20 years old

I was looking about some of the dark corners of this site last night and discovered that my first blog or ‘plog’ entry was dated 18-10-2005  – nearly 20 years ago! Back then i was still living in London, was about to release my first collection of poems ’27 Watt’ and started the website as a place to publish new poems and thoughts. I hoped a few people would wander by.. but social media was already getting going and there wasn’t a lot of traffic just wandering around the internet bumping into homespun blogs any more.. and my content has always been a bit eclectic and sort of whimsical so i guess it never really caused anyone to pause on it for more than a few seconds if they did bump into it. So it quickly became and remained a sort of continuation of my own diaries and as time went on it even incorporated material i’d written in some of those old notebooks, so stretched back into the late 20th Century.

I’ve been using chatGPT to get some of the old php on this site to work again and resurrect some pages that had been offline for a few years.  It’s really amazing actually, getting a chatbot to write code for you. In the past it took a lot of hunting through message boards for the right answer and a lot of trial and error hunting down typos and it got harder as the code for some of my early pages had become so obsolete that it stretched my skills and enthusiasm to attempt to update them.. but cut and paste the whole damn thing into an LLM and it just debugs and refreshes the code in a few seconds and suggests improvements all with a cheesy smile…  and so my poem library is resurrected!

I haven’t added my new poems to it in about 9 years though, because the backend to add into the database still needs some more work and is very clunky.. instead i have been publishing them over on wardrobe in the cupboard and in the recent collection “bleeding nose pose“. But mostly i haven’t been writing poems, they just sort of don’t come to me like they used to. My last poem in the library “a void” refers to this poet’s connundrum. But songs have been coming and i have been hammering out lyrics to those. My latest song “war again” is released this week i think as soon as i get it back from mastering by Greg Cotrez at New Monkey (Elliott Smith’s old studio). I’ll update this entry with a link to it when it’s out. It has some poetic lyrics. The Bee Song also started out as a poem..

It was always my plan, sort of, to focus on poetry and then switch into music a bit like Leonard Cohen did. But to remain a poet at heart. I think that’s what’s happening. I did hope to get a bit more recognition as a poet than i ever did, i always did well at readings and things but didn’t really get noticed anywhere else, maybe i am just too shy and didn’t put it out there enough. Even as recently as last month i was hopefully submitting poems to competitions so it’s still a possibility. But i think a combination of not really being at that gangster tier of poemry and not pushing hard enough and maybe just not being the flavour of the present moment has kept me from being found out by the poetry scene. Kris Hemensley put it succinctly, after i sent him one of my collections, he sent back his own – ‘Your Scratch Entourage‘ and said modestly that there may be one or two of the poems that ‘do’ it.  I’ve written about Kris elsewhere around here i think. He and Michael Horovitz were the closest i had to poet mentors.

Anyway 20 years feels like a lot and the world has changed, got a lot darker perhaps, but i can see the sun glinting in from the future. And i’m still going, even though the cracks in my brain seem to be wider than they were – but maybe those let the light in too, like Cohen said. Perhaps i’ve said enough already – after all nothing really needs to be said. When i was getting going i would delete as much as i wrote cause it all just seemed to besmirch the void. That impulse is still there…