So, two (very) different readings under my belt…well, one reading, actually; I quit a poetry gig for the first time ever Saturday night. But before that mini-rant, the good one: spent a large chunk of Sunday afternoon playing compere, and doing a set of my own poetry, for a gig in the Starbucks on St. Stephens. It was a lot of fun, if slightly clubby; out of about a dozen other performers I was already friends with at least half of them, and vaguely knew most of the others. That seems to be the atmosphere of Norwich, for good or bad: the poetry scene and mini-scenes are inextricably linked. When it’s good, it makes you feel like part of an honest-to-god community; when it’s bad you’re just SICK of people’s FACES and every gig is EXACTLY THE SAME. At any rate, the afternoon was an artistic success for us, and a financial one for Starbucks, so odds are it will happen again.
Now on to the bitchery! I was passed an email from another poet I know about a festival looking for poets to read. The last clinging dregs of my propriety don’t want me to name it, so I’ll just leave it at that. I emailed the organiser, got a reply asking me to bring anyone else I knew, so I cast around a bit and harassed two friends into reading with me. So, come Saturday night, we showed up at quarter after six at the Workshop, thinking with a 7:00 pm start we had enough time to catch up a bit and get partway into a drink before setting up began. So we sat and chatted…and chatted…and chatted. Finally, it was 7:00, and the only poets in the place were, well, us. Once it was about half past and no one else had shown, we figured the night was a bust poem-wise and moved on to our collective second art, Getting Pissed. You can imagine my surprise, then, when a bit after eight o’clock, the organiser showed up all ready to hold a poetry reading and to slot us on the bill…just after she and her friends read, of course.
I had two main problems with this. One: at this point, everyone in the downstairs of the Workshop was there because the upstairs was full up, not because they were there for a lovely evening celebrating the arts. And I’m all for shoving literature down people’s throats (I do teach, after all), but performing what would have essentially been a guerrilla hostage-taking poetry gig is a bit confrontational, even for me. Two: I don’t like being dicked around. I have long ago accepted that Poetry Time, much like Public Lecture Time and My Aunt Libby Time, runs about fifteen minutes behind the rest of the known world. But once you’re so belated that a reasonable person would have given up…At my college, if the professor hadn’t made it to the classroom by the fifteen-minute mark, it was assumed class was cancelled and everyone was justified in going home. That doesn’t seem like a bad everyday rule.
So yes, we told her we were leaving and walked out. A shame, since the Workshop has some killer cider, but I think saying “oh no, you go ahead, I’ll just stay here” would have been…well, hysterically funny, but a bit much.
Anyone else? At what point do you feel justified quitting a gig, if ever? Or does this poetry malarkey mean we’ll take the crumbs of performance we’re given and like it, why in my day, get off my lawn, etc etc.
