OXFORD POETRY LIBRARY NIGHT, (I AM NOT A POET).

“Who knew poetry would be so popular?” Poetry Ed said excitedly.

It was a Tuesday night, Poetry Ed, Erotic Wendy, and I were queuing in a gloomy alleyway to enter the Oxford Poetry Library event. The only light was from the red LED above us that spelt out, “THE COMMUNITY WORKS.” There was something appealing about the underground vibe, it made me feel kind of edgy and cool, as if if I was entering a speakeasy.

We got inside a fairy lit conservatory where a man with a printed list asked me if I was going to be reading a poem today.

“Absolutely not,” I replied, and then explained that I was the official cheerleader for Poetry Ed and Erotic Wendy.

I did once try to be a poet. Like all people, I dabbled in rhymes whenever I felt emotional. When I was 8, I wrote one for my dead dog Cheddy, and buried it with his ashes. The night of September 11^th, I laid awake writing on-the-nose verses because I wasn’t sure how to process the news. And I still have my teenage diaries that are filled with smudged rhyming couplets from the aftermath of hormonal heartbreak.

Lies you said.

What a dick head.

I should have kept my poems in my diary, but I didn’t.

For some reason in my mid-twenties, I thought it would be a cracking idea to release my own e-book. It was called O London Town You Let Me Down, and was made up of ‘poems’ that I had jotted down on the tube whilst working in London. I found an illustrator on Fiver, (who was very talented), and got him to illustrate each poem, then voila I had a ‘poetry book’…..well I thought I did.

Self-publishing can be empowering for writers, but can also be humiliating, especially when you find out that Amazon makes it impossible to delete the book. And so the 3.5-star book (two 5 stars from family, and one 1 star from a stranger), now remains online for eternity. Leonard Cohen can rest easy. Me, not so much.

Back to the event with the real poets.

One by one the poets came up, each one utterly different to the one before.

We had a long man with long hair and thick glasses reading about war, and then a witty American woman who observed passengers on a London bus.

Will Harris, one of the headliners and no doubt one of the coolest poets out there, tugged his golden hair whilst flicking through the pages of his paperback (Brother Poem).

And then my friend, Wendy Allen, took the mic. What’s enticing about Wendy’s readings is that you would think by the innocen tone of her voice and the unassuming way she holds herself, that she could be reading a poem about a Cornish landscape, but then you hear the word vulva and suddenly you are in Wendy’s Neverland.

Then Poetry Ed swaggered to the front with his charming moustache and baggy trousers. He entertained the audience with ‘Down the Rabbit Hole‘, a quick witted poem that tells the relatable story of someone ‘going down the rabbit hole’ of Youtube.