‘s what raises you
and places you above
the life you’re leaving, severed
from the one you live;
what hurls you forth
and holds you to the light;
whatever makes you into someone who’s made it,
and ‘it’’s the break, and what comes afterwards.
The break’s a falling-off
that isn’t flight;
is where you score the line decisively,
where change asserts its edge;
is where the present stops being itself,
the past becomes a cliff;
is what divides, on
either side, ‘What if’.
It’s where we wait
until
whatever’s next;
is the white spaces in the text;
is what’s suspended between page and pen
before the leader signs the law;
is where we pause;
is where we start again.
Hello! My name is Richard O’Brien, and I’m a critical-creative practitioner interested in early modern theatre and its creative afterlives in the present day. My PhD was on Shakespeare and the development of verse drama. I won the 2015 Ben Jonson Journal Discoveries Award for an article on fictional representations of Jonson. I’m also a widely published poet, and the winner of a 2017 Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. You can contact me about the course on r.t.obrien@bham.ac.uk, or make an appointment to see me in my office, shared with Dr Elizabeth Sandis, just through the computer cluster.
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