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Please enjoy the following poems from two OAs.
the oyster by Jamie Chong Life is water: a grain of grit comes in – through the unfaltering current – to me and, in each breath I exchange with the sea, fathoms a pearl of language in its spin. the iridescence changes in lighting: yu, yu, yu – fish, word, rain’s cacophony thunders through my coral sanctuary, dislodging me into the current’s din. the foreign turbulence carries me south through wild, whirling words straight into the rout where divers shuck me off from where I’d clung. the pearly vowel spinning in my mouth cracks into charcoal. no words can come out: i clam shut, concealing my bitten tongue.
Gifted Amateurs by Ben Keating (i) At school
playing at Hyde Park this year supporting Robbie Williams, and I've supported Mike Skinner from The Streets. I've also played lots of Amex Gold events that are a bit eccentric, like a festival called ‘Taco Fest’. When you're in music, you're always looking at those slightly ahead of you. One of the things I learned this year was to pay attention to my own successes. Music isn’t a conventional job where you work your way up the ladder. You can go from zero to 100 very quickly, or you can work incredibly hard with no guarantee of payment. This year's been my best because I've matured to realise people do things in their own time. How is music different in the age of social media? I used to play open mic nights at a pub just by Craven Cottage. For some reason, they would put the open mic on match days, and so the audience were not always interested enough to pay me any attention. I could always tell when I’d done something cool because it wouldn’t just be one or two people stopping talking. You’d see more than one table watching and you’d feel a connection. Live music can be a shared and transcendent experience. I’ve got a more complicated relationship with social media. When I started out, it was about to take over, and in 2020 TikTok became the most important avenue for musical success. It took me a long time to come around because my favorite bands didn't use social media. Nirvana were pre-internet, and the Arctic Monkeys had a MySpace page run by a fan. You can't be aloof and mysterious in the way that you could a few decades ago. I have a song called ‘A Taste of Your Own Medicine’, which I've been relentlessly promoting on TikTok. Whilst it hasn’t gone viral, there’s been high engagement, and it's reached a core group. What’s incredibly special is listeners reach out to me, sending very emotional words about how much my music has helped them. I suppose it's a new opportunity to share in that transcendent experience. What’s next for you? I'm working on a new set of songs for an EP. Charlie XCX says that niche has never been more rewarded, so I'm pushing away from pop and I'm moving back into the alternative rock I was listening to at Dulwich College. My manager and I are spending a lot of time on branding and I'm learning about visuals. I'm watching a lot of David Fincher films and that's the aesthetic he wants me to aim for. So that's the plan, but as always, music is very fluid, and you've got to be reactive. I'm quietly seeing out the year, working on songs and getting ready to jump on whatever train comes my way.
there was a boat, the James Caird in a huge cloister, presumably a Scotsman a wealthy laird whose debris of Empire
ended up there. Soon I learned
how they were amateurs, Captain Scott missing out to Amundsen, dying in his tent, his last ‘rough notes’ tolling throughout England from Antarctica. (ii) Gifted amateurs are ambitious people baffled by fate,
Jamie Chong (20-22) has been awarded the Eugene Hamilton Prize (organised by Oriel College, Oxford) for best Petrarchan sonnet – the oyster.
as my father said. No one mentioned Shackleton or Crean, I found the Weddell Sea myself, 800 miles they’d crossed in that rowboat a bobbing skiff. Gifted amateurs are many things, those explorers are one big thing.
Ben Keatinge (86-91) is a celebrated poet having won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 2022 for his manuscript ‘The Wireless Station’. Gifted Amateurs reflects on the influence of walking past pieces of history, like the James Caird, in a school day.
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