Honesty #1

Life and soul is being poured into everything right now. All tasks are being balanced on a small blue planet that, from time to time, becomes witness to very important things. Right now there is a series of poems in progress which places individual artworks front and centre in my mind. Every piece is as important as every other and this is a perfect union.

I have been taught by a very dear friend the various values of the tailored poetic response, which is a very different beast to most other forms of the craft. It is something that, it turns out, I have a skill in. It makes me think that at some point Slam Poetry might happen, that the ability exists, yet reminds that the process of learning is more than simply winning. This is not about submission.

This is the business of nobody eclipsing anybody else.

I have no favourites. It annoys my family immensely. It makes picking Top Ten lists of anything massively problematic. Yes, there are stand out items, and comfort spaces, but in the main being open to everything and refusing to give opinions on most stuff to people not known well is the norm, because experience has told me how much damage favouritism can and does do to my equilibrium.

It means that when someone asks me to state what is 'good', and they are known well enough, curation always takes place. What might challenge them, before considering their interests before mine, which makes the process a lot less emotionally stressful. This has also given rise to me being called weird across the years. When something I want to see appears however, that all changes.

I took the Art Trail job to challenge myself to become more objective.

As it turns out, I feel we are doing a decent fist of maintaining the objectivity. Whether everyone will be happy is open to debate, of course, but the fact remains this is how the World has worked since the first cave painting was drawn. Expression is a right, observation is an option, and once you decide to write down that observation, you need to be prepared for reaction.

I have already had to defend myself in a social situation over my motivations. It was simultaneous nasty and funny, and the more that is looked back on, the more determination will ensure that nobody gets a poem that is anything other than totally glowing. If there wasn't a respect for the process and the ability on show, there would be no point at all to the process to begin with.

Everybody's work is important, relevant, and most importantly compelling.