So I found myself Engaging with poetry in a surprising context, I was in the middle of doing some academic work, and as I was reading all these difficult texts, and needing to write assignments, I found myself coming to string together words in little poetic phrases. And I got so captivated by them, and I found myself writing poetry.
It surprised me because I’ve never particularly been interested in reading poetry or anything like that. Quite by chance I had been invited to go to an open mic session in Hull, down South, and I happened to have written a poem, and in strange circumstances, I then found myself putting my hand up to share my poem. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my academic supervisor happened to be in the audience, and afterwards he came to me and he said, ‘Louie, you have to put that in your thesis’. When he said that, it was as if suddenly I had been permission to use what I was playing with and so when I again continued to find myself writing assignments and getting stuck in the mire of academic language, when these little flirtations of poetic phrases started coming to me, I gave permission for them to fully land. And strangely, what happened was that freed me up to return to the academic work that I was doing.
Over the years of this doctoral work, I’ve I ended up writing over 30 poems and in sharing them with my supervisor, he continued to encourage me to use them, so I ended up pulling them together in an anthology of 35 poems and I submitted those as part of my doctoral submission.
Subsequent to that, I joined a learning programme which took me to Berlin over these last three years. Once again, in the midst of exploring, and participating, and bumping up against people within the group processes we were doing, once again these poetic flourishes started to show up.
What I began to realise is the poetry had become a different way of doing my internal processing and sense making. And that had me feeling even more excited. And then I found the urge that I wanted to share these. It wasn’t simply about having the words on a page. And then I found myself wanting to join in with some of the open mic sessions in Edinburgh. So, I have signed up to doing sessions with ‘Hame-ish’ with the ‘Loud Poets’, with ‘Push the boat out’, and have really got this urge to want to do more performative playing with the material that I’m creating.
It’s brought such a vibrancy and excitement to my life, both in a in a daily sense, in a professional sense. But it’s lifted up the experience of living… and meeting whatever life throws at me there’s a strange joy in being able to write about some of the frustration, or the rage, or the disappointments that I experience. And so it’s like worth having ‘life’ because of the creative expression that seems to be tumbling out in me.
I mean it’s transformed how I ‘be’ in the world, because everything that I do has an outlet that then fascinates me more. So, it doesn’t matter what the experience has been, I get something from it that not only do I want to share, but I do share. And that brings something to other people whose lives are resonating with some of what I’ve been going through.
When I think about the difference, it’s made to me. I and I would just say to anyone, if you find yourself drawn to expressing yourself in ways that are unfamiliar, is to follow that urge because you really have no idea where it’ll take you. But the fact that it’s there, is telling you something. It’s inviting you to come out to play in a different way.
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