Damn the reviews!

On Monday evening, I hunkered down and read Da Bomb's comments (made early last year) on my first two years worth of poetry, spanning 2003-2004. Until now, all the poems have been kept in one MS Word document (it's a kind of motherlode of piss-poor poetry). The document is divided into four sections; ballads, blues, spirituals and comedies (the split frankly doesn't work, I know). I read through the ballads and concluded that 90% of them were shit. Most of them were written as a knee-jerk response to certain events in my private life, and they ended on an over-dramatic note. Of course, there were a few good ones, but generally I believe I cannot write a decent love poem for toffee (maybe because I was never really in love, just infatuated).

Across the document that Da Bomb reviewed, there are many poems from that era that require editing. Some will require a major rewrite. But for 90% of the ballads, its a one way ticket to the trash can. Thankfully, few people have seen them (and even fewer have them), so I can consign them to history and forget I ever wrote them.

Woe betide anyone who reminds me of them in the future.