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!