A Little Black Book With My Poems In


There is nothing as terrifying as the empty page.

The empty page can take you anywhere.

The question is... where to go? What to do? You can go anywhere in the world. Master of your own destiny. But where?

Amongst other things - parent, husband, jerk, employee - I'm a writer. Unpublished. The world is full of writers. The world is full of guitarists and painters and drummers and poets. Very few ever get published. I know I'm better than some of the published writers. And I'm not as good as many writers. Ability and talent and artistry are no guarantee of being published. All that matters in any marketplace - artistically, at least - is that the art can and will sell. I've never even tried to sell mine. I'd do it wether I was paid or not. I do it and I'm not paid. It's my way of making sense of the world. Imposing order on an essentially random existence. Or, as Wobbie Rilliams said : Life Thru a Lens.

One symptom of mild depression - not that it feels mild, it feels constant at the moment - is the appearance of hyper-critical voices in ones head. (I know this because it was on the Bernard Sumner Prozac Diary, a 1995 BBC documentary about depressed artistes I found on a videotape yesterday. I know I've done some right crap : you won't see published anywhere but in drawers, filed away, at home, as the tripe it rightly is. Every poem is filed in a series of black notebooks. I havn't written much this year - maybe 30 or so pieces - but I have written better. But the critical voices are still there. I'm brewing a good one though. I can feel it. Anyone can write a brilliant work. But it takes thinking to make something good into something excellent. I may fail, but at least I try to write something good these days. Something that wouldn't shame me if I had to read it out loud.

I should be writing this week. Instead, I am conspiring with displacement activity to do something else completely different. Hang clothes, wash up, that type of thing. Oh! The Hitchcock box sets just arrived. ACE.

Incidentally, Googlesightseeing has found something pretty interesting.
- posted by Mark @ 12:15 pm