Emmaprovement Continues...

New Year. New Goals. With a birthday looming in mid-February (send gifts c/o the Urban Junkies office) I use January as a time to really hone in what I want to accomplish this year.

My closest friends and I are pretty serious about our resolutions. At one point we actually anonymously wrote them for each other. Some people like to make silly, vile goals such as drink less and exercise more. We know better.

Smoke more pot appears on quite a few of our lists. As does kissing strange boys. And dancing. Because, really, in the end, we all know those things make you so much happier than a slim waistline and clear head in the morning.

My goals are more basic: trying to stay organised, avoiding romance, and investing in plastic surgery (stay tuned) all feature, but most importantly, I want to start living the life I write about. And that means getting out more.

Another key goal (we have five key goals, three you are accountable for), is to write more poetry. Very few people know this, but I used to be a poet. Not a very good one, mind. But it's what I studied in university, and began publishing after I graduated. Then, my mum - so excited that one of my poems was coming out in a REAL poetry journal - got a little upset about the, ah, sexual references in said poem. And, well, freaked.

So that put an end to that. For the last decade or so, I've put that part of myself away. But there have been a rash of weddings lately, and dedicating a poem to the couple is a pretty impressive, yet inexpensive, gift.

I forgot how good I was, basically. Making grown men brush away tears feels pretty powerful. Also, clearly, I like the sound of my own voice.

So, this week, my friend Sam and I headed down to Bloomsbury theatre to see (or listen) to the shortlisted writers for T. S. Elliot Poetry prize, arguably the most prestigious prize in British poetry.

I wanted to see how good these guys were. Because, after all the accolades at the weddings, I thought I should probably enter the contest myself next year.

The poetry crowd, as expected, is a little less glamorous than the fashion crowd. But the poets were excellent. An education at all-girls school has left me completely cold to male authors - bar F. Scott Fitzgerald, Leonard Cohen, and Michael Ondaatje - but Alan Gillis reading from his new volume, Hawks and Doves, made me laugh outloud.

The recently jilted should invest in Sophie Hannah's Pessimism for Beginners. A modern day Dorothy Parker, Hannah's caustic tone is brilliantly juxtaposed with her light, breezy rhyming couplets.

Other notable authors shortlisted included Fiona Sampson, the editor of Poetry Review and Scotland's 87-year-old poet laureate, Edwin Morgan. After hearing all the authors, I was rooting for the youngest candidate, Frances Leviston, who had the room spellbound with her reading from her debut collection, Public Dream.