discipline, the framework, the bankability of “as many poems as I can get through, in as long as it takes me”. People want feats they can turn into shareable memes. He learnt a poem a day! He made a skull art-work every day, for a year! Erik Schveima did a year of incredible mixed-media drawings inspired by the LA Times, one a day! And you can’t even memorise a poem a week!?”

The anti-Hector however says: “But isn’t this whole thing about less is more? Aren’t you discovering as you go along, that it feels really really good to get that poem well written into and onto your bones, as Kim Rosen would say, that the longer you spend steeping yourself in its lines, the more they reveal to you? Take your time, go slow, go deep. Enjoy.”

I like the anti-Hector. We should hang out more often.