Fiction and poetry writing, recapturing the muse.
20:108
Content smile at
the sound of your snores,
losing time as I
gaze at your sleeping face.
My chest so full of
warmth that you
exist for me, with
a small flutter of
fear at the thought
of our mortal status.
Capture these moments
with a sneaky snap
on my mobile, so
I can gaze even
when you’re not
here. Until the
moment we’re together
again, I’ll replay
and remember.
20:107
I don’t know why these
thoughts cross my mind,
especially in my happy life,
but they do.
I imagine drinking bleach,
or spraying bug killer
down my throat,
and my husband coming
home to find my corpse.
A life he loves more than
his own gone before him.
Or do I flatter myself
too much?
These dark thoughts
last only a moment
as I shake my head
and continue to bleach
the sink, kill
the flies.
Why such dark tests
of love spring to mind
instead of the
everyday proof
I already receive?
20:106
The empty right-side
of the bed has been
piled with books, devices,
creams and stuffed toys.
Anything to distract from
the absence of the man
who should be occupying it.
Does it work?
No.
None of these things
breathe the way
he does.
20:105
War between relief and anxiety
at my reprieve from adult work.
Relief for the break, the breather,
the chance to rest and catch up
on activities that soothe my soul…
Anxiety that, in the end,
they’ll realise I’m not needed,
and my world will be taken
away and cast into a
void I can never
crawl out of.
20: 104
We’ve changed our minds,
about the day’s start.
It will begin now at 19:36,
let your phones chime
with app updates,
daily poems, daily news.
No need to finish the day,
after all, what would
you really have accomplished
in those four hours?
Better to start a-new,
now, and make your day useful.
20:103
Too late in life,
you experience real love…
Already tied together
with a husband and
children, sucking away
any identity you once had.
Too late in life
you met him, and
experienced the joys of
being selfish,
being someone other
than Wife,
other than Mother.
Too late in life,
you planned to be together
forever, and be happy,
and have it all.
Too late in life,
your children stopped you,
the security of your husband,
the loyalty of your life.
Too late, too late,
you cried for yourself.
20: 102
Skulking while you’re sleeping.
In the same room but
separated into two
different worlds of
dreams and wakefulness.
Can we meet in the
in-between? Can you
sense me still here,
watching from where you
left me alone, skulking.
Perhaps another me is
there with you, comforting
and loving, while
I remain here,
bringing in the washing.
20:101
People continue to fear and die
as they sunbathe, and push forward
in the queue for trivial things
that they can’t survive without.
The cloud still hovers over all,
but life has begun again,
the workforce returning to their
death sentence, assuring
customers they can handover
disease-coated notes and
wipe their germs on the counter.
Style their hair to better
fit in their coffin, shop for
clothes to burn with their body.
Blame and fear, but don’t
think twice of an afternoon
at the pool. Just push
the living dead aside and
continue as the world always was.
Death never wins, right?
There is no change.
No need to reshape your ways.
Restrictions are worse than extinction.
This section will be for my first Masters module. I’ve been given a reading list and will be writing my thoughts/opinions on each book after I’ve read them in order to remember the reactions I have to them. This is the list I have so far (it may change a bit because this is last year’s list, but I asked for it so I could get a head start while I’m still on furlough).
Unreliable narrators
Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger (Virago, 2010).
[And if you have time or already know it Sebastian Faulks, Engleby (2007; Vintage 2008).]
Köppe, Tilmannand Tom Kindt, ‘Unreliable Narration With a Narrator and Without’, Journal of Literary Theory, April 2011, Vol. 5, Issue 1, pp. 81-93. Online via library.
Structures, linear and anti-linear
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (Penguin Classics 2000).
[and if you have time or know it, E. Lockhart, We Were Liars (Hot Key Books 2014)].
Abbott, H Porter, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Especially ‘Narrative Contestation’. Generous preview on Google Books.
Extended poetry
Alice, Oswald, Dart (Faber & Faber, 2010).
[and, if you have time or already know it, Alice Oswald, Memorial (Faber & Faber, 2012)]
Modernism(s)
Further details to come, but a basic familiarity with James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot will be useful.
Persons – first, second or third?
Ali Smith, The Accidental (Penguin 2006).
[And if you have time or already know it, Iain Banks,Complicity (1984; Abacus, 2008)]
Jarmila Mildorf, ‘Second-Person Narration in Literary and Conversational Storytelling’, Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 2012; 4:75-98.
Psychogeography
Ian Sinclair, London Orbital (Penguin 2003)
Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography (Oldcastle Books 2018).
Additional Reading
If you want to follow up on anything above.
21st Century Fiction:
de Witt, Patrick, The Sisters Brothers (Granta, 2012).
Ferris, Joshua, Then We Came to the End (Penguin 2008).
Galgut, Damon, In a Strange Room(Atlantic Books, 2011).
Hartshorne, Pamela, Time’s Echo (Pan, 2012).
Martel, Yan, Life of Pi (Canongate, 2001).
McCarthy, Tom, C (Vintage, 2011).
Robinson, Marilynne, Gilead (Virago, 2004).
Sebold, Alice, The Lovely Bones (2002; Picador, 2009).
Smith, Ali, The Accidental (Penguin, 2005).
Waters, Sarah, The Little Stranger (Virago, 2010).
20th Century Fiction:
Alain-Fournier, Henri, The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes), translated by Robin Buss (1912; Penguin Classics 2007).
Amis, Martin, Time’s Arrow (1991; Vintage, 2010).
Banks, Iain, Complicity (1984; Abacus, 2008).
Christie, Agatha, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926; Harper, 2007)
du Maurier, Daphne, The Parasites (1949; Virago, 2012).
Faulkner, William, As I lay Dying (1930; Vintage Classics 1996)
Fielding, Helen, Bridget Jones’s Diary (1995; Picador, 1997).
Ford, Ford Madox, The Good Soldier (1915; Wordsworth, 2015).
Garner, Alan, Red Shift (1973; Collins Voyager, 2002).
James, Henry, The Turn of the Screw (1898; Dover Publications, 2000).
Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake (1939; Wordsworth, 2012).
Joyce, James, Ulysses (1922; Wordsworth, 2010).
Spark, Muriel, The Comforters (1957; Virago, 2009)
Spark, Muriel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961; Penguin Classics 200).
Vonnegut, Kurt, Slaughterhouse 5 (1969; Vintage Classics, 1991).
Winterson, Jeanette, Boating for Beginners (1985; Vintage, 1990).
Wright, Susan Elliott, The Things We Never Said (Simon and Schuster, 2013).
Earlier Fiction:
Collins,Wilkie, The Moonstone (1868; Wordsworth Classics, 2012). Also available as a free download on Project Gutenberg.
Collins, Wilkie, The Woman in White (1859; HarperPress, 2011). Also available as a free download on Project Gutenberg.
Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy (1759; Penguin, 2012). Also available as a free download on Project Gutenberg.
Poetry and experimental compositions
21st Century:
Armitage, Simon, Seeing Stars (Faber & Faber, 2010).
Duffy, C.A. The Bees. Faber & Faber (2010).
Goss, Rebecca, Her Birth (Northern House, 2013).
Porteous, Katrina, Dunstanburgh (Smokestack, 2004).
Reid, C. A Scattering. Arrete (2009).
Olds, Sharon, Stag’s Leap (Jonathan Cape, 2012)
Prynne, J. H., Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2005).
Shapcott, J. Of Mutability. Faber & Faber (2010).
20th Century:
Marquis, Don, Archie and Mehitabel (1934; Faber and Faber, 1989).
Phillips, Tom, The Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel [project begun 1960s] (Thames and Hudson, 2005).
Prynne, J. H., Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1999).
Stein, Gertrude, Tender Buttons (1914; Dover, 1997) Also available for free online on Project Gutenberg.
Plays
Churchill, C., Collected Plays, Vol 4. Nick Hern Books (2008).
Havel, V., The Garden Party and Other Plays. Avalon Travel Publishing (1994).
Theory and Criticism
Abbott, H Porter, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Especially ‘Narrative Contestation’. Generous preview on Google Books.
Bennett, Andrew (2004-12-24), The Author (The New Critical Idiom) (Routledge, 2005)
Richard Appignanesi and Chris Garratt, Postmodernism for Beginners (Icon Books, 1995). Fun. Browse.
Barthes, Roland, The Pleasure of the Text (Hill and Wang, 1975).
Barthes, Roland, S/Z (1970; Hill and Wang, 1974)
Benjamin, Walter, The Storyteller Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov (available as free download on the internet).
Bertens, Hans, and Joseph Natoli (eds), Postmodernism: The Key Figures (Blackwell, 2002).
Blasing, Mutlu Konuk, Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry: O’Hara, Bishop, Ashbery and Merrill (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Booth,Wayne C., The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961; University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Butler, Christopher, Postmodernism, a Very Short Introduction
Butler, Christopher, Modernism, a Very Short Introduction
Cobley, Paul, Narrative (Routledge 2001). (Especially ‘Postmodernism’. Some preview on Google Books).
Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography (Oldcastle Books, 2018 [3rd edition]).
Derrida, Jacques Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1980).
Drolet, Michael (ed), The Postmodern Reader (Routledge, 2004).
Gottschall, Jonathan, The Story-telling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (Mariner Books, 2013)
Jencks, Charles (ed), The Post-Modern Reader (Routledge, 2005).
Lennard, John, The Poetry Handbook (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Postmodern Condition, translated by G. Bennington and B. Massumi (1979; Manchester University Press, 1984). (Especially ‘The Narrative Function and the Legitimation of Knowledge’, ‘Narrative of the Legitimation of Knowledge’ and if you have time, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Delegitimation’). Extracts are also available in Michael Drolet (ed), The Postmodernism Reader (Routledge 2004); and you can read ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’ by Lyotard in The Postmodern Reader edited by Charles Jencks (Wiley, 2011), and in Postmodernism: A Reader, edited by Patricia Waugh (Edward Arnold, 1992). There is a short chapter on Lyotard in Hans Bertens and Joseph Natoli (eds), Postmodernism: The Key Figures (Blackwell, 2002).
Malpas, Simon, The Postmodern (Routledge, 2004).
Maxwell, Glyn, On Poetry (Oberon Books, 2017).
Porter, H., The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Generous preview on Google Books.
Prose, Francine, Reading Like a Writer (Union Books, 2012).
Reeve, N. H., and Richard Kerridge, Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J. H. Prynne (Liverpool University Press, 1995).
Sim, Stuart (ed), The Icon Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought (Icon Books, 1998).
Waugh, Patricia (ed), Postmodernism: A Reader (Routledge, 1992).
Websites and Audiobooks
O’Farrell, Clare, Michel-Foucault.com, http://www.michel-foucault.com/
Appignanesi, Richard, Postmodernism, narrated by William Roberts (an excellent audiobook which clearly and entertainingly outlines the key features of poetmodernism).
Articles
On the unreliable narrator:
Murphy, Terence Patrick, ‘Defining the reliable narrator: The marked status of first-person fiction’, Journal of Literary Semantics, 2012, Vol. 41, Issue 1, pp.67-87.
On extended poetry:
Burnett, Paula, ‘Walcott’s Intertextual Method: Non-Greek Naming in Omeros’, Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters (Callaloo) 2005 Winter; 28 (1): 171-87
Fumagalli, Maria Cristina, ‘Derek Walcott’s Omeros and Dante’s Commedia: Epics of the Self and Journeys into Language’, Cambridge Quarterly (CQ) 2000; 29 (1): 17-36.
Nwosu, Maik, ‘Derek Walcott’s Omeros and the refiguration of the Caribbean Eden’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Aug2008, Vol. 44 Issue 2, p127-137.
Ramazani, Jahan, ‘The Wound of History: Walcott’s Omeros and the Postcolonial Poetics of Affliction’, PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA) 1997 May; 112 (3): 405-17.
Tynan, Maeve, ‘Mapping Roots in Derek Walcott’s Omeros’, Anachronist. 2006, Vol. 12, p233-250.
On tense:
Longenbach, James, ‘Feeling tense’, Kenyon Review, Fall2012, Vol. 34 Issue 4, p54-68.
Had a bit of a dry spell the last few weeks, but finally got inspired yesterday with some poems, so I’ll be posting them from tomorrow. Also, I have my reading list for my first Masters module, and will be creating a new section ‘Reading as a Writer’ where I’ll write my thoughts after reading each book, just so I can keep track of the content.
Scribbled Thoughts