Dear Eve,

I hope you are well! I, sadly, am not. I’m writing to you after stubbing my toe for the third time today, so I am slightly incensed. Perhaps this is a Roethke situation — “I learn by going where I have to go”. What mystifies me in this case is that I don’t want my toe to brazenly collide with my door frame every time I leave my bedroom, yet here we are. Let’s move on!

I just finished Diarmuid Hester’s Nothing Ever Just Disappears. Really great read – remind me to lend it to you! (and remember to refuse, because I always forget to ask people to return things). So excited to have him supervising me this year, and less excited to have to write things — boo. I raced through it in about three days, averaging 150 pages a day — whether this is portent of my rapidly worsening status of unemployment, or a rediscovered passion for the hallowed halls of literature, is yet to emerge.

“Biscuits have a curious space in the literary canon”

I particularly enjoyed his chapter on Kevin Killian. Hester’s authorial voice reminds me of an excerpt of communication between Killian and Gary Sullivan around Jack Spicer, a wacky poet of the San Fran Renaissance — he was a poet of “extreme mystery and fascination” because of his struggle with language’s materiality, a “critical mass… [threatening] to topple his sanity”. On a base level, this reminds me of many unhappy hours spent in the Lucy Cavendish Library, writing a shoddy essay on Middlemarch, or my darkest-hour realisation two days before our paper four exam just gone, when I learned Gawain and the Green Knight were, in fact, different people.

In other news, I’ve really been getting back into biscuits. The consumption of Hershey’s products across the pond reminded me that, if I’m being totally honest with myself, I’ve never been totally sold on chocolate. 65p Sainsbury’s ginger snaps have resumed their rightful place. Critically speaking, biscuits actually have a curious space in the literary canon — Carl Sandburg himself called poetry the “synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits”. Shame I hate the smell of hyacinths (there are notes of rose in there, which I similarly can’t stand).

“My poem was, shockingly, about social embarrassment”

Speaking of things I hate the smell of, the other day (in my unemployed stupor) I thought back to one of my Prac Crit seminars, in the evil Lucy Cav basement room, where we discussed, and composed haiku and senryū. There was some kind of unnameable beauty in each of us coming up to the board in turn, etching in our words with rapidly drying whiteboard pens. My senryu was, shockingly, about social embarrassment. Who would’ve guessed? I’ve taken the liberty to reprint it below, but please know that sharing it constitutes a copyright infringement, and (given my priorly discussed bountiful free time), I’m feeling litigious.

this is too loud:

eventually settling on

charcoal grey again

You might be wondering what planted the seed for this demonstration of poetic prowess. Luckily, you have an in with its author. The piece was inspired by a particularly disappointing trip to The Grafton — things were going well after a side quest to Superdrug, an unsuspecting umbrella snatched up for £2.50. And then it all went wrong. Primark has a kind of effect on my neurotransmitters that I can’t fully articulate, but for whatever reason some colourful, arresting and particularly fun penguin socks were rejected by me in favour of plain grey ones.

Perhaps the next piece written to you will be from a braver man. We can only hope. Wishing you all the best and awaiting your prompt reply,

Joe