This site is something that I never intended to produce. I’d been happily not being a poet for years, and really wasn’t intending to change that. I’ve been a musician of sorts for as long as I can remember, so I’ve always had an outlet for things, even if the majority of what I wrote remained unfinished and unperformed. I’ve also been a blogger of sorts under a variety of guises in the past, so again I’ve had outlets to share what was on my mind if I felt the need.
Having said that, I found myself having a series of conversations with my dear friend Paul B. Rainey (he of There’s No Time Like The Present, Why Don’t You Love Me? and other such graphic novel masterpieces – look him up if you haven’t enjoyed his work yet) in which we both expressed a desire to have a go at doing stand-up comedy in some form or other. We’ve always made each other laugh, and I know we can both write, so it seemed like something that might be worth a go.
So it turned out that I really struggled to do that. Every time I tried to write something even remotely amusing, I found myself getting angry and/or upset about whatever it was that I’d been trying to find the humour in. There was humour in there, and I was managing to find it, but it was coming out as a form of comic relief in amongst all the vitriol and general woe, rather than being something that could ever be classed as comedy.
I did experiment a bit, but found that this was stuff that I also couldn’t verbalise in song format – there was just too much that I wanted to say. I realised that I had been trying to get some of this stuff out in general social media conversations over recent years, but those invariably turned out to be exercises in futility. Those who already thought like me didn’t need convincing and those who didn’t think like me, weren’t remotely interested in entertaining alternative points of view.
Poetry then, seemed to be something worth trying, in my quest to find a vehicle that I could use to release this anger and energy that seemed to be trapped inside of me.
The Sixty Second Scribe moniker came about, once again, completely by accident – I’d become frustrated at the variety of different hats I was wearing as vehicles for things that I do, and wanted to do things under my own name for a while. Having done a number of longer poems, a conversation with my Uncle Barry where having watched a video of me performing a ten minute rant, he suggested I try to be more succinct.
I had no idea if I could do that, so set myself a target of writing a short poem once a day for a week, which then became a month, which then became a book and then some songs (more on that in the future) and I’d found an approach that I find both challenging and rewarding and one that I’m really inspired to continue with. The time pressures to write and record daily during each project, combined with the challenges of getting what was particularly important to me at that time across in a minute or so, makes this amusing, frustrating and intriguing.
(I’m still going to write longer pieces under this name, because the idea makes me laugh.)
I hope you find this interesting.
The Sixty Second Scribe