Mouth and Music is a monthly event held by the lovely Heather Wastie in an unlikely gallery space above an unlikely pub in Kidderminster. The welcome you get is great though.
I’ve been thinking for a while that I’ve been skirting around and politely ignoring the performance elements of my work. I write poetry that gets stitched, or I record myself singing. But these words are never spoken to an audience. Having been introduced to Heather over mutual friends on Facebook, this seemed like a good way to dip my toe in the water to see if I liked it. I gathered up the friend who would be most likely to get something from the experience and off we went. I had a moment of panic in the car park when I realised I had invited an English and drama teacher to my first ever poetry reading… schoolgirl error perhaps.
There was a theme of weddings which was applied fairly loosely – people either didn’t know, or ignored it. I happened to have about my person a poem I had written for our wedding anniversary (an absurdly large number for a woman of my youth). It was ok, so I did another one, the original Lullaby poem that eventually got turned into the song (If you ferret around in a determined fashion you can find a link to it on my website).
I quite enjoyed myself, was complimented on my confident performance(pretend), and had other poets recommended to me. It was fun, and I’ll probably go again. The question is, will I start to include performance in my work?
*shrugs*
Dunno.
