Andrea Gibson is perhaps my favourite human being.

On some days I think that I’d like to loudly confess my love and beg Andrea to live with me forever. Friends and colleagues may well balk at such a statement, not only because of my general misanthropic demeanour, but because Andrea Gibson’s affecting, queer, and emotional poetry represents a neat antithesis to my stoic, detached, and cerebral public persona.

But Andrea’s work is so mesmerizing as to be worth memorizing. Occasionally, with a full heart, I will replay the poem Ashes in my mind, walking through the spaces where it lives and falling in love with it and its author all over again. There is so much feel, so much body, so much light and life, so much hurt, so much feel, so much poetry in everything that Andrea writes that for a long time I have felt that it could only ever be cheapened by analysis. I say that as someone who lets nothing slip by unanalyzed; Andrea Gibson’s work is better if you try to open yourself up to feeling it.

In this regard, whenever I encounter reviews of Andrea’s work I often find them to be either merely observational or a poor reflection of something that Andrea does better than poet that I know: affect.

Thinking about affect, perhaps we do not have to let the work pass by unanalyzed but rather we need to invoke the necessity of developing a different kind of sense to analyze it. I’ve always loved this quote from Felicity Coleman on how Deleuze considers affect:

Watch me: affection is the intensity of colour in a sunset on a dry and cold autumn evening. Kiss me: affect is that indescribable moment before the registration of the audible, visual, and tactile transformations produced in reaction to a certain situation, event, or thing. Run away from me: affected are the bodies of spectres when their space is disturbed. In all these situations, affect is an independent thing; sometimes described in terms of the expression of an emotion or physiological effect, but according to Deleuze, the affect is a transitory thought or thing that occurs prior to an idea or perception. Affect is the change, or variation, that occurs when bodies collide, or come into contact.

What changes when bodies collide… I saw Andrea perform in Manchester this month and can certainly say that my heart left with bruises from a quite brutal crash. Thinking in terms of affect,  (as an aside, “to impress the mind or move the feelings of” might number among my favourite definitions), renders thinking available to the dense cacophony of emotion and feeling in each of Andrea’s poems.

As a challenge to any readers I might suggest the following: listen to these three poems:

I Sing the Body Electric, Especially When My Power’s Out  (Text)

Angels of the get through (Text)

Radio (Text)

A page from “Take me with you” showing the opening lines of the poem “Orlando”

Pay attention neither to what is said, nor to the captivating array of imagery and partial-objects which constitute these poems, and instead try to feel your way into the affective spaces that the poems are carving out. Those heavy-hearted feelings that come before you can think through what they are about. I picked those three at random but all are entwined with the theme of a pedagogy of love: of self, of a friend, of a partner. This is perhaps too cerebral a version of the analysis. To think in terms of affect is simply to be rendered open by the lightness and weight of what is being said, thus rendering a life vulnerable to the possibility of compassion; of suffering with someone else.

Andrea’s work batters down the well-practiced apathy of everyday life and joyously invites the listener to suffer with them (recall the etymology of compassion), to smile, laugh, hope, dream, and weep with them. This audacious act of compassion is a collision of bodies of a kind, words used as weapons, catapulted against the walls of stoic detachment and disengagement.

But, there are cynical and critical voices who live in my head. As such, I sometimes find myself thinking that even this preoccupation with affect is limited, following from some comments by Claire Colebrook on the subject of affect:

There is nothing radical per se about affect, but the thought of affect–the power of philosophy or true thinking to pass beyond affects and images to the thought of differential imaging, the thought of life in its power to differ–is desire, and is always and necessarily radical. The power of art not just to present this or that affect, but to bring us to an experience of any affect whatever or “affectuality”–or that there is affect–is ethical: not a judgment upon life so much as an affirmation of life.

Art- not as the presentation of liberatory affect- but as an affirmation of life. Even if Andrea’s affect(ing) writing can’t save us, the affirmation of life doesn’t seem like such a bad consolation prize. We all need that sometimes.

Needless to say, I am looking forward to Andrea’s new book being released in November.

It’s exam season again and that means that I’ve been obsessing over marking again. While there is a broader conversation to be had about the intensification of academic work and the long hours culture that entirely obfuscates any notion of a “work-life balance” and the way that an obsessive climate of measurement (and consequently marking) contributes this, my preoccupation has most often been on the psychological complexity of marking and my reflexive questioning of myself and my own agenda while marking rather than on the stress placed on me by, say being told by the University that I must mark 130 papers in 5 days.

In one of the few essays within our discipline to even consider the problem of marking (and one of my favourite essays of his) Damian O’Doherty reflects on the “Impossibility of Marking” and the complex of psychic forces that intervene in and direct the process of marking exam papers. These often conflicting desires include general expectations over standards, the lecturer’s desire to be seen as a ‘good lecturer’ and the student’s desire to be seen as a good student, the performance of identifying students by a particular grade etc. Indeed, O’Doherty importantly unpacks that marking is not just an arbitrary grading system but a system of identity construction, a branding. Students are labelled as ‘first class’ or ‘average’ which constructs, threatens and reinforces various identity politics, prompting anxiety, uncertainty and general panic among both markers and the marked.

O’Doherty stops short of a full catalogue of experiences in his short essay and I wanted to add a listing of my own experiences of the complexity of marking as an append to his text:

1. A student has not quite answered the question but has followed my advice to think ‘critically’ and ‘ethically’ about the topic of performance appraisals. I give them a higher mark than I should both because I am glad that they followed my advice and because I am afraid that my instruction has been insufficient to help them appreciate how to think critically about a question.

2. I spot the essay of a notably brilliant student by the handwriting and syntax. It is undeniably better than the majority of their peers but it does not seem to merit a first. I cannot tell if I think that it does not deserve a first because I expected further excellence from this particular student (based on my conversations with them, their previous assignments, conduct in seminars, attendance etc.) or because it actually does not meet some supposed ‘objective’ standard of quality. I give them the first.

3. I notice that I am far more generous in my grading than my colleagues. Where another would give a 25 for a thoroughly insubstantial answer, I am tempted by a 38, the idea being that I am already failing this paper and see no point in tanking their average with a very low grade. I do not know if this means that the integrity of my marking is compromised or if it is because I am more sympathetic and less willing to pretend to be “objective”. A situation comes up in the Board of Examiners meeting where a student fails all of their modules except mine, passing with a 43. I try not to make eye contact with the chair of the Board, just in case she decides to ask if I’m sure about that grade or why mine is the only module that this student passed.

4. A student gives an answer which seems average: noting points briefly without fully developing them, lacking substantive analysis, lacking a real awareness of the literature etc. I am, however, sorely tempted to give them a first because I recognize whole passages of text as quotations of things that I said over the course of the term. I feel vaguely flattered that a student has put time and effort into memorizing things that I said but I am concerned that there is no understanding of that quotation and furthermore that if an internal or external examiner got their hands on this paper they wouldn’t see what I was rewarding. I decide to go with a low 2:1 but would feel guilty about it later.

5. I find myself marking the paper of a student who does not speak English as a first language. Their writing is bad enough that I have trouble understanding a) what they’re trying to argue and b) whether they’ve understood key content from the course. I wonder whether my willingness to give this essay is a Third is because of my own fairly conservative attitudes towards English and its use and consequentially whether I have somehow been indoctrinated by some manner of anti-immigrant discourse that convinces me to more harshly judge the paper. I also reflect that the “official marking criteria” state that one of the criteria by which I should judge the quality of a paper is its “Presentation” (which includes grammar and punctuation) and I wonder whether if conforming to this makes me complicit in a system that at once seeks to attract International Students because of the money that they bring, while also vilifying them in the press. I give the paper a Third but later will feel anxious about the exploitation of the hopes and dreams of students from the global south.

6. While marking I keep a spreadsheet of averages and numbers of papers in different ranges. I notice that the number of firsts is getting a bit high and wonder about whether I should be more strict and “willing to see 2:1’s” in order not to raise any faculty or external examiner suspicions. I dismiss this as foolish and resolve to try to consider each paper on its own merits. The next paper that I mark is one that I can clearly identify as being “on the borderline” (either a 72 or a 68 because of the University’s categorical marking system). I decide upon a 68 but later will be bothered by the question of whether or not I decided that because it’s what the student deserves or because I wanted to keep my averages in line.

There are perhaps many more that I could add to this list and readers may well have their own. The moments of doubt, uncertainty, and self-questioning that all examiners go through aren’t considered or discussed because we have to maintain the pretence of “academic expertise” so that students will trust or otherwise accept their given marks. This is the reality to which O’Doherty alludes when the notes that consistency can vary wildly among different markers. No amount of training addresses or assuages this because it functions as a manifestation of the chaotic and confused nature of the human condition. In an era of automation, how dare we have human concerns?