bits and pieces

Hmm, not feeling amazingly inspired to write today; I’ve got a few g&ts in me and really I just want to watch the latest episode of Generation Kill again. (If you haven’t seen this fantastic miniseries from the creators of The Wire, sort that out now.) But it’s Friday, and I didn’t post on Monday, so it’s got to be done really.

It’s been a lumpy sort of week; I’m still finding it hard to organise my time and myself in general, though I’ve slowly been putting into practice some of my running reflections. Workshop time is coming round again quickly and I’ve got to write three new pieces and finish off my Rosie poem, which has been hard work but is nearly there, I think (and got some positive noises at last week’s informal workshop). This time around I’ve set myself the challenge of writing at least two of my new pieces ‘after’ Alice Oswald, having reminded myself of how much I love her writing by doing a little presentation of her fantastic poem ‘Pruning in Frost’ in this week’s workshop. I’ve decided to scrap the St Andrew first draft that I did back in October and start on something completely new for this year’s Advent/Christmas poem… got an idea that feels exciting so hopefully something interesting will come of that.

Fascinating reading for this week’s Poetics (Edmund Burke; Ernest Fenellosa; Paul éluard & Andre Bréton; Jacques Lacan), and a really good seminar this afternoon; for one reason and another we were a small class this week and our discussion was really enjoyable – as well as silly at times; somehow I seem to get the giggles quite a lot in our Poetics lectures. We talk about such abstract concepts – I love it but for some reason I just find it hilarious, too. My highlight of the class was discussing Lacan’s metaphor ‘Love is a pebble laughing in the sunlight’. Good, isn’t it? Especially as we’d already established that poetry is basically metaphor.

Also on Poetics, I’ve pretty much decided that I’m going to write my essay for the module on ideas around inspiration and the writing process. We’ll be looking at this in class in a few week’s time but I’m already collecting extra reading for it, and hoping to generate more ideas over the next week or so… To that end I borrowed a coursemate’s copy of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way as it’s one of those classic creativity/self-help texts and I thought a modern voice would be interesting to bring into the mix. It’s fairly ubiquitous but I’ve always avoided it until now because it seemed so… well, self-helpy, and American. But I thought I’d actually give it a go (ie do the exercises it suggests) as well as just reading it, and I’m finding it fascinating so far. It’s a twelve-week course so I’m only right at the beginning, and who knows how helpful I’ll ultimately find it, but it’s certainly interesting. The two main ‘tools’ the author recommends are 1: morning pages – three pages of freehand stream of consciousness; and 2: the ‘artist date’ – where you basically go out and ’stock the pond’ by doing anything interesting/stimulating: going to a gallery, for a walk, watching an old film etc etc. Both tools have been very interesting to use; the morning pages have uncovered a lot of anger and frustration… and for the artist date this week I took myself to Norwich cathedral and a tour of the Broderers’ Guild workshop, where volunteers make new and repair old ecclesiastical  furnishings and vestments for the diocese and beyond… fascinating. (I love learning all the vocabulary of a craft that I know nothing about – lots of detail for a poem maybe…)

Finally I went to see Bright Star last night, Jane Campion’s film about the love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, currently being hailed as the only recent film about a poet worth watching. I had some problems with the story as a whole but I’d tend to agree. Lots more gorgeous sewing detail (the opening scenes are very sensual – and suggestive – or is that just me?), some actual poetry, beautifully shot and some genuinely poetic scenes (in the best sense of the word). Worth seeing at the cinema just to enjoy the quality of the light, I reckon.

This post brought to you with music from Amon Tobin; encouraging conversations and hilarious stories by Estelle; trip to the cinema by Matthew.

 

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learning to run/learning to write

As I was running round the park this morning, reflecting on starting running again (after over a year of being pretty inactive), I found myself thinking about how my experience of running might relate to writing – mainly because I’ve found them both so hard and scary in the past, and all of a sudden I’m now learning again to do this thing I thought I hated (ie running). I’ve actually thought about this quite a lot while huffing and puffing my way around the park over the last few weeks; at times it’s felt like I’ve been putting my energy into learning to run while I’ve been waiting for my brain/heart/soul/whichever bit of you the poems come from to feel like it’s ready to start learning to write in earnest. Almost as if my body’s doing the thinking for a while until the rest of me catches up. I can’t quite explain it, but it’s given me hope in a weird sort of way. I’ve really struggled not just with the writing but with organising my time and being productive at all the last few weeks – and then struggled with feeling guilty about it.

But as I struggled round the park this morning, I was thinking, if I can do this – if I can learn to run again, and make myself do something (ie exercise) that I’ve never liked and has never come naturally to me – then I can do this whole time/writing/working thing. I can. And I started thinking about the parallels and what my body has been teaching me while it’s been learning to run and I’ve been trying to write…

• I need a plan. The great thing about the last eight weeks’ running is that I’ve had a timetable: do this amount of walking/running, on these days. Someone’s done the thinking/planning for me, so I can just get on and follow it, knowing that if I do so I will be able to run 5k at the end of it. And I think this is key for my studying/reading/writing etc. Without a map of what I’m doing it’s too easy to dither and delay and – whoops – before you know it, the whole day’s gone. Or a good proportion of it, anyway. It’s time to start timetabling my day/week and making sure I can just get on with stuff without having the agony of trying to decide what to do this particular moment.
• I need to do the hardest thing first. Although there haven’t been many mornings when I’ve actively looked forward to going for a run (especially during the middle few weeks), apart from being ill/away I haven’t missed a single run, which is kind of astonishing to me given how lazy I actually am, and how much resistance you can feel to getting out into the cold/rain and doing some exercise. And the only way I’ve done it is by making it the first thing I do on running days. So there’s no messing about, and it just gets done. So I need to decide, I think, how the first two hours of my day are going to be spent, ie doing the thing I find hardest first. I won’t tell you what that is right now, but amazingly something has supplanted even the actual writing of poetry as ‘hardest thing to get around to’.
• I need to start slowly. If I’d just tried to go for a 30 minute run eight weeks ago, I would have hated it, failed, and probably hurt myself. Instead I started out really small – almost pathetically small – running for a minute, walking for a minute, and building up from there, until this morning. And no wonder I fail and then feel guilty when I’m expecting to straight away be able to do a smooth eight-hour work day of poetry or whatever. I need somehow to timetable in really small bite-sized chunks of whatever it is I’m doing – both so it’s easier to achieve and also so it’s less terrifying. In the same way that I could say to myself, come on, you can run for just one minute – anyone can – so I can say to myself, come on, sit down and do some editing for just thirty minutes, and then we’ll do something different.
• I need to find satisfaction in it. The more I’ve run, the more I’ve enjoyed it; it’s a combination of knowing that I’m getting better, simply enjoying being outside, and, well, finding out that I can actually enjoy running (though not all the time). I guess I’ve just got to hope that the more productive I am, the more I’ll find pleasure in it. I can’t force it, but hopefully expecting it to become more fun (at least some of the time) will be motivation in itself.
• I need the right kit. One of the best things about running is that you really only need a pair of shoes to do it. But I did find that once I’d started replacing my thick, hot gear for lighter, better running stuff, it helped a lot. Not just because it was more comfortable to run in, but because I suddenly felt like a runner. I’m not quite sure yet how this might map on to writing, but I think having a clear workspace is probably a large part of the battle. And maybe if I get all my filing done this weekend…

Well, that’s it. Hope these reflections aren’t too tediously self-help flavoured… it’s just what I’ve been turning over in my mind recently.

This post brought to you by Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, Pow at the Mustard Lounge, Marky’s badly packed kebab and repeated viewings of Generation Kill. Swooning courtesy of Alexander Skarsgård.

the principal object

‘The principal object, then, which I proposed to myself in these Poems was to chuse incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.’

– From Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802)

word clouds

Hmm, I’m not brilliant at this blogging thing, am I?

This week is officially reading week at UEA, but (hardworking poets that we are) we had a workshop this week anyway, and our week off from Poetics actually happened last week, so it’s business as usual. But I did take advantage of having last Friday off and had five days away up north, visiting friends in the wilds of Northumberland and then cousins in Newcastle. It was just the tonic: I got loads of writing done (though it was pretty frantic at times – sorry, Kerry!), quite a bit of reading, and generally just enjoyed being somewhere different and catching up with brilliant people. Highlights included Saturday’s walks in the woods and by the sea at Tynemouth, eating lots of home-made soup and sitting round the kitchen table setting the world to rights while drinking whisky…

Following the last time my work was critiqued, and the subsequent tutorial, I wanted to write something a bit longer and try to experiment somehow. It was a bit of a rush to get it finished but I really enjoyed stringing together three little childhood vignettes (not necessarily my own…) into one linked poem, all written in terza rima. Although I found the form really challenging – the rhymes interlock aba/bcb/cdc/ded etc, so that you have to find three rhymes for the last word of each line – I really enjoyed stretching out and writing something bigger than usual: I’m not generally brilliant at length. And the flow of terza rima really suits narrative, I think. I was happy with what I wrote, and then got some really helpful feedback in the workshop yesterday: most people seemed to like it, and highlighted the slightly clunky/overdone bits. A bit more tinkering and it’ll be a really nice piece of work, I think. And there may be plans afoot to collaborate with someone to do something musical with it…

This week in Poetics we’re talking about poetic diction, with cues from Dante, Wordsworth, Eliot and Mikhail Bakhtin. Part of our prep for the seminar is to come up with a list of words that we think are part of the contemporary poetic lexicon, which is a really interesting idea (and reminds me of one of the first books on writing poetry that I remember reading, Peter Sansom’s Writing Poems, which suggested that words like ’shard’ and ‘lozenge’ are much over-used in contemporary writing). But I thought I’d cheat and get a computer to do some of the thinking for me, by putting in the text of all the most beautiful poems that the class came up with a few weeks ago into www.wordle.net and seeing what it looked like. Here’s the result:

Clearly ‘like’ is the winner – poets being fans of simile, I guess – followed by ‘love’, ‘weeps’, ‘night’, ‘now’, ’silence’ and so on. Here’s the word cloud of my own writing:

Again it seems I’m fond of simile, along with ‘earth’, ‘one’ and ‘weight’… It’s a lovely tool to use and there are lots of different ways of displaying the results; here’s my latest three-part sequence:

Isn’t it gorgeous?…

As an aside: I’m probably not going to put much more of my poetry up on here, but if you’d like to read any of it, just leave me a comment or drop me an e-mail and I’ll send it on.

This post brought to you by redbush chai and Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, with thanks to Kerry, Dave, Joe, Rachel, Ruth and Dave for the northern hospitality

it’s not about brownie points

Well, it’s been a while… Since I last posted I had my first workshop where my own work was critiqued. The really scary part was getting all my writing to a state where I was vaguely happy with it; it was a bit of a rush, and I ended up sending round two pieces that I felt were nearly there, and two pieces that I knew were really only very early drafts. But the important thing was to get them sent round.

Then I spent the weekend trying not to think about seven other people reading them.

By the time Tuesday rolled round I was so nervous I was just pretending that it wasn’t going to happen. I think the fear was simply about people not liking my work – or, worse, thinking I shouldn’t be on the course. Of course it went fine, and the hour or so I had was both wonderful and awful, and for the same reason: close scrutiny of your work. On the one hand it’s terrifying, because everything’s exposed; on the other, having people pay close attention to the words that you’ve put together so carefully is really what it’s all about. It’s not just about getting feedback, it’s about what you’ve written finally having what it’s meant to: an audience.

Aside from the thrill of having seven good writers read your work as if it’s actually worth something, it was of course very good to get feedback – both positive and negative. One of the (many) helpful things our tutor has said is that the most helpful criticism is what the poet him or herself instinctively knows to be true – when someone highlights a doubt you yourself had about your work. But I also took on board some weaknesses that I hadn’t noticed, and conversely was delighted to get some very positive noises about one piece in particular – and I’m not going to pretend that having a T. S. Eliot-prizewinning poet and academic say of one of your pieces ‘it’s a 95% excellent poem’ isn’t rather thrilling…

After the workshop I had a tutorial by myself, which again was both helpful and inspiring. We talked about the other pieces I’d sent round that hadn’t been discussed in the workshop, and also my difficulties in breaking out of the lyric form – I came away with some very helpful and interesting ideas. Most of all, I was encouraged to experiment, take risks; and the most powerful thing was to be reminded that this course isn’t about turning up each week with ‘good’ pieces, in order to amass poetic brownie points; but to try to do difficult things and not worry about failing. Great advice, but so hard to take…

I have to confess I’m still finding the writing coming very hard, and very slowly. Much of it is to do with getting into good rhythms and routines. I’m confident I’ll get there, though. Right now I’m working on an advent piece (one of the drafts I sent round; I’m not quite sure what I’m doing with it to be honest); a piece about my youngest sister; and I’ve just started what I hope will be a sequence of three pieces in terza rima about some childhood incidents. Oh and if I have the time, something about how learning how to run might teach me how to write…

We have a week off from our Poetics module this Friday so I’m taking myself off up north to visit some good old friends, plus cousins. I’ve been promised long walks, home-made soup, backgammon, good chat, and maybe some lamb… just what I need, I reckon, and hopefully time and space for lots of reading and writing.

This post brought to you by the steps to the lindy circle, with music by Campus Five and words by Wendy Cope

heroes and heroines

I thought I’d make up for my lack of posting recently by just quickly linking to Carol Ann Duffy’s poem for today – National Poetry Day (the theme is ‘heroes and heroines’). I meant to post at some point that I heard Duffy read at UEA’s literary festival last week, and she was fantastic: funny, engaging, warm. A few of her poems brought tears to my eyes, and it was magical to hear her read ‘Prayer’. Sublime, even (which I’ve been thinking about from my sickbed today – battling to get my Poetics reading done for tomorrow and reading Longinus’ On the Sublime…)

In other poetry news, apparently T. S. Eliot is the nation’s favourite poet, according to the BBC’s poll to celebrate National Poetry Day. I have to say, much as I love Eliot, I find this rather surprising… although maybe people are thinking of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats rather than The Wasteland…

And congratulations to Don Paterson, who last night won the Forward poetry prize for his collection Rain. I haven’t read it yet, but I very much enjoyed Landing Light when I read it last year, and in fact I’ve been re-reading bits of it in the last week or so. Great stuff.

I’ll leave you with a poem that I wrote for my own heroine – my mum, of course.

Snowdrops
‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.’

For most of the year’s length, its slow turn
you lie hidden, held in the cool earth’s cupped palms
a fastening of concentric skins, tissued
layers, tightly wrapped and packed like a parcel.

All around is shift and tangled tumble
the rustle of leaf and stalk. Finger deep
your minute processes unfurl – cells bloom
roots reach and stretch in a gritty embrace

until early spring, when freshly minted
fleshy leaves appear. On supple blown-glass stems
buds lift and shed their paper wraps: like a gift
petals condense in delicate drifts

as unexpected you break the cold crust
of earth as if to say look, here, now, this.

This post brought to you by Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, hot lemon and honey and the wonder of my first non-liquid meal since Sunday

the most beautiful poem you know

Apologies for the delay in posting. I realised on Friday that it probably wasn’t a good day for posting after all, what with finishing off Poetics reading in the morning, the seminar in the afternoon, and of course chatting in the grad bar afterwards… Posting took a backseat to actually getting on with the writing of poetry over the weekend, and then this week I’ve been completely wiped out with tonsilitis (miserable). The antibiotics are finally kicking in and I’m starting to feel a bit better, but it’s really frustrating to be missing out on everything – all the reading and writing I want to be doing, the workshop I had to miss yesterday, and various fun I’ve had planned.

Poetics, then. I mentioned the week before last that I was really excited at the thought of getting stuck into literary theory again, and looking forward to getting on with the reading. Last Monday saw this exciting delivery from amazon:

These are my three essential texts for the module – Classical Literary Criticism, Sidney’s ‘Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism and Poetry in Theory:

And joining them are a couple of extras I treated myself to – John Lennard’s The Poetry Handbook, Terry Eagleton’s How To Read a Poem and the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory:

– mmm, yummy books!

So last week’s topic for Poetics was ‘Poetry and Truth’ – might as well start with the big guns – and our reading included parts of Plato’s Republic and Ion, Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy and a couple of other pieces. Fascinating stuff – especially as I’d never read any Plato before. We’d been encouraged to come at it all from a practitioner’s point of view, so it was fun to argue/disagree with/question everything as I read it, and look for the connections between it and the way I read, the way I write. To be honest I disagreed with most of what Plato had to say about poetry; his willingness to sacrifice truth for an ideal state seems rather puzzling given his insistence on the importance of truth in general; at times he seemed so illogical and contradictory that I wondered if I was missing something. But for me the ultimate, and most delightful, irony is that he privileges diagesis (ie narrative, the author speaking in their own voice) over mimesis (imitation, the author speaking in the voice of their character), and yet his entire writing appears to be a conversation between Socrates and various others. Brilliant – to me this seemed to destabilise all his rather high and mighty (authoritarian? dictatorial?) ideas about poetry and how it relates to society…

Equally thought-provoking was the poet Laura Wilding’s writing about her poetry (Preface, 1938 and Introduction, 1980), which I found frankly hilarious in places; her utter seriousness and unsmiling conviction at her own rightness was both amusing and impressive. Her take on poetry is this:

One reads to uncover to oneself something that would otherwise remain unknown – something that one feels it is important to know.

I think I’d broadly agree with this – both in reading and in writing. She brings up all sorts of fascinating questions that I wanted to argue with, but in my rather weakened state I think I’ll spare you that for now.

So it was all good, chewy stuff, and we had a thoughtful seminar discussing it all. But to me what was most interesting of all was that we didn’t really talk about the notion of ‘truth’ at all; we sort of took it as a given that the idea of truth is desirable and possible. And that’s rather a big assumption, isn’t it?

This week (assuming I’m better by Friday) we’re looking at ‘Poetry and Beauty’. Having been sick I haven’t looked at any of the reading yet, but it includes Longinus’ On the Sublime, Shelley, Barthes and Wallace Stevens. And we’ve been asked to e-mail the tutor ‘the most beautiful short poem that you know’. What a challenge! I’ve been mulling this over all week and it’s even harder than I first thought, because when a poem really moves me, I’m not convinced it’s primarily its beauty that does that… it’s more about what it’s saying (though of course beauty is a part of that). Going through some of my favourites I’m not sure I could say that any of them are ‘the most beautiful poem I know’. Running out of time, I opted for this gem, by John Burnside. It’s from his 2007 collection Gift Songs.

Varieties of Religious Experience: XI Lares

All afternoon I have heard you
going from room to room, as if you would offer
the gift of a watchful presence, the gift of a look
to how the sunlight gathers in the folds
of curtains
how the shadows on the wall
flit back and forth, more sparrow, or swallow in flight
than birds would have been.

Like you I have felt it today, that space in our house
where doors might swing open
messengers appear:
the curve of a bowl, or the red in a vase of carnations
softly assuming the forms of a visitation.

We go for weeks and never catch ourselves
like this, the trace of magic we possess
locked in the work of appearing, day after day,
in the world of our making;

we go for months with phantoms in our heads
till, filling a bath, or fetching the laundry in,
we see ourselves again, at home, illumined,
folding a sheet, or pouring a glass of milk
bright in the here and now, and unencumbered.

I’d love to read your most beautiful poems…

This post brought to you by the miracle of antibiotics and Bella’s patented hot toddy recipe; music by James Remote

Varieties of Religious Experience: XI Lares

    All afternoon I have heard you
    going from room to room, as if you would offer
    the gift of a watchful presence, the gift of a look
    to how the sunlight gathers in the folds
    of curtains
               how the shadows on the wall
    flit back and forth, more sparrow, or swallow in flight
    than birds would have been.

    Like you I have felt it today, that space in our house
    where doors might swing open
                                messengers appear:
    the curve of a bowl, or the red in a vase of carnations
    softly assuming the forms of a visitation.

    We go for weeks and never catch ourselves
    like this, the trace of magic we possess
    locked in the work of appearing, day after day,
    in the world of our making;

    we go for months with phantoms in our heads
    till, filling a bath, or fetching the laundry in,
    we see ourselves again, at home, illumined,
    folding a sheet, or pouring a glass of milk
    bright in the here and now, and unencumbered.

seek first to understand

It’s Monday night, and as of this week that means blogging night. But it’s also swing night; I went to my first class this evening, and we learnt the Charleston, so I hope you don’t mind if I practise my moves under the table…

We have our first workshop tomorrow. I’m rather relieved that I’m not up for dissection – sorry, discussion – first time round; I’ve got at least a couple of weeks to work up the four pieces I’m currently writing. And it’ll be good to get a feel for the way things work before it’s my turn. But I’m also keeping in mind our tutor’s direction last week: that in the workshop we seek first to understand what we’re looking at; only then do we evaluate it. That seems to me a deeply respectful and encouraging way of going about critiquing someone’s writing.

So, do you want to know my deep, dark, shameful secret?

It’s this: I find writing poetry really hard. That in itself isn’t such a bad thing (though it’s easy to feel inadequate, and to compare yourself with others who seem to find it so much easier), but I often find it so hard that I mostly – recently, anyway – don’t actually enjoy writing poetry; so hard that I can, and do, put it off for ages. In fact sometimes it feels like I’d rather do almost anything than sit down and write. And the really, really shameful secret: I haven’t written a poem since I found out I got a place on this course. Which is understandable in one sense, but mostly it makes me feel like a fraud. A writer who doesn’t write isn’t actually a writer.

I’ve been finding it quite a painful paradox, to be honest. On the one hand it’s not an exaggeration to say that a part of me is deeply convinced that poetry is the most important thing in the world. And so here I am, taking a whole year out (and spending thousands of pounds) to learn to write better poetry, to learn the craft. On the other hand: I just haven’t been writing. For the last couple of weeks, more than just the usual procrastination, it’s this rather shameful, confused feeling that’s had me rabbit-in-headlights-frozen, and meant I haven’t picked up my pen to write since I got here. Every day that I haven’t written the panic’s risen a little more, and I’ve felt a little more like I shouldn’t be doing this at all.

Thankfully a couple of good, honest conversations over the last week have helped to break the deadlock – that and a truly horrific anxiety dream on Sunday morning that had me reaching for pen and paper while still in bed, so I could at least say ‘I have now started’. And this morning I finally got some good writing time in – whether the writing was any good is another matter, and at this stage doesn’t actually matter I don’t think. So that’s a huge relief. Maybe I can do this after all.

Hopefully it’s not too uncommon to enjoy having written something rather than the actual process of writing. I’m sure I’ve heard writers say that before. Who was it that said the craft of writing is mostly about the application of the seat of one’s pants to one’s chair? They were right, I think. And Laura Riding (see my last post) writes this:

It is quite true that when someone sits down to write or read a poem the amount of inertia to be overcome is greater than with any other activity.

I agree, to be honest – and the fact that someone else experiences that too is hugely comforting. It’s so easy to assume that everyone else writes freely, joyously – that they just can’t help writing all the time, whenever, whatever. I’m sure that’s true for some people, and certainly reading Joe Klein’s biography of Woody Guthrie right now isn’t helping me in the insecurity stakes – but for lots of other people, writing is just hard work. I’ll never forget hearing Tom Paulin say that writing is like ‘digging ditches; it’s real Desperate Dan stuff; it’s like eating old bakelite plugs’. Preach it, brother!

Really, the main thing I need to do is forget all the myths that surround writing, and creativity in general, and simply write the way I write. Now I’ve definitely made things more stressful/panicked/rigid than they need to be, and one of the things I want to learn this year is how to write in a more relaxed, fluid manner (I’m talking process here rather than style). But at the same time, I do also need to learn to accept the fact that I’m not a midnight-oil type of livewire, and I likely never will be, bar the odd sudden visits from the muse (it has happened before, but only a couple of times). Mostly I need routine, I need solitude, I need time and space by myself, and mainly, I think, I need stability. And the last six months have been anything but stable, so I’m going to cut myself a huge swathe of slack and stop beating myself up for not having written any poetry during that time.

(Strangely I find the process of writing fiction much easier; since November last year I’ve been working on a very crappy first draft of a children’s story. I can and do write that quickly, and once I get going the sense of flow is almost addictive. It’s just a completely different kind of writing.)

Well I thought I was going to write about Poetics today, and in fact I photographed all the lovely books that I received from amazon this morning just so I could show you what I’m reading. But I guess I was in a confessional mood, and Poetics will just have to wait till Friday.

I’ll leave you with one of my own poems this time, as a reminder to myself that yes, I can write. And I’m going to learn to write better.

All the maps of Russia stop at Moscow

but home lies somewhere beyond, under
the blue bowl of sky, ceramic, unglazed.
I’ve heard of vast forests, immense fields,
black soil. But there are no maps, and
my only clue is a mustard seed wrapped
in cabbage-leaf complexities of skin
and heart. I must make my own way, collect
to myself the riches I hope to find:
a pinecone, a tug of sheep’s wool, a smooth
pebble, a paper seedcase, a sea shell.
I am a riffle in a stream, catching
particles of gold, of light. And if there is,
after all, a home to be found, I need
to see the shining thread, to feel its pull.

(I wrote this quite a long time ago, as a new year poem, and over the years it’s meant a lot to me; when I wrote it I was navigating a particularly turbulent time, and it really felt both that everything was up for grabs – all the old maps I’d relied on didn’t take me where I needed them to, after all – and also that there was still, somehow, a security somewhere – a home to be found. I hope you like it. It’s probably my favourite of my own pieces, and I’m delighted that it was highly commended in the Duino International Poetry Competition this year, and as such will be published in their anthology next month. So it’ll be my first published poem, which feels about right.)

This post brought to you with thanks to Anna and Louisa for the encouragement, Marky for the music, Richer Sounds for the new tuner, and a raised glass to the Workshop, my new favourite Norwich pub

week one

Well, here I am. Around ten months after first thinking about it, seven months after applying and five months after finding out I had a place on the course, I’m in Norwich, embarking on the creative writing masters at UEA. Some days it still doesn’t quite feel real; it’s as though I’ve been transported out of my old life and set down in someone else’s – like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Is it really that easy to give up your job, your life as you know it, and move to a city where you know precisely one and a half people? Apparently so. (Although my long-suffering friends, family and colleagues know that the last few months have hardly been an easy ride.)

So, week one. I got here last week, and spent it unpacking, settling in and doing all those jobs you have to do when you move house. This week it all kicked off – I enrolled on Monday, and throughout the week there were various meetings and meet-ups: an introduction to the faculty, the school, the course, our lecture module for this term, and a big old scrum on the Monday night for all the postgraduates starting in the school of literature and creative writing.

It was great to get onto campus on Monday; I’d spent the previous week oscillating between enjoying the simple pleasures of nesting (I’m sharing a lovely house in Norwich’s ‘golden triangle’) and feeling rather lost and lonely, with all my familiar points of reference gone. For the last few months before leaving London I’d been so focused (can you focus while essentially procrastinating about everything?) on the actual logistics of moving, constantly telling myself that as soon as I got here it would all be all right, that it was almost a bit of a shock when I actually got here to find that I was lonely, homesick and quite scared about the whole thing. Speaking to my London-based sister one evening and hearing sirens in the background down the phone I was suddenly hugely nostalgic for Brixton, even though I’ve always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with London and was looking forward to somewhere a bit smaller and prettier and leafier.

So finally getting stuck in and being reminded of why I’d moved here was a relief. UEA has a lovely campus and a very friendly vibe – staff, students and faculty included. It was carnage for the first few days, with all the new undergraduates arriving en masse; I felt very glad to not be eighteen/nineteen any more, with so much to prove (though they did look like they were having  a lot of fun). Strange to think of myself as a ‘mature’ student – the freshers must look at me in the same way that I did older graduates when I first started at university…

Teaching starts next week, so this week was just about meeting our course tutors and fellow course-mates, getting an overview of the way the course is taught and assessed (more on that next week) and getting the reading list for this semester’s lecture module, which is Poetics, writing, language. All very exciting, as well as daunting. We have two tutors for the workshop element of the course (one this term, one next), both of whom I’ve long admired as poets, so it’s going to be a huge privilege to be taught by them. I’m not entirely sure exactly how many of us there are doing the poetry strand of the MA, but we’re definitely five full-time, with another five or so part-time. But in any case workshops are definitely going to be a more intimate affair than I’d imagined.

Getting the reading list for the poetics module was perhaps the most exciting element of the week for me; I’d forgotten just how much I love thinking and talking about ideas, and how much I’d enjoyed studying critical theory as an undergraduate. I’ve ordered all my set texts and done some preliminary reading, and can’t wait to get my teeth stuck into the rest of it next week when all my shiny new books arrive. Just knowing I’m a student again feels deliciously exciting. There’s so much to learn…

More next week. I’ll end with a fantastic poem by Laura Riding, a poet I’d not heard of before this week, who features on week one of the Poetics module.

The Troubles of a Book

The trouble of a book is first to be
No thoughts to nobody,
Then to lie as long unwritten
As it will lie unread,
Then to build word for word an author
And occupy his head
Until the head declares vacancy
To make full publication
Of running empty.

The trouble of a book is secondly
To keep awake and ready
And listening like an innkeeper,
Wishing, not wishing for a guest,
Torn between hope of no rest
And hope of rest.
Uncertainly the pages doze
And blink open to passing fingers
With landlord smile, then close.

The trouble of a book is thirdly
to speak its sermon, then look the other way,
Arouse commotion in the margin,
Where tongue meets the eye,
But claim no experience of panic,
No complicity in the outcry.
The ordeal of a book is to give no hint
Of ordeal, to be flat and witless
Of the upright sense of print.

The trouble of a book is chiefly
To be nothing but book outwardly;
To wear binding like binding,
Bury itself in book-death,
Yet to feel all but book;
To breathe live words, yet with the breath
Of letters; to address liveliness
In reading eyes, he answered with
Letters and bookishness.

This post brought to you by the letters U, E and A, books by Granny, music by Basement Jaxx, with the assistance of much rooibos tea, runs in the park, and my ever-loving parents (kind sponsors of the shiny new laptop)