November 20th 2005

Went to NAWE's Autumn conference at Lancaster University.  Calum Kerr told us how his PhD had become forced into the realms of theory because of it's hypertextual nature.  He seemed cynical about his whole experience.  Sheree Mack was more upbeat, though she'd had problems sorting out a supervisor.  I'll keep in touch with her.  She seemed like a friendly, going-places sort of person.  She talked about being 'between worlds' as a result of being black and British.  The question she asked:  'what dialogue or language do we use when we are between worlds? applied also to her experience of being a PhD poet, similarly between the worlds of creativity and academia.  The implied, but not explicitly stated, answer to her own question was that we should make up our own language or fashion our own dialogue.  She asked us to make notes on the two sides of our lives.  I wrote notes on 'teacher' and 'poet', the former being responsible, boring and part of a machine, the latter being androgynous (!), dangerous and unpredictable.  She asked us how we might marry the two, merge them or allow them to co-exist.  This seems very pertinent in my life, split, as it always has been, not just between teacher and poet, but between conventional, parent-pleasing and unconventional, 'naughty'.  They need to merge.  The energy which resides in my 'shadow' needs to infuse my whole life bringing with it the confidence I so desperately need, without which I run and escape and so perpetuate the split.

I liked Sheree's phrase 'Self As Source'.  That has got to be this PhD's emphasis.  It's not about THEORY.  It's not about what METHODOLOGY I should or should not be using.  It's about ME, MY AIMS, MY RULES, MY PROJECT, MY SELF-ASSESSMENT, all on my own terms.

Lucy Collins/Kathy Flann also seemed to suggest that the commentary part should NOT follow a theoretical route but be IN THE TRADITION OF POETS' SELF-REFLEXIVE WRITINGS, eg. those of Heaney ('Government of the Tongue'?).  In these Heaney compares the self-reflecting part of a writer's self as like the TV commentator who dissects and comments upon the action replay of a goal or kick in football.  The goal or kick is a combination of impulse/technique/chance/intention - and often happens very fast.  The commentator often uses slo-mo to describe and explain where the kick came from, how it was carried out and what consequences it might have.

I must have missed a lot of the rest of the papers in this session because I loved this analogy so much and was dreaming up an analogy for my whole PhD project along similar lines.  I doodle the diagram for the analogy below - this could be extremely useful as a way of imaginatively visualising and understanding the structure and dynamics of my project.

MY PHD AS A TV FOOTBALL MATCH.

Pre-match: coaches and managers, the brains and masterminds plan, plot and talk about strategies and expectations - where the team are now at and where this match might take them.  This managerial conversation is like my PhD proposal where I set out my history and influences, my intentions, my themes, what I would like to explore, what I would like to achieve and my probable tactics and techniques.  It sets the probable boundaries and probable significance of the project.

Match - From The Pitch:  A series of kicks.  Some goals.  Some near-misses.  Some blunders.  Each kick relies on players' learnt skills (previous experience).  Each kick relies on the players' intentions at that moment, the team's global intentions, the players' impulses (unplanned) and the chance configuration of players and influences in which the kick is made.  These kicks are like my poems being written.  Each one different.  Each one attempting to be part of a significant whole.  Each one a nexus where intention, skill and pure accident meet.  None of them having any solitary significance.

Match - From The Commentary-Box:  A spontaneous, live commentary from the media, including some slo-mo playback.  This is my journal.  (This is THIS!!!)  A constant, unplanned, unstructured, informal analysis of the poems as they happen or unfold.

Post-Match:  The managers and commentators do a 'global' commentary on the match - highlights, successes, failures, surprises - and assess its significance and how it affects future fixtures.  This is my final commentary which, in a structured and formal way, analyses the collection, assesses it and assesses and contextualises the whole project with reference to how it affects my future as a poet.

I should also find Heaney's poem 'The Harvest Bow' as a commentary on his artistic shaping and reworking of a Jungian archetype (?) and also Peter Abbs whose critical work might be useful.

After lunch Graeme Harpter talked about 'Creative Writing' at PhD level as a global academic phenomenon.  He said US PhDs were more related to pedagogy, ethno-cultural research and experiential studies.  Hollings University, Virginia and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center For the Arts were mentioned - might be useful to look these up on the net.  In the UK there was more emphasis on relating it to 'Literature'.  In Australia and NZ the emphasis was on forms of discourse and interedisciplinary stuff.  And in Europe on language learning and applied linguistics. 

It was said that PhD's involved criticism which is based not only on PRODUCT but on PRODUCTION.  It comments on living language not dead language.  It makes a link between 2 actions:  making and receiving.  It was also said that criticism acknowledges and celebrates the emotive, the fortuitous, the dispositional and the personal.  Also that it's a 'wide-open arena'.  It's not restrictive.  It's not stucturalistic.  It's not Lit Theory.  It's person and product- (or production-)centred.  Creative Writing is 'relational stucturist' (what is this????)

Susanna Gladwin (grey hair, used someone else's work without permission!) talked about abstracts and how it might be useful to posit the 'thesis/abstract writer' as a 'narrative hero'.  I must remember this when I come to write an abstract or find myself in the position of having to formally explain the PhD - make it dynamic, set up quest(ion)s (and unfulfilled desires/tensions) in the listener which I then answer (and satisfy) at the end.  Abstract as fairytale!  I like the brain/brawn dichotomy, found in a heroic quest and also found in this interplay of critic-writer which is the stuff of my project.  The brain/brawn is not a dichotomy, a binary opposition.  They are interrelating functions of my PhD persona, and fit perfectly with my manager/football player model in which brain and brawn all come together to make a satisfying spectacle.  I like the idea of the quest being open-ended, the hero looking whimsically at the horizon at the end of the story, already thinking of new adventures - just as my PhD 'story', and my collection of poems, will not be the end.

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