Literary Figures on Campus

Vincent Loh explores what would happen if key literary figures chose to study on campus today… 

Yeats on Monday Evening

He walks the same way to class every morning. On the way back he always sees stray branches litter the pavements in front of the incomplete Second Coming of the new Sports Centre. Along the road, fallen leaves swirl in the wind in widening spirals, then settling to the floor again, like falcons failing to take flight. The flowers and trees are dispassionate, their colours muted by the dust of buildings, while the concrete skeleton of the building looms large with dispassionate intensity.

Driven by desperation, he pulls the images together like jigsaw pieces in his mind

The creative writing deadline comes due. “Write what you know”, but what is there to write in this austere and sanitised campus? His eyes fix on the construction site. Surely there’s a metaphor here somewhere? He watches the leaves float again. They turn, and turn, and turn. He calls to them, but they cannot hear him. The tornado of leaves fall apart. Things cannot hold. They scatter and are lost upon the world.

Driven by desperation, he pulls the images together like jigsaw pieces in his mind. He turns pictures into words. Turn. Turning. Turning. Turning leaves like falcons in the air. The words fall apart and fall in place. He has it. The ceremony of writer’s block is done – revelation is at hand! He begins to write. He has work to do.

Edna St. Vincent Millay on Tuesday Night

She had planned to go jogging, but had emerged from her room to find flakes flying in her face. She watches the pavement turn from gray to silver to white as the snow falls and the temperature plummets. She kicks off her shoes and takes off her socks to watch the snowstorm, blown from the dark shape of the Student Union onto her flat door. Three flakes arrive, then four, then many more.

She likes the sunset, but rarely sees it nowadays, trapped in lectures and seminars as she is

The days end early in winter. She doesn’t like it. It makes the world seem darker, like the days are gone before she can hold onto them. She likes the sunset, but rarely sees it nowadays, trapped in lectures and seminars as she is. When she emerges from the rooms of her building, she finds the sky dark most of the time, as it was when she entered.

She has work to do, but the day and time for work is past already, and the night is depressing her. She’ll do it tomorrow, she has to wake up early enough to catch class.

Or perhaps she’ll sleep in, and wake up to find that the day has left already. Night falls fast. Perhaps tomorrow will be in the past, as it turns to today.

Allen Ginsberg on Thursday Morning

He writes a better Howl after POP!

The world blending into an indistinct mess of colours and pumping music rattling through our bones – an animal soup of time running through the night. The glaring eye of the piazza billboard that never stops like a sphinx of glass and colour and gold screaming “Moloch Moloch Moloch” at passers by? He likes watching the laughing crowds walk loudly past, the best minds of our generation destroyed by drunkenness, dragging themselves through the protest laden streets to sit, hungover and sleepy, in an empty lecture hall.

I’m with you in the Library, crossing the picket line, watching the snow fall in March

“Carl Solomon! I’m with you in the Humanities Building, dazedly walking up to the 5th floor for seminars, forgetting about the strikes in a daze of post-alcohol delirium. I’m with you in the Library, crossing the picket line, watching the snow fall in March. I’m with you in the Business School, watching students stream in unending lines through the thronging hallways, while half a campus away, the English Department is abandoned.”

He walks home to sleep off the hangover, picking up coffee from the cafe on the way back.