Carnegie Vacation Scholarship: Week 5

Week 5 already! Just one more week to go and I should have a complete manuscript draft sitting before me, ready to be emailed away. The idea is very exciting and seems like a fantastic end to the scholarship – to have a solid body of work ready to unleash at will after much planning.

Therefore the focus this week has been on editing and reassessing the past work of this scholarship, so I have revisited week 1-4 poetry and focussed on condensing the poems to what I really want to say. My supervisor has been invaluable to this, offering an unbiased eye to the work and performing the dreaded strike-through penmanship where necessary. Thank you, Ian (Dr Ian Blyth, UHI Literature Programe Leader, recently editor of a very hefty book on Virginia Woolf, dontchaknow). It’s amazing how much a second eye adds to poetry.

With our meetings in mind, I was set to the task of cutting and reshaping the poems into something resembling their final form. Losing some of the work was necessary, but still hard. I had lines I liked that just didn’t work, despite my protestations. Similes that weren’t right but sounded so good I almost wished the world could make it fit. Being a great over-writer, I was pushed to condense the poetry I had to its very essence, ensuring that I wasn’t over-saying what I had to say. I was also banned from using the words ‘sudden’, or ‘suddenly’, and pushed to show it rather than say it. With Ian’s encouragement, I tried different forms in my poetry and better understood the value of placement and page use. It was a lot to take in for just four weeks, but will definitely be carried forward in future poetry.

The honesty of some of the works I have still surprise me. For poetry, I think you really have to push aside the idea of readership and focus on yourself as the writer. You don’t write for anyone but yourself, so you have to be honest. I’ve created poems that are as honest and dark as my thoughts do get but also poems with humour that reflect the self I show more often. The poems are both mine and me.

Today I am working on collating the poems I have to begin the idea of ordering. Mental health is not a linear thing, so in that way I don’t want to poems to be either. The focus then, is to create a manuscript that allows for humour amongst the dark and life amongst less happy ideas. I am doing this by categorising the poems loosely and then arranging, slightly randomly, these categories throughout. The first and last poems are obviously very important to pick with clarity and focus in mind so I am giving special attention to these areas. Having never really considered my poetry so far as a manuscript, these ideas are all totally new to me and a major part of my scholarship experience. Again, I am bowled over by the acceptance of this scholarship and the breadth of learning I have been able to attain, both scholastically and personally.

When I received the email that my proposal had been accepted by the Carnegie Vacation Award I was so pleasantly surprised. This year especially I have striven to push myself beyond the boundaries I usually set for myself and really test the limits of my abilities, and this seemed like such a good step in the right direction. Notwithstanding the introduction to really focussed study, invaluable to this year’s(!) start to my dissertation, the chance to move forward with both something I love and something I would like to be some sort of advocate for, these two things being poetry and mental health awareness, the scholarship seemed ideal.

Personally, the scholarship has given me a taste of the openness with which I would like to conduct my poetry career. As previously stated, I did not find it easy to discuss my own mental health and really struggled to know who to tell, or who needed to know. Do I tick the box on the application that asks for my health history? Is it pertinent to bring it up when discussing symptoms at a doctor’s appointment? And if someone notices the scars on my arms, how much do I have to share to get them to look away? I am not writing about these things because I like them, I am writing about them because I live them – and the scholarship has given me a structured way to do this.

With the heavy focus on editing and rewriting, this week of study has given me so many ideas of being thankful, for direction and acceptance. To be able to produce and collate this work has been a real privilege and I am aware of the fortunate position I am in. This opportunity has strengthened my resolve to talk openly about mental health and really give back in the ways in which I have been helped – by poetry, fellow feeling, and pushing boundaries beyond anything I have imagined.