This week has been most odd.
First of all, I’ve been looking for a particular brand of brolly for years, since I lost my last one in Bremen. Well, I knew where the wine had me leave it, but that place was unlocked hours after my train departed. I found mon nouveau paraplu in, of all places, La Défense metro. These brollies are tough little beasts that should easily withstand Irish winds.
I travelled across to Cork for the SoundEye poetry festival, where, despite the list of readers on their site, I gave a reading. I think the way to describe my reception is—well, I got applause, enough to get to my seat, sit down and look nonchalant—but no groupies, no acolytes, basically I don’t think anyone really actually noticed. That’s not quite true, of course, but, really, I made no impact.
Then I split from wurm im apfel, citing geographical differences. I think the wurm collective wanted me to hang around, but living in Paris is not practical for running a series of events in Dublin. I pulled out of wurmfest and wurm press too. I wish them well.
Then someone I’m rather fond of told me, in effect, to eff off. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know how it is. It’ll come out in the poetry.
You can probably understand why I didn’t quite absorb the poetry I should have absorbed. Mind you, Eleni Sikelianos, from the US, showed some concrete poetry which really stood out for me.
I hardly sold any poetry—grand total one chapbook—although I did commit a couple of swapsies. But, to my delight, I did sell a couple of photo books. They were put out to see what would happen, and a couple of people really liked them. Well, I say sold. One person was going to buy, but, since she’d organised the conference, I gave her a copy. I did sell the other one, to the lady dancer; but I was going to give her a copy, but she insisted on paying a token amount. All the same, I think I’ll make some more combined photo poetry books. It’s not practical to use Apple to print them, they’re too expensive, but Lulu have introduced photo books, and that look likes a cost fellow poets might be able to afford.
Hey, City of Light, wait for me …