i finished my festival readings by including a (mis)quote from kenneth white which went along the lines of – there are three types of people, the living and the dead, and those who go out to sea. i was taken by it when i heard it and used it to illustrate a point i was trying to make about collaborative working and, by extension, my whole festival experience.
the captain’s bar. i ended up doing three readings here, each one different but each one building on the one before. there were definite crowdpleasers and i found myself enjoying them in the repetition, memorizing the material and just generally putting a bit more on the delivery each time. plus we got to meet a bunch of people and, even better, hear a bunch of people we’d never heard before many of whom actually live here and don’t seem to have appeared elsewhere during the year. this was deeply reassuring!
i’m still abuzz with the reading at the church. not only was it a great contrast with the pub, better acoustics, different style of reading but i found the experience of reading in, for me, a unique venue, really quite exciting. again i feel enervated to be doing some more of this. also, i found the presence of some of the local writers really supportive. sometimes the writing can be a bit of an isolating business and their presence gave me a bit of insight into just how much having a gaggle of like minds grounds me, gives me some sort of sense of belonging.
and then there was the weaving. this took place at craig’s close, off cockburn street, a place i’ve walked by many, many times but had nebver realised the robert fergusson connection. the omens were good!
it’s a funny thing with poetry in scotland. sometimes you feel it isn’t such a youthful activity. one of the many things i’ve enjoyed about working with this collection is getting to work with, meet and engage with people younger than me. it’s great to get caught up in all that enthusiasm and potential (so unsullied by job, mortgages and the like!! lol). and finally to meet rocio.
the deal was we were to fill the space with lines of wool, invite passersby to get involved, just to see what happened. we sat on the steps and got to blethering about non-space, skateboarding, three and four dimensionality, all that theory stuff that i never, ever talk about except to t and maybe, rarely, one other human being! i really caught myself at this and was quite taken aback at the level of my self editing! but what a wonderful thing. i can’t remember the last time i came away from a poetry type event full of so much energy. the rain poured down. i sat in a puddle. i got very cold. none of that mattered. everything that i like to think and believe in when it comes to the individual and art was absolutely possible in that one wee space for that one hour. it was sublime….
and so to the banshee labyrinth cinema for short films and more readings. we were both well into simon jackson’s landlocked (the rest of this collection’s films can be seen here with the promise of more to come) but the quality and diversity of the films shone out as usual. simon was away before we could speak to him which was a shame. ten minutes of reading later and it was all done. off we went into the festival night and for the first time in the last ten days i didn’t have to be thinking about what i was going to be doing at the next gig. (a brief shout out for saffrani in south college street. top quality indian food, far surpassing that of other more well know establishments i’ve eaten at in the town)
what did i learn? i focused more on my voice, how i delivered it. i discovered that memorizing my own work wasn’t so difficult. i discovered again that i really like working with other people, embarking on some voyage of discovery, making something new.
there really are three types of people. there are those who just live, who get by and blur the line between living and dying. and there are those who get out, who set out to sea, who go and discover new experience, daft wee things, make memories and stories and bring them back to land. i love that mode of life. what a brilliant thing it would be if more of us adopted that moe of life, set out into those uncharted waters just to see what might happen…
