Yesterday, at 9:30 am in the morning (just as it started to snow and Pisces rose over the Eastern horizon), Dr. Zoe Skoulding congratulated me for passing Viva in poetry. I can’t even begin to describe the elation. I’m now officially Dr. Stephanie Warner PhD after four years of pushing that thesis boulder up a mud-slaked hill — Saturn cracking its whip in my 9th of academia, tomes, and treatises all through the pandemic.
I’d like to say the thesis was a labor of love, but more often it was fuelled by sheer masochism, and spite. After my whole life bottomed out in early 2020, I was determined that my academic toil wouldn’t be hoovered into Hades as well (hard Pluto transits amirite?).
My thesis — Denise Riley’s Fractured Elegies: Songs and Sonic Futures, Across the Radiant Void — will soon be hard-bound and slotted in the stacks of The University of Manchester. Something to take with me in my sarcophagus. A poetry collection was part of this project as well: though some of the poems have already been published in my first collection, A Violent Streak, there’s new material I’d like to shape into a chapbook this year. Feeling like Saturn’s goodest girl.
The astrology of my defense was quite uncanny (and no, I did not choose the date). The Sun had just inched out of Capricorn, from the 8th’s shadowy vales to the wide country skies of the 9th. As my natal Sun is at 1 degree of Leo, I had my annual solar opposition yesterday, lighting up the axis of learning, communication and the life of the mind. This transit sees the ambitions of your life reaching some sort of climax or critical point, with one last obstacle to be overcome.
The opposition itself is Saturn’s aspect, and could be thought of as the process of dialectic, or an awareness of separation and polarity. It’s perfect for the notion of defense, as several of the questions sprang from what my thesis did not do, or the avenues it chose not to explore. That tension of opposites was baked into the thesis itself, which is a creative-critical poetry PhD (unique to England), requiring both a dissertation and a collection of poems (and connective tissue between the two).
The third house, where my Sun and Mars reside, presides over mental exertions that have a more provisional, or day-by-day quality. The Moon finds her joy here, and the third house delights in the kind of transmissions that are broken, unfinished, and in a state of flux.
Poetry, blogging, emails, memes, horoscopes (which I now make my living writing) all find their home here. The third house concerns the ways in which our mental landscape, and the fray of our external environments, are in a constant feedback loop—sculpting each other. Denise Riley’s porous, Lyric I, explores these third house tensions across her poetry and philosophy.
The ninth house, on the other hand, presides over adventures of the mind that require a longer journey. From spiritual pilgrimage, to writing a novel of thesis, the 9th presides over academia, publishing, and organized religion.
The first universities were offshoots of the church, after all, so the entanglement of these themes makes more sense from an ancient perspective. If the third house is more heretical and pagan in its interfacing with spirit, the 9th is hierarchical, orthodox, and steeped in tradition. The monasticism required of a scholar is not so different from the clergy, of course. As Saturn finally entered my 9th (an otherwise empty house, apart from my Midheaven), it was the pandemic exile that allowed me to finally write my thesis. No epicurean Spanish distractions…
The Venus retrograde piece is quite fascinating as well. My research subject coalesced around the elegies of British poet, Denise Riley, whose collection Say Something Back, cracked my poetic imagination clean open. The 8th house presides over death, as well the occult (it’s a place of hauntology and entropy).
My research delved into Greek funerary songs, spooky Scottish Border Ballads, mystery rites surrounding Dionysus, psycho-analysis of the Orpheus myth and the linguistic contortions required in addressing the dead from a place of decorum (among countless other strands). I was also writing a long poetic sequence that explored epigenetic trauma through my bloodline, which was an attempt at an elegy for my grandmother’s lobotomy.
As I went through my thesis with a fine-tooth comb, I experienced the text as one haunted with its own hungry ghosts, and many sorrows. Its production spanned a mental health crisis that forced me to leave Spain (my home of 8 years — a Venus cycle), and then a strange, slow-motion breakup through the pandemic as Saturn-Pluto’s unleashing of the furies opposed my Venus exactly. Fun times.
The afore-mentioned mental breakdown forced me to interrupt my studies for a year, which in turn meant the loss of my student visa. When I returned to Canada I’d basically given up on finishing — lacking the energy, wherewithal, or money to do the visa process all over again (and part of me was like, fuck the home office). Then covid made returning to England a moot point, after all.
It was the pandemic, strangely enough, that caused the University of Manchester to waive the need for a visa to finish. I was also fortunate enough to be eligible for CERB from the Canadian government, and suddenly had 8 months of unemployment ahead of me to bang this thing out from my mattress on the floor.
The last months of finishing and formatting my thesis taught me all about the grueling Saturn-Mars opposition. I started my full-time position at Chani last summer, and for a few months I was juggling full-time work with thesis sprints in the evening and on the weekend. (If you’re wondering why my Substack output has been so scant as of late). All of this is to say, after months of mental beast mode, I’m definitely ready for the epic naps, retreat, and reverie that the north node in my 12th promises.
In any case, it was a joy excavating these PhD poems from Capricorn’s catacombs — their molten flows now cooled to obsidian. I’m not being precious when I say I repressed this poetic sequence… it scares the shit out of me. However, I think I’m now finally ready to return to this text and perhaps write some new poems around it. This feels like the Venus retrograde gold I’ve retrieved from the Orphic 8th house.
After finishing my virtual defense, I wandered the nature trails for some dazed forest bathing — ah yes, the sensual world beyond my scholar’s turret. My Virgo bff kept rubbing the most opulent, intoxicating smell from the cedar branches. A creek trundled through the melting snow. I saw my first robin of 2022. As the light gathers palpably in Aquarius, I finally have the sense of floating above Saturn’s box maze.
I’m about to book a ticket to California to finally meet my colleagues at Chani, and do some proper solar basking. A new spaciousness has opened in my life, and I’m overwhelmed by all the creative projects I want to tackle. Saturn has been appeased, for now, and I think I’d like to do Jupiter for the next while. A new life as a roving bard and mystic, moving steadily southward? A bolt hole in Argentina? You will hear all about it…