Happy :)

I am excited today. Excited because I’ve been thinking about how positive these last few months have been, and how I am seeing things in existence now that I could previously not have dreamed possible.

I keep looking at my framed degree certificate and thinking about how thankful I am to have had this opportunity. I feel like some serious ‘loose ends’ have been tied up. It was a long time to wait but I feel like I appreciate that simple slip of paper a whole lot more, at 29, than maybe I would have at 21. I look back over these past three years, in this beautiful city, and I just feel so thrilled.

I am excitedly anticipating my MA course, which begins in four weeks or so. I can’t wait to delve into deeper study once more, and I am so looking forward to the self directed elements of it. I am so thankful for the scholarship I’ve been given which will help so much with that. Again, it feels so resolving, so much of a blessing.

And now I have a beautiful flat to move into as well. I am an expert at making the best of any space …of squeezing myriad bookcases into small corners… But my new flat is genuinely lovely, with fresh white walls, cathedral views, and a wonderful communal garden. Again, it’s such a blessing.

I don’t mean to sound just super hyper and unrealistic about everything, because sometimes things are still tough. I’m sure, for example, I will still have to battle encroaching spiders in my new flat, but today I am just reminded of how things really do ‘come good’. Sometimes it feels like so much is a struggle but then there are breakthroughs, there are gifts that are extravagant and more than you could have hoped for, there a beautiful days when you have space to sit by a river in the sunshine.

Happy Vicki is happy

Busy with the Bubble Wrap!

Moving house is a process that both thrills and terrifies me.

It brings out my best and worse sides.

It makes me want to fast-forward time and also pause it, escape from it, sleep through it.

Repeated moving is a student norm, and my experience has proved this. I have had five different addresses, since moving here in 2009. Every geographical shift has marked a change in circumstances, a change of season, variations I have both welcomed and regarded with ambivalence.

There is something exciting about moving. I love taking all my precious things off my shelves, looking at them, remembering what they mean, the stories behind the items. I enjoy carefully wrapping them up, labelling boxes. This preparation appeals to my analytical side: it’s a very measurable process – once everything is in a box, the job is done and I am ready.

I also enjoy the moment of arrival, when I unlock my new front door for the first time. This has been especially fun the last couple of times as I’ve moved into a flat on my own. I love that moment of blank space, a bit like when I approach a blank canvas ready to paint on it, or a blank notebook page with the first strains of a poem echoing in my mind. For me, choosing where to put my sofa is an artistic process, and I really enjoy unpacking, organising – like choosing where to sketch in detail, where to add colour or simile. I also enjoy the planning process (which, interestingly, is different to the way I usually approach creativity). In the weeks before a move I am to be found sketching floor plans, measuring wall lengths, thinking about ‘zoning’, and making endless lists. I suppose this may be a defensive attempt to control the chaos of moving, but I think it is more about owning the process, mentally preparing myself for what will become a physical reality.

Where I live physically has long been linked to the bigger picture of my life and what I am thinking about / journeying through at that moment. Last year, I was thinking about the completion of a ten-year period of my life from when I left home the first time. Twelve months on, this new flat reminds me of the process of settling into the ‘spacious place’ that I have been ‘brought out’ into. My current flat, the affectionately nicknamed ‘Huge Small Flat of Train Glory’ has been important and lovely and a blessing. It has taught me so much about life (Lakeland do sell flytraps, city councils aren’t good at applying student council tax exemptions), and so much about myself (hoovering spiders out of an air vent can vastly improve my sense of wellbeing, cooking for guests makes me happy). It is, however, time to move on. The flat has been good fun, but rats and mold are not for me. My good friend affectionately named it a ‘tenement’. At the time I was defensive. Now I see her point.

My new flat is on the ground floor, and there doesn’t appear to be any mold (or rats, hopefully). It’s a big spacious room, with a separate large double bedroom, and a nice size bathroom, and it even has a hallway and an airing cupboard. This thrills me: at 29 and a bit I finally have a home with an airing cupboard (nearly). It’s got an entry phone, and is still near enough to the station for me to be able to hear the comforting hum of trains. Best of all, it’s all in one (like most normal flats!) so there won’t be communal stairs running through the two separate bits. I really can’t wait to get in and get started and to begin giving the space that unique ‘Vicki’ touch (this mainly involves papier-mache teapots, multiple pterodactyls and a selection of cute accessories given to me by the lovely Mandy). I might even hang my aluminium fish in the bathroom!

At the same time as all of this excitement, there is a bit of my personality that revels in calm and quiet. I want to wake up and all the packing and signing and waiting for credit cheques to be done. I find myself panicking about things like not having enough boxes, or the van fitting under the 2’2m entry to the flats. It’s frustrating as most of these things are out of my control, and they just take up mental energy: what is the point in worrying about what might go wrong? I’m self-aware enough to know this is silly, but there is something in me that won’t quite be able to believe the move will happen until I have that set of keys in my hand.

The other thing moving highlights for me, which is a good thing, is the sheer brilliance of the community I have around me here. They are brilliant at joining in, at lending me boxes and bubble wrap, at unpacking, at driving vans, at helping me with forms, at attending housewarming parties, at picking me up from work at 7am and taking me for coffee… I am so blessed, and the loveliness of my friends helps to offset the elements of panic.

So today marks move day -13. Today I am bridging the gap between joy and fear. I am thankful and yet anxious. I would quite like to hide somewhere quiet for a day and try to discern what this next chapter is all about, but I also want to get busy with the bubble wrap!

MA Reading List (yikes!)

This should keep me going over the summer!

Gibaldi, Joseph ed. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 7th edition. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009. (paperback).

Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies (1862-3) 9781551117737 Broadview Press edition

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (1865-72) 9780199558292 Oxford World’s Classics edition

Mark Twain, The Prince and the Pauper (1881) 9780140436693 Penguin edition

F. Anstey, Vice Versâ; or, A Lesson to Fathers (1882) 9781906469214 Victorian Secrets edition

R. L. Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883) 9780140437683 Penguin edition

H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines (1885) 9780199536412 Oxford World’s Classics edition

Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1837-38)

Caroline Clive, Paul Ferroll (1855) Valancourt edition

Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859-60)

Mary Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1861-62)

Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

One other text to be confirmed at the start of term, possibly Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868)

John Foxe, Acts and Monuments ed. John N. King, (Oxford World’s Classics, 2009)
ISBN-10: 0199236844 | ISBN-13: 978-0199236848

Anon Arden of Faversham ed. Martin White, (New Mermaid Edition, 2007)
ISBN-10: 0713677651 | ISBN-13: 978-0713677652;

Thomas Dekker The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt This play is available online at http://archive.org/details/famoushistoryofs22dekkuoft

John Bale, King Johan This play is available online at http://archive.org/stream/miracleplaysmora00polliala#page/146/mode/2up/search/king+john

Shakespeare’s Henry VIII & King John ed. Jonathan Bate, (The RSC Shakespeare, 2012)
ISBN-10: 0230361927 | ISBN-13: 978-0230361928

You might also read a general history of the period such as Patrick Collinson’s Reformation (Phoenix, 2005), Diamaid McCulloch’s Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700 (Penguin, 2004) or The Sixteenth Century ed. Euan Cameron (The Shorter Oxford History of Europe series, Oxford 2006).

Stallworthy, Jon. Ed. Three Poets of the First World War: Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen. London: Penguin Classics, 2011.

Mary Borden. The Forbidden Zone. 1929. London: Hesperus, 2008.

David Jones. In Parenthesis. 1937. London: Faber 2010.

Keith Douglas. Keith Douglas: Poet to Poet (Poems Selected by Ted Hughes). London: Faber, 2006. (NB an earlier edition has the title Simplify Me When I’m Dead).

Hamish Hamilton. Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica. 1948. Polygon, 2008.

Alexander Baron, From the City From the Plough. 1948. Black Spring Press, 2010.

Gissing, The Odd Women

Cholmondeley, Red Pottage

Angelique Richardson, ed, Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women, 1890-1914

Caird, The Wing of Azrael

Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda

Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan

Wilde, Collected Poems

We will be discussing most of Christopher Marlowe’s plays and some of this poems. The poems are available in Stephen Orgel (ed.), Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Poems and Translations (London: Penguin Classics, 2007). For the plays you may use the collection edited by Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey, Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays (London: Penguin Classics, 2003) – although students are encouraged to buy single-text editions of at least those plays they discuss in their essay. Most of them are available in the excellent New Mermaids series.

Tamagotchis and Plums

I thought I’d try and start blogging again because I am methodically (stutteringly) filling a moleskin with poetry but a lot of the time I feel frustrated by the constraints of form and register and I just want to rebel. I’ll scribble a stanza I’m really happy with; and yet feel entirely disinclined to follow it with a neat another. I want to write sparsely, and with every line that I jot down, I start to feel like the page is cluttered and overstated. Like I’m doing metaphor to death and I hate that.

There was a time when I just felt creatively blocked, and I didn’t write for months. This is different to that. I have the thoughts, the inspiration, the lines that whisper into my mind as I walk home, but I feel such an urge to leave them alone. Somehow they look better stranded on their own in the centre of a page, without my tendency to extrapolate and say the same thing twice using different words. I’m thinking a lot about subtraction and creativity at the moment… the symbolism of the status inside the block of marble that you only get to by stripping away chunks.

(at this point in writing I spent a long time on ebay looking at tamagotchis. I bid on a teal one. I’m not sure what this says about my state of mind).

On Saturday I drove to Hertfordshire and we spent a long time discussing the ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ phenomena. Thankfully, most of my friends have explored it and then written it off as drivel. I am saddened, in the same way I was saddened by The ‘Twilight’ debacle and then the ‘Hunger Games’. It seems to me that everyone keeps getting really excited about these books that (in my opinion) aren’t that great. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it is that frustrates me about them, and its hard to put into words. With the Hunger Games its simpler: it’s like the language – the content of the book doesn’t seem to do justice to the concept. It feels to me like there is a mismatch there. And that frustrates me because I feel like the books could have been brilliant. Like the potential was there for a greater story.

‘Fifty Shades’ to me just seems gratuitous, and yet at the very same time “bald”, as this interesting article in Saturday’s Guardian noted. I think the disturbing relational and sexual transactions worry me more than the explicit nature of the descriptions. It’s the twenty-first century, do relationships have nothing better to offer than these tired roles? Does writing have nothing better to offer than, as The Guardian notes, “the way everybody always seethes, scolds, smirks or whispers and nobody ever just says; the way his eyes are constantly blazing, and she is constantly biting her lip.”

There’s more I could say, but I seem to be responding to my own thoughts about writing by commenting on the writing of others. Hey, let’s complete the cycle by posting some great comments by Jeanette Winterson along similar lines:

I keep thinking about writing another long piece of fiction. Then I lose heart because fiction has to have some fight in it. By which I mean it shouldn’t be smooth as a tube to glide along. Imagination is an interruption; it interrupts repetitive thinking, predictable thinking. It jolts the mind. Trouble is, the mind likes what it knows. It enjoys a cheap thrill, sure, but it likes what it knows. A real challenge is never just about content; (and I see the double meaning there), it is some stranger way of seeing the world. Art offers that – in all its forms and we have got to the point where we can go with it in the visual arts. Literature is struggling for a place. Language is difficult. Not data and information language or simple exchanges, but the language poets use to rinse the eye clean of use. Poetry is doing fine, by the way. This is poetry’s moment. Fiction – the story – the literary story that is not the literal story – is having a harder time of it.
And we are obsessed with ‘reality’. But fiction is not mimesis. Not a reproduction or a representation but a renewal and a reinvention. (from: here).

I am thinking a lot about “the language poets use to rinse the eye clean of use.” It strikes me as a good way of expressing that elusive ‘something’ i am striving for in my own writing. I don’t want to say nothing. I don’t want to say something to death. I don’t want to say important things in language that is either trite or cringe-inducing.

I think William Carlos Williams gets it right in this poem, This is Just to Say: 

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.

This is also powerful  I want to write about the important stuff too. Not just tamagotchis and foil packets and plums. There is stuff going on that really needs to be voiced, and I want to find the words for that amongst all the others fighting for airspace.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism

Nothing is new under the sun
and, I wandered lowly as a cloud
that floats on into the valley of death
marched the stately pleasure dome.

My tongue is the pen of a skilful writer
the ink runs low, I thirst.
I cut out the words and rearrange them
into a Hundred Thousand Billion Poems.

Your beauty and love chase after me every day of my life.
as I rehearse, rework, reword.
expression eludes me, eloquence stutters:
Come my friends, ’tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Uni Reflections

It’s the night before my first ‘final’ exam, and I probably should be revising. I’ve spent the day poring over secondary sources and reading over my notes from the past two terms, and I’m feeling like I’ve got a pretty good grasp of things. I suppose its a bit like ‘if I don’t know it now…’

Tonight feels bittersweet, though, and I think more revision will just compound that feeling, so I am taking a moment out to write and wonder and reflect. Its so strange thinking that in three days time uni really will be over. There’s been so many ‘lasts’ these last couple of months: last taught seminars, last coursework deadlines, last meetings with lecturers. And I feel ready for it to be over, its just strange.

For so many years, this has been my goal. This has been the secret desire that lingered in my heart as I tried to be ok without it.

When I was 17, I took part in a summer school that was for students attending normal state schools but who could be potential Oxbridge candidates. I went to Oxford for a week, staying in St Hugh’s college, studying Archaeology and Anthropology. I don’t remember everything about that week, but I loved it more than I can remember loving most things at that age. The idea was to give you a taste of Oxford life, and thus to increase your confidence in applying, interviewing and hopefully gaining a place there. We went to lectures, in quirky Oxford buildings and old houses. We chatted with current undergraduates and their professors. We visited a Roman archaeological dig, and spent a lot of time hanging out in parks and museums, talking about life and our ambitions and who we wanted to be. Everyone should have this sort of experience when they are 17.

I met people, that week at Oxford, like I never had before. They were bright, sparky, interesting and eloquent. I felt like the week ignited something in me. Before, I’d felt like the odd one out ‘for being clever’. I didn’t know that it could be something to be celebrated or that I could push further into and find like minded people. I didn’t know that there were academic institutions that would garner and encourage that sort of thing. I didn’t know that there were other crazy people like myself who actually enjoyed learning in that way. It blew my mind.

That week marked the beginning of the end for me, I think, in that my home situation deteriorated swiftly after returning from the week and expressing a desire to do everything I could to get to Oxford. Twelve months later I was working full time in Boots, having told my sixth form tutors that “I’d decided not to go to uni after all.” It was a dark time.

And, the thing is, I don’t resent my life for going in the direction it did at that time. I’m not bitter about it, gosh, I reckon I’d have missed out on a whole bunch of thrilling, formative stuff if I’d gone off to uni at the same time as all of my friends. But for a long time the Oxford ghost has haunted me. For a long time, I wondered.

In 2009 I packed a whole bunch of burgeoning suitcases and moved down to Canterbury to study Digital Art and English Literature here. A vastly different subject matter (which not a shrunken head or Roman dig in sight). At 26, I was given the opportunity I had quietly longed for all along. I didn’t know what it would be like, I went through all the ‘freak outs’ I guess I would have at 18, though I already had an amazing bunch of people around me down here that I knew would look out for me, would be family with me.

And I’ve truly had such an amazing time. I can’t begin to write about all the incredible stuff uni has brought, and the amazing people I have met through it. I’ve become a godmother again to my friends little boy, I’ve had the opportunity to write for and help produce our poetry anthology, I have sat in parks speechless at the beauty of some of the literature we have studied:

 

When you’ve wanted something for so long, it can be a mighty strange feeling when its over and done with. When something has been, for so long, the pain that you can’t quite admit to, and then suddenly its there in front of you, it feels like such a precious precious gift. I feel so blessed, because I knew what it was like to long for this, and then to find that longing met. And though there have been things about uni I have found frustrating (a tiny word limit for my dissertation, for example), I want to hold onto the beauty of these past three years, and to celebrate all they have meant.

Apart from all the learning, it has been so beautiful just to live, to enjoy, to take part in life here in beautiful Canterbury. I’m not the kind of student who can stay in bed till 3pm watching re runs of 90s sitcoms, but I have enjoyed a slower pace of life (well, until this year, when I decided to mix my third year with all the jobs in the world )

And now I really am on the brink of another new chapter. People said these three years would go fast and they really have.

I don’t yet know what the next years will hold, but I hold on to the gift that this time has been, and I am ready for whatever the ‘new thing’ will be.

It makes me want to say to anyone who is holding desperately onto a dream that looks impossible to hang in there because you never know when that dream is going to be met beyond your wildest dreams.

I’d better go and plan another couple of essays though… just a last couple.

Poem…

Pencil-case Dictator

Their hiding place: the inauspicious corners,
Overlooked and ink-stained.
They wear the woody feathers
Discarded by more fortunate friends.

A silenced Staedtler underclass
Short and stubby, stroppy.
Disenfranchised by my choice
Of brighter paint or sharper point.

No shopping lists, no annotations
neatly squeezed in margins.
No scribbled masterpieces here:
The blunted. Broken.

All their HB possibilities unmet,
The grey cursive words unspoken.
Who knew the potential unwritten
In one graphite stalk.

Goodnight Mr Tom

Goodnight Mr Tom

I was stealing
pencils from the squat grey drawers.
I don’t know why,
Except perhaps their wooden solidarity,
Their painted rainbow smell
Brought solace to me.

She found all my bounty.
My guarded graphite talismans.
Redistributing them to their rightful owners she
gave me my own.

I was writing
a story with details I shouldn’t know.
The metaphors were wrong,
Purportedly a tale of war-torn London,
The blitz in my heart
was thinly veiled.

She read between the lines,
My pleas written in invisible ink.
Rewording them into cohesive narratives she
wanted to know.

I was reading
of widowers and evacuees.
Wishing it was me,
I longed for the stark unfamiliarity of cattle,
A fresh air country life
far from cities and cellars.

She told tales of a place
My guarded heart could only dream about
Reinterpreting my world she
Brought hope to me.

I was crafting
an alternative world of words.
A loving family of pages,
Turning and teaching, embracing and reaching,
Binding and glueing
the torn and rubbed out places.

She left to teach in the city.
My world changed again.
Recalling all she’d taught me I
picked up my pen.

Quest

I am not, it has to be said, a fan of rhyming poetry. Sometimes it works but most often it just sounds contrived. In the way that I think this does. I’m just not very good at fitting in with a set metre and rhythm and pattern – that feels too much like conformity. There seems to me to be an inherent irony writing poetry about rejecting societal norms in a way that is itself a societal norm.

So I am not happy with this, but I post it as a work in process, and because Stacey ‘Esperanza’ Riley, (my chief compatriot in all things poetic) said she liked it:

 

Quest

I searched for my heart in the ivory tower,
Amidst the abandoned stones of the past.
Cast as Rapunzel I let down my hair,
But the princes were paupers and they didn’t care.

Too busy with dancing to think about valour,
Their mead and their folly masking their minds,
And they wouldn’t hear of the quests I had known,
Forget their glass slipper, I’ll find me my own!

Their trail of crumbs only led me to dust
But the witches were real and they glared in disdain
Suggesting I alter my plans for success
Watering them down to a manageable less.

The frog might transform if I give him a kiss,
Trapping me in his neat narrative arc
I won’t be his princess, victim or muse
Turning my back on the titles he’d choose.

Avoiding the prick from a malicious spindle
Escaping the fairy tale, stealing the pen!
From the Grimm and the ghastly I found my own gold,
Priceless and new from the dusty and old.

Type-Writer

This is an unashamed diversion, so it might look a bit weird sandwiched in the middle of this strange tale I am trying to write about dreams and woods and children. At the same time as that, I am trying to put together four poems for the university poetry anthology (it’ll be published ‘proper’, and everything). Dave Kemp will be proud of me, I am grasping the poetic bull by its metaphorical horns. So this is my first attempt. It might need some editing. I’m not sure the metaphor is strong enough. It might be too opaque. I’ll return to it at 2am or some other crazy time when I should be doing something else.

 

 

Type-Writer

 

First words,

Uttered on a ribbon of ink

When I erased ‘mistakes’, the indentation still remained.

 

Those were my First keys,

First kisses, written in words I though they wanted to hear.

Trying so hard to get it right.

 

I can be the insolent, the arrogant

The adolescent when they want.

I can be the tight-lipped child.

 

I learned fast:

Everything but words can be stolen.

They cannot rip the sonnets from my heart.

 

Rosetta stone resilient,

I kept my battered notebooks close

And crafted rhyme in code.

 

Following a trail of crumbs:

Adjectives, verbs and nouns.

I found my voice in those who wrote before.

 

And all those qwerty possibilities,

Ran on in front, to wait, to guide.

They can shape the tale more honestly than I.