What I Live For

To celebrate the publication of her books under her new name, Satya Robyn is curating an online event today in which bloggers share “What I Live For”.

There are lots of things that I could describe in this way – family, friends, books – but given the date my choice was easy. It’s three months exactly until our wedding, so I thought I would post a poem about our upcoming marriage.

 

 

Bride
after Marcel Duchamp and Octavio Paz

Outside the station, you juggle gravity,
so when we step onto the platform
it opens out to rails made of matches
soaked in fresh green paint.

The train sets off as though shot
from a cannon. I hear its cogs and springs,
the clockwork straining to keep up
with our direction of travel; it’s been wound
beyond its litany’s pace and theme.

The centrifugal force of our meeting
rips my rain-mask from me. You
give me a glass skin
in which I cocoon myself
like a caterpillar noctuelle.

Your glass is the only thing strong enough
to withstand my tongue of solid flame.

Within my new epidermis, I slow life;
grow into a dusk-dusty mariée.

—–

Image: Us. Photo by my Mum. We were all laughing so hard about something or other that she couldn’t quite focus.

‘Bride’ was first published in The Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual 2012.

Previous blogsplashes for Satya’s books are filed under her former name, Fiona Robyn.

Stop Animation: Dewey Decimal Classification

Many of our part-time students have interesting day jobs. Ellen Dutton works as a school librarian in a great environment that has encouraged her passion for information literacy. Here’s a stop animation she’s made to give students an overview of DDC, which I’m sharing here for the benefits of the cataloguers whom I know read this blog regularly. Do click through to see her videos on other library topics.

Day of DH: Catching the Last of the Day

N.B. This is a reposting of part of my Day of DH blog.

So that was the main part of my day today. Pretty traditional and almost entirely analog. I barely even used a computer, and when I did it was only for email, wordprocessing and blogging.

After leaving the library, I had two main meetings: one with a student discussing a couple of job applications she is making and one discussing the latest installation planned at UCL by The Itinerant Poetry Library.

Any day that involves The Librarian is a good day in my book (pun intended).

—–

Image: late afternoon sun on the way out of Senate House.