Posts Tagged 'Solitude'

Confidential

Published January 21, 2012 Literature , research , Writing 3 Comments
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

How much can you put yourself into the mind of another individual? It’s not a trick question: though I ask it a lot, I seem to do it a lot too.

My work on Marvell and Private Lives took up most of 2011, and it’s been a wonderful introspective process because the way I’ve symbiotically linked our biographies together has given me license to think as deeply and darkly as I please.

But now, just as I come to wrap this up, there’s something quite subtle which doesn’t add up.

Marvell almost always strikes the reader as the shy, demure sort. Occasionally women are abruptly visible, but otherwise they are teasingly distant, obscured, or absent. He weaves threads of complicated desire behind fastastical themes and layers of honeycombed language.

Honeycomb_FracFx

But perhaps that’s just his writing. After all, his publishing history is thin, and there’s little sign that Marvell placed a great deal of value on the majority of his own poems. Perhaps he’s even embarrassed by them. Why would that be?

Continue reading ‘Confidential’

Shadow Seasons: An Epilogue, 2011

Published January 9, 2012 Geneva , Leicester , Literature , Music 5 Comments
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Dedicated to the few who messaged on New Year’s Eve.

2011 was a story I don’t know how to tell. It’s a year that had so many structural positives, countered by surface negatives. Perhaps it’s best defined by what others have said.

Shadows

In the early summer, I was ‘strange’, ‘sick’ and ‘damaged goods’. Thanks. In the mid-summer, I was an expletive abomination. Consequently, in the late summer, I was branded a defeatist.

Victimisation does arise sometimes. Not because it is wanted – if there’s a brand of people who don’t want to be happy, this author is not one of them – but because it’s a way of dealing with the various angles of attack and the after-effects that cannot be disguised.

Continue reading ‘Shadow Seasons: An Epilogue, 2011′

Behind Closed Doors

Published August 19, 2011 Culture , Leicester , Literature Leave a Comment
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

When I consider the poetry that inspires me the most, it all seems to have privacy at its root. Perhaps, given an earlier definition of poetry as ‘95% loneliness’, this is not surprising. Yet, not only does poetry have a long tradition of being a public form, but privacy as a theme remains a dark and complex subject that manifests itself in fascinating ways.

Our recent instalment on KUSP Radio, Santa Cruz, a 1-on-1 discussion with Gwynne Harries, was generously dedicated to my favourite poems. The (perhaps surprising) choices to best fit into the parameters of the show were ‘Sestina [September Rain]’ by Elizabeth Bishop, and ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ by Robert Browning, two poems that I’ve known and loved for many years, and which both deal with loss and loneliness from vastly different perspectives. As an addendum to what was discussed on the show, to compare these together offers something striking and special.

The Poetry Show, KUSP / Radio Santa Cruz, California

Continue reading ‘Behind Closed Doors’

Brands of Solitude: Poets and their Nature

Published May 19, 2011 Leicester , Literature , research 5 Comments
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

The highlight of this year has been participating in recordings for The Poetry Show on KUSP Radio, Santa Cruz. This post is indebted to a discussion of Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Garden’ and Christina Rossetti’s ‘In the Willow Shade’ for our fourth installment which aired on 8th May, the best to date.

The Poetry Show, KUSP / Radio Santa Cruz, California

We all enjoy solitude at points in our lives. Privacy is not just a right, one might argue, but a human requirement. We all enjoy that little realm when the door is shut firmly behind us and we can lapse into self-sufficiency.

The fundamental problem is how to draw the right balance. Managing solitude can be vital to our psychological wellbeing. It is difficult to maintain relationships that have little contact, and even harder to develop new ones. We live in times where it is easy to get lost and forgotten if we do not project ourselves publicly. It is rare that people will come looking for us.

Continue reading ‘Brands of Solitude: Poets and their Nature’

A Green Thought: Private Minds

Published January 10, 2011 Literature , research , Writing 4 Comments
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

It is a great shame that it is so difficult to make personal experience count in professional or academic writing.

The first time I attempted genuine research was looking at Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray through the lens of dysmorphophobia, or body dysmorphic disorder. Of course, it wasn’t random reading of somatoform disorder textbooks that brought this match to my attention, but personal experience. And, to be honest, personal experience does not always match what textbooks or research papers have to say.

There’s a scene where Dorian’s portrait is revealed, and Dorian is momentarily ecstatic with it, then inexplicably miserable. It’s one of many emotional episodes that seem so tangibly familiar to me, yet so difficult to map credibly and analytically into academic writing. This is probably why, despite being my most unique piece of work, it has never become anything more than a reference in a personal newspaper article on the subject of BDD.

The same scenario surfaces for Andrew Marvell. Continue reading ‘A Green Thought: Private Minds’

Archives

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 186 other followers

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 186 other followers