Many moons ago, I was once a wallflower. A fly on the wall of life. Just another faceless face in the interminable grey crowd of it all. The seedlings of my life of poetry only started to sprout at the height of my last relationship about 2 years ago. The plant of my poetic pen went into full bloom in the aftermath of that relationship. Even though most artist try their best to convince themselves and others that “not all great art is born of heartbreak” the evidence says otherwise. Happiness doesn’t need to be understood, only felt. Heartache on the other hand demands to be explained, justified and accounted for. This is the human condition. This is the origin story of many a poet.
I started attending poetry events and open mics during this time (see old blog posts). They were unforgettable, to say the least. Invaluable threads in the tapestry that is minervo lore. What I want to touch on here is who I was then in those rooms and who I am now in those rooms. I wasn’t one to walk up to a stranger and chat. Not because of my inherent shyness but because the inclination was simply absent. I was just there for the poetry. (I know now that all of it was indeed “the poetry”.) I would go most of these nights without saying more than a few words. This may sound sad but I assure you it wasn’t. It allowed me a great deal of freedom. I could retreat into my inner world and use my body as a mere sensory vessel. Like that one SpongeBob episode, mini minervos would just sit back in their comfortable chairs, adjust their glasses with their index finger, sip on an empty cup of tea and take notes for the event review I would be up until ungodly hours writing later that same night. In today’s therapy culture climate, there are a bajillion CBT buzzwords you could attach to what I just described and it may even be diagnosable on one of the many spectrums, but this is my blog and here we will simply refer to it as me having a Rich Inner World.
Being invisible in these spaces was such a delight. Not having to worry about entertaining a date or making small talk with a possible future friend freed my mind to absorb every sound, smile, simile, and slight sight of someone’s soul they unwittingly let slip, a line of poetry, ambience, energy, everything. While simultaneously finding creative ways to narrativize it, and all that could only be done with a mind free from the shackles of any and all social performances. I was not real which allowed me to be an empty and a conduit of the moment onto the page.
Unfortunately over time ironically the writing that stemmed from my days of invisibility made me more visible. I even ended up getting on a stage or two. I took on the title of ‘poet’. I declared myself a fellow ‘maker’. There is something inherently fraught and slippery when it comes to calling yourself an ‘artist’. The inherent self-aggrandising and self-centring of it all require deep investigation, but more on that in the memoir. Me stepping into my artist shoes robbed me somewhat of my privilege of just being another audience member. I was visible. My fellow poets would randomly acknowledge my presence while on stage and I would have to be present in my flesh prison. I would have to abandon a mental draft I was working on and begrudgingly step back into my meat machine and muster a smile or more. As you may have deduced I am not the best at compartmentalising, which is great when you have to tap into your empathy for a poem, but not so great when you have to function as a human being. In short, I almost became too real. Dangerously so. It may have been the end of minervo as we knew him, luckily I caught myself in time. Mind you, I am writing this as if I become some kind of microceleb. I didn’t. I just made a friend or two and became known among my fellow writers as a peer. But even this slight shift in perception threw that serene office in my mind into complete disarray, and it really became like that scene in the SpongeBob episode.
This also played a part in my poetry as I started writing more towards what might earn some snaps or praises from my peers. I look back on that minervo with shame. Since my almost year-long hiatus from the stage now, I can confirm my work stems from necessity and not glorified pandering to preconceived notions of what my poetry ought to be or a scribbling of my initials into the grand tree of life. The last part may be a lie. Aren’t all our actions a collective scribbling of the initials of humankind into the grand tree of existence? @Ernest Becker
I credit my realification as one of the main reasons I don’t do poetry event recaps anymore. That, alongside the increased monotony of said poetry events and those that stand out and truly move me to tears, feel too sacred to write about. Too sacred to feed to the capitalist death machine which demands the commodification and contentification of everything the sun’s rays touch. These touching moments where art moved me to places beyond language often involved art about my ancestors and the horrors they went through. Moments of alchemy. I feel my blog is not the place to address such moments. Though all this polarising leads to the dilemma of me not wanting to write about the boring events and also not wanting to write about deeply moving ones which begs the question: then what do I write about?
And I assure you, I do want to write. I want to share and immortalise what I if feel must not be forgotten. I want to keep moments safe from time that make me feel as large as air itself and moments that take me by my shirt’s collar and pull me close to the mundane minutiae and demand I find beauty in watching grass grow. I want to write about small random poetry shows I attend where only two or three gather in the name of the Love for Poetry and the Poetry of Love still avails itself unequivocally. I want to write about open mics in fully packed bars where lines that get zero applause still stay with me a week or two after the event. I want to write about the beautiful bespectacled Nutella-brown babes I meet and never see again. I want to share the things poetry can do and the things poetry did for me during those terribly tumultuous times. How it was a refuge and reprieve from the enraged waves of my heart. And the path back towards that starts with me reverting to my wallflower ways. I have to shed the myth of the artist and the stage (ego) that comes with it. To honour the people that enjoy my work I have to ignore their acknowledgement of my existence completely, because as a writer and a conduit of every moment I inhabit; I’m not real and I’m not supposed to be.