The deadline for this term’s essay is Friday at noon, so essentially there’s one more full day of writing, plus a few hours of editing Friday morning, between me and submission. As always, despite my protestations otherwise, it’s come down to my usual pattern of research, research, research, then write everything in the last few days. The first couple of essays for my MA were written in two all-day sessions each – neither of which was very pleasant. Putting together a cogent 6,000 word argument from dozens of pages of notes is tricky, but for some reason I can’t get myself into the habit of writing earlier and editing / refining at leisure.
One possible reason (read: excuse) for this, is that starting the actual writing too early feels to me like missing out on valuable days of research. There’s a part of me that thinks that the research is the most important and time consuming part, and that the process of writing the essay is almost secondary: gathering as much great material as possible is the first priority; the masonry work of building something coherent out of it can be done more quickly.
So far (and I realise the extent to which I’m tempting fate by typing this right now) it’s worked out OK for me. But every time I go through one of those two or three day solid writing periods of putting notes through the juicer to make a paper, I promise myself I won’t do it the same way next time. This time around in particular I became a little obsessed with the idea that I would get sick just as the days I’d set aside for composition came up. All over the Christmas break I was almost Howard Hughes when it came to being around anyone with a head cold, or eating anything that hadn’t come, unopened directly from the fridge. Barring some overnight virus taking hold of my system in the night however, it looks like I’ve dodged that bullet this time, but it’s another reason why I know the way I go about this whole process isn’t particularly sound.
The essay this time is for my Modernist Poetry module, and I’ve chosen to write a comparative piece on work by two poets. The full, TBC title is Fragmentation and Palimpsest in Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos and HD’s Trilogy.
It’s been a fascinating paper to research, even if I feel I may have leant a little too heavily on Pound. Of the poets studied on the course over the last few months he was the one with whom I had the longest aquiantance already, and I felt like I got a lot out of studying The Cantos; it was pretty obvious to me when we were assigned them that Pound would be part of my essay for the term. HD, on the other hand, was a poet I didn’t know, and whose work I have to say I didn’t particularly enjoy when we read it for class.
I took the decision to write on HD for a couple of reasons:
- The use of palimpsest in her work is interesting on a formal level even if I didn’t like to themes in the poetry too much
- She had a relationship with Pound which, despite it being barely mentioned in the essay, forms a nice bond between the two of them [1]
- Writing on work you don’t particularly like can give you something to sink your teeth into
As it’s turned out I found a deeper appreciation for the technique in HD as I re-read Trilogy. In terms of poetic chops she’s considered among the very first tier of imagists, and it became clearer to me why that is the case. The material inTrilogy however, contains a great deal of medieval and biblical allusions which I don’t particularly get a lot of enjoyment out of.
I’m looking forward to having this essay finished up and submitted on Friday. I’ve got a haircut pencilled in the diary to celebrate, and then it’s on to reading Nabokov’s Pale Fire for the Postmodern Fiction course which begins on Tuesday afternoon!
[1] HD was actually one of two women Pound proposed to in the course of one year; they both turned him down.
