September 5th, 2010

Stage Fright

I´ve got a poetry reading to go to tonight and I´m a bit nervous.  I shouldn´t be.  I´ve been going to these readings regularly, once a month, for the last 8 years.  I always get up on stage and read something.  The audience response is always polite, even if my work totally sucked.  I´m not so self deprecating as to say that my work sucks, but they can´t all be gems and some months have been better than others.

The reason I´m nervous tonight is that I think I´ve written something good.  The problem is, my idea of good and other peoples´ idea of good are very often two different things.  I know the audience likes it when I write short, mildly comical poems with a very tight meter and rhyme scheme.  But the one I´m going to read them tonight is 6 pages longs.  Eight and a half minutes.    I know that my most popular stuff has just popped into my head, it took no work at all to write.  This poem took me 3 weeks and I´ve been mulling over the idea for it for over a year, at least.  I know my most popular poems are about every day things – children, animals, the weather, love, public transportation.  Tonight’s poem is entitled “A Poetic Discourse on the Theories of Vladimir Vernadsky and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.”

It is quite possible that a great percentage of the audience will have no fucking clue what I’m talking about.  Oh, well.  If the poem doesn’t make it clear, then it’s not a very good poem.  (the theory is that every level of development creates the environment for the next level of development, e.g. language enabled the development of writing which enabled the development of printing which enabled massive public education which enabled the spread of the internet.  The 2nd part of the theory is that now we’re in the information age so whatever evolves next will come out of that – at least that’s how I understand it)

So, we’ll see, but my prediction is:  polite applause