Collared doves on clotheslines
(about anxiety, imposture, but mostly about some tight-or loose-ropes between them)
Present tense(-ish):
I recently joined a new-to-me poetry community and took an opportunity1 — to read multiple poems at once, out loud, to an audience. Welcome — grab a seat and a drink, and let baba2 chat with you about the two crucial elements of this particular anxiety-defying endeavour: (1) the poetry and (2) the reader.
As I’d just discovered last month when I incredulously put together a book-length poetry collection (!), I did have enough material to spend a surprising amount of time organizing it for the reading.
A lot of things that involve time can become surprises if your temporal processing is just a little askew — such as not realizing how much you may have managed to rescue from the Ocean of Oblivion that bathes the shores of Distraction and Forgetfulness. This brings forth
the reader/poet, whose brain, in this case, has much in common with a ferret. (Curious, capable of both stealth and blatant conspicuousness, definitely attracted to rabbit holes.)
Now, I don’t know if ferrets can have anxiety-related challenges, but I do.
Past tenses:
loosely, yet undeniably connected anecdotes.
I recited poems and sang songs written by others, in front of others, throughout my school years — all of K-12.
K[indergarten] was mostly about Nicolae Ceaușescu and his oh-so-many aspects of multilaterally developed lay-divinity: Genius (of the Carpathians), Pater Romanorum3, Beloved Leader… The poems were immensely boring and I didn’t like them, but I complied. Just a chore that all of us had to put up with, right?4
By fourth grade, the material I was performing had become:
In ‘90-’91 Romania (the first couple of years after the dramatic political-regime change of ‘895), “Hello! Sandybell”, an animated series, was a cultural phenomenon on par with Kaoma’s “Lambada”. (I did try to learn the dance steps and I could probably still sort-of pull it off, but I much preferred independent or voice-based activities to dancing as part of a group. Decent proprioception isn’t a selling point for my brand of neurodivergence either.)
In teenage years, I focused on music. For a while, I sang in a band-of-sorts with a few peers. The band didn’t have a name, but I don’t remember that ever coming up, nevermind being a problem. We were hitting the stage at my town’s City Hall once or twice a year for showcases alongside dance-club troupes and martial-arts students, and we spent the week before Christmas carolling around town. Yeah, it was cold in December back then, and there was snow during southern Romanian winters.
In December ‘97, we went live on the radio in the county capital! (I should have the recording, but I’ve been looking for that cassette for years now.) That Radio D session and a high-school-level competition were also the times when I got to sing something I’d written myself. Yes, I’d used the G-Em-C-D progression — those are roughly a third of the chords I know and can play on a guitar.
I don’t remember if I felt nervous whenever I had to perform. Once, I even inhabited the experience so strongly that I decided to fall on my knees for dramatic effect. I was told to maybe consider not doing that, and I complied.
Maybe I was pretty relaxed because being very young can mean being unaware of many ways in which a performance could go wrong?
Toward the end of the band days, I started frequenting the local poetry club. We smoked filterless cigarettes like snakes6 and drank vermouth. I received a couple of poetry-competition awards. I had a brief crush on a boy; we wrote Dada poetry together. For my 16th (or was it 17th?) birthday, he left a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra and a carnation on my classroom desk. As far as I know (that is a couple of decades’ far), he’s a serious doctor now, as opposed to this non-practicing weirdo. This photo was taken on Zarathustra day.
That summer, under the (much appreciated then and now) influence of a friend from the county capital, I even dared to attend one of their poetry club’s meetings. I’m not sure anymore if I read something and was met with polite okay, sures — or if I wasn’t eligible to read, as the non-member, non-local that I was. (That slightly askew temporal processing thing? It also means holding grudges, if you’re so inclined — and/or diffusely re-living moments of less-than-ness like that one — for a looong time.)
Then my artistic endeavours took a long break, Millennium to pandemic.
Intermezzo A: graduate teaching assistant and college instructor. I taught a bunch of undergraduate-level Physiology lectures, each of them to audiences of a hundred or more. Anatomy for Practical Nursing students — those lectures could be up to 4-5 hours long, every day for a month per module. Biochemistry seminars to groups of about a dozen. One-on-one tutoring sessions.
I don’t remember if I felt nervous whenever I had to teach. I do recall enjoying the stories I got to tell or “protesting” effusively against the common (at least back then) notion that Biochemistry is “useless” for doctors. Now that I knew (?) more about how the body worked, I could share with the students some clinically relevant reasons that made it useful to have some idea about the structure of cholesterol. I could do something to try arming them against triteness and groupthink.
Maybe I was pretty relaxed because these stories made sense intrinsically, as established science often does — so there weren’t many ways these talks could go wrong?
Intermezzo B: research conferences. I do remember feeling nervous whenever I had to present slides at such events. (Posters were fine, I loved my work and can still talk your ear off about it, especially if I stand next to visualizations of it.)
Maybe I wasn’t as chill about slides because I didn’t know how to move from one slide to the next? Dang transitions.
Those are the things I write on my printouts: magic formulas. “Which brings me to…”, “But, as we would soon see…”, “Changing gears for a moment…”
I’m realizing as I write (Thank you, Process! This is why I trust you.) that a poetry reading is a combination of wonders and challenges7:
an incredibly personal material
inevitable transitions between pieces (unless you’re reading a single piece that takes up the whole time)
a certain freedom with regards to the sense you want your story to make in this space and time (my book-length collection is “split” into seven interconnected themes, and I wanted to try bringing all of them in, however briefly). That’s a lot of pressure, isn’t it?
Now I always feel nervous when I present. Be vulnerable. Don’t get maudlin. Don’t alienate the audience. Stand out. Make it relatable. Tell a story that matters. Remember why you’re the best person to tell it. (I am?) Yeah, I’m not great at any of these. I’m a counterdependent existentialist pursuing connection — Friend, I can barely relate to myself.
My current tips and tricks involve:
going on stage as early as possible (first is ideal, second is nice, “lottery” is the absolute worst) — anxiety may take a little while to catch up, although it’s a little odd when it kicks in halfway through the performance (what’s up with that?)
allegedly, nervousness can’t be picked up in your voice (maybe up to a point, after which this becomes lies and propaganda, especially if your audience are no strangers to anxiety themselves and can recognize the tattletale signs)
being aware that hands can start to shake quite visibly
recording myself (if I remember), which makes me feel a bit more “in control” — for no immediately obvious reason whatsoever, as I’d only get to see that post-factum, right? However, if something goes wrong I can revisit it and “fix” it for next time…right?
asking myself: does it matter whether your poem talks about a hoopoe, but you’re so determined to use only your own images that all you have for birds-in-flight are collared doves?
also asking: does it matter if you’re “really” a poet or can only go through the zbrrr! motions of one?
why yes, I’ve just watched a documentary about Eminem
crone
I sure hope that’s the correct Latin for “Father of Romanians”, because if I open another tab to check, only the ghosts of Ceausescu’s propagandists might know when I’ll get around to finishing this
Yeah, I do get very frequent flashbacks to that propaganda these days.
we executed our Beloved Genius Leader on Christmas Day
Romanian idiom; I’m not sure what kinds of smoking snakes my ancestors witnessed, but they sound really chill
not mutually exclusive