My First Poetry Reading

For those who don’t know I am involved with a poetry group that Martin Malone runs in my school. And a few weeks ago Mr Malone (I can’t call him Martin it sounds wrong to me) asks the group of four if we would like to go to his poetry reading and possibly read out poetry while we were there.

Now can I just point out that I am not the most confident person in the world I am probably the least confident out of the four of us who were asked to read. I have trouble reading in our small group with a teacher and three people who I basically have known for best part of six years.

So even the thought of reading in front of complete strangers terrified me.

But not only are they strangers, these people are published poets and reader of poetry and had such knowledge of the subject and that thought alone that experts on the subject would hear my poetry terrified me.

 
The other problem that I had when Mr Malone asked me was which poems am I going to read?

I knew that I would read ‘Odds’ but other than that I had no idea. I didn’t want to read something too personal, thought that didn’t happen; I ended up reading ‘Tommy’ mainly because speaking in disjointed Japanese wouldn’t help my confidence.

All in all the poetry reading went well; I read my set and didn’t slip up and spoke fine. Ok it could have gone better. I could have spoken louder or clearer or not held my poems in such a way that everyone realised I was shaking because I was so nervous.

Can I just mention there were about 20 people at this poetry reading.

 
But after everything was done I really felt proud of myself there was a time about an hour before I was meant to go out I really didn’t want to read but I just threw myself at the challenge and I wouldn’t have wished it to go any different.

This spark of confidence has served me well. I realise that I can do things that I know are very scary to me and that I can get through those challenges and come out the other end very proud of myself.

So thank you to Mr Malone for letting me read and I hope that I have more opportunities to do things like this in the future because believe me it did me a world of good.