This March I will be joining the Institute of Advanced Studies at University College London as a Fellow in Creative Practice.
The purpose of the fellowship is to use creative methodologies to intervene in our ideas about knowledge production in academic contexts. I’ll be carrying out interdisciplinary research and teaching undergraduate and postgraduate students about using poetry-writing methods in their academic practice.
On Thursday 25th of February I’ll be headlining an open mic hosted by Writers in Oxford. Head over to https://www.writersinoxford.org/ for details of how to join.
Last term, during Homerton’s Wellbeing and Mental Health Week, I wrote a new poem that thinks about pain and openness. You can hear me reading it over on the UoC Facebook page:
Over the past six months I’ve had the very great pleasure of getting to know the brilliant Ellen Hinsey. An award-winning poet and academic, Hinsey and I discussed poetry, ‘truth telling’ and the interdisciplinary nature of her work.
You can read the interview in full here, read Ellen’s poems here and read my editorial by clicking here.
On Commemoration: Global Reflection upon Remembering Warhas been reviewed by Professor Jay Winter (Yale) in this week’s Times Literary Supplement. Professor Winter praised the collection for the way it draws attention to ‘the need to extend our catalogue of commemorative forms and sites to include many other media, including literary texts, testimony, music, prayer and silence’.
The key problem the book identifies, Professor Winter suggests, is ‘that of linking remembrance, understood as the process of reflecting on the past, usually but not always with other people; and memory, understood as the product of such reflections each of us carries’.
My research is interested in how trauma interrupts the processing of experience into memory, asking how we can find forms able to express what is often inexpressible. The poems I published in the collection use ink and redaction techniques to engage with these ideas. It’s very gratifying to see these creative-critical engagements, in dialogue with more conventional essays, so well received.
It was wonderful to finally arrive at Homerton back at the beginning of October. Due to Covid restrictions, the recruitment process for the Poet-in-Residence role had been totally online. Since I was appointed, I’d had many Zoom coffees with new colleagues but nothing could compare to arriving at the leafy campus on Hills Road.
The remit of the Jacqueline Bardsley Poet-in-Residence is simple: to put poetry at the heart of college life. The residency is named after Mrs Jacqueline Bardsley, a college alumna who passionately believed in the power of poetry to foster self-expression and build strong communities. In service of this aim, during my residencies I’ve organised my time around three strands: writing and performing new poetry; teaching and interdisciplinary research.
I began the residency by using poetry to engage with the college’s archives. My PhD research sought to engage with the way that archives curate meaning, translating it into poetic form. I’m particularly interested in how archives work as an amalgam of material facts juxtaposed with absences and silences. Extending this idea at Homerton, I’ve been working with physical materials to produce ‘collage poems’ as well as novel poetry.
One of the definite highlights of the residency is teaching. I kicked off our poetry-writing workshop series in October with sessions focused on exercises and games students can use when they are feeling uninspired. Over the course of Michaelmas, we’ll work on shaping these initial ideas into fully-fledged poems and the stunning results will be published on the college website and in an anthology next year.
Listening to our guest poet for the term Marvin Thompson
On the interdisciplinary research front, I’ve been thinking about what poetry-writing methods can bring to other subjects. The College has a strong track record in Education and I’ve been collaborating with Homerton Changemakers to ask how poetry might help us produce graduates with the dynamic skillset needed to address the ecological, geo-political psychological questions of our time.
It’s been a strange start to my time at Cambridge (teaching via Zoom and ‘live-streaming’ my writing via social media are certainly new to me!) but a positive one, nonetheless. This is not least because of all the support given to me by the Cambridge community. I look forward to how the residency will continue into the new year.
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