Saturday arrives and there are things to do once my waking rituals are done. Once complete, I get up and get into my training kit and take my morning meds. Before I train I do a number of preparation chores for the visit of my youngest daughter, partner and son on her birthday tomorrow. Its mostly clearing the decks so they can stay the night without clutter around them. With things organised I go to the garage and the rower. I select a short session and get on my way. At the end of 30 minutes I am hot and sweaty having worked hard. I put the effort as I know that It will be a couple of days before I can train again.
With the session over I record it and change into what I am going to wear for the poetry stanza zoom meeting. I run off a missing poem and set the computer up for the Zoom meeting and then have a very late breakfast. When it comes logging in for the meeting I discover the speakers that I have tested will not work on Zoom so I have to rapidly change to a laptop.
When I read through the poems in preparation I was not moved, thirteen poems and not one of them grabbed me. It was to be omen for the session. All the usual people were there and the format was the same but as I listened to the group discuss and dissect the first two poems I felt like I did when I first attended a stanza meeting. The language used and the ideas and the interpretations just seemed alien to me. I felt lost and could not for the life of me understand what was going on, or the poems. As a result I just listened to the poems being read and discussed scribbling the odd note to myself. I neither read a poem for the group nor submitted a poem for the group to read. In fact I did not say a word for the whole session and logged out at the end with a sense of relief. The experience felt as if I had lost all touch with poetry, at least not the poetry of this session or the way it was processed. It begins to feel as if I have had a narrow escape, I had forgotten how alienated from the “poetry industry” I feel and I wonder if I have lost myself in something that is beyond me. These are erudite, educated and talented people who live for their poetry in the world of literature and its construction. Somehow it feels that I have lost something, I’m not sure what it is but I can’t do poetry like these people do, at least not now. Once again I feel the alien.
After the session I watch the international rugby that carries on through the evening to its conclusion of seeing the French claim the six nations championship. I draft a short blog, take my night meds and take myself to bed knowing that tomorrow I shall see my youngest grandson and youngest daughter on her birthday. What more could I want.
