This week I was planning to write about the word geometry but I couldn’t work out an angle. Was that a groan I just heard? Listen, this stuff doesn’t write itself, you know! Anyway, instead I’m turning my thoughts aways from geometry, past trigonometry, algebra and slide rules, towards poetry.
In a couple of weeks I will be performing at a local spoken word event called Raw. It’s the inaugural show and it has raised several concerns in me. Firstly, until the point when I agreed to take part, as I was being handed a pint of deliciously quaffable Session ale from the local Pilgrim Brewery, I didn’t realise I even wrote poetry. “What about your songs?” said Richard, who’s organising the event and also happened to be the person handing me the pint. “Ooh,” I thought. “I suppose some of them do rhyme, don’t they?” “Yes,” said Richard.
But I don’t feel I can just read out the lyrics to a bunch of songs about bus stops and unrequited love in a whimsical voice. It needs more than that. I need to write some actual poetry. Now what exactly does that mean?
I’ve always fancied being a poet and have always wondered how you become one. Write some poetry would be a start, I suppose. But then who knows you’ve written it? These days, it’s all about performance. It’s not enough just to wander lonely as a cloud and hope that someone notices you looking a bit wistful and offers to take care of your couplets. You have to get out there and deliver. And I’m concerned that when it comes to delivering my sonnet comparing love to various chocolate bars, I might go all, um, flaky.
To add to my anxiety, Richard then asked me under what moniker I would like to perform? Blimey! I hadn’t thought about that. Avoiding the obvious double entendre, I racked my brains for a pseudonym. It seemed my creative juices had run dry somewhere during the line about Curly Wurlies. As a youth I used to write letters to the NME under the name Free the Individual. Then there was my Tim and his Trimphone period in the 90s. Both of these were spent by the time I turned 30, though, and rightly so. Nicknames are for the young.
I mean, imagine still being called The Edge in your 60s! It probably felt pretty cool and, well, edgy back in 1981, but now? It doesn’t look so good on a bus pass. Worse still, Slash! Pink!! Lady Gaga!!!
I thought it would be apt to go with something on the theme of contrariness. It’s a description that’s often levelled at me by my well meaning but exasperated friends, but I think it’s a cheap shot. It’s not an accusation you can deny, is it?
“You’re so contrary.”
“No I’m not.”
“Ahh, gotcha!”
I shouldn’t like the word contrary but I do. I like the way it’s pronounced. In most uses of the word we say contrary, with the emphasis on the con, but when it comes to describing a person we say contrary, with the accent on the trar. If I was really contrary, of course, I’d say it with the emphasis on the ry.
Contrary implies that you do or say the opposite of what is expected or desired, just for the sake of being different. “Perversely inclined” it says here. I don’t think I’m perverse. I wouldn’t do or say something I don’t believe in, just to prove a point. And to prove the point, I decided to go with Mr Contrary.
Richard liked it, which of course made me want to change it, but I had other fish to fry so I stayed with it and now I’m stuck with it. As the day draws nearer I am being gripped by an intensifying case of impostor syndrome. If poets live their lives in poverty and die in destitution, what happens to failed poets?
This is not me. I am not a poet. And yet I am committed. In precisely two weeks time, a person by the name of Mr Contrary is going to stand up in front of an audience and read out a song about Zinedine Zidane and a sonnet about chocolate bars. And hope to get away with it. It has all the hallmarks of social suicide. I’m beginning to wish I’d stuck to geometry.
