June looks like a pretty exciting month (World cup! Birthday! Trip to Glastonbury!) but the highlight is the launch of Rosy’s pamphlet Chokey (tickets available for £5 from the Rialto website). The event will be incredible, with performances, tattoo parlour, ‘beefcake videos’, themed cocktails and an actual real life chokey. I’ve never seen a spoken word event with this much planning and complexity. You must come!
For me, personally, the launch of this book is a huge event. I’m listed in the acknowledgements, where Rosy thanks me for help with editing the poems, and “for living through them with me for the last twelve years”. I don’t know that I’ve done much real editing, although it’s been fun discussing these poems in workshops, fields and late nights over the years. But I’ve definitely felt the intensity of living through these poems.
The thing I love most about poetry is the way that it captures intensely personal moments and opens them up for other people. No other artform does this for me in such a powerful way . Seeing these poems collected together in a single volume was like a reunion with old friends. It’s beautiful to see them gathered together to set out into the world.
Of course I love these poems, although some are difficult to re-read. Most striking of all is the penultimate poem, Thickening Water, an intense eight-page poem. I’ve seen it performed a couple of times and it’s breathtaking.
Rosy is having something of an imperial phase right now, having just done three Brighton dates for her show Passionate Machine (for more see this interview or review from the source). I turned up as a character in that, which was a weird experience, seeing some events from my life recontextualised. It was also good to see an explanation of what had been happening over the past few years, with Rosy’s weird trips and the odd letters that keep arriving.
(The other day I saw a stranger who looked like an older version of Rosy, and my first thought was that it must be Future Rosy, popping back in time).
Art is a beautiful, transformative thing, a way to share our feelings and our lives. It makes the world a better place.
2/6/18: More reviews for Passionate Machine:
- BN1 Magazine
- Fringe review (highly recommended show)