Ophelia enters, playing the lute
to share a song that she wrote
about being sick to death of being good
but keeps hitting the wrong note.

The Lady of Shallot is mute.
She has been since she failed to float
but she etched her song into the wood
that made up her grave and her boat.

So, this is the poem that I will end up writing
when no other poem is willing to do the work.

This is the poem I write when I'm past not
being able to sleep and I'm beyond
even trying. This is born of body burnout.

This unfolds as I unpack myself from
bags beneath by eyes.This is an ugly poem
unfolding from ugliness.

In this poem, I'll make an ambiguous allusion
to someone who is missing. The kitchen
feels suddenly too small.

This may be one of a few kinds of resentful:
parental, psychosocial, rebel-without-a-cause sentimental
but the poem blames something for what it is.

This poem is to say I am not a talented poet.
I'm a poet with a stammer, a non-poet, speech impaired,
a poet with neither the rage nor the riot.

So this poem may even plagiarise, for
not even poets have measured how much
the heart can hold. -Zelda Fitzgerald.
This poem throws itself down the stairs.
It burns down the asylum with stolen words inside.

How do I urge this poem to do better?
I can't, I can only keep writing it.
Writing out my resentment, my restlessness.
Wretchedness, Wanting. I can even break
linguistic, grammatical and syntactical
regulations By capitalising some arbitra-
ry Words and messing with enjambewhatnow.

This poem has found a neologism.

In this poem I CAN RAISE MY VOICE
for my wanting, and then in the same poem
shut my voice into a music box
to leave on your nightstand.

This poem has managed a neat trick. Illusion?
Some rhetoric magic. Some see a rabbit appear from
nowhere. Others see a girl being sawed in half.
.
The best (- though, at what?) could see both
but know it's not really about that.
They know it's about appearing as something
that are you not and that's a craft in itself.

As I or this poem already told you,
I am  not a talented poet. I am just a girl
masquerading as someone she's not,
because she doesn't know what she is yet
or wants to be or could be, yet.

She and this poem may seem to have more
to them, to be even interesting,
but both are waiting for you to grow bored.
"

(3 hours. 3 years. A lifetime.)

1. 'and the Doctor said, "are you saying you feel guilty unless you are hungry?"
Discuss, with reference to the roles of female c haracters in the American moderns, particularly  to Plath's representation of Esther in The Bell Jar , the relevance of this quote to your adolescent development.

(10 marks)


2. Should a poet's work invariably utilise enjambment or read in sequence, allowing the poet freedom to let the poetry find it's own form?
(Candidates are encouraged to explore the source to which the question above alludes, and to formulate an original argument with an effective use of rhetorical devices to communicate it,)

(8 marks)


3. Elucidate your role as a daughter, then compare and contrast it with your role as a student. Use quotes directly taken from personal experiences and your own examples to clairfy your explanation.

(5 marks)


4. They are all looking at you and laughing at you. You are a joke. You are hallucinating and haven't slept in days. How does this make you/the reader feel and do you think this was a part of your plotline intended to elicit a particular response?

(5 marks)


5. Love is not unconditional. Discuss.

(10 marks.)


6. "To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering."
This famous quote by Nietzsche presents him as a nihilistic and misanthropic individual. Do you see him in this light or can you find hope in his hopeless stance? Use examples of your own suffering to corroborate your viewpoint.

(8 marks)


7. Is morality a prerequisite for appreciation of art? Are you? Are you appreciating/appreciated? Discuss.

(10 marks)


8. Calculate the 369th digit of pi as the fractal proxy to represent the infinite worlds contained witin each human being, and in doing so determine the contribution that you and the offspring you will most probably never have cannot contribute to the world shared between the infinite number of individuals posessing their own words, continuing on to deduct your own value from that of the mean value of the population considered in this infinite data set and draw up a graph to visually demonstrate the extent to which the world doesn't need you.

(15 marks)


9. Using the individual calculations formulated in question 8, derive the meaning of Y.

(5 marks)


10. Draw the shape of your sadness

(20 marks)


11. Don't you think you should have learnt by now?

(25 marks)


12. Explain what you are hoping for, and substantiate your hopes with empirical support.

*(5 marks)

We grew the earth, grew it around us and grew into it.
We grew into pairs of shoes after pairs of shoes
and we grew into our names.
We learnt to tie the laces of our shoes
and to tie our tongues around our names,
and the names of other things, other people,
and around other people's tongues.

We planted our cultures, cultivated them,
and they blossomed into traditions
and stereotypes and generalisations and rituals.

We broke in our shoes, broke the ice,
broke our voices, broke promises.
We broke glasses, hearts and bones.

We built hierarchies, looked up, looked down, bowed down.
We broke down into dictatorships and demonstration.
We found solutions like democracy
and diplomas and delegated.

We fixed fountains and freight trains
and falling trees in the forest and faucets that leaked.
We formed partnerships, made promises,
pledged to parties for both politics and both parents.
We made marriage and then we annulled, we divorced.
We fabricated the faiths that we fed on.

We invented stopwatches, reality television,
pedicures, lampshades, philosophy,
greenhouses, dictionaries, exclusivity,
feng shui, hand-holding, ****** medication,
street art, lawsuits, lingerie, car boot sales,
snow days, karaoke, comics, psychics,
boarding schools, toast, baseball, psychiatry,
bird-watching, plaid, research, stag nights,
slasher movies, salads, and interventions.

We wanted and we wished and we waited
and we wanted for more.
We were growing faster than we invented.

We were outgrowing ourselves
and our earth
and our shoes
and our names.

We forgot what we had found and fixed and formed.
We broke down and went broke.
We are waiting to invent a new way we can fix ourselves.

I.
Why do you always speak in twos
in twos?

II.
I speak to myself in the third person,
listen from the
first time I
heard
the first time.

III.
Spoke = I'm stupid = shut up = out of breath.

IV.
I've been holding my tongue for years
everything aches unspeakable aches
that I- and I- and
you-

V.
Mistakes.

VI.
"I wish you were somebody else."
Words can't be unsaid.
"It's all inside your head."
I wish it was, someone else instead,
her instead, her instead,
someone else, someone else said.

VIII.
Always skip the stanza seven.
Couplet in elegy of cousin, in heaven.

IX.
Speak now, or, forever hold your peace.
I chose to hold forever, not knowing
it was all I spoke for.

X.
"Keep quiet, until then."
Hold my breath until when?
Out of breath by stanza ten.

XI.
You must have me mistaken,

XII.
No words.

How did you wear it so easily,
make your head hang so naturally?
Perhaps it's one of those things
for only some people. For some,  
mourning suits. I'm not one of them.

Tell me, how did you cut your grief
so clean in half, just like a smile I saw
caught in the gleam of sun
on a swimming pool, shimmering
in a mirage or a lifetime ago,
when the summer heat knew us
and was simmering around us,
lifetimes ago.

It cut the world in half,
divided then from now,
divided moonlight,
split open decay to allow for more decay.
We've been doing that since May.

Now it's autumn,
meaning cold feet and a pile of laundry
losing heat, and inconsolable sky
and a train pulls into the platform,
empties itself, and on a sixth floor balcony,
evening dewdrops cling
to the railing, trembling, shy.

The thud of old telephone books,
thrashing in the wind. Our bones shook,
as we went on running on, ruining
one another for anybody else.
Everybody else.

Broken leaves, gold and russet.
Seasons leave us more than people do
so why is it we don't mourn the fallen
from trees as well as wars and cars and
wars and wars and  wars.

The 11th of the 11th month at 11
they called for peace. Rest in peace.
At 11:11 I wished that someone
somewhere will soon kiss away
my idiosyncrasies
and my memories
until they sigh,
bye, bye, and you're gone
as if never here. They always say
earth is a place you didn't belong.

Cold and birdsong, chuckling
at the window. You are always there- yes you,
at the edge of that photograph
in lecture halls. in guitar chords,
in nothing-at-alls, in hospital wards.

Your face, slow-burning,
an afterimage,
across fields of morning light,
under the lapels of mourning suits.

A pile of human teeth,
that which does not belong to itself but to the night and the moon
     and the lock and the hook, that which once did belong to itself,
     or to me,
a murmur and little more,
   something you shake in the hope that answers to the questions
     you want or some reasons you've yet to find
     will come falling out,
an inhabitant in a house that becomes a crime scene during their absence and they cannot be an eyewitness,
she who wanders along the beach by the sea,
    in search of shells,
   to listen in for the sound of old echoes,
         the unreal, suspended, irrelevant,
         the night-time fragments leftover after
            daylight gets its teeth in,
       a rule-****** in asymmetrical glasses,
       one of a family of confused clowns, juggling dreams
         that were once in trees, struggling
         and underestimating distance,
a cracked window in November that seems out of place,
    a Tuesday afternoon, and specifically not a Friday sunse
    or Sunday dawning,
a wishful **** belonging in the boneyard,
housing an ocean of unspeakables in
    attic mind,
    greenhouse heart,
    cavern mouth full of sea,
the container of many unspeakables,
    a cup, profoundly sad for being always a touch too empty,
        contained inside a small glass bottle,
         a paperweight.