So, just now I got reminded of this thing by Emily asking me for a list of poetry blogs. I was happy to oblige, but then a little sad that I'd never really done anything much with this. So, anyway.

So, today my Mum picked up two books for me from the local library. One of them is The New York Poets II (edited by Mark Ford and Trevor Winkfield), and the other is Making for Planet Alice (edited by Maura Dooley). I'm a big fan of Maura Dooley (which is probably the reason I got the book out - I'm still working my way through 'Modern Women Poets', a more extensive Bloodaxe anthology of, well, women poets) and it looks pretty good so far. I haven't really looked at the New York one yet - I had the first one out for a while, but never really worked my way through it. I'm a big fan of Frank O'Hara, so I feel like I need to research more into the poets working at around the same time as him, and those that took up the gauntlet after he'd gone. The problem is that I'm really supposed to be buckling down to work now (I have a three hour English exam in just over a week) and so I don't really have time to read; anthologies are pretty good at this sort of time, because they don't require you to work all the way through, but frustrating - I want to work all the way through, really, but I can't.

Still, soon enough all of my exams will be over. I think my last one's on the 12th and 13th (or is it the 11th and 12th?) of June, and that's Art. Then I'm done with AS, done, done. And I do three days on either Arabic or Russian (don't know which of the two language courses I got onto yet) before being launched into the murky waters of A2 English Lit, History and Government and Politics. I'll probably have to continue Art until the summer holidays, actually, but I can't really see me carrying it on after then - to be honest, I'm not really good enough at it. If I want to apply to some good universities then I need to focus more on getting As in my other subjects, not on getting at least a B in art at the expense of my main three.

Anyway, I'm trying to think of a poem to sign this off with - the problem with being a big fan of modern poetry is that it's all in copyright! So I'll leave off a poem for today, but I'll try and post something in the next few days.