I was delighted some weeks ago to be asked by Helen Heath to submit a poem to be her Tuesday feature. This modest and friendly gesture was one of a handful of reminders for me that I have slipped sideways from being someone mucking around with words on the internet into that rather more solid category of Poet. This is a joy, but a joy with a history and rather a curious effect on the present.
For most of my life I have been either a poet or a recovering poet, a fact of which I was reminded in my recent initiation of the domestic decluttering initiative. Reserved from a previous clear-out was a small stack of manuscripts and typescripts, some dating back to primary school and completed in felt-tipped pens and paints, some word-processed and ink-jet-printed. Together they formed a creative slice whose themes were largely melancholic but observational, and whose style tipped, over time, from doggerel into various forms of blank verse (as opposed to free verse, which was, confusingly, called blank verse by my primary school teachers).*
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1. At Home
This is not my baby, nor is it my dog.
Among the variety of things that people made when I was pregnant were remarks concerning the dogs. Some simply asked, reasonably enough, “what are you going to do about them?” Others jumped to statements perhaps deriving from their own housepride, or shuddering at the thought of being in our shoes; “of course you’ll have to get rid of the dogs” came from more than one source.
Now, one does not spend years becoming a crazy dog lady to give up quite that easily, and so it was that I replied first with politeness and later with vehemence (since it is remarkable how people whom you see only occasionally will say exactly the same thing again and again over eight months of pregnancy) that no, the dogs would stay. It was part of my hitherby dragons philosophy for the year’s post-partum latter half: I didn’t quite know how we would manage, but manage we would.
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The days are filled with writing, of a purposive, industrial kind, as well as the usual demands of course materials and curriculum. I feel at times as if all the skills of my erstwhile liberal arts education are being mobilised in a way that’s untypical. Academic arguments typically gain their urgency under the pressure of deadlines functional rather than industrial and have consequences somewhere along the professional/individual borderline, unlike this sweep more institutional.
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The enrolment requirements for doctoral students have tightened all over the country since I was such a one. My more-than-four years spent spelunking in various imaginative destinations productive and less so was made possible by generous funding, an indulgent supervisor and a postgraduate office that would not, in my experience, scrutinise what students were doing too closely unless their supervisor(s) abandoned their support. (The vulnerabilities of students working within a system are not the subject of this post). This left me free, in the time-honoured fashion of the humanities, to follow research hunches until such a time as I had an argument that hung together. Not everyone I worked alongside was so fortunate; some did the former without achieving the latter.
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I am not much enamoured of my lyrical gifts at the moment, but am writing my way through the funk in hope of producing something that’s less, to my reading, jejune. I can’t think of a better solution (ignoring the cheap seats’ solution which is always, stop for a while).
It is my hope that Giovanni’s readers’ results may vary.
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Narrow and Winding Channel[s]
20 March, 2010
in commentatrix,in Aotearoa,writing & research
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