I’ve been writing poetry for as long as I can remember. I was that nerdy girl in school, the one you all hated, who, when the teacher set the homework of writing a poem in the voice of Macbeth’s Banquo, ignored the groans of all her classmates and happily ran home to write a long epic narrative in iambic pentameter. I write poetry for me. I write it to express myself, to try and understand my emotions, to make something beautiful out of a moment I wish to remember. I use it as a diary, a way to plot growing up and all the emotions encountered by that. I think it’s a very humanising thing to do; to want to scrawl our deepest feelings and thoughts across notebooks, to react to lives and deaths and loves through structure and rhythm and rhyme.

A thought struck me then, as I wrote about writing in my latest post, and as I looked up at the header which sits over my blog: ‘Avid reader. Aspiring writer. Amateur photographer.’ I use this blog to share my photos and my book reviews, to write about all the things which mean the most to me, but I’ve never once shared anything that I’ve written creatively. It’s a scary thing to do, I admit it. But a big part of creativity is being fearful. Fearful of how you will be perceived. Of how the work which you have crafted so lovingly, which is so very important and personal to you, will be judged.

And yet I’ve just started announcing to the world, loud and proud, that I want to be a writer. Doing this, without putting my writing out there into the world, is like saying that I want to be an actor but then being too frightened to go on stage. So here I am, about to launch a new series of blog posts sharing some of the favourite poems that I have written, new and old, fictional and biographical. This will be me taking that first step onto the stage and shouting to my audience (you, dear reader, by the way): “I’m here, I want to write. This is what I have written. Judge me how you will.”

I’m just praying that you don’t boo me.

Introducing then, on my newly bought blog domain (it’s mine, it’s all mine!), Poetry Corner, a little space set aside here online for me to share my work. First up is a poem I wrote recently. It’s called Versioning and it’s about the expectations and perceptions you have of other people, and about how easy it is to get swept up by the idea of somebody, rather than the person themselves with all of their flaws . I hope you enjoy it.

(N.B. Thanks to azrasta on Flickr for the photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/azrasta/5088254388/in/photostream/)