Later this week I’ll be taking a trip down the country, and also down the years. On Sunday 12th June, I’ll be reading a poem in Sandown on the Isle of Wight.

I started off writing poetry seriously around 2004 or so, as a kind of preliminary to practicing the longer forms of writing that I wanted to do. I still write poems from time to time, but mostly only when they literally mug me on the street and force me to (like this one did). The resulting works may be brief, particularly since I got interested in the liberating constraints of classic forms like the sonnet, but they burn through a lot of creative bandwidth in a short time, like fireworks; my mind has been busy with longer things in recent years, and as such poetry has become something of a back-burner discipline, a skill gone somewhat to rust, like riding a bike down the promenade after years of driving long distances.

But you know what they say about riding a bike, right? I dragged myself out of retirement in response to an unexpected commission, one of the weird synchronicities that life throws up every once in a while. See, a few years back I got sent by New Scientist to review an exhibition at the Lowry and interview the artist, one Katie Paterson. I enjoyed the art and our conversation, and wrote it up the only way I knew how, through the lens of science fiction.

It turns out that Katie appreciated that particular perspective, and the resulting review. Around a year ago, she emailed me to ask if I’d write something to accompany one of the stops on the “tour” for an artwork to take place in 2019, titled First There is a Mountain. And of course I accepted, volunteering to take the Isle of Wight gig — because the Island is just across the water from that other island, Portsmouth, where I spent half my life, and where I started to learn to write.

Quite why I decided to write a poem, and why said poem ended up as the thing it is (the commission was almost comically open-ended regarding form and word-count, which was both a blessing and a curse) will have to be a story for another time, I think. But if you should be in the area, you can hear me doing the debut reading of the piece, entitled “The point of the work is the work”, at 11am on Sunday June 12th 2019, somewhere along Yaverland Road in Sandown, as part of the Hullabaloo festival of arts, science and seaside kitsch. I’m looking forward to it, and to seeing some old friends while I’m there.