Suzie Hanna, ‘The Blue from Heaven’

It’s been over two years since Professor Suzie Hanna and I recorded Glenda Jackson reciting ‘The Blue from Heaven’ in a little Woolwich studio. Since then, the track has been waiting patiently in the wings as Suzie experimented with ways to animate Stevie Smith’s extraordinary poem.

Suzie tested out filmed footage, symbolic imagery, collage (all juggled with running a busy Masters course at NUA) but nothing seemed quite right for this strange, resistant little text. Describing Arthur riding through a blue world – coloured by mysterious gigantic cornflowers, which tower above his head – the poem challenges us to separate the literal from the symbolic, the metaphorical from the nonsensical.

So it was very special to be able to watch a whole rough cut of the film, for the first time, on 10^th August 2018, at a session of the ReLit Summer School run by Dr Sally Bayley.

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Dorothy Richardson in Abingdon

I happened to see on Twitter that the Abingdon County Hall Museum, just a few miles from Oxford, was holding a week-long exhibition on the life and work of Dorothy Richardson. I’ve got a great dissertation student working on Dorothy Richardson this year, so I decided that this counted as teaching prep. I left my (almost-finished) thesis behind for the mid-week trip to Abingdon.

Singing Smith: Five Musical Poems

Well, it’s always fun doing this, fitting other words to an old tune. (Stevie Smith, ‘A Turn Outside’

Stevie Smith sang a lot of her poems in performance. Often, her subtitles include instructions about the tunes which they should be sung to.

‘Miss Pauncefort sang at the top of her voice…’

Persons from Porlock: Smith, MacNeice, Thomas

It was not right of Coleridge in fact it was wrong
(But often we all do wrong)
As the truth is I think he was already stuck
With Kubla Khan.

He was weeping and wailing: I am finished, finished,
I shall never write another word of it,
When along comes the Person from Porlock
And takes the blame for it.

Illustration of Stevie Smith’s ‘Thoughts About the Person from Porlock’ (1962)

Coleridge’s Person from Porlock had a good few outings in the mid-twentieth-century.

With Your Crown On: Auden’s Light Verse

My first name, Wystan,
Rhymes with Tristan,
But – O dear! – I do hope
I’m not quite such a dope.

Illustration to Auden’s clerihew on himself in Academic Graffiti

Shaun Tan, The Singing Bones: Bones and Snippets

For the last few days, I’ve been preoccupied by Shaun Tan’s illustrations for the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Tan created sculptures corresponding to 75 of the fairy tales, each photographed and presented alongside a snippet of the original narrative.

Shaun Tan, The Singing Bones

Review essay: Allowing a Lapse

The Cambridge Quarterly has just published my review essay on Elisha Cohn’s very thought-provoking book Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (Oxford, 2016). You can read my review here.

The book is also brilliantly discussed in one of the v21 Collective’s ‘Collations’, linked to here. And you can read the thoughts of Raphael Lyne, editor of CQ, about the book over here on his blog.