Balls. Yay!

4 days after hand in and the sun is shining and so are the birds and so is...whatever, I'm done.

Balls

Only 4 days to go till folio hand in. I find myself in a weird space between not having enough time to rewrite the whole thing (I wonder if anyone has ever tried?) and being sick of tinkering. In fact I constantly have to check that I am not over-editing and removing anything that was interesting about the poem in the first place. It is easy to do that, I think, the bits that your editor brain seems to think don't fit are often the lines that make a poem wonderful. The clunky, unfortunate, slightly baffling sections. Sometimes happy accidents, sometimes where the sound of the words have taken over from the narrative. It's tempting to try and smooth all those parts out, make some kind of homogeneous ball.

I saw on Myth Busters a few weeks ago, there is a craft where people polish balls of dung into shiny ornaments (these are called dorodango or happy mud balls in Japan). It takes days of polishing with your hands - apparently it is the oil from your skin that helps bring up the sheen as well as help draw out the excess water, but eventually you get this pretty brown ball that looks a bit like glazed pottery.

Shoot an Editor Day

This is a message from the Overactive Editor Gland Degenerative Disease Society

In today's world, 1 in 5 people live with or are an Overactive Editor.

Over three thousand terrible manuscripts were attributed to this disease in New Zealand last year. Imagine what it is like in places where clean paper is freely available and ink is cheap?

We all shake our heads and say, but what can I do? How can someone like me make a difference?

Well now you can...

OEGDDS International has organised 'Shoot an Editor' day on the 10th of November and we want you to pull the trigger.

Dan Brown, author of the famously erotic movie - The Da Vinci Code, says:

"If just everyone of us shot just one editor, books like 'Stranger in a Strange Land' and 'A Lifetime of Love: Poems on the Passages of Life' by Leonard Nimoy might have had a chance at a better life. A life where words like 'tootle-oo' and 'farness' can exist without threat of violence or ridicule. How many years must this vicious cycle of Over Editing go on?"

Please shoot your editor this 'Shoot an Editor' day and give generously.

And please, please don't let him trick you into changing the title. Again.

Potential Titles

First Born, Then What?

The Wolf Market

Idea for a Film (Short?)

Witnessless

The Arborist

On Parole

Tasseography

Motive

The Evangelical Book of Unconvincing Certainty

The Evangelical Book of Convincing Uncertainty

Wolf Music

Rebuilding

Folio is being rebuilt at an excruciatingly slow pace.

I've got about 25 pages settled in, so it should be simple just to spatter a few more in there, but no.

Haphazard rewriting, a bit of a mess of ideas overall and no real structure to speak of. What fun!

The Arabic Star

Let's talk fonts. Who votes for Palantino? I like the space it has. This place seems to have a reasonable range of free serif fonts. I think I'll look for something similar to Palantino, but less Microsofty.

My biggest break through has been to go for the six pronged asterisk, otherwise known as the Arabic star.

Also most of the books I've been looking at seem to have different justifications depending on the overall width of the poem. I like that idea too. There is nothing uglier than having a short lined poem left-justified with an ocean of white space between it and the edge of the page.

And of course have decided to go for slightly larger font titles, bolded and title-cased. I used to do lower case titles (except for the first letter), but this looks too grungy I think and doesn't really separate the title from the poem. Makes it look a bit like a first line. When you are as rubbish at coming up with titles as I am you need to keep them as separated as possible.

Think about it people.

Form

Michael Palmer talks about the difference between the 'laws of form' and the 'rules of form'. The latter being able to be learnt, seemingly fixed and in many cases not particularly exciting. While the former, can never be learnt, but also can never be broken if writing good poetry. I like to think of the 'laws of form' as being completely different for each poem. Where one poem might require couplets and end rhymes, another might want to be a single stanza of variable lines and syncopated enjambments. You can't learn what those might be, in fact I don't think you can even plan it. Until you start writing the poem it will be formless. Until a conversation, a subject or a tone starts to emerge there are no laws. It's a blank page after all and what form do you put on a blank page?

From The Danish Notebook (quoted in Active Boundaries. New Directions, 2008) which he was apparently asked to write as a kind of journal, 'connecting the dots', type thing:

I once thought I should find a form for this little book you have asked for, but now it seems unformed would be better, a book at fault. Displaced. I accepted your invitation because it seemed an impossible thing for me to do, against my nature as a writer. Of course one should never have such a nature. If you discover that you do, you must erase it, as violently as possible. Coup de torchon. Clean slate. One of our cats, the apricot-colored one, is sleeping on the computer as I write this. He doesn't give a shit one way or the other. As long as the computer stays warm.

He goes to say that the book did eventually find its own form "beyond conscious intent or design" that exposed "hidden memories and patterns." That last little bit about the cat is indeed against Palmer's nature. I've never seen him write anything so mundane and confessional before. It was very exciting. I think I'm going to have to try and track down that book. Hopefully it's not out of print.

I think pattern is good way of looking at it. Where is the pattern in this? And there is no pattern that can be imposed on an unwritten work.

Passive resistance

Three things have happened lately that have made me think about how politics (not sure that is the right word) interacts with poetry/art and if I should be doing more of that, which in short I think I should. So...

1. I've been reading Michael Palmer's essays in Active Boundaries (New Directions, 2008) all of which so far are as much concerned with politics as with poetry (in his mind they don't exist without each other I feel). He talks about George Bush, the Iraq ware, Vietnam, The Cold War - all the things that shaped who he is/was as an artist I think. He is so passionate about it and yet from his poetry, you would struggle to find an overt political subject. But it seems if he is always thinking about it working on what he seems to feel is a 'war on language'. So that was really interesting.
2. I went to the start of the World Peace March (it starts in NZ and goes around the world in 90 days), which was also a celebration of Mahatma Ghandi's birthday. I'm not what you'd call a peace activist, but I'm certainly a pacifist and I think passive resistance is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen (I have seen it on a small scale and it's impossible to beat). So I was incredibly interested in that.
3. I watched the Tua vs. Cameron boxing fight which made me feel sick. I am not against sport or competition or even aggression in the context of those two things and the actual boxing match was not such a bad thing. I think it was the spectators that bothered me the most, the baying for blood. The comments after the match - how wonderful it was, how sensational - it had been a particularly short and brutal knockout. Cameron was out of it by the end of the 1st round and at the start of the second Tua had him on the ropes and was pummeling him even as Cameron's legs collapsed and he fell to the ground. So by anyones standards it wasn't a tense battle between two great sportsmen, it was one guy getting the shit kicked out of him by another guy, but that's what these particular spectators wanted. And while I am loathe to draw the connection between that and greater issues of violence - international war, domestic violence etc. Maybe it does start in places like a boxing match at mystery creek?

So I guess I'm saddened by the whole thing. But then what do you do with that? How do you write a good poem about it. Palmer might use the bullshit hype/marketing speak of the fight promoters to illustrate something (however obliquely) that way, but what should I do? Describe the fight in detail? Describe everything about the fight except the fight itself? Talk about what I would have been doing instead of watching it? Run with the words 'Mystery Creek'? Have a dream? Talk about hippos and dinosaurs? I dunno. My poetry is often meaningless and that seems to be my violence, the thing that saddens me the most.

Fergus Barrowman

Yet another speaker last week. This time Fergus Barrowman from VUP. He talked about a whole bunch of stuff about the NZ book industry, including the slow demise of Whitcoulls, which has apparently allowed the independents like Unity etc. to have bumper years (yay!). He had a whole bunch of other depressing facts and figures, but the most interesting thing about him was how genuinely positive and optimistic he was. Especially about the digital 'revolution' and how that might allow good writing to rise to the surface and allow potentially much larger readerships than is possible with conventional books.

It seems we are in a fortunate space, geographically and culturally in New Zealand. We are in a position to both benefit from having a small market and in the future being able to go global through the digital thing. I'm feeling positive too. Thanks Fergus.

At the half-time coffee break I tried to crack a joke and asked him whether as writers, we should think about putting often-searched keywords into our work for better google-books indexing. Like 'Britney Spears' or 'Blowjob' or something. I don't think he got what I was meaning though and I kind of blurted it out in a really offhand way. He kind of laughed weirdly and I had nothing else to say. An awkward silence descended over the whole room, until I stood up and pretended I needed to go get something. I'm so cool sometimes.

Interrogating the mind

Brian Castro came and spoke with us last week. He is an Australian novelist who also runs the Creative Writing program at Adelaide University.

He said some really interesting things about the nature of the novel and of the writer. He talked about his move to writing a novel as an 'interrogation of a mind' and his emphasis on voice over plot. He seemed incredibly intellectual and experimental. A real inspiration.

He also talked about melancholy artists and the power of melancholy which he differentiated from depression which he saw as a commercial/medical thing. I think he was coming at melancholy from the angle of its inherent introspection and space/time to let things sit an simmer I guess. It was an interesting idea and nice to hear a rejection of 'happiness' as an ideal, which I have heard elsewhere and I think I agree with. Why, if you ask so many people, do they say the meaning of life or their goal in life is to be happy? What is so great about being happy? Is that an honest way to live and more importantly what are the kinds of things you might have to do to attain 'happiness', what if you never attain it? Are you then a failure? Can't we be 'content' being ourselves, sometimes happy, mostly not - complex, interesting.

Here is an interview with him.

So yeah, he was incredibly interesting and thoughtful and humble, yet confident in himself. A great 2 hours.

21st Century Authors: Geoff Cochrane and Elizabeth Knox

So Geoff and Elizabeth Knox talked to us yesterday for a couple of hours. The idea behind the session was I think getting to know what it's like to be an 'author' in the contemporary age.

The startling thing about those two was how they both call themselves 'writers' and seem to have done so since the beginning (before the beginning?) of their careers. Which is nice I think that people do that, own the profession I guess. Kind of ignore all the defunct ideas of the 'author' as in authority and just say I am a writer, I write, that's what I do. For some reason though no one ever wants to say that, people are at pains to point out that they are not writers, either in it temporarily (like who knows what will happen tomorrow) or they kind of rebrand themselves as something artist like an artist or a thief or a note-taker or a bricoleur or something. Which is probably what I would do. Someone asked me the other day when I decided I wanted to be a writer, and I couldn't figure out how to answer. I ended up something lame like I don't think I want to be a writer. Which is untrue I think. I some respects I don't know what a writer is, unless it is someone who writes, cause then I am one I guess, but if it's all this other stuff like authority, being witty, clever, insightful whatever, then I'm not. Most of the time it feels like writing is totally out of my control and I'm not it and it's not me. Like it is a vacuum cleaner that has attached itself to my leg and is dragging me around the house.

One really cool thing Geoff said about how he writes is that he said you just have to 'man the station' - by which I think he meant, get up every day and get out your pen or computer or whatever and write cause if you don't you might not be around when a poem comes. That idea of the poet as a channel I guess, as opposed to the maker. Which I'm not sure I agree with a kind of belief, but I also think the end result is good. You do have to get up every day and write. It is a simple as that.

They also both talked about this thing called 'talent' which they both thoroughly believed in. I'm not so sure I agree with that either. I believe some people are better at some things that others, but I also think that they have learnt that, even if they did so at age two, being read to by their mother or whatever. But I guess there is then the issue of creativity, which no one seems to understand biologically, so maybe that is something you can't learn? Your brain either works that way or it doesn't?

Geoff Cochrane come on down

Geoff Cochrane is incredible. Just been reading Vanilla Wine and a bit of Acetylene (both VUP, 2003 and 2001 respectively):

Roman numerals

& spiky carburettors

clog the drains.

As I pass the Cenotaph

a cold wind soaps my cheek.

[...]

He is coming to talk to us today at the IIML (along with Elizabeth Knox), so hopefully he'l have some interesting stuff to say. He has a poem in Vanilla Wine called Automatic Writing, so I wonder what his process is? If he writes 'automatically' or has a more considered hands-on approach, some of his poems are so mysterious I suspect that they might be totally subconscious, like For Anne Carson:

[...]

The purple gloom

of a dire Friday,

and here we are sans God

lights stuck in us like darts

lights like stings all over

Gelid chrome deflects the pinging hail

Beautiful language and that is something I've noticed - he uses a lot of really unusual words, that seems to be his thing (as well as strange metaphors). The last line of that poem is a good example. Which is something I don't do and Damien has remarked I could try doing, which I don't for some reason? I've noticed Geoff uses specific nouns where I would probably tend to use a general one, like there are several poems where he says things like 'Mazda' instead of 'car', or 'Cold Water Surf' instead of 'washing powder', that kind of language I don't think I'd ever want to use, seems too temporary or too specific? 'Gelid chrome' on the other hand...