Hello again

I'm not very good at this whole blogging thing, am I? I never seem to update and then when I do it's like, here, have far too much in one go.

Since I last wrote some things have happened, some good, some bad. I've got a place at two universities and I've got an interview at a third next month. I'm pretty sure which will be my firm but I'm still trying to decide on an insurance (obviously this will be easier when my other three have said whether they're making me an offer or rejecting me). It's exciting, though, and I really can't wait for October now. I really love one of the places that has made me an offer and now I'm terrified of missing it, but hopefully I won't. I should probably start revising for my January exams. Eek.

I've been working a lot (well, by a lot, I mean every Sunday and three days in a row this weekend, but it felt pretty intense at the time) and I'm a bit sad about my job ending in a couple of weeks, but I guess I'll get over it. It'll be nice to have two days off a week, but I'll miss it. I'll also miss my amazing new discount card which I actually haven't used yet (I only got in on Saturday) but I will be using this weekend or tomorrow.

Christmas was pretty lovely, I got a lot of books and some DVDs and some other things. I've already read two of the books, one An Abundance of Katherines by John Green and the other the novelisation of the movie Enchanted (which I haven't seen yet). I'm excited about an anthology of poetic forms that I got and a book of John Donne, amongst others, and it's just all very exciting. I do love books. I'm currently watching a DVD of Aanastasia (much to the dismay of my mother, as it's gone 1am and so this probably seems like quite an indecent hour to be watching a cartoon) and I'm probably going to watch Clueless tomorrow. I love Clueless, it's such a perfect film.

I haven't been writing much recently, which is annoying; I've had a lot of stress over the past month or so, what with two university interviews, a few essay crises and then the wait for a letter from a university, but now that it's the holidays and I don't have work until Saturday and Sunday and then I have another almost-week after that (I go back next Friday, and yes, that's a mystery to me as well) it's a bit strange. I'm definitely going to take advantage of my free time and try and write something as well as do some reading and some revision.

I went to a poetry reading a week ago today (well actually a week ago yesterday, Wednesday the 19th, because it's gone midnight) at the poetry cafe, one of the New Blood series. It was very excellent, Richard O'Brien was doing a slot and then a couple of other people did them too and I managed to snag an open mic slot. I got asked to do my own slot at a New Blood in the future which is exciting, and I'll post about it here when a date is chosen/it gets nearer, although I suspect anyone that reads this blog already knows me and will probably hear me going on about it a lot anyway.

I should probably stop writing now as I don't think I have anything else to say. But here's a poem that I love, by Frank O'Hara:

Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

Death by Stuff

After doing pretty much nothing for the whole of the holidays, these last couple of months have been something of a shock to the system. I've sent off my UCAS form and everything (a week and a half ago now!) and I have not yet heard anything from anyone other than UCAS themselves (their letter came REALLY fast, considering). I'm not particularly worried though, I guess the universities I have applied to just don't do the whole confirmation of application thing. As long as I get in somewhere by next May or whenever the deadline for responses is then I'll be happy.

Now that personal statementing and worrying about my UCAS form is on the backburner a bit, I am free to be busy with other things. I've been working in a bookshop for the last month and a bit, and it's fun, if hectic etc. Today I read a bit of The Divine Comedy, and I want to buy it. I probably will at some point. But yeah, I'm also busy with school, of course - I'm doing four A Levels. I haven't exactly been swamped with work yet, though, but I do have a number of essays due in at various points next week and I also have various things to do for art. I got a new camera for my birthday, which is exciting.

Oh yeah, my birthday! I turned eighteen exactly a week ago today, which was both great and awful. The birthday part was great, of course - I got some awesome presents and cards and I went for an ace meal with my friends, but the turning eighteen part... I'm not sure. I don't want to be an adult. I like it, in a way, but it's like - where's the fun, now? Getting into gigs underage was always amazing, now that I'm old enough to go to any I want to? I dunno. It'll be less annoying when I get IDed, anyway.

This last few weeks have been very poetry-orientated. I went to the FYP awards (of which I have already blogged, o readers) and then on Tuesday I went to Buckingham Palace. BUCKINGHAM PALACE. It was very strange. I don't really have much to say about it - it was nice meeting so many people and all that, but it was all a bit of a whirlwind - I mean, it was over by half one. After that we poetry-cafed and then Emily Middleton and I went to Foyles in London. I have been spending far too much time in bookshops lately, but I don't mind - I LOVE bookshops. And the poetry section in that shop is awesome.

Talking of poetry, I have been reading Luke Kennard's collections a lot recently, and I would just like to state, for the record, that they are amazing. They're so other, if that makes any sense - they're funny and political and just so sharp, not a single word in any of his poems seem to have been wasted. I read The Harbour Beyond the Movie before reading The Solex Borthers, but they're both wonderful, and I recommend them really, really highly. I just wish he'd won the Forward, sigh.

For my birthday, among other books, I got Frank O'Hara's collected (!!), David Morley's creative writing book and some money with which I bought a hefty anthology of Central / Eastern European poetry in it. I've been reading a lot of stuff in translation recently, I'm still reading The Master and Margarita (awesome) and I have various books of russian poetry and Romanian poetry lying around. I'm learning Russian at the moment actually, it's great, even if I'm a bit slow.

I'm off to do something else now, this is far too long. I'm doing an open mic night in Cambridge on Tuesday, wooh! Exciting stuff.

Yesterday the winners of the Foyle Young Poets 2007 were announced. I'm in the top fifteen again, and I guess I can officially post about it now. It's my third year in the top fifteen (I was top 100 the year before that) and as it was the last year I could enter it's quite nice to end it on top, or something.

The awards ceremony was in the evening, and it was lovely. I left school at about lunchtime (after a slightly bizarre session with an Oxford outreach officer in the careers office) and caught buses home, got changed as soon as possible and then dashed back in to catch the half two train to London Liverpool Street. I was wearing a dress and some very sequinned gold shoes, and if any photos exist of me that aren't completely hideous then I'll possibly put one up here to demonstrate. Don't hold your breath, though, I am recovering from a cold and I am not very photogenic.

You'd think that as this was my fourth FYP awards thing (well, fifth, really, as there were two events in 2005) I'd be used to it by now. I'm really, really not - I was still ultra-nervous and probably very annoying. I did talk to a lot of people, and I drank too much of this weird ginger and elderberry drink and I didn't eat much at all (although I did accidentally insult the food while someone was trying to give us caviar or something, so that was embarrassing). The worst part was when we were sitting down and our poems were being read out and my eyes suddenly started being like OH MY GOD THE PAIN ETC so I was trying to like, stop them hurting while crying with laughter at a man reading out Annie's poem, which you should all read here (you should read all the rest while you're there, although I'm not going to force you to read my rather twee effort) and it was a bit of a crisis. But then my eyes stopped hurting and it was okay again.

I was also interviewed for a podcast by Tom Chivers of penned in the margins, which was a bit weird, as I'd never been interviewed before. It was nice, though, I think I went went on about books a lot. When the podcast surfaces I'll try and remember to post a link here, if anyone's interested.

Anyway, then it was onto networking. I haven't posted about pomegranate here yet, which is utterly shameful, and I think that everyone should go there NOW and read everything (although again, feel free to miss out my poem there too, it's really twee again, sigh!), but we handed out lots of flyers for it and told people to read it and submit to us, like, NOW, so hopefully we'll hear from a few new voices and stuff. If you're reading this and you somehow haven't yet been and marvelled at Pomegranate, then where have you been?! Go there now, anyway.

I was a bit sad about coming home again. Rosie and I sat on the train and moaned about Ipswich - it's not a very exciting place ever, really, and especially not if you want to be involved in poetry. There are never any poetry readings here anymore (PoetryIpswich mysteriously died, not that it was very exciting anyway) and I can hardly ever get to them in London (I've been to ONE, and that was ages ago) and much as I love Waterstone's (I work there and it's awesome) it doesn't have any poetry magazines other then Poetry Review and so I can never get Magma or Smiths Knoll (?! I can never find it ANYWHERE, and it's based in Suffolk! What is going on?!) and all the poetry reading groups in Suffolk are ages away and full of old people and I can't get there anyway. When you look up Suffolk on poetry websites for listings or whatever, Ipswich usually isn't on there. It's all Aldeburgh and Felixstowe and Bury St. Edmunds, which are nice places but they're all posher than Ipswich and it's not plausible for me to get to them for events in the evening, as I can't drive and the buses here are particularly rubbish. So Ipswich, poetry-wise? It's dead.

It's dead for pretty much everything else too, as there are no alternative nights (oh I think there might be one actually, but it's very late and I have school / work and god I hate being young sometimes) and there's only one cinema and there are no second-hand bookshops (although obviously Waterstone's has everything anyone needs) and the Wolsey Theatre is nice but small and the library has a patchy selection of books and ugh.

In just under a year I'll be out of here, I hope.

On a less whingey note - I read Luke Kennard's The Harbour Beyond the Movie cover to cover today, after flicking through it last week. It's completely amazing, original and sharp and beautiful and also really really funny in a really strange way. I'm really gutted that it didn't win the Forward. When I get paid, I think I'll have to buy his first collection!

Oh dear

I haven't updated this for months, actual, real, months. Hi, June, how are you! July, so sorry to have missed you out, have a biscuit or a strawberry split.

I mean, not that many people (well, anyone, really) reads this blog, probably largely because I, er, never update it.

Anyway, I'm not going to write an entire blog post about not-blogging, because that would be disgusting. Instead, I'm going to have a moan about UCAS, sorry, and then talk about some rather lovely poetry that I have been reading. If you want, you can skip the boring UCAS moaning. Just cover your eyes and scroll down until you see a happier paragraph and read that instead.

So, UCAS. I mean, hopefully I'll get into a university and go there and it'll be lovely and jolly and everything, but I hate that I have to go through this whole... process. I mean, the personal statement. How exactly am I supposed to sell myself in this thing?! I mean, sure, I love reading modern poetry and I'm hopefully going to get more involved in less-modern poetry this summer (Hi, Chaucer! I see you did Troilus and Criseyde! That's very exciting) and yeah, I like Middle English, but, um, I don't know. I don't read much other than poetry and early twentieth-century novels and I'm trying to work on it, I really am. But I still haven't read a lot of the stuff that I feel I'm supposed to have read.

But then... I figure after it's all over, I'll hopefully be able to go to university for three years. And to be honest, that's pretty much my entire goal in life. There is no job that I particularly want. I do not dream of earning 40k a year. All I want to do, really, is sit around in a shitty flat, eat rubbish food and spend a lot of time reading and talking to other people that like reading. Have you read Forster's The Longest Journey, O hypothetical reader? Well, the beginning of that is amazing. They're sitting around at university and discussing philosophy and being all witty. Once that bit's over, the book makes me despair (I think I still like it, although the middle section is pretty much the most depressing thing ever) but that opening is just amazing. You know that really cheesy film, Starter for Ten? Yeah, when James Mcavoy sits there and talks about wanting to learn things at uni, it sounds stupid, but that's what I want. It's not so much that I want to go to uni so that I can have a degree or anything, I just want to go. This is probably a pretty silly ambition to admit to, and a lot of people seem to think that university's just about getting a job. I don't want to go so that I can train for a job. I honestly don't care what salary I end up with, as long as it's enough to rent a flat somewhere a bit more interesting than Ipswich.

Maybe this whole thing is why I'm scared by the whole UCAS deal. Because what if I get it wrong? Hopefully I won't, though. Even if I do, I can always take a gap year. I know I have options. It's still a bit scary, though, and that's not going to change. The whole idea of university's a bit terrifying, but hopefully also a bit wonderful, too. I just hope that I meet some interesting people and that I get to learn new things, wherever I end up going. It's all I can really ask for, I suppose.

Sorry, that UCAS rant turned out to be a rather pathetic musing on university in general. Here's the promised stuff about poetry:

1) Along with Emily (she's on my blogroll!) I visited The Poetry Library in London towards the end of last month. It was very nice, although they wouldn't issue me with a card, and I read whole collections by Lavinia Greenlaw and Deryn Rees-Jones, both of which were basically amazing. It's strange; for a while all of my favourite poets were men, while my favourite novelists were largely women, but it seems to have evened out now (which I'm glad about) - the most exciting collections I've read recently have been by these two and Sarah Maguire, Frances Leviston (not really a collection, but a pamphlet, Lighter), Michael Donaghy and Frank O'Hara. I suppose throughout the centuries there's been such a long male tradition in poetry, a tradition that still seems to continue now (while most of the winners in young poet competitions seem to be female, the situation seems often reversed when it reaches older generations, although obviously not always) but I'm glad that this seems to breaking down and there's more of just a general tradition of poetry, a tradition that becomes more exciting when it's broken and spat on and someone tries to do something new.

2) I also visited the Scottish Poetry Library. I'm just back from holiday in Scotland, and while in Edinburgh I obviously had to go. They even issued me with a borrowing card (my Mum handily provided me with proof of address) and so I have Frances Leviston's previously mentioned Lighter, the anthology Ten Hallam Poets (both from Mews Press) and some anthology of urban poetry from Singapore (No Other City?). The librarians there were really nice and helpful (I managed to read Alice Howlett's pamphlet before it had been catalogued, which was very nice. It's called No Stars So Lovely, and it's great). Even though it gave me a headache (as libraries tend to do, oh dear) I simply took a break (in Starbucks, of all places) and then went back. I wish there was one of these poetry libraries near me. Ipswich is pretty much the worst place to live for poetry, except when it's Aldeburgh festival time.

3) I'm going to the Aldeburgh Festival for the Saturday and Sunday! Various events: readings, masterclasses, a free workshop and some craft talks. It should be a blast; it was very nice last year, although I felt conspicuously young.

4) I had fun writing poems in Scotland, including one that's about turning eighteen, alcopops, slush puppies and not actually liking alcohol. I also wrote one that was basically me bitching about Edinburgh, which is actually a very nice place, it just made me unbelievably tired. I think I prefer Glasgow, although I didn't write a poem about Glasgow.

5) In Glasgow I bought Magma poetry magazine, which I've often wanted but never really felt that I can justify as it's expensive. I did this time, though, and I love it. Roddy Lumsden wrote a really interesting article about what's new in poetry, which I really liked; he talked about how young poets at the moment seem to want to read poets that are looser and weirder than those that emerged in the early 90s such as Armitage and Duffy. I'd largely agree with that; while I admire both of these poets, too much of their work at once makes me feel a bit dull, lifeless. This probably also has something to do with studying them both at GCSE, but the point still stands. I'd rather read Frank O'Hara (Roddy mentions him in the article), Muldoon, Mahon, Greenlaw, Dooley, Donaghy, Koch, The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, various Modernists and French Symbolists and all that sort of stuff.

6) I listened to a recording of Michael Donaghy in The Scottish Poetry Library and it was amazing. I'm now listening to him on The Poetry Archive and it's not really the same - I think that you should all grab the biggest fuck-off headphones you can find, plug them in, listen to him or anyone else on the website and just, I don't know, try and find something that you love.

7) It's almost half past midnight and I've been writing this for far too long. In summary: I want to go to university and I like reading poetry. If you've actually read all of this then you deserve a smoothie and some chocolate, but instead, have a poem by John Berryman:

John Berryman
Sonnet 117

All we were going strong last night this time,
the mots were flying & the frozen daiquiris
were downing, supine on the floor lay Lise
listening to Schubert grievous & sublime,
my head was frantic with a following rime:
it was a good evening, an evening to please,
I kissed her in the kitchen--ecstasies--
among so much good we tamped down the crime.

The weather's changing. This morning was cold,
as I made for the grove, without expectation,
some hundred Sonnets in my pocket, old,
to read her if she came. Presently the sun
yellowed the pines & my lady came not
in blue jeans & a sweater. I sat down & wrote.

So, just now I got reminded of this thing by Emily asking me for a list of poetry blogs. I was happy to oblige, but then a little sad that I'd never really done anything much with this. So, anyway.

So, today my Mum picked up two books for me from the local library. One of them is The New York Poets II (edited by Mark Ford and Trevor Winkfield), and the other is Making for Planet Alice (edited by Maura Dooley). I'm a big fan of Maura Dooley (which is probably the reason I got the book out - I'm still working my way through 'Modern Women Poets', a more extensive Bloodaxe anthology of, well, women poets) and it looks pretty good so far. I haven't really looked at the New York one yet - I had the first one out for a while, but never really worked my way through it. I'm a big fan of Frank O'Hara, so I feel like I need to research more into the poets working at around the same time as him, and those that took up the gauntlet after he'd gone. The problem is that I'm really supposed to be buckling down to work now (I have a three hour English exam in just over a week) and so I don't really have time to read; anthologies are pretty good at this sort of time, because they don't require you to work all the way through, but frustrating - I want to work all the way through, really, but I can't.

Still, soon enough all of my exams will be over. I think my last one's on the 12th and 13th (or is it the 11th and 12th?) of June, and that's Art. Then I'm done with AS, done, done. And I do three days on either Arabic or Russian (don't know which of the two language courses I got onto yet) before being launched into the murky waters of A2 English Lit, History and Government and Politics. I'll probably have to continue Art until the summer holidays, actually, but I can't really see me carrying it on after then - to be honest, I'm not really good enough at it. If I want to apply to some good universities then I need to focus more on getting As in my other subjects, not on getting at least a B in art at the expense of my main three.

Anyway, I'm trying to think of a poem to sign this off with - the problem with being a big fan of modern poetry is that it's all in copyright! So I'll leave off a poem for today, but I'll try and post something in the next few days.

Maybe I'll give this a try

I actually quite like blogger - the problem with LJs is that they're really for having a good moan, that sort of thing. I think I'll use this as more of a poetry blog; I can write about competitions & submissions, as well as do my own mini-reviews. I would write a nice long post now, actually, but I have a history essay to do. So, instead, have some Rupert Brooke:

The Hill

Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.
You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass;
Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,
When we are old, are old. . . ." "And when we die
All's over that is ours; and life burns on
Through other lovers, other lips," said I,
-- "Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!"

"We are Earth's best, that learnt her lesson here.
Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!" we said;
"We shall go down with unreluctant tread
Rose-crowned into the darkness!" . . . Proud we were,
And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.
-- And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.

I'm not going to use this

for some reason, i was half-registered here?? anyway, i finished the registration, but i already have a livejournal at http://by_motorways.livejournal.com, and i like the whole social-blogging thing a bit too much to give up livejournal. might have a poke around at the blogosphere here, though. huzzah.

not really sure who'll read this, but if you were angry that you didn't get the lovely subdomain that i managed to get, then sorry.