Commissioned poems. The very thought of them used to put the fear of god into me. I suspect a large part of that came down to imposter syndrome – the sneaking suspicion that as soon as someone asked me to step outside my comfort zone of only writing about what I wanted, to a timetable of my own making, I’d fall flat on my face.
Maybe, one day, I will. But – in a year when so many other areas of life have been curtailed – it’s been a godsend to be given the opportunity to work on commissioned pieces. To my great surprise, I’ve found myself loving it. It feels like a kind of poetry yoga – and if that phrase has conjured up some disturbing image of me doing downward dog in a shocking pink leotard, I can only apologise. Let’s all move on by watching this video, of a piece written for a National Lottery project at Boundary Way allotments in Wolverhampton, to put the leotard incident clean out of our minds. And let’s never speak of it again.
note: the video was filmed by the very talented Rachel Gillies, who also created short films for other commissioned poems by Emma Purshouse and Dave Pitt as part of the same project. Click on their names to view those, too.