The last Creative Writing reading series of the term offered us the chance to hear some of the current undergraduate and postgraduate students read their work at the open mic night.
Duncan MacKay, first-year PhD student, artist and poet (his work can be found at Poetsdoos, Enigma, PN Review and ZONE magazine, his artwork is held in collections at CERN and NASA and exhibited locally through the Lilford Gallery) kicked the night off by reading three short lyrics. Duncan is also a research fellow is astrophysics, and his poems use innovative poetic techniques to interrogate scientific methodology, and scientific language to disrupt poetic form, though he also has a more lyrical – what he described as ‘Zen-y’ – mode, which came across in ‘Refuge from a Sudden Shower’.
Polina Orlova read a poem responding to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land called ‘Water’, which investigated many of the tropes of the original poem.
Olivia Pinkney read a poem called ‘Body’, which interrogated the objectification of the female body, and women’s relations to their bodies – the repeated refrain ‘my body is not my own’ morphing by the end of the poem into ‘I am not my body’.
Katie Szyszko got the prose readings off to an excellent start, reading a tautly-written prose piece which explored childhood memory, family relations and diaspora experience in both funny and moving ways – reflecting upon her changing relation to her Grandparents’ orthodox faith.
Joe Hill read one of the lightest ‘Dirges’ I’ve yet to hear: a response to his mother telling him that he would have to have children or face being alone, his poem, which started out by seeming to be about his inability to relate to children used a perfectly pitched repetition to achieve a humorous twist at the end of the poem.
Tom Parsons read a poem-critique of Richard Linklater’s 2014 film Boyhood, examining the premises of identification and universality that he sees as underpinning the film of ‘this young man with memories you could own’:
I wanted to see him mainline heroin
Or kill a friend
Or just alienate himself from others
In a way that wasn’t cool or introspective
Neelam Saredia read two new poems – Neelam is a very accomplished performance poet whose clever observational poems are delivered with energy and panache – she’s always an enjoyable poet to watch.
Chris Scott, a second year PhD student, read two scenes from his novel Intermission – the first a dialogue, and the second a visually descriptive piece which used short and, most particularly, sentences composed of three adjectives, to great effect.
I read some new Sappho translations out with Molly Bloom in January & which will be performed more fully at the Centre for Gender, Sexuality & Writings LGBT week from the 16-20th February.
Maryam Ala Amjadi read an excellent poem ‘What meets the eye may run from the mouth’, soon to be published in the next issue of the feminist magazine Hysteria, which also offered a feminist reading of the body and perception.
Then, after wine and mince pies, it was time to wish each other a merry Christmas and say goodbye until next term, when we have another fabulous rostra of writers lined up for the series.