Here Comes the Weekend

Saturday 12th May 2012

A quick visit to the bathroom allows me a glance out the landing window and I see it’s brighter now. No rain. Of course, the woodland trails will still be saturated so if I ride my bike today it will be a street circuit.

Last night I watched The Cure Festival 2005 dvd. Quite a number of songs on it I’d not heard before. From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea and, shamefully, ‘M’ from Seventeen Seconds. I still really want to see the band but not in a field from a poor vantage point in unpredictable weather. Think I’ll keep my fingers crossed and hope they do an Arena tour next year.

A couple of days ago I ordered a memoir/autobiography by LA poet Wanda Coleman. I think she’ll be a great read. I loved her poems in the early nineties. I have absolutely hundreds of books that deserve revisiting, there’s no need to purchase any more.

Tonight I’m doing a short doubleheader performance with Jenni Pascoe at Trent House NE Live Birthday Party. A section from our thirty minute set. Probably the opening poems – although I don’t want to do Hypomaniac. I really enjoyed my Shades of Grey set from Thursday night at Pink Lane and would like to just do more of that book for the rest of the year, really.

I must put my next collection of poems together. I have plenty of thoroughly road-tested pieces – either on stage or magazine page – so it isn’t even a case of having to write more, just finding the headspace and time to sequence. I was going to use the old ‘marking time’ way of selecting material – say, poems 2003 to 2009 – but I might just look at what makes a good book regardless of composition date; that way I can cherry pick a set that would work well as a performance, and have stuff left over for the next book. I could really just stockpile poems and prose and sequence a book every eighteen months or so, regardless of current creativity at point of selection. I still have a huge thing about making a 2012 diary book. Admittedly there’s a lot of dross from the daily pen and paper get-togethers but there’s also a lot of bits and pieces I could make use of. So, potentially two books in mind plus ‘Confessions of an Isolationist’ which has somehow fallen by the wayside. I should typeset the first fifty pages of that and see how I feel about it. Ideally, a month off from workshops and rehearsals, just pure editing every day instead.

I need to consolidate my efforts and put out something substantial. Probably a good idea to send some poems to magazines as well. Need to get back into submitting regularly again. 8.10 am.