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Last week, I hosted the fourth event in my live reading series Is it Dirty?

It wasn’t necessarily meant to become a series but every time I host it, I get a bunch of people saying ‘sorry I can’t make it this time, I’ll come to the next one’ which, although annoying, has created a fertile atmosphere of expected continuity. I’ve also started getting people nominating both themselves, friends and other writers, which is fun. One of my favourite things about writing is not knowing what’s going to happen, and it’s the same with readings.

One of the readers at the latest event was a poet called Harry Brooks-Kent, whose book Sick Notes reads as a series of excessively linguistically dense sick notes. They’re amazing on the page, and you kind of have to let them just wash over you, if that’s possible when reading. Live, they delivered the poems, fast, loud and with a lot of punk energy, firing on all cylinders in a way that immediately made everyone in the room sit up straighter and tilt forward with all their attention.

I also really enjoy sharing other writing at these events and this time it was Gertrude Stein’s posthumously published ‘love notes’ to Alice B Toklas, which sent me spinning into hysterics when I opened the first pages. The more you read, the more hilarious they get (imo!).

A flavour:

Baby, sweet baby

Baby my sweet baby,

Baby all baby all my baby,

Baby baby bay, that’s what you hear me say,

Baby all my baby all night and all day.

Baby sweet kissed baby, baby sweet baby,

Sweetly sleeping baby, unbathed but delicious

My baby, sweet baby clean baby all baby.

This is what I say, I love her all night and I

Love her all day and every day and every night

And in every which way and only she and

All she my sweetie

All you need is love!

I would like to honourably mention poets Maria Sledmere and Mau Baiocco (also of SPAM fame) who were the event’s ‘headliners’ even though there are really no headliners—they just travelled furthest to be there. It was a privilege to host them, as I’ve long been an admirer of their individual writings.

The audience genuinely seemed enchanted and inspired by their readings, asking me for precise information about them once the readings were over.

I met Mau in London just before I moved to Margate in 2022. They came direct off the train from Leeds with a big suitcase to catch me do a performance reading of a strange, sequential poem inspired by the art of Hilma af Klint with a homemade sonic backdrop in a shed that Café OTO grandly called its ‘project space’ and contained a double mattress that we all sat on.

It wasn’t a literary reading, but a music show. Some immensely talented people played that evening, and there were people in the crowd I’ve re-encountered in Margate and discovered they were there too…The serendipitous-magnetism of encounter fascinates me—its looping nature, the unpredictability of travel.

I guess I’m thinking about music too. I gave up trying to make or perform it in 2021 in favour of poetry and haven’t really picked it up again, though I’ve collaborated with multiple musicians and find myself regularly invited to read/perform in music-centric spaces.

At the last event I hosted, I noticed a healthy contingent of musicians (I rate) which made me really pleased. Letting the binaries slip. A couple of them told me they’d never attended a poetry reading before. I reassured them poetry readings were often terrible.

Which brings me to some thoughts on poetry vs music performance. There are very few poems I’d want to hear ‘on repeat’ although a couple do exist. It seems with music, a song’s strength often comes with its repetition. But I’m less convinced that’s the case with poetry.

This is really me saying I miss music, and if I’d spent the past five years pursuing it, maybe I’d be at a reasonably advanced stage of personal musical expression by now and I’d have written a song that makes me cry. I am rarely moved to tears by poetry. I like tears. In the rare instances it does happen, the poem becomes crucial to my personal identity. My internal inventory.

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Another aside: A few weeks ago, the unthinkable occurred. My father followed me on Instagram, which seemed both horrifying and absurd. I brushed it off, followed back a few days later trying not to think about all the sad poems I’d posted, the nudes.

I thought it unlikely he’d master it.

Last week, I posted a comedic poem about my cunt.

Last weekend, there was a big family gathering.

The moment I stepped off the train, my father commented on the poem, said he thought it was great.

Am I too old for humiliation? I noticed I barely reddened.

I said my artistic persona was shaped by the freedom of parental lack, and politely suggested he might’ve committed an encroachment.

F/Mortifying. I decide.

I miss music, but I love poetry. I generally attend a lot of author readings. It’s hard being a poet in a memoirist and novelist’s world, but you don’t always get to decide who you fall in love with.

Feel like I may soon reach my contemporary fiction limit.

My social media limit.

Need some weird new job to be invented where I get paid a liveable amount to just hang out in gardens and talk to people about anything. Hireable (non-sexual) companionship for wealthy retirees?

Or even better, for wealthy trees.