Paper-chasing and dusty juvenilia
Paper everywhere. All the old, dusty and often deeply embarrassing effluvia of a life spent attempting to make words work spread out on the floor in neat, and thus unrecognisable, piles. The cat is intrigued and I am aggravated, sneezing like a diseased hedgehog - but the remains of the snow and ice is keeping me indoors and forcing me to be a useful and productive householder, sorting out the wheat from the chaff, forcing me to make space in my little attic workroom, which currently looks like a bonsai version of the warehouse the American military place the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
What astonishes me is how much crap I have kept. All the lonely rants of a 16 year old wannabe poet, the sort of juvenilia that makes a pen want to curl up with shame for having been the channel for their creation, all the useless lines and random, excised beginnings of poems that I am proud to have written, but which could have gone so badly wrong if these lines hadn't been buried in an Evian box and forgotten.
It's amazing how mercurial the connection between brain and pen is; one slip, one person from Porlock, and the whole fragile artifice comes crashing down in a dust-cloud of breast-beating self-indulgence. If I find any particularly awful and splendid howlers, I may well post them. It helps for other people to laugh at such painful nonsense, makes it easier to bin it...
That's one of the terrifying things about keeping a blog - I wonder how much of what is posted here will make me cringe in years to come? I'll cross that bridge when I come to it, but at least I won't be sneezing so terribly and constantly when I come to glean the worthwhile bits from this blog...
