Yes, I second that Andrew. That's a story of a real trooper, Chris. You're
stomach must have been churning ten thousand times over. I read somewhere
that Yeats's father said that 'poetry is the social art of the solitary
man.' We sit there, scratching out our lives on paper in silence and then
whallar! we read our words from meagre beginnings until someone comes up to
you one day and says, 'I really liked that one about the blah, blah, blah.'
Then you start to think, hey, maybe I can do this.  My experience has been
that when I first got up to read the pages rattled in front of me and
wearing glasses, handling the A4 paper that suddenly felt like butcher's
paper, then turning pages then seemed to stick like the sweat of your hands,
it became a nightmare. So I decided to change all that. I memorised all my
poetry (well the one's that I liked best for an audience). In the car, going
to work, I practiced, practiced, practiced.  Now, sometimes I jump up at
venues with that one or two poems going on in my head and enjoy myself
tremendously. As some kids over the road often say to me, 'it's funner!'
HH


>From: "Andrew Jackson" <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: [log in to unmask]
>To: <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: stage fright
>Date: Sat, 22 Jul 2000 16:23:08 +0100
>
>Great story Chris!
>
>Here's my own tale . . .
>
>I was asked to read at the launch evening for one of the annual
>New Writing Scotland magazines, since I had work included.
>Firstly, and most importantly I think, I decided to read the poems
>from memory.  No great hardship, since I knew them by heart
>anyway -- and I'd been to countless readings where the poet
>mumbled into a sheaf of notes.  It *is* a performance -- reading
>from memory means you can at least address the audience
>directly, make a series of eye contacts, deliver the poem outwards.
>
>So, no problem there.  Slight snag though -- I have a mild stammer,
>usually triggered by words which begin with a vowel.  Also, I'd
>decided I wanted to read a new poem which I'd written on the
>subject, and which included a few 'impossible' words as examples,
>i.e. 'innocence' and 'Icarus'.  I have a terrible time with those.
>
>Solution?  I asked my sister along to the reading, and turned this
>poem into a performance piece.  For this poem alone, she stood
>there beside me as I began . . . everyone wondering what was
>going on.  And as I recited, "Words like . .", she piped up "Icarus"
>on cue.  A double-act!  It was also an interesting experiment in
>distributing the words of the poem -- for the final difficult word,
>I'd arranged for a friend of mine to say it loudly from within the
>audience . . . . so there were words flying all over the place  :-)
>
>With this piece of theatre, and the fact that all the memorised
>material was projected into the eyes of the audience, it turned
>out to be the best reading I've done . . . and, as I was told after-
>wards, one of the best readings the organisers had ever heard.
>
>So, if a stammering fool like myself can do it, anyone can do it.
>Don't read -- deliver.  A reader's attention should be on the
>audience as much as the audience's attention is on the reader.
>
>
>Andy
>

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