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.

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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.

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).

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

Day of DH: About Me

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

I’m Lecturer in Library and Information Studies at University College London and a member of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH) core team. This is my third year taking part in Day of DH. Previous years’ posts are available here (2011) and here (2012) and collocated on my own blog, Library Marginalia (Day of DH posts).

We’re between terms at the moment, with students gearing up to complete case studies (3000 words based on a workplace or work placement project) and begin work on their Masters dissertations. In terms of student-focused activities, this year I’ll be setting up a careers event for the department in my new role as Careers Tutor, meeting with one of our doctoral candidates who is organising a public engagement event for the Reading strand of our Festival of Arts in May and writing a couple of job references, in response to requests that came in over the weekend.

The rest of the time is, luxuriously, all about my own research, and tomorrow will largely be spent at Senate House Library studying the Working Library of Walter de la Mare, preparing for a conference in Oslo later in the Spring. So, not very digital – you have been warned!

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Image: Reading Walter de la Mare’s Pleasures and Speculations (Faber, 1940) on a recent train-trip home to Scotland.