the Closest East to the Heart Tweet
A quote by James Earl Jones has resonated with me for years.
“One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can’t utter.”
Since working with a guy with MS who could not speak I have been struggling with my own inability to speak the words I write.
At University in the late nineties I ran performance evenings as a Student Union company and had the pleasure to witness the performances of my peers, as well as the now famous Benjamin Zephania and MC Jabber.
In March this year the struggle has abated all with my second reading within a year, of my poetry at the Buchmesse Noch Besser Leben event. The trade fair has become world famous, as has Leipzig’s fame increased. On the coat tails of this an organisation called Leipzig Leist has been running small reading events all over Leipzig during the annual book trade fair.
It all came together through my modern day equivalent of the S.U. Organisation, LEWriters, where four disparate writers met and came up with the idea of a first of it’s kind, all English reading for the Buchmesse. This collaboration included working with three musicians, a multi-gifted artist and two opera singers.
On the night there was the usual organisational chaos that surrounds a group of artists working together. The performances/ readings were all of a high standard, and the highlight for me was the added comedy of a scene of Svetlana’s reading, whereby the aforementioned opera singers imitated very vocal sounds during the sex of cameo characters in .
After watching my own poetry video it dawned on me that I am my hardest critic, but also that I have been slightly bitten by the performance bug. I hope in the future that this continues and I am able to speak those words closest to my heart.
Tags: art, Benjamin Zephania, Buchmesse, create5, English, Germany, language, Leipzig, Leipzig Leist, MC Jabber, Noch Besser Leben, poetry, readings
