Poetry Live

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

[Update Sept 2, 2017] I am not well at the moment but no worries. Going into hospital soon, but hoping for a short stay and back soon. Meanwhile, I hope you will enjoy browsing the blog/s anyway. You can, of course find poems via the search field in the top right hand corner.]

[Update  March 25, 2017]: Well, the poetry evening is  done and dusted. Not a lot of people came but we enjoyed ourselves and it raised a tidy sum for Prostate Cancer UK. (I have been living with prostate cancer since 2011 during which time hormone therapy has prevented it from becoming aggressive.) There's nothing quite like live poetry.) Everyone seemed to appreciate my choice of gay-interest and general poems and we all got on well during the break which was really nice as some people had only just met for the first time. The arts are meant firstly to entertain and secondly to offer food for thought. Feedback suggests the evening was a success on both counts.

For me, personally, it was hard work but a labour of love so I'm glad I went ahead with it despite being a bag of nerves...which, thankfully, steadied once I got started. This year marks sixty years of getting my poetry into print, given that my first published poem appeared in my school magazine summer 1957.]

I did not have the confidence to read in public for years. However, after a few years of occasionally performing Open Mics at Farrago Poetry evenings in London, I found the self-confidence to accept invitations to give readings around the UK (2003-2014). Only weeks after a reading in 2014, I had a bad fall and have spent much of the last two years learning to walk again. I can get out and about quite well now with the aid of a walking stick, for which I am truly thankful as my left ankle had sustained a complicated fracture and I was warned I might never walk again. Oh, but I love walking and am stubborn enough to defy any harbingers of doom. Even so, I did not expect to give another poetry reading.

Now, this first poem appeared in Visions of the Mind, Spotlight Poets (Forward Press) in 1998 and subsequently in my first collection,  Love and Human Remains by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2001. It is an early piece, written in the summer of 1976 during which I gave an impromptu reading of it in Trafalgar Square to a friend (and several appreciative passers-by who paused to listen.) 

POETRY LIVE

Words

to music, out of words

let the sun rise

in the eyes of that ragged-eared mongrel

curled on George’s doorstep

tongue lolling stupidly

nostrils a-smoke

Words

to music, out of words

let carnival hot dogs

substitute for garden scents,

make easier the stink

of slop-outs in

the gutter

Words

out of choc-smeared mouths

in Bank Holiday sunshine;

kids in glad rags spilling

on the streets like bin bags;

shirtsleeves copper

getting chatty

Poetry

Copyright R. N. Taber 1998; 2017

I never dreamt that 30+ years on I would be reading a selection of my poems there, this time to a global audience via web stream as my contribution to Sir Antony Gormley’s ‘live’ sculpture project, One and Other (2009) sponsored by Sky Arts. To view, click on:

https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20100223131109/http://www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/Roger_T    [NB: Sept 19, 2019 - The British Library confirmed today that he video is no longer available as it was incompatible with a new IT system, However, it still exists and BL hope to reinstate it and make it available to the public again at some future date.] RNT