In the 15 or so years since, not much has changed - except I'm able to look most people of average height in the nose rather than the knees - I have even discovered it's equally as difficult to be taken seriously when people are addressing you in baby talk as it is when you grow a pair of breasts.
I am a woman with the overwhelming desire to speak, but that's not quite right.
I am a woman with the overwhelming desire to be heard.
Despite a partial lifetime of getting my, admittedly slightly grating, Mancunian drawl forcibly down the ears of anybody within a few hundred metre radius it is only in these past few months that the payoff for my 'hit it 'till it breaks' approach is making itself known.
Last night I had my first taste of creative responsibility and it both warmed my heart and scared the living shit out of me.
Cantankerous radical and notorious critic, Harold Bloom (who I always had trouble ploughing through in an academic context) sprung to mind in the early hours of this morning. In 'Anxiety of Influence', sometime before your brain completely switches channels, he writes that "Poetry (Romance) is Family Romance".
Admittedly, the man was a few clowns short of a circus and haplessly obsessed with Freud but this one snippet of theory began to make blinding sense - in the same way that we can't take a lover without embracing their family, friends or house pets a poet/poem can never be truly autonomous. They must be read one into the next and so on and so forth.
Therefore in both the act of decreeing myself as 'Poet', producing works (with gusto) and eventually influencing the writing of others I have inadvertently stumbled into a position where I hold not only the weight of somebodies literary future but also a rich past of my peers and betters.
If my insecurity was not now at it's peak then the addition of a phone call, just received, telling me Gary Bushell wants to see me perform has sent my day free falling into blind panic.
Let us hope only this, that my anxiety be realised in some act of dubious genius and not drunken frivolity.
Annie.
<3
I am a woman with the overwhelming desire to speak, but that's not quite right.
I am a woman with the overwhelming desire to be heard.
Despite a partial lifetime of getting my, admittedly slightly grating, Mancunian drawl forcibly down the ears of anybody within a few hundred metre radius it is only in these past few months that the payoff for my 'hit it 'till it breaks' approach is making itself known.
Last night I had my first taste of creative responsibility and it both warmed my heart and scared the living shit out of me.
Cantankerous radical and notorious critic, Harold Bloom (who I always had trouble ploughing through in an academic context) sprung to mind in the early hours of this morning. In 'Anxiety of Influence', sometime before your brain completely switches channels, he writes that "Poetry (Romance) is Family Romance".
Admittedly, the man was a few clowns short of a circus and haplessly obsessed with Freud but this one snippet of theory began to make blinding sense - in the same way that we can't take a lover without embracing their family, friends or house pets a poet/poem can never be truly autonomous. They must be read one into the next and so on and so forth.
Therefore in both the act of decreeing myself as 'Poet', producing works (with gusto) and eventually influencing the writing of others I have inadvertently stumbled into a position where I hold not only the weight of somebodies literary future but also a rich past of my peers and betters.
If my insecurity was not now at it's peak then the addition of a phone call, just received, telling me Gary Bushell wants to see me perform has sent my day free falling into blind panic.
Let us hope only this, that my anxiety be realised in some act of dubious genius and not drunken frivolity.
Annie.
<3
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