My Ray Morimura arrived. I bought it at the affordable art fair. Given that my days have become little more than writing at my desk, eating ice-cream and staring at the wall, I figured I should have something nice to look at. I would like to accompany this with prints by Romare Bearden, Ingrid Pollard and Emory Douglas. In fact, I’d like to accompany it with most of the work I saw at the Thin Black Line exhibition at the Tate Britain shortly before I left the UK.
I’m working on a piece for a new anthology set to come out mid-2012. It’s called In Their Own Voicesand will be edited by Helen Ivory and George Szirtes. Fifty or so authors will each talk about their “poetics”. I’m having trouble working out what that means. I understand that “poetics” refers to discourse around the theory of poetry (thank you wikipedia), but every attempt I’ve made to apply the term to my work seems false. So I’ve been concentrating on the tension between my self-identification as a writer and my tendency to perform rather than publish. In doing so, I’ve been reading lots of fascinating essays and article, including a piece by Peter Middleton called “The Contemporary Poetry Reading.” It was written in 1998, so a lot has changed since then, but I love that he begins with a description of a reader on stage and then this:
“This ritual is an ordinary poetry reading of the kind that has become widespread in the past forty years, and is therefore so familiar to most readers of contemporary poetry that its strangeness requires an alienating description to be visible at all. Listeners and poets have had almost nothing to say about this phenomenon despite its importance for financing and fostering their careers, assisting the distribution of their poetry, and even shaping its very forms.” (p.262)
Last night was technically my second performance of the year (the first was in New York, at an event with the rather opulent title of “Rivers of Honey.”) Bani and Riduan were cool to work with and I think the final result made for an unusual night out in Singapore. Seeing Riduan’s collection of drums and his loop machine made me want to experiment more with music. Without using the R word, maybe that’s an idea for 2012.
Last night, the motion for the debate was: ‘Cultural boycott can be an effective, indeed morally imperative, political strategy’. Speaking in favour was Omar Barghouti and Seni Seneviratne. Against, Carol Gould and Jonathan Freedland. Read More
I’m blogging for the Southbank Literature Festival. Just put up my first post.
People often say things that would be excellent on a t.shirt, especially at literary events. So that’s what I’m doing on the blog – posting potential t.shirt quotations alongside the write-up. These are the first, from Tim Graves and DJ Connell respectively. There are more to come. At the end of the festival I’ll get two of them printed. Huzzah.
In two days I will don my sub-fusc and jump through the biggest hoop of my academic career: I’ll spend a week writing exams in the morning, then revising in the afternoon, all the time wondering what impact it will have on my life and what will happen when it ends. I know what will happen, of course.
First, I will write up a very long Letter to Potential Applicants, a piece I’ve been thinking about for some time and which will (hopefully) be a useful addition to all the stuff written about Oxford. I am both fascinated and repulsed by my education, unlike Zadie Smith who managed to get over any issues of entitlement / inferiority very quickly. I suspect there are others who have not yet arrived who will be especially prone to this dilemma, so I’m writing for them. Second, I will devote all my time and energy to re-discovering why, exactly, I picked English.
So I’m now on Poetry International Web. It’s curious to see my life in writing laid out like that, especially as an English student who endlessly salivates over the British Council profiles of great writers. Thanks to Rebecca Mustajarvi for her description / outline of me and my work. And of course, thanks to Campbell for the photo.
Last night I read for the delegates at the NUS Women’s Conference. Afterwards, several people came up to me and said they liked my poems, “especially the one about the beard.” I said I’d post it online, so here it is. It’s a poem I wrote after being asked several times whether I was a boy or a girl by kids. It can be an awkward question and answering it always leaves me wondering whether I’ve let the side down and/or scarred the kid for life. So I wrote a poem in which someone’s mother grows a beard and sticks two fingers up at the world. Whenever I read it, people laugh and enjoy the easy rhythm, but it also gets them thinking about gender and this strange question of whether someone is a girl or a boy. I think of it as Gender Studies, Key Stage One. (Key Stage Two will address the tricky implication that adopting the appearance and mannerisms of a man is necessary to achieve and assert personal liberty, thus perpetuating the idea of the feminine as weak and oppressed other – but more on that next time.) Poem featured after the jump.
I think there was a magical year at Norbury Manor, around 2004, when a class of teenagers graduated in to the big wide world. When I am bored, having spent the day clipping my nails and popping spots in the bathroom mirror, I am compelled to google that little thoroughfare I grew up in. One notable resident was Rox, who I hear everywhere – in shopping centres, in taxis, HMV – another is HolsyWolsy, who I thought had given up on the dream:
Apparently not. Now I can’t sing, and I have no talent for instruments despite having tried many, but have never been able to shake the feeling that what I do is a weird, even archaic art which doesn’t fully utilise the voice. Linguists often point out that the vocal tract is used most fully when singing, which suggests we all have a natural propensity, but it’s beaten out of us at school. So I’m all about the speaking voice, which despite the above, I still think is underestimated and underused.
But there’s this idea that a poet is on the same continuum as a song-writer. A little while ago I had the pleasure of reading at Akilah and there saw a woman named Becca do her thing acapella. I was so impressed I wanted to write for her. But when I tried, I realised I couldn’t come up with shit in a particular metre, or come close to the self-contained line that, say, Joni Mitchell, is so brilliant at. I’m gonna have another crack, but I’m messy, me, and all about the enjambment.
