Hello, hello, with a hey nonny-no.
It's been three years, three months and three days since my last post. Three threes. I couldn't have planned it better. The truth is I didn't plan it at all. I procrastinated and resisted writing this, and finally here I am as if I'd never been gone.
I took a break from writing after the MA, in 2018, as that final dissertation was quite a strain on the old creative muscles and it wore me out. My mental health had also taken (another) dip in 2017, half way through my studies (two years part-time), and I was back under the GP and on medication, so I was overdue a rest. Coincidentally, I had also started working for a mental health charity, having resigned from my post as a funeral arranger in 2016 a few months before I started the MA.
I've been 'struggling' coming to terms with the overall MA mark I was awarded, and a comment received on my dissertation that really got to me. I know, far greater things happening in the world and all that but I'm human and want to get this off my chest and get on with my writing life. And I don't really expect anyone to care much either, to be honest.
I graduated with a Pass, a final mark of 58 percent. Not a bad mark, and I'm happy to have passed. But here's the thing, throughout the MA I was awarded a merit (between 60 and 70 percent) for all my modules (apart from one lovely 71%) and was very happy with that. But unfortunately that final mark completely negates all the previous ones, dragging my overall MA grade down a pass. But it wasn't even that so much as this comment from one of the two markers, dissertations being 'double marked' (allegedly anonymously but easy to work out who they both were, making the whole anonymous submission and marking procedure a farce, like so much of academia is in truth, but anyway): "...but be careful of occasional slippages, which can lead to things unravelling fast - the one thing that curtains should never do in a poem is "billow". "
Note the use of the word 'should' here, an instruction rather than advice. Instead of the marker just saying they personally don't like the use of that word, or that I could perhaps have used a more descriptive or more poetic word and even gone to the lengths of suggesting one, they invent a totally non existent 'rule' of poetry. This came as the last line of a mostly positive comment on my creative piece, a suite of 25 prose poems that I presented as a chapbook, fully edited and ready for publication, and that I was overall very happy with. So why should that last line bother me so much? I really don't know, and what else can I say about it anyway? Not a basis for appeal or grievance, but I was, and remain, aggrieved.
I printed both reports out, and underneath the one I've mentioned above I wrote "Utter bollocks. Poetry can speak in any way it sees fit for the poem."
I think I found the comment sloppy and unhelpful, and the fact that the marker was (and still is) not a poet themselves pissed me off, and that they saw fit to confuse personal opinion with fact. And I resent the lower mark that I feel did not, and does not, reflect the research and creative effort I put into those poems, and the critical commentary that supported it. But the reality is all of these marks, grades and comments were and are completely out of my control. And I need to add here that, for both of the markers of my dissertation I have the utmost respect, both as academics in their chosen fields and for the creative work they produce. And I loved their modules and learnt from both of them, as I did from all the tutors whose modules I studied, and those that helped me along the way, and those poets and writers I was introduced to by them, and who I discovered myself through my research.
So here I am back on my blog, on the one hand dismissing academia as a farce and criticising comments that I don't like and found unhelpful, yet on the other acknowledging how much I learnt from it, and from them, and recognising what a privilege it was to be accepted to study for this MA without a first degree, and showing gratitude for those who helped me to get to that point, who encouraged me, wrote a reference, read my work and gave their own feedback. And more.
I have a lovely back catalogue of unpublished work from before and during the MA that I don't know where to begin with it all. Revisiting it for this post has reminded me of it, and in the writing this post I can feel that resentment slipping away. I had stopped posting here anyway as I was trying to get my work published, and posting on a blog counts as self-published which means that publishers won't accept it.
And of course the world was turned upside down in early 2020 by the pandemic, lockdowns, and working from home. For me personally, whilst I continued attending the lovely Colchester Write Night group I've been a member of for ten years, albeit virtually, I picked up my paint brushes again and have plunged head first into the world of abstract painting, producing several canvases and still going, and have rearranged my creative process and my flat around that. I've also been adopted by a lovely black cat.
So, (another so), that's it for now. I will keep painting and writing, and will post more on here whenever and however the creative mood and muse flows through me.
Laters.
