A London poet’s diary on performing at the Barbican’s summer season, the specific terror of reading new work, and why the shaking hands actually mattered
Read six minutes of new work at the Barbican this week, part of their season running through the summer celebrating Pan-Africanism’s influence on contemporary arts and culture, and my hands shook so visibly through the entire piece that I could see it happening in my own peripheral vision, a strange out-of-body kind of nervousness. I’ve performed for a decade now. I genuinely thought I was past this particular symptom.
Why This Reading Actually Mattered So Much To Me
The poem itself was new, written specifically for this season, wrestling with what it means to inherit a political and cultural movement secondhand, through diaspora, through my grandmother’s stories rather than any direct lived memory of the actual moment. Reading it in a room built around exactly that theme felt genuinely exposing in a way my usual sets don’t.
What The Shaking Hands Actually Told Me
That the work mattered enough to my own nervous system to override a decade of stage experience, which I’ve decided, in the days since, to treat as a genuinely good sign rather than a failure of professionalism. The poems that don’t shake me are usually the poems that aren’t asking anything difficult of me either.
How The Room Actually Responded
Genuine, attentive silence through the whole six minutes, followed by the specific kind of applause that feels less like performance and more like recognition, several people afterward telling me their own version of the same inherited, secondhand relationship to a history too large to have witnessed directly themselves.
Why I Keep Writing Into This Specific Discomfort
Because the easy poems were written years ago, and the genuinely difficult ones, the ones that make my hands shake reading them aloud to a room of strangers, are apparently where the actual growth still lives.
Where I’m Actually Taking This Next
Expanding the piece into something longer, a proper sequence rather than a single six-minute reading, treating this shaky Barbican performance as the genuine first draft it turned out to be. Terrifying, worthwhile, back to the desk tomorrow regardless.