The Arts-Muse Fair

                            Three-Legged Sprinting  It isn’t so much that she adores him and wants to move in with him that keep me sleepless at night as the image of them trudging upstairs hand-in-hand in a sort of three-legged sprinting. I only have to shut my eyes and he is holding her by the waist, urging her towards the bed. He has left the door ajar, but I can’t quite see what’s going on, only peeps once in a while: the tattoo on her leg, the sweat on her glistening back. I want to turn away, but the horror of her orgasm throttles in my throat, the shock of her tongue flaunting with his tongue, her mumbling sweet nonsense, her letting out a monstrous moan.  Fraulein of Coy She must think me maverick teasing my rod against  her hands of ejection she giggles perhaps  behind my slack before the next smack  certain in her confidence...

There is no one secret to reading a poem, but the closest I know is to think of it as a journey. Where are the thoughts, the sounds, and the feelings coming from, and where do they land? ‘Each word is a step on the road’, Patsy Rodenburg (who is a voice coach at the British National Theatre) often tells student actors. To give words to an audience,   she says, you have to feel the “journey of thought” in them and the shape they take. “Try walking”, she tells the student-actor, ‘the journey of the poem’.  In life, too, poems and journeys go together. Both move. Both take a bit of time and effort. Both let you reflect on other things as you go on. Both can upset and surprise you. There may be boring moments or moments that seem boring at the time, but afterwards, you realise they were crucial. Both give you new windows on the world and take you out of yourself, but let you go deeper into yourself at the same time. They get you to new places. So what is the journey of reading a p...