What Me? I'm just Jenny from the block...

Any body else experience this strange sensation whenever you find your name mentioned? I've just been linked for the first time to Ron Silliman's blog, and the Other Room blog seems to like my last post too. Great! I should feel glad. But I can't help that awful feeling of "why me?" Every time I see my name in print, I get this awful feeling that it's not me, it can't be me they're thinking of.

It's that Borgesian Other who goes about saying wise and significant things, or even writing half-way decent poems that get put into magazines and published online. It can't possibly be this bloke who comes from a deadend ex-industrial town in East Lancashire and has the gall to call himself a poet.

There must be several selves in there, swimming about. The religious self I hardly ever talk about. The poet self. The pacifist self. The grumpy old man who complains about the traffic down Oxford Road and the self who watches me getting all this attention and thinks, "who does he think he is, a blip on the cultural landscape? Ha!"