Poetry in motion

I should be in bed.

I am in bed, actually, 

wrapped in a duvet

and listening to the dog’s muffled snores.

I have been doing poetry today

can you tell?

diving into an unknown world of words

beneath the surface of language.

I am not a natural poet

more the sort of red roses and blue violets

but I have learned a lot

about how even the simplest piece of prose

can become a poem

if you are in Cambridge.

Apart from that I have had the happiest day. 

It is truly hard not to break this up into little bits with the line breaks signifying something important. I have read and thought about so much poetry that it is happening by itself and threatening to turn everything that I write into something modern and pensively insightful.

I like studying here. It is rather splendid to be in a place where even my most dopey and badly explained comments are encouraged as a valid appreciation of whatever thoughtful verbiage we happen to be considering. 

I am, truly, in heaven. Everybody else is very clever, interesting to listen to, and some are brilliant. I do not think I am one of nature’s little poets, although you never know. We had some guest poets reading to us last night, one of whom described herself as a Bull Dyke and who had written a book of poetry called C+nto. I imagine her mother must be dead or abroad or something, because I do not think mine would have been very impressed if I had become famous by that route. 

However, I am in Cambridge now, and I have already learned so much that I was able to really admire the poetry, which is an improvement even on last week. In any case I discovered over a glass of wine afterwards that I got along very well indeed with the poet, who was bright, and scared, and an utterly brilliant performer. I liked her, and bought one of her poetry books, in which she inscribed her name and an affectionate little message, which pleased me very much indeed. 

In fact she was merely part of an already-established pathway. Some readers might remember that when I was at school I won a prize for some activity, I forget what, but almost certainly English because I was rubbish at everything else. You had to choose a book to be handed over at Speech Day. I chose a book of poetry. It was by Pam Ayres, whose poetry is a jolly sight better than some I could mention, even though she never made it to be a guest lecturer at Cambridge, and it was also autographed, as it happens, so now I have got two books of poetry, both of which have been signed by the author. 

I will become an intellectual in the end, you’ll see. 

We have been studying Meaningful Poetry all day and frankly I think my brain has started to crawl out of my ears in a bid for a bit of mindless drivel.The last lot was about death and funerals in other cultures. Up until then we had done landscapes and communities and prose poems and some stuff about meteorology. I had no idea that there were so many ways to do it. I knew about rhyming couplets and iambic pentameters and thought that was pretty comprehensive. I can tell you now that I am a mere taxi driver in the world of literary appreciation. There is a very lot of thinking to be done.

If I am honest I will probably never be able to write modern poetry. 

In other news, the food is jolly splendid, and also I have been Matriculated. This is when you promise that you will behave respectably and probably leave a fat legacy in your will to Lucy Cavendish College when you die. I am not exactly confident in my ability to do either but I signed up anyway, sombrely gowned in a garment with oddly-designed sleeves. 

I have got to go to bed. It is midnight and I am almost falling asleep as I write. I will tell you more tomorrow.

This is the most peculiar, amazing place.

Goodnight.