Friday, 7th October 2005.

The junk of poetry

I went home over lunch, and in the middle of rifling through a pile of music scores that lay gathering dust in the garage, I came across my old poetry files.

I should inform you, first of all, that I started out as a pretty awful poet who only ever reached 'substandard' on the scale of merit. I don't give a damn whether anyone says that it's all personal and objective and that it's what it means to you that counts. There is such a thing as bad poetry and while I do think I produced the occasional rough diamond, such pieces were few and far between.

The arc of artistic growth got a little steeper during my time at university and then declined again when I started throwing together performance poetry - usually crowd-pleasing but not particularly good. But the volume I unearthed this afternoon was composed during my sixth form days, which saw an intense, prolific output, and on inspection it's clear that I wrote some genuinely shocking stuff: typically whiny, crass and overly sentimental. When it rhymed, it was full of sugary affection for my friends and loved ones - we're talking couplets that even Hallmark would reject for being too sickly:

"I had to tell her what I felt
my burning love refused to melt."

or, later -

"Until I find that girl sublime,
I'll love you 'til the end of time."

and, worst of all,

"I'm sorry Claire, but I can't help
this way I feel - I'm such a whelp!"

And so on. When it didn't rhyme, it was full of awkward, misjudged phrases, artistic pretentiousness, bad imagery and lousy, hackneyed cliché. Anything that was good was usually plagiarised. The introduction is particularly dreadful in its endless use of been-there, done-that phraseology: "a young musician sits armed with a biro and a sheet of paper and a wave of ideas." Oh, and the sort of inappropriate metaphors that make emailed lists: "I felt no urge to write when it didn't suit me. When inspiration was lacking I would not sit anxiously, pen in hand, fretting like the accident victim's relatives in the hospital waiting room who are anxious for news."

I make no apologies whatsoever for any of the above. It was bad, but I was sixteen. When you're sixteen, you think you know everything. You think that no one else could ever understand you, that you'll never grow any wiser. If you're with someone you're set for life, and if you're not you're convinced that you'll never find happiness, for the rest of your days. In any case, no one in the history of the world - not Solomon, not Romeo, not Heathcliff - has ever had the sort of feelings you have for this girl. It's the way of things; what can you do? "Now I am six I'm as clever as clever, and I think I'll be six now for ever and ever."

Anyway. There was a point to all of this, which was that while Emily and I were reading 'For Claire', Joshua decided to crap all over the bed. I am inclined to believe that this was not a coincidence.

"This poetry looks like shit, Basil!"
"It *is* shit, Austin."
"Oh, so it's not just me then..."