April 5th 06

April 5^th 06

Last night I went to Exploding Alphabets at Morden Tower. This is the first time I have been to this event, which is on monthly ( I like how the dates work, as it is easy to remember, the 4^th of the 4^th, the 5^th of the 5^th, etc.) It was an enjoyable night, though a strange one. I didn’t know anybody there, and to be honest felt absolutely ancient since everybody there was in their early 20’s at the most. The night is ran in a very relaxed fashion, the idea is it is a place for new work, poetry but also songs, and there is no schedule for the night, people just get up and read when they want to. (The only problem with this is if you are shy you don’t want to just get up because you are worried that doing so may take time away from other people, and you are not sure how many people there have stuff they want to read- so maybe there are advantages of doing a quick head count of who may want to read at the beginning.) A problem I found was that because everyone there seemed to know each other no one said what their name was when they read, which frustrated me as I like to put a name to work.) What I liked about the night was the inclusion of music amongst poets, which is something that should be done more often ( a young woman who sang without accompaniment was brilliant, sang an amazing and uplifting version of Nina Simone’s Feeling Good- like I said, I wish people had offered their names.) I was amazed at the turnout, which was high, of mostly very young people. These are people I have never seen at poetry events before (where it is nearly always the same faces), and I am wondering why (would like to put it down to the venue, except for the turn out being so poor when the Finns read at the tower), wondering what it takes to get people like this to gigs. Quite a small percentage of the audience read work, so the obvious answer of people turning out to where they can read their work needn’t apply. It’s a mystery to me. I felt that if they like Exploding Alphabets they would have enjoyed the night the Finns read, where there was a good mix of performance, poetry, and music, but how do we get them there? I felt a bit out of place all night, on account of not knowing anyone really, and being too old (and had the feeling that the audience would be thinking, who’s this old bag? What’s she doing here?) I read a short little poem I wrote while I was sitting there, and later read a new poem I actually wrote on the day of the last Exploding Alphabets (thought never turned up to read it due to the snow- what a wimp!)