Hail, readers. As you well know, I am a writer, and like to dabble, dawdle and dip my brush in an intimidating range of media (plays, novels, histories, polemics, masques etc). As if that wasn't
enough, I'm also an able poet, having wowed the world with my psychoanalytic thriller
Gulf Scream, Labial Elegiac and the recent
Aphorisms for my ex, which extends over many more hundreds of pages than I dared to publish to my blog (for legal reasons, I've been told: apparently some of my honest admissions in that work, for example the details of how I hacked Martin's internet banking and stopped the child support payments to his ex wife, could actually be used as evidence against me. Whoops! Has no one ever heard of artistic licence??).
Anyway, last night I had the good humour to attend a poetry reading in the 'Xing the Line' series (pronounced Zing the Line I think, poets eh!). I went along primarily to schmooze, I mean why else would I go, and met some very attractive Beta males who had lots of interesting things to tell me about themselves. All was going well until, two glasses of Rose down, I encountered literary sexism of the kind that hasn't been encountered since William Wordsworth nicked all of Dorothy's best lines. I was told at point blank range by the curator and tsar of a prominent poetry reading series, who shall remain nameless (you know who you are, Steve) that I, a lady writer, was unsuitable to make an appearance at his 'night'. I was informed, however, that if I wanted to pass my poems to a MAN to read, or make a short video of myself reading them in a bikini with a soft core Bashment backing track, I would be allowed to participate, but otherwise, no!
Once more the mesmeric ivory bower of the literary establishment was
Clossed for women. The fact that other ladies have been admitted to these readings is merely further proof that sexism is rife in the world of poetry: does everyone remember
Working Girl? That film, apart from being solid gold entertainment, taught us that it's not only men who polish and buff the glass ceiling - women can be raging, careerist chauvinists intent on keeping other women
down as well. Like little Tess was abused by the Ivy League show off bitch, Katherine Parker (Sigourney Weaver), so little Posie has been cast to the wayside by the sorts of trustafarians who can take a year out to complete a 'Poetry MA' merely in order to meet a few people who they could meet anyway by merely attending a poetry reading and offering around a few cigarettes and looking 'needy and interesting'. In my early twenties I had no time for such things and, until Aunt Lilies' estate was wound up, had to labour and toil hard in Miss Selfridges as a personal shopper merely to afford a panino at the Nero's across the road in my lunch hour. Any poems I found time to write were scrawled on the back of a receipt for shoes, and my first novella,
Me, Tim and My Quim (now a major motion picture) was written entirely on an All Bar One wine and nibbles menu. It's experience like
that that makes a great writer, like Hemingway, not arsing around and paying good money to be deemed a 'qualified writer' by an academic institution. (I should say as an aside that I am now enrolled in Birkbeck's Summer Course in
Female Memoir Writing, but what of that?)
Anyway, having been turned away so cruelly, there was nothing for me to do but consume further Rose, vom a little on my skirt, then come home and plot my revenge. This post, set to lay waste to the blogosphere, is merely the beginning. I have skills, for example internet banking fraud, and I have rage on my side. I've also just had a contraceptive implant (which stops your period for three years girls!) so, like Lady Macbeth, I will cry
unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty! Step one, an protest poem! I feel just like Brecht! Enjoy!!
Openning the cowl
I am self published!
Hark lute! Thumb me an envious tune
and autopsy reveal
the various instances
of the demise of the crowd song.
Openning the cowl
I am self kettled!
Authoritatively pilfering
lyrical nonchalance from
complacent bloggers all set
on their own aggrandisement.
Openning the cowl
I am self-harming!
Just to see if I can write.
Trade marking utterances best left be
or taken out used worn destroyed
passed out again
through the thigh of a pig.
Pour into moulds the
filling of the Arctic Roll tube
as capillary excess waste
laden tissue damage
but let’s turn this about
and call it dessert!
This is like me!
