Annie is mediocre. Oh noes!

The fact that I can't seem to be able to join in with the others' discussions about "voice" and generation gaps and such on the Pomegranate forum, and have just failed to write any kind of insightful entry here about poetry, suggests I'm maybe not the kind of person who thinks very hard about their own poems. I don't know, is that a bad thing? As soon as I start thinking about my own writing, about whether I have a "voice" or not or what exactly a voice is and should I even have a voice yet, my brain tends to seize up in a kind of semi-panic and thinks, "No!No!TooThickForThis!NoInsightHere!GoAndDoSomethingElse!Now!" My whole attitude to poetry at the moment seems to be to just lurch through it with no direction. I have no specific aim, I have no damn CLUE about anything...and I suppose I don't intend to. This probably makes very little sense.

The only thing I am thinking about a lot at the moment is how crashingly mediocre my poems have been lately. It's been ages, AGES since I've written something and actually thought, "Yeah. You know what, that...that ain't bad." It feels like I'm going round and round this cycle, which goes something like this:

I write something very patchy;
I work on it a bit, it turns into a big lump of words;
I show it to other people, get feedback etc.;
I grit my teeth and get back to working on it;
the lump-of-words starts protesting against all this WORK being forced on it, until it literally feels like it's wrestling with me or something, like some brattish toddler;
I get slightly weary, start obsessing over tiny things and religiously reading thesauruses;
Real Life rears its ugly head and dumps a pile of essays/phone calls/social commitments/dentist appointments on my head;
I start to bitterly resent the lump-of-words, which I know has only had about 70% commitment put into it;
eventually I decide that - oh deary me! - it's all getting a bit much, decide to leave it "for now" until I'm less busy or more inspired or both;
"for now" becomes "forever". And that's it - a big lump of words, a 70%-type effort, an elephantine, mediocre slush.

Yeah, OK, so what I've just described is like the birth of the average poem, I know, and I'm all too aware that the poem that just hits you in the face comes once in a lifetime, but it really depresses me that currently I can't get past the mediocre slush phase.

Mediocre poems make me so bloody angry, especially my own mediocre poems. But at the moment that's all I seem to be able to write. TRYING NOT TO doesn't work, trying makes it even worse. This isn't "writer's block" or anything, because I am still writing. It just happens to all be shit. No, not shit - just very average. And that's actually worse - you know, I'd rather be incredibly, incredibly shit sometimes than drifting around in the middle all the time.

Someone said I had a "signature style" over on the Pom forum, but I don't think so. I don't want any kind of signature style. Not at the moment. I'm young, I'm so inexperienced it's laughable, I want to have a hundred different styles and be a thousand different poets. I want to pretend to be Anna Akhmatova and Auden and Dylan Thomas and Frank O'Hara and Lavinia Greenlaw and Christopher Logue and everyone else first, I don't want to be recognisable at all.

If I do have a style and this is it I'm not sure I want it.

Anyway, enough woe-woe-woe. INSECURE WRITER, hold the front page!...Or not. Here are some happy things: having a lane all to myself in the pool today; Who Loves The Sun by The Velvet Underground; bus drivers who let you sit down before driving off; the word "avocado"; and my dad randomly deciding to bake bread this evening for the first time ever:

"Why are you baking bread?"
"Because we have no bread...but we do have lots of FLOUR!"