Agnieszka Studzinska

Agnieszka Studzińska has a BA Cultural Studies degree from Norwich School of Art & Design – an MA in Creative Writing from the UEA and an English P.G.C.E from UCL Institute of Education. 

Her first debut poetry collection, Snow Calling was shortlisted for the London New Poetry Award 2010. Her second collection, What Things Are (Eyewear Publishing 2014) was described by the award winning novelist and poet, Michael Symmons Roberts, as a ‘A subtle and beautiful collection in which – poem by poem – the possibility of true knowledge is tested.'

She is working on her third collection, The Branches of a House as part of her practice based PhD at Royal Holloway.

Agnieszka has taught English and Creative writing at secondary schools as well as art galleries and is currently a short course tutor at The Exchange, part of St Mary's University, Twickenham. 

Her research interest include interdisciplinary work between word & image, and contemporary American poetry: Anne Carson, Carolyn Forché, Jorie Graham, Alice Notley.  She is also interested in how writers such as Hélène Cixous, fuse critical and creative practices in writing.

PhD working title: 'The house a shelter for imagings': The Poetics of House in contemporary American Poetry

According to the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, “The house is one of the greatest powers of intergration for thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind." (Bachelard: 1964:6).  I am interested, as a point of departure, to look at Bachelard’s topoanalysis of the psychodynamics invested in the literary image of the house, to explore how writers use such images to examine their relationship to the idea of home.

Through close readings and analysis I examine two poems by Carolyn Forche: 'The Angel of History' in her collection of the same title and 'Nocturne' in her collection Blue Hour. I adopt an interdisciplinary approach, which entails phenomenological perspectives, literary and cultural theory, using Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology in Specters of Marx, (2006), to commence a conversation on hauntings and spectrality.

I offer a reading of Forché’s work in light of Jacques Derrida’s notion of 'hauntology,' proposing that Forché is a haunted writer and that both of her poems, embody and engage in the notion of spectrality. I also propose to explore the work of Alice Notley. I intend do explore how Notley presents and explores the subjective “I” – against the backdrop and structure of the house image. How Notley appropriates the house in her poetics as a discourse on subjectivity, autobiography and the unconscious in the poems: House of Self, Diversey Street and the penultimate poem, Mysteries of Small Houses in her collection of the same title.

My creative component works towards a third collection of poetry; raising questions on how we inhabit our world? How we dwell in the space of house and home? This collection is an exploration of the hauntings of lost homes and places, told through a series of interconnecting narratives engaging with family history and memory that embody a sense of dislocation.

The poems embrace the prosaic, the poetic, and the fractured utterance of thought and meditate on the reliability of memory. They are constructed out of the gaps in remembering as well as from experiences of the longing to find ‘our corner of the world.’ (Bachelard: 1964:4). Branches of a House is an archeology of fragmented thoughts, and weaving narratives, in which a house of memories is built but in which memories are never safe, always poised on the threshold of loss.The sections are arranged without any linear progression; they are not supposed to be read as subsequent steps in the narrative but as sections, which could stand on their own yet when read together create a narrative on the presence and absences of homes, places and people.