While I’m waiting for the Dettol Mould and Mildew Remover to eat into the shower tray, I thought I’d check email: Diane Abbott for Leader, Join Cath Kidston on Facebook, Live Journal Updates, Meet the New Ipod Nano With Multi… and Word Hustler Ink Have You Written A Short Story? Saturday must be Send a Spam Day. What a shame the Internet has come to this. It used to be a way for intellectuals to send theses to each other but now I may as well switch it off and live without it. Except I can’t.
I like Nico and the Velvet Underground Sunday Morning, hence the blog title. I’ve been watching Sky Arts about Mr Warhol’s factory. I bet Dylan wished he’d kept the Elvis. But gosh Warhol was a genius. He’d have loved spam.
Yesterday I chucked away thousands of rejection slips from poetry submissions I made between 1996 and 1999. In 99 I gave up poetry and realised that Britain doesn’t want or need another poet. It’s amazing what you learn on an MA. I salvaged the acceptances and the funny rejections: Jane Holland at Blade and lots of other scathing personal hand-written remarks to savour. I did not write too much and I am truly sorry I sent seven poems when the limit was five but they were short.
I did find a scrap saying that my poem Horse Studies came joint fourth in the Sunk Island Review competition 1996 judged by my favourite poet Geoff Hattersley. Michael Blackburn still runs SIR, and his link to my poem in April 1996 is as far as I can tell my first publication on the Internet. The link, now long gone, is in itself worth savouring for all you technos who remember hoping the Internet was the last gasp of a dying civilisation rather than the creak of an automatic pick and pack arm in a factory in Canary Wharf. It’s http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/TheWorks.
