On the advice of jojo, my long suffering best friend, I've decided to create a poetry blog. Let me start earlier.

About six months ago I started writing poems and sending them to five people, jojo, Alnis, Jess, and my two sisters Vivien and Alexis. I started doing this because I've always wanted to be sort of good at writing poems, but have always produced indulgent ill formed things. My intuition was that poems are the type of thing which spring effortlessly from the mind and plant themselves on a page, but I think that the reality is that it's a lot more like digging ditches -- you dig enough ditches and eventually some of them are going to be ok. Thus was born the five year poem project: write poems for five years and surely somewhere in there surely there will be a well dug ditch. So I started sending these things to friends and family.

Anyway, it recently occurred to me that sending somebody a poem is a strangely sort of aggressive thing to do. It's sort of like saying 'well what do you think of this thing, do you like it?' and since these are my good friends and family, and I am a fragile and willowy person they will almost always yields a 'yep, it's great'. So rather than do that I am now going to publish to the wilds of the internettes poems which seem to mostly be about girls. There may also be witty reparte, but that'll come later. So now these five people can read poems at their leisure, and not be bothered by pleading emails.

g.