This blog is my apprenticeship to poetry.  I don’t come to the art completely ignorant nor completely unskilled, but this blog is where I will learn the process of poetry.  Like any apprentice, I might get to the end and realise I hate the trade or that I am really not that good at it.  I’m going to do it anyway.  One poem, every weekday, for a year.  Some of them will be pretty smudgy and amateurish, but that’s okay: crayons are non-toxic.

I have a suspicion that one of the biggest obstacles to writing is embarrassment and fear.  I think it was Julia Cameron, in The Right to Write, who said that being an unpublished writer is like having an embarrassing case of unrequited love (if I’ve misquoted or misattributed that, my apologies), and I couldn’t agree more.  Like unrequited love — especially the terrified, pining variety — being an unpublished writer carries with it a cachet of being Not Good Enough and Trying Too Hard in the face of futility.

And then there’s the awkwardness of those first steps — Hell’s bells, it can be horrific to look back on what you’ve written and realise people will associate your name with that drivel.  Makes you want to hide in your own hair.

But how to get around it?  It is terribly tempting to hide the ache to write: if you do it in secret, then nobody will know if you failed, right? That’s one way, certainly, but it’s not for me.  I will own my cockups and early bumbling steps, my embarrassments and painful realisations that what I’ve written could be, actually, painful pap.

Pass me my crayons.