tumble – a reading and a playlist

Hooray, tonight is the beginning of reading from MY NEW COLLECTION!!!

Ahem. Excuse the caps. I may be just a tiny bit excited.

No, make that: thrilled, relieved, happy, hopeful, and grateful. I’ve spent the last week or so going through everything aloud and working out timings, and trying to decide which poems to read. One complicating factor is that some of the poems have been read a lot at the CPC over the years. Fare, for example, has been one of my go-to, show-stopping poems for yonks. Ditto Lucifer in Las Vegas. And The Ministry of Sorrow. I love them all immoderately, think they’re damn fine poems, and they work really well as performance pieces. But … the CPC has heard them multiple times. To the point where some people may be able to quote them back to me as I go. (There’s a thought – audience participation, a ‘la the Shakespeare play-along in Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair? Hmmm!)

So Christchurch may have to wait a bit to hear those poems again. The CPC audience, at least. Or, you know, come up to me and ask me to do a private reading. Or a public one, whatever. Heck, I’m always happy to take requests! And when the world calms down a bit, and we return to a world where traveling to do a reading is possible again, I can take the show on the road and use those three – oh, and Clemency, which is another big gun poem that has been read at CPC too recently, dammit – and deliver the full arsenal at audiences beyond the CPC bubble.

Thing is – and I know I’m heavily biased – there is enough good stuff in the book that I can afford to tuck those ones away for the evening. I just have to whittle down my list of contenders to fit a fifteen minute slot.

Or just randomly stab at pages and read until Erik hits me to make me stop.

I’ve been planning for quite a while to post a playlist of the music I listened to while putting the poems together. The full playlist will have to wait for a few days – I know a rabbit hole when I see one – but as a starting point, below is a live version of the piece of music I had on loop for the process of assembling the book: Experience, by Ludovico Einaudi.

Now excuse me while I go dance around the room.