Katrine Lynn Solvaag

Katrine Lynn Solvaag is an Alumni Postgraduate Research Scholar (just like Sam was: see pages 4-5) studying for a PhD in Poetry: Text Practice as Research. Her work entails transforming the entirety of Herman Melville’s classical novel Moby-Dick into a sequence of prose poetry, while simultaneously researching similar literary transformations among fellow contemporary female writers.

The accompanying poem, created through a blend of found poetry and confessional poetry, utilises the language found in the fourteenth chapter of Moby-Dick to express her emotions while reminiscing on Dungeness, a location she once used to visit with a former partner.

When asked what inspired her to undertake this project, she highlights how throughout the majority of literary history women have predominately been excluded from the act of storytelling. As a result, recently there’s been a trend of female writers taking it upon themselves to rewrite canonical texts, in particular ancient Greek classics, in order to infuse a female voice within a narrative where it has previously been missing.

She continues by explaining that her poetry is jointly inspired by the concept of translation within a single language from one literary format and into another, alongside the found poetry tradition of using the words of another to tell a story about oneself. What she hopes to achieve with the poetry collection is primarily to highlight the poetics already present in Melville’s language, potentially inspiring more people to read and enjoy the novel she has personally fallen in love with, and secondly to establish literary transformation as an accepted technique within the academic world. However, she also is aspiring for the collection to take on a similar emotional journey to the one experienced in the original, tackling parallel themes of grief, loneliness, companionship and adventure in order to showcase that regardless of how much our exterior world might change across time, we will always continue to tell the same stories.

I just want to extend my most heartfelt thank you to all of you who donate to the Kent Opportunity Fund. Without your support I wouldn’t have been able to embark upon this degree, and more importantly, to receive the time and support needed to undertake this poetic journey. I look forward to the day I can share the finished collection with each and every one of you.

Chapter 14

Nantucket

An ode to Dungeness

I turn the pebbles over in my hand, each stone clinking against another, and release them in time to greet the racing tide.

I always thought of this as our place. Didn’t you? Like Nantucket, it occupies a strange corner of the world. Take out your map and look at it. Nothing happens here anymore. It’s a lonely place occupied only by thistles, wrecks of ships with faded names, a fenced-up electrical plant blocking the sunset, and a solitary lighthouse waiting for no one.

Yet here I am. Waiting for you. But not even the haunting memory of you bothers to show up. All I find is sea, gulls and pebbles. Why am I here again?

I listen to the call of the gulls crying out their own oral Iliad. They say one blade of grass makes an oasis and I have spotted three, ready to be rocked to sleep by the crashing billows.

I turn a pebble over in my hand, feel its smooth surface against my fingertips, and throw it back into the sea. An offering, perhaps. A token of peace. A plea for the ghosts to leave.