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Blog it up, blogboy.

Melancholia time.

I've started work on a new piece tonight. The working title is "Roughs for a longer text". It consists of snippets of what might be poems, what might be more a statement of intent (my reading of the semantically dodgy catch-all term "poetics").

My field is just so fucking vast . There is a weight of canon which, provides something to kick against at the smae time as being a huge set of shackles. I can write what I like, I can fight every poetic tradition that has ever existed, which may be the key to "making it new" cf Pound, tho' he was a cunt. At the same time, however, I will unconsciously reference Lee Harwood, Tom Raworth, Bill Griffiths, Roy Fisher, Brecht, Perec, Bunyan, Pynchon, Allen Fisher, Rob Sheppard, Scott Thurston, everyone I've ever read who has impacted upon me in some way.

(Take a few moments here and G00gl3 a few of the names, it'll help understand, trust me).

GAH! Why do I bother? The answer is immediately self-evident. I do it because I can't imagine for a second doing anything else. I do it knowing I will never amount to anything more than a literary footnote. I do it with duende, I do it knowing that I will slide silently into obscurity. But better that than not trying, surely?

The roots of this compulsion need examining. I have everything going for me. Adorable and adoring girlfriend. Steady job. The unquenchable support of a wonderful network of friends and family. I work hard at everything every day. Why do I feel that I'm not doing enough? What the hell is this standard that I've set myself?

I work with a woman called Angela Keaton who has, late in life, decided to become an avante garde writer. She attends conferences, and publishes in a manner similar in it's low key way to the publication I currently have. To recap, a few magazines, one proper print anthology. She lives for her work, I seem to be motivated more by what glory the work may bring me and I suspect that this is my biggest failure as a human being. You can't hunt for glory working in the most obscure branch of the literary arts you fucking loser. Be happy for God's sake, I know I know I know...or else swallow your pride and write hack prose.

Which, as anyone who knows me, will know, isn't me.

So how to reconcile these urges? I admit to a shameless thirst for recognition. It is my biggest and most obvious weakness. And yet I hold even obscure old poetry's mainstream in contempt. There is no readily apparent escape route.

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