Yesterday & Today: 2nd June

It is quite rare that I have truly bad days, but yesterday was one of them. It felt like a very black day.

Perhaps I should have been warned of what was to come when my run-through of Crash was interrupted twice and I ended up limping through the piece drained of any real conviction (though I’m sure this is a one off – only 5 tickets unsold for the show on the 10th!).

A little while afterwards I sat down to draft some more of ‘Z’. This went, I thought, reasonably well – that is until later in the day when I decided to draft some more and started, as I always do, just rereading the previous few paragraph.

Derivative drivel. It lacked any life, rhythm, emotion. I was truly shocked; what was this stuff I was reading? And how could I possibly have written it? It was like being hit with a sucker punch.

Later, in order to lift my mood, I listened in to the awards ceremony for the Magma poetry prize. Sadly that didn’t have the desired effect either; a significant proportion of the winning and shortlisted poems wouldn’t get a look in as far as New Contexts is concerned. One or two I struggled to identify as poetry.

My last act of the day – no doubt in response to what had transpired above – was to enter the most radical poems I have written (and deliberately ‘radicalising’ the form of a conventional one) in a couple of poetry competitions. It felt partly an act of rebellion, and partly desperate measure…

But it was the ‘Z’ experience I took to bed with me – and with which I wake up this morning.

What does that mean for today? Well the short answer is that I don’t know – except that I won’t be touching ‘Z’ in its current format.

There are questions to be answered. Did I rush to write? Have I been too mechanistic and formulaic about defining what it was I was going to write? In inverting my usual process and sequence, did I forget that I need emotion and soul to kick something off? Is this a wake-up call to embrace something more radical in style? Should ‘Z’ be a stage or radio play and not prose at all? Is ‘Z’ misconceived in its entirety?

So I think what all that means for today is that there are questions to be answered. Above all else, that…

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