Are we going to prom or to hell?

Gaaaaah. Just got back from a party in Maidstone. Have spent all morning sitting on the floors of various trains. In about eight hours I have to be at school wearing a ridiculous dress for the sixth form ball, which...yeah. God. Sentences. Goawaysentences.

I'm not hungover at all, just exhausted. Evening basically consisted of firstly drinking too much wine too fast forgetting I have a stomach bug, suddenly remembering I have a stomach bug, lying down behind a sofa for ages, and then spending the rest of the night talking to Charly/Antho/a few other people, and helping to look after drunks. It was quite fun actually - I mean, not looking after drunks, but just seeing people again. Also spent a bit of time wandering around having stupid earnest conversations with people ("Yeah, I mean - yeah! YEAH, totally!") and quoting things at a guy dressed as Hamlet. He looked like he was going to throw up at one point so I said, in a kind of I'm-not-really-taking-the-piss-out-of-you-but-I-am way, "O, what a rogue and peasant slave are you" to which he yelled in my face "FUCK YEAH. HONEYING AND MAKING LOVE OVER THE NASTY STY!" and ran out of the room. So yeah, that was...I'm not really sure why I just remembered that actually.

Am tired, tired tired. Very pale too. I will look like a corpse at the ball. Oh God. I want to go, but not now, not today. Just got that line from Heathers in my head: "Are we going to pruhhhhm or to hell?" Really want my pyjamas. My lovely pyjamas. Only I know if I get changed into them now I will never be able to get changed out of them. It's really dark and it's blatantly going to rain and oh heck, I have to get to school myself which means walking through town in a dress in the rain, OH WORLD GO AWAY.

At least, because I have no desire to drink tonight, at all, I won't repeat the ridiculous drunken fiasco of last year's ball. (Gah.) And it's in a house/manor thing this year, not on a big lurching boat, so...that should be interesting. I am looking forward to it. Should really stop typing. OK, I will read for a bit, then have lunch, then bath, then get ready, then stagger out of house. Yes, a plan. At the moment I'm reading One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (which has been on the To Read list for years and years) and it's quite good; I'm not hooked but I like it. It has Ken Kesey's sketches in it, which is nice. Pictures of men who look like their faces are falling apart.

My face is falling apart. What is this quintessence of dust?

Pietas Pie

And so it's February - limbo-month, love-heart-month, cheap-googly-eyed-teddy-bear-month. Also Arvon-month, for the second and last time, although I'm trying not to get too excited about that just in case it turns out it's not real (I did exactly the same thing last year, refusing to believe it wasn't all just a crazy dream right up until the evening of the first day - and partly not until then.)

There is a man outside Charing Cross tube station who sells the Big Issue standing on one leg. London is wonderful. It's also wonderful because of this man's photos. Aren't they amazing? I'm very tired (so what else is new?) because I just got back from a day of classics lectures. Lots and lots and lots of Virgil, and plummy Oxford professors with weird pronunciation (EE-nee-as for Aeneas, EE-lee-ad for Iliad - is that normal?), and people I had actually heard of (Edith Hall! who is MAD) and a few slightly weird points (apparently Aeneas "stays pretty much the same throughout the Aeneid" - er, what?). My note-taking fluctuated a bit due to random bursts of sleepiness, so for one lecture I wrote masses of stuff, while I've also got another page that only has four points on it:

"Juno is Joan Collins on speed."
"Mad, hairy, passionate lionman"
"PIETAS. PIE."
"ancient sandwich"

and also many many stickmen.

Meanwhile I'm not exactly a model of pietas myself. I am neglecting my family, who are currently arguing over the fact that my brother hasn't done his homework, I am neglecting my duties because writing about Nazi Germany WOULD BREAK MY SOUL, I am neglecting my country because I haven't spoken a word of Russian since Thursday, and er...I can't really think how I'm neglecting "the gods", but today Mum said, "[uber-religious] Great Aunt Susan is coming to stay soon! We'll all have to give up meat for Lent!" and I swore loudly, so it's fair to say I'm going to hell.

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!"