{"id":290,"date":"2015-01-05T16:30:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-05T16:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/?p=290"},"modified":"2015-01-06T09:30:29","modified_gmt":"2015-01-06T09:30:29","slug":"dorothy-legane-and-sonia-overall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/dorothy-legane-and-sonia-overall\/","title":{"rendered":"Dorothy Lehane and Sonia Overall"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"dorothysonia\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Dorothy and Sonia both lecture at the University of Kent. Dorothy is a poet and editor of Litmus<\/a> magazine, which focuses on intersections between science and poetry. Sonia is a novelist and poet who also teaches at Canterbury Christ Church. Her previous novels include A Likeness <\/em><\/a>and The Realm of Shells<\/em><\/a> (Fourth Estate \/ Harper Perennial).<\/p>\n

Dorothy read from two recently published works \u2013 Ephemeris<\/em><\/a>, her debut collection from Nine Arches Press, and Places of Articulation<\/em><\/a>, a chapbook from Dancing Girl Press, as well as some very recent work. An ephemeris \u2013 as the definitions from the OED in the collection make apparent, is, in one of its meanings, a diary or calendar giving the positions of the planets on a daily basis \u2013 binding together the astronomical with ideas of change and perception by an observer over time. Thus Ephemeris <\/em>combines, as one if the lines from \u2018Music of the Spheres\u2019 says, \u2018maths and harmonies in the macro\/micro\u2019 \u2013 mixing and understanding relations between the personal and the astronomical. Take, for example, \u2018Goldilocks Zone\u2019, one of the poems Dorothy read:<\/p>\n

Not too hot, not too cold, but just right.<\/em><\/p>\n

Robert Southey
\nMeet you on Titan,
\nlex loci, take a lifeboat
\n+++<\/span>as the red giant bloats
\nluminary & exhausted<\/p>\n

we call safe haven
\nthe big engulfing
\nhuman sterility is a no-no<\/p>\n

deep freeze mother
\nprimordial grime
\ndon’t speak now, hypoglycaemics.
\nTitan, shrugging freeze
\ntrigger clement
\nmeet you on the hillside
\nsay what a small new world<\/em>
\ndon\u2019t say toska<\/em>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 toska<\/em> won\u2019t cover this<\/p>\n

The Goldilocks Zone, or the circumstellar habitable zone, is the region around a star within which planetary-mass objects with sufficient atmospheric pressure can support liquid water at their surfaces \u2013 it is the place where life can be supported. Should Earth be become uninhabitable, Titan, the largest of Saturn\u2019s moons, is, according to astronomical scientists, the place in our solar system most likely to be able to support human life. Astronomical research meets other discourses \u2013 it starts off, for example, sounding like a love poem. It is the called the colloquial Goldilocks zone in the poem, rather than its more scientific name, partly because of the fairytale status of Goldilocks \u2013 a children\u2019s story in a collection where mothering is a central concern, and in a poem where this central concern of mothering is exploded to its macro level \u2013 the Goldilocks zone is an important concern only because \u2018human sterility is a no-no\u2019 \u2013 we imagine ourselves to keep reproducing ourselves. Poet laureate meets fairy tale; Shakespeare\u2019s brave new world is diminished, yet even the Russian toska<\/em> \u2013 the word Nabokov claimed was too large for the English language to express, cannot \u2018cover it\u2019.<\/p>\n

Nabokov said<\/p>\n

No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.<\/p>\n

With this, Goldilocks Zone starts to meet the later poetry, some of which is collected in Places of Articulation<\/em>, and its overt concern with language use and failure. Dorothy\u2019s current research is on aphasia \u2013 speech conditions \u2013 and takes full advantage of the resources of a linguistically innovative poetry – fracture, repetition, assonance, word association – to develop new ways of thinking about various speech conditions. In performance this tends towards a staccato delivery \u2013 poetry emerges from and as stutter. Dorothy talked about drawing on ethnographic studies, translating the sentiment into a poem until the original line becomes unrecognizable. Hear Dorothy reading some of the poems from Places of Articulation<\/em> on the Free Range website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Sonia gave us one of her first readings of her new \u2013 not yet published \u2013 novel \u2013 Eden<\/em>: a response to Hemmingway\u2019s final, unfinished novel The Garden of Eden<\/em>. This metatexual novel weaves together three narratives \u2013 that of Pen, a lecturer in Modernism, who is writing on Gertrude Stein, but rather guiltily devouring The Garden of Eden<\/em> instead; Catherine Bourne \u2013 the heroine of The Garden of Eden<\/em> and, as Sonia said, Hemmingway\u2019s strongest female character \u2013 become aware of her role as character; and Hemmingway himself, laboring over the novel in the years leading up to his death. Sonia read a section from each narrative \u2013 Catherine in particular was memorable for me \u2013 a character painfully aware that, as her husband\u2019s attention slips, so too does her creator\u2019s \u2013 her awareness that she is a character losing focus and depth, whose environment is closing in around her was gripping, and her struggle with her male creator to be realized as a character demanding attention irrespective of the attentions of her husband made for powerful feminist critique.<\/p>\n

The three narratives intersected, read with and against each other. Sonia too talked about her writing process \u2013 each narrative was written separately as one continuous narrative, with Hemmingway – who required plenty of research into his writing practices and the editorial process that went into the publication of The Garden of Eden<\/em> \u2013 which was heavily reduced from the vast manuscript that Hemmingway left on his death – plotted first, then Catharine, then Pen, and only when written were they spliced together. The three tasters she gave us of these narratives left us all looking forward to the publication of Eden<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":39849,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39849"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":317,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions\/317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}