Elaine Ewart

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Application for the post of Professor of Transformation

Describe your current role:

An enormous eye, fading like autumn,
by the light of a laptop late at night

Courses taught:

–Theory and practice of recognition
–How to untie yourself from knots
–Animal, vegetable and mineral specialisms

Theory of pedagogy:

The importance of inhabiting your own body before trying another

Explain the gaps in your employment history:

–in an enchanted sleep
–trapped on the other side of the mirror
–temporary participation in a hive mind

Educational background:

The time my father held me down to stop me leaving,
I was fish snake fire in his thwarted grasp that tightened,
shook and blistered. You’ll never amount to anything, he said.

For as long as I’d known her, my mother had been stone
in the corner of the room, and how could I be
anything else? Even when I was water out of the door,
they couldn’t see what I might become. Each Christmas I fall
as snow on their roof, and they shiver and shut the windows.

List your significant publications:

A swan’s wing
I finally made fly

A heart in flames
unconsumed

Reference (describe your relationship to the applicant):

Too often we said, there’ll be other times.
I won’t be there to see you
stepping up to the mic, needing no introduction,
blinded by the spotlight, sensing only when you try your voice
the size of the hushed crowd,
the rim of your spectacles the horizon
beyond which your eyes are lost.

You were the new moon in my old moon’s arms.
Every thought we shared is a chrysalis.
They still hang above my bed
a string of green paper lanterns
twitching as I sleep.

All I did was provide the heat.

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ELAINE EWART is a poet and writer of creative non-fiction, based in North Yorkshire. Her work has been published in various places including The Interpreter’s House, Arc Poetry Magazine and The Alchemy Spoon. Her travel memoir, Heligoland, is forthcoming with Muscaliet Press.