Mon papa ne veut pas que je danse la polka

Read the translation of Margarita (the fact that it's printed in the Moscow Medical Journal next to a crossword amuses me no end). It's by my grandad actually, who's kind of an occasional poet - he's changed a lot of the lines, so the sense of the poem stays the same but there are phrases I didn't write/didn't mean etc. I do like it, but if I was translating it (not that I'd be capable of doing so, my Russian's not that good) it wouldn't be the same. Which I suppose is the point. The translator brings new veg to the stir-fry.

Sorry. There was talk of stir-fry earlier, I have it on the brain.

Misha was ill today (or rather: Misha had a fever for about five minutes last night prompting Mum to squeal "Ohmydayzzzz* he's ill someone must stay at home and look after him! ANNIE!" only the fever then disappeared and he's been absolutely fine all day. Bitter, me?). So all day I've been making paper chains, playing table hockey - which I SUCK at - I mean, I don't even have to let him win, he is genuinely better than me - and just spending time with my little brother, having heart-to-heart chats etc. Well, sort of.

Me: "Misha, do you know what gifts the three wise men brought?"
Misha: "Gold, frankenstein and myrrh."

Also...

Me: "Do you ever do poetry at school?"
Misha: "No. We never do poems, we always do puzzles of poems. We have to fill in the gaps and stuff."
Me: "Is that fun?"
Misha: "No, it's really boring." Pause. "I want to write a poem."
Me: (surprised and strangely excited) "Really??"
Misha: "Yeah. But we never ever do that."
Me: "You could ask your teacher, maybe she'll let you."
Misha: "No, she says we did poems in year 1 so we don't do them in year 2 because they're not in year 2 exams."

Year 2 exams. Let's not even go there on how insane that whole concept is. But the conversation reminded me of this from a few weeks back. Not sure where I stand on this - yeah, GCSE English was like drowning in a vat of bad metaphors while Gillian Clarke cackled manically in the background and I don't remember doing any poetry at all in primary school, apart from learning some poem about ducks...but on the other hand, what are you gonna do? English Lit. at GCSE and below is always going to be formulaic if they insist on examining it at the end of the year. And if it's formulaic then it's boring, and if it's boring then about 90% of the class just isn't going to care. If people want kids to really appreciate poetry I think it's got to be done outside the classroom.

All of which now makes me desperate to write poems with Misha. Seriously, I really want to try it, although I'm not sure how to go about it exactly bearing in mind he's six and has the attention span of, well, a 21st century six-year-old. If anyone has any ideas, it'd be much appreciated. I have to babysit again on Friday and need something else to entertain him with other than relentless table hockey.

In other news, I just spontaneously fell off my chair. Oh, gravity.

*OK, Mum didn't actually say "Ohmydayzzzz", but it would have been SO WONDERFUL if she had.

Cutting onions into moons

Having someone else read your poem out loud is very surreal. I still don't know the name of the guy who did it last night, but I liked the way they did it - even though at the time it was EXCRUCIATINGLY embarrassing and I was tugging at my hair so hard it almost fell out. Anyway, he read it well, although - and I suppose this is natural - it sounded different in my head. He read it quite slowly, for a start, and in my head it was always meant to be read really really really fast, like some frenetic advert. This isn't me complaining: it's just different interpretations or something, I don't know.

Yesterday also proved that I'm not very good at the whole canapes-and-mingling thing. My tactic is basically: Drink. Eat. Babble. ("Tiny banoffee pies you probably wouldn't touch in any other context? Why thank you, I'll have SIX!") So at one point Daljit Nagra asked me which poets I liked and all I could think to say was "ERRRRRRRRRRRR I really like YOU, actually!" Cringe, cringe, cringe. And then when I tried to plug Pomegranate to Helen Mort, I spent ages circling her trying to work up the courage and then finally just went, "Are you Helen Mort????" ("Yes.") "Have you heard of Pomegranate? No? Er (brain turns into banoffee pie) it's like...for YOUNG POETS...and like...anyone can submit and like...will you? I mean would you? I mean are you interested? Erm. Have a flyer!" Only we'd run out of flyers, so what I actually gave her was a piece of paper with www.pomegranate.me.uk written on it in Adham's gel pen. And what I didn't realise was that she was standing with another girl who was also a poet, and I didn't offer her a flyer, so basically I insulted her.

Awesome PR, Annie, just awesome. (Charly gave the other girl - Bridget Collins - a flyer later, and we talked and she was really nice. So that's OK, but also aaarggh.)

There was also the podcast, which had me going yada-yada-yada at the speed of light due to sheer nerves, and then reading out my poem badly. But it was really good to see all the other winners and they all seemed like pretty fantastic people, and their poems are brilliant - it took an hour to get home and I spent the whole time buried in the anthology (well, the stapled-together sheets of winning poems). Also - free books! Tobias Hill's Nocturne In Chrome & Sunset Yellow, which I was actually planning to get, so score - it's got this amazing sequence called A Year In London in it. And a selection of Shakespeare's verse selected by Ted Hughes, and Two Barks by Julie O'Callaghan which to be honest I'm a bit confused by - they're basically children's poems? Not that I'm against children's poetry, but...well, anyway.

All in all, an interesting evening.

It made today's extravaganza of UCAS finalising, English coursework, Tsar Nicolas II, cold rice salad and helping the classics department set up for Open Day incredibly dull and depressing, not to mention the impending weekend of - oh, let's see - work, work, work, work, work, work...

Xi

It's just this squiggle I can't write,
not yet. Uncertainty is bliss.
This pause: no life-change, no great insight -
it's just this squiggle I can't write.
These underrated words: could. Might.
Who knows? For now there's time, there's this.
It's just this squiggle I can't write.
Not yet. Uncertainty is bliss.


Yuck. Triolets just don't do it for me. I wrote that yesterday while very tired, and knew straight away that it would be one of those poems I would never have time to go back and work on, but I felt I should preserve it somewhere so I've preserved it here. Really, how can you say everything you want to say in eight lines - actually five lines, two of which repeat themselves - without sounding all simpery and twee? Poetic twee. I can't do it. And I disagree with myself completely on "Uncertainty is bliss" - uncertainty is not bliss, it can be liberating and exciting sometimes, which I think is what I meant, but "bliss" is the wrong word. But if I change it, I'll have to change the sixth line too - to what? To be honest, there's no time to work on this. It's going in the MIGHT POSSIBLY SALVAGE THIS ONE DAY IN THE DISTANT FUTURE pile. Moving on.

Greek. I knew I would like it, but I didn't know how much. It's fantastic. Really, really intense (the teacher, Theodora - when someone figured out her name meant God's gift, Eve, a woman in the class, went, "OH!!! OH, that's BEAUTIFUL!!!!" and Theodora blushed a LOT - anyway, Theodora said we would be at intermediate level by the end of the course, so...we're moving pretty fast). It's a mark of my geekery that all I'm doing lately is declining nouns and putting accents over words and actually enjoying it. And I like the routine of it too: getting up, getting the train and tube to UCL, going down to the little classroom; being in the classroom with the four other students (all of whom are older than me - there's a Latin teacher, a postgrad and undergrad in English, and an older woman called Eve who's "just doing it for fun"), and all of us ploughing through the Greek, translating hilarious little stories - "Dicaeopolis works all day and groans and says, "O Zeus! Life is hard!!!" - and then eating lunch somewhere, doing more Greek, highlighting stuff, underlining stuff, and then lectures in the afternoon. The day before yesterday there was one from Peter Jones, author of Reading Greek and Reading Latin and a book I've got called The Intelligent Person's Guide To Classics, which must be the ponciest book title ever, but it's a great book and he's AMAZING. And yesterday there was a lecture by the UCL guy Stephen I've-Forgotten-His-Last-Name-Dammit, which was also really good.

So, Greek - as brilliant as I expected, and more.

In other news...tomorrow is...well, I suppose tomorrow could be called the first date. Which seems RIDICULOUS, considering how long this has all been going on, but it is officially, I suppose...er, that. I don't really know how I feel about this. Excited? Scared? The usual, then. One half of the brain going "YAY! OMG YAY!!!" and the other half thinking, "He is soooo going to come to his senses tomorrow." Hmm. I'm going to stop talking about this because I don't think I can be fully articulate.

Yesterday was prizegiving at school. I won the Ancient Languages Reading Cup, an adorable little goblet I could actually drink out of, and it has my name inscribed on it at the end of a list of previous year 12 ancient language readers. Prizegiving was boring as hell as usual, the only funny bit being when we had to sing God Save The Queen and all the language teachers refused to sing it, and Mr M The Poncy Plato-Quoting Drama Teacher stood there with his hands in his pockets, wearing his best "I am a rebel I am above this kind of crap" scowl. The food afterwards was rubbish too.

It meant I was so tired when I got home that I didn't do any Greek homework, and so I have to go now and will be scribbling it all down furiously on a train packed with commuters. Woohoo.

I aaaaaaam the one and only

Didn't write anything in the past week, not because nothing happened, but because (yesterday's strawberry and raspberry picking extravaganza aside) it was all extremely boring. This may have had something to do with a lot of people I know disappearing to Snowdonia to wade through mud for educational purposes (one of whom was the person mentioned in the previous entry, which is why that issue is still kind of unresolved and I have NO idea what's going to happen now, and am scared nothing will, but ANYway). In the meantime, we all stayed at school for Activities Week and, yeah, they tried, they really tried to make it fun. But when the rest of the school is on various trips and there are literally about TWENTY of you left, well...being trapped in the place becomes even more unbearable than usual.

There was first aid, and a "world trade game" (let's not even go there), and a "World Cinema Day" which was actually quite good because I got to see Pan's Labyrinth and a Japanese film called Kamikaze Girls - one of those films that are frothy and insane and pure escapism, and made me want to wear a frilly dress for the rest of the day. But, you know, I could have watched films AT HOME. There was a treasure hunt around London which I refused to attend. There was a German-born WW2 survivor who came to talk to us, only it turned out he was a little bit too senile - he remembered with amazing clarity his stay at some hotel in Frankfurt in the 60s but couldn't remember anything about the actual war. ("Did you feel afraid leaving Germany?" "Well, I don't know, I was only about four at the time.") It meant that I felt bad for feeling a bit, erm, bored, because he'd obviously had a tough childhood, but...

And of course, Personal Statement Hell. Ugh, personal statements. There are some people who've been taking it oh-so-seriously, like Oliver who's practically written a thesis on himself, and there are others who just haven't, like Alex whose statement contains the phrase "orgy of maths" (and he refuses to remove it), and Alistair who (for ancient history) has written, "I am Alistair son of Hector. I like dead people, deader people and really really really dead people. I also like swords." I've fallen somewhere in between. But I'm just so, so,

SO

bad at writing about myself. It's the one thing I can't write. It's why at least 3/4 of the poems I write aren't about me, and the ones that are are always the hardest to write, and are always the ones I'm terrified of showing people. It's really annoying actually. I've always wanted to be able to write really raw, personal poetry, something that when you read it you just KNOW it's me. That's kind of like...that's my goal with every poem I write. I always want it to be really clear that it's from MY perspective, not anyone else's. But then it never quite works because they're hardly ever about me, they're about...well, people in comas, and people with ginger hair, and people on crash diets, and then "literary" crap, writing about literature - The Tempest, The Master And Margarita. My current poem-in-progress, the first stanza is about Ovid, being in exile, writing his Tristia, and while it's fun to write and I think it works OK as a first stanza, well...it's not ME, it's just me pretending to know what it's like to be in exile. And really, who wants to know what I think about that when I clearly don't even know what I'm talking about?

I mean, obviously everything you write is written from your perspective in some way, it's got YOUR stamp on it, but I still just really want to be able to write loads of poems that are just fully me: my life, my world, things that have happened to me. Maybe I'm not that kind of poet (hahahaha - "poet"). Maybe I just haven't lived enough. Yet.

Anyway, so, personal statement. Can't do it, for similar reasons. I would much rather talk about something else than myself, which is why the PS is currently full of crap about How Ovid Is, Like, Totally Amazing And Like, Yeah, OMG, but doesn't have anything else in it, really. Apart from one disgusting paragraph where I manage to compare myself to Virgil without meaning to - MUST REMOVE THAT ASAP.

Tomorrow is my last day of school. Everyone else stays behind until Friday and for that I laugh at them, but as for me - it's Greek Week!!!!!