Roads to Joy

A couple months ago, a call came out through the WriteOn writers group based in New Galloway from a previous member who is now chairing the Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival. The editor was looking for poems from eager writers about cycling.

In response to an earlier stimulus from one of Claire Lynn’s Northumbrian Writers groups, which was to be an investigation into roads, I’d created a rather long poetic odyssey. Roads are a great metaphor, certainly (as we know already through the entries on this very blog!) and I chose to consider some of the many roads, and transport, that I’d experienced throughout my life. Of which, of course, bicycles featured rather importantly. I was so delighted, naturally, to have a few verses of my longer poem selected and edited to fit into the lovely pamphlet that the Arts Festival has produced. Sharing the pamphlet with seven other poets, all I suspect much more experienced than me, is a very odd, and yet uplifting, feeling indeed.

The festival organisers also want poets to attend a couple cycling events to act as guerrilla poets, planting pamphlets, declaiming a verse or two to a waiting crowd, and otherwise waxing poetic. I wrote a poem about this sort of exercise, or at least the sort of concept I imagine it to be, for this month’s VisualVerse.org based on the stimulus that included a brief on ‘talking to strangers.’

In each of these exercises, the cycling one and the guerrilla poeticising one, there is a certain amount of risk, a frisson you might say, which accompanies the foray. But nothing ventured, nothing gained, they do say, and I think the delight at fulfilling the task assigned is likely to outweigh the risk. Definitely, I should say my young self, as my face crashed through the ice into the ditch along which I was riding one late winter’s day, would have agreed with my aged perspective.

Of course, there’s always a risk that a friendly overture may crash and burn. A stranger may turn their back and sneer when accosted with a poem. But how else, one might ask, can we find joy unless we look for it? Sometimes, true, joy just arrives, and maybe it’s the more exalted in those instances, than when it is actively sought.

Or, maybe not.