This is Writing?

Poetry and ebooks - what're you lookin' at?

2011-12-09T07:10:00.001+13:00

Warning: this post gets a bit technical and nerdy at times, but had to go there. It seems the tech nerds that design all this stuff don't understand what a poem is. I don't know if any of them will read this post, but poets/publishers won't solve this problem alone the designers of HTML and CSS will, let's remind them that not all text is prose.

So anyway, I recently had a poem published in an ebook for the first time. Exciting, but also a bit scary. 4th Floor is a great journal, with a fantastic editor and brilliant contributors. So I was thrilled to have a poem in the anthology. Thanks to 4th Floor and Whitireia!

4th Floor ebook

http://www.whitireia.ac.nz/4thFloor/ebook.html

All was great until I downloaded the ebook and opened it in an ebook reader called Magic Scroll. I haven't tested on other ebook readers, but from what I understand they all should have fairly well established rendering of the ePub format.

So anyway I read through Hinemoana's nice editorial and went to the first poem, 'Dear Grandmother' by Renée. And lo and behold, it was mushed up horribly! The very first line didn't fit on the page, it was broken arbitrarily.

The line:

Husbands are a necessary part of the design

became:

Husbands are a necessary part of the

design

And let's be clear for those people (web developers?) who don't write poetry, this effectively ruins the poem. A line break in poetry is everything. It is in many cases what makes it a poem, gives it it's value. It is used for rhythm, as a pause, a beat, it can change the meaning of the words (people tend to read one line as a complete syntactical unit). It is even used to create a visually appetising image on the page, which is all part of the pleasure of reading poetry. I tend to spend just as much time if not more time editing line breaks as I do the actual words themselves. Okay so that rant is over, but what do we do about it?

So I thought oh maybe this is an ebook publishing problem, like they forgot to turn on the 'poetry option' or something, and being an IT nerd in my other life, thought I'd do a bit of research and maybe help with the next one.

And for the non-technical poets out there, an ebook is basically just a webpage. It uses HTML and CSS like a normal webpage to display text using tags and styles.

I searched and I searched and it seems there is surprisingly little discourse on this out there (if anyone knows where people are discussing this then please let me know).

I found many posts where some web developer provides examples of how to style a poem in HTML/CSS. Most of these were horrible, involving centring the poem and using prose syntax to try and fudge the shape of the poem. This doesn't solve any of the issues I've found with ebooks on small devices.

But then I came across this issue raised by Dr Olaf Hoffman to the W3C (who are responsible for improving this stuff). He is basically putting forward the case to add poetry elements to HTML. It is very illuminating as to why this hasn't happened yet when you read the responses to his suggestion. Developers seem to view poetry as a sub-set of prose, like say legal documents or shopping lists. And the argument never gets past that as far as I can gather. He is doing his best to explain the elements of poetry and how they differ from prose, but still, judging by there comments they don't seem to get it.

The 'issue' remains unresolved as far as I can tell.

Again for the developers that might read this, prose and poetry are about the same as Chinese and English. In a simplistic way I like to think about it as...

Poetry = Is primarily about rhythm and words to create meaning
Prose = Is primarily about words and sentences to create meaning

Left Brain Right Brain
Prose? Poetry?

...of course this is all fluid and there are hybrids of both of these. Obviously there is overlap. And there are historical reasons for the two approaches and why one now dominates the other. I would suggest reading Dr Hoffman's post if you want to go into that more. But suffice to say, they are two parts of something greater, our language.

So what started out as looking for a guide on 'how to e-publish poetry' turned into an issue at the core of the world wide web itself! Jeez.

I still can't believe poetry has been completely forgotten about?

Okay, so I know poetry is a pretty underutilised form of writing these days, so it is (kind of) understandable that it got missed, but still, most people know about it don't they? Know what poetry is don't they? Apparently not.

So what happens now?

Well first of all the web seems to deal with the issue fairly well. There are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of places (millions?) where poetry is published on the web and thoroughly successfully too.

But the web is different to an ebook. An ebook is also about accessibility and a book-like experience on a mobile device. So whether you have a tiny phone or a massive monitor you can read the same book easily. A great idea, but like I said, at the moment poetry on that little phone (and even on the big screen) looks rubbish.

I see two things happening. One, we all get behind Dr Hoffman (not sure how to do that exactly?) and push for poetry in HTML. Which I think makes sense, but there is probably a whole bunch of people who need to be convinced.

Or two, we don't do that and continue on. Either someone will make a 'workaround' for ebook readers to render poetry properly or poetry as we know it will disappear. Which is interesting I think. I'm not much into preservation, poetry does and will change with the times and with technology. That is how prose came about after all.

But you know there are poems NOW that need to go on to ebooks, not to mention that last several thousand years of poems that would do well in a digital format.

So please web developers, don't forget about us again. And if we can help move this along. Would love to, seriously.

ADDENDUM: Some interesting articles on ebook poetry problems

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/240586
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/14/poetry-and-ebooks-will-po_n_645677.html
http://ageofsand.com/2010/10/can-we-trust-poetry-ebooks-the-case-of-allen-ginsbergs-collected-poems/

Bird North (the original)

2011-11-29T10:31:00.001+13:00

Apparently you can't be original. If you try to be original, you won't be. It will be forced, fake, cringe-worthy. For a while there, people concluded that there is no such thing as originality and everything is a copy of something else, so don't hide it, embrace the copy, the fake, make that the point of the thing.

I think originality is not about form, or style, or saying something new. It is about being honest, it's about finding the truth. And I don't mean the facts, I'm not much for the purity of fact, I mean the emotional truth. That thing where you don't hide from what has to be said, even if it is ugly or shallow or silly or stupid. I'm a bit bored of being told nothing is new, because I read writing all the time that is new and fresh and makes me feel like I'm back at high-school again, baffled and out-of-my-depth.

There is plenty of ugly, silly, shallow and stupid men in Breton Dukes' collection of short stories and I loved them all. They made me cringe and gasp and think it's all just wrong. These stories are so wrong, why is there a sex scene in almost every one? Why don't these guys grow up and treat women better? How can they do such stupid things? But then that's the point, part of the reason it's so wrong is because it's so right. Some of these stories aren't easy to read and they might make you cringe. The trick is to ask yourself why.

Pick 'n' Mix

2011-09-15T13:05:00.003+12:00

This is my entry for the 'Mix and Mash' competition which aims to encourage use of online content. Seems like a good idea to me. I think I would call this more of a Pick 'n' Mix, but I quite like the act of rearranging other people's poetry fabric. My Mum is into quilting and she makes the most amazing things out of old scraps of material she finds. She made one for my brother that has multi-coloured piano keys made from old clothes he wore as a child.

Words in this poem come from Hinemoana Baker, Lynn Jenner, Airini Beautrais and Bernadette Hall. See Mix and Mash website for their original poems. This poem also borrowed some words from an American called Yusef Komunyakaa who recently won the Wallace Stevens award (past winners are pretty much a who's who of all the poets I love). His poem, 'The Day I saw Barack Obama Reading Derek Walcott's Collected Poems', also borrows heavily, I believe, from Derek Walcott himself. The circle is complete.

The Garden of O

we hear each others’ dogs
crisscrossing the border

moving from reverie
to reverie. a concrete fence

of flamboyant pumpkin vines,
sweet, intoxicating,

blood-orange
bloom. we are ants if you like,

a yellow backdrop
to the sag of powerlines,

an open mouth,
a crow clutching the hand’s

bright corrugations
of being and nonbeing.

as one watered
by the wind

and the sound of mountains,
clouds of double consciousness.

we never hear
the dense blue shadow

of each others’ voices.

Forgetercise

2011-07-01T11:45:00.003+12:00

This is a writing exercise modified by an exercise from Ann Lauterbach. Thanks Ann.

Forget everything you know about poetry or poets or language (I can do this pretty quickly, quite often I walk into the photocopy room at work and spend 5 mins looking around for the coffee machine, it's next door to the photocopy room). Now try to remember an experience you had of reading or hearing language that fascinated and/or baffled you. Now write about the place or time where that happened, don't worry too much about the words themselves, concentrate on the scene. Make that into a poem somehow. At this point you can unforget everything you know and make an awesome poem out of it.

The Hill of Wool

2011-06-23T09:16:00.012+12:00

The Hill of Wool, Jenny Bornholdt (VUP, 2011)

Here is an image of the painting that appears on the cover of The Hill of Wool. It is a painting by by Johanna Pegler, 'Webb Street'. Johanna seems interested in the texture of planar surfaces, like ruts on a grassy hillside, choppy harbours, driftwood covered beaches, stuff like that. They are kind of decadent and driven in their obsession with these kind of details, to the detriment of other things in the paintings, like in this one the sheep and trees seem almost secondary against the harsh beauty of the hill. There aren't as important as the hill itself.

And why am I talking about a painting when this is supposed to be about a poetry book? Mainly because I think there are some parallels here between Pegler and Bornholdt.

At first glance the poems here seem like realist paintings, the things in the poem relate to real things in life. Like in 'Winter' where the family is on a skiing trip, but the focus is not on the objects but on the language about the objects, the snow, the names of ski runs:

(apologies, but some of the formatting is removed by this blog website. Grrr!)

As the bus winds up
the children practise
their snow vocabulary:

Ridge Run,
Wedding Knob
Shirt Front
Escalator
Snowmat
Platter
The Chair

At night, a quiet
horse, white
as you-know-what,
moves out from the trees
to shadow us
down the road.

This poem intrigues me, partly because it seems almost perfectly formed (you'll have to buy the book to read the first half of the poem I'm afraid) and because there is this mysterious, silent horse at the end, an anti-horse of sorts, it stands in for something else, the you-know-what. A light-hearted take on a metaphor staple, but also with an underlying weight, where one thing stands in for another, where the horse is the snow and the snow is the horse and that is more important than the horse or the snow on their own as 'real' things.

Horses feature in this book in a few of my favourite poems. Especially in 'Poem About a Horse' which is again perfectly formed and a beautifully witty example of the 'imagination poem' where we know the things in this poem aren't real, they are stated as memories or hopes, and are evoked so evocatively we can't help but believe in them, we see them in the reality of the poem:

[...] Yaks could be good. The yaks

you heard about from the nice young man who sold you
your phone-the global roaming one. His uncle
was a yak farmer who lived next door to an Amish

community. In exchange for the wool they helped him
build his house-big so the yaks could come
inside. Tables and chairs were nailed to the floor

so the animals wouldn't knock them over
as they wandered about the kitchen. Yes
a yak could be good. [...]

The other thing I love about this poem and the reason it is more successful than some of the others I think is the length of the lines and exuberance of the voice and sentences. This poem is far less clipped and controlled as some others and the poem is all the better for it. The voice of is much stronger and comes through in a really delightful way. This poem is like a conversation, one where we are drawn into the voice as much as the images and the story. I was wondering why that appeals to me so much and I think part of it is Bornholdt's register, which is some ways is much like my own. It is the ordinary words that interest her, ordinary language, which has its own natural, subtle and beautiful rhythms, in a way that using a word like 'recliner' instead of 'chair' would break. The words themselves aren't waving flags, saying look at me, how great I am. It's the sentences the rhythm that is more important here. And for that reason, I think the longer lines, more complete sentences work better I think. They allow the real power of the words to come to the fore, a the voice to be strong and entertaining.

The book covers a lot of other territory of course, there are bunch of poems about the poet's mother and father. Children run down the halls of many of the poems and language, memory and imagination drift through many. Like in 'Memory':

[...]
They say to make a house. You can pretend
the rooms are there and in them store fast
memories so they stay whole, more than just a tremor

or a sense of something past. To do this, send
the years upstairs and down. Build shelves to last.
Evict the fact that sometimes we forget to remember.
[...]

I read a comic by Sarah Laing the other day on memory. She talked about 'The Rats of NIMH', a book I had completely forgotten about, but now that I remember being read it as a child how much I loved it and how it was so rich in imagery, the fields, the place where the rats lived. It is an amazing book. I can't believe I had completely forgotten about it. But that is how memory works. Little mines to be discovered I guess, and by discovering you are essentially reimagining them.

Another painting by Pegler, 'Norfolk, Repose'. I like this one because it reminds me of the Hauraki Gulf where I grew up.

New Post

2011-06-17T09:53:00.007+12:00

Someone told me once you should never name a blog post 'New Post', but that's like not calling a kitten The New Kitten, when it's old enough you give it a name. When a blog post is older and house trained you give it a name. Kitten's are cute and you can't blame them for not having a name.

The real blog, the one that will have a name, will be about the books I am reading now. Jenny Borholdt's latest and maybe something else. I read 'A Poem About a Horse' by Jenny at http://theredroom.org/?p=786. It was amazing. It had everything I love in a good poem. The Yaks, the Yaks! So I had to buy the book. More to come...

In the meantime a gratuitous picture of a kitten.

New Review - Rae Armantrout's Money Shot

2011-06-16T09:53:00.006+12:00

I have a new review! But not here. At www.helenheath.com.

It is of Rae Armantrout's latest book, Money Shot. I don't want to give anything away, but it stuck to the wall when I did the spaghetti test, so what does that tell you?

Helen is amazing, she blogs all the time. Poems, interviews, reviews, it's like a magazine, but she doesn't have anyone to boss around, only herself. She is also the marketing person at Vic Uni Publishers. I don't think she has anyone to boss around there either. She works hard I guess. You should check it out.

Dear Sweet Jenner

2010-08-26T16:52:00.003+12:00

Lynn Jenner’s first book of poetry (Dear Sweet Harry, AUP 2010) really is something that is more than the sum of its parts. It is one of those books that you can’t put down and read from cover to cover wanting to find out what happens and not so much what happens next, just what happens.

It centres around Harry Houdini and his life or at least the fictional representation of his life. There are letters, prose chunks and traditional lyric poems about Harry as well as Mata Hari and a whole bunch of poems that are more about Lynn’s personal stories or stories of New Zealand.

This might give the feeling of something cobbled together (like most first books of poetry?) - what does NZ Railways have to do with Harry Houdini? And I suspect in some ways the book did evolve that way, but through form and voice and changes in pitch it all comes together as a complete book. It has that look about it too, that it has been crafted with a wholeness in mind.

The result of this is that some of the poems seem to be there as linkers or to flesh out the story a little. Some of the letters felt a bit like this. And one could argue whether this is a weakness or a strength having these. I think that in this case, the book is better for it.

And on the flip-side there are some beautiful poems that are amazing in their own right and don’t need the book around it to dish out their goodies. The title poem, Dear Sweet Harry, was one of these. The rhythm and tone is wonderful and perfectly handled.

This book is cerebral without being a know-it-all, it is thoughtful yet plainly spoken, it sort of sets its gaze on you in a questioning way, without ever offering its opinion. A quiet surefootedness. A feeling not unlike you get when talking to Lynn in herself.

This is a lovely book that comes together as a whole and has some wonderful poems in it. It deserves all the praise it is getting right now.

There's Something Compulsory About This

2010-07-20T10:38:00.011+12:00

Kōiwi Kōiwi by Hinemoana Baker (VUP 2010)

I've been surviving on scraps of Hinemoana's work in journals for six years and now, finally, her second book has arrived.

It strikes me first of all as completely different in voice and style to her first. Where that was trimmed and clipped, almost to the syllabic level this is more voluptuous and 'talky', there is more in here of what I have come to love of her voice, the raw emotion, the turns of mystery and the self-deprecating humour. This is definitely a solid progression from the first book and also, perhaps this is the benefit of waiting six years, it's range is massive yet consistent in quality.

I loved dismantling the crane, fortune cookie and the fossils:

[...] Outside
men in orange vests prepare

to dismantle the crane
its four ropes of chain rise
like snakes from the bed

of a dusty truck, link after link
[...]

Her father visits for her 40th birthday. Don't think of it
as trying to conceive, he says. Think of it as catching a flight.
[...]

- wow, what a way to start a poem...

[...]
Well I
said the depot manager
I feel like I've swallowed
a large white
brick state house.
The brick isn't real
it's a kind of cladding.
At one corner
a nest of spiders is building.
[...]

And then there were some more readily available poems obviously influenced by her own childhood and her parents that were also up there in my list of faves:

From the squash club

[...]
The whole place smelled
like my father's gearbag

his headbands left overnight
in the wash-house.
[...]

And then more sonically experimental poems like the astonishingly visceral language sourced from a music theory exam paper in homebirth:

[...]
(iii)
An emerging event two thirds of the way through
has a rising motion which gives way to
an exploding attacking sound.

(iv)
Covers the full frame from root
(low thudding event)
to canopy
(floating bell echoes)
with the centre being occupied
by a wide band of white noise.
[...]

- floating bell echoes? Jealous.

Hinemoana also said at the launch that the best gift we can give her is to talk about the book on blogs, twitter, whatever. In this current state of great books passing by unoticed and unreviewed I like this idea of relying less on the print media and just putting the word out there ourselves in our own biased, unprofessional and incoherent way - all of which I am repetitively guilty of.

I was intending to write about it anyway, but I'm glad I could help her out in some small way because this book made me smile and not only because it was hilarious in places but because it was better than I expected it to be (on top of quite high expectations).

The first two lines in one of the most mysteriously intruiging poems about a kayaking trip called observation beach: a farewell mirrors in an opposite, yet reflective way, this book I think.

Soaked to my socks in spite of my spray skirt.
There's nothing compulsory about this.

And at the end of it I was soaked to my socks in lithe and slippery language, equal measures of mystery and truth and very much pleased that I had decided to leave my spray skirt on the beach.

Duets, sparkling

2010-07-12T22:02:00.010+12:00

Went to the launch of Duets, a chapbook project that pits (?) a NZ poet against a US one.

Edited by my friend Alice Miller and featuring Sam Sampson, Joan Fleming and James Brown from the NZ side.

All good and all very different obviously. A nice selection I think. A couple of poems James read were particularly great, he started off by deprecatingly proclaiming himself "New Zealand's foremost writer of light verse." His poems were simple and funny, but mainly so tight, like little balls of poetry rolling down a hill, but not a scary hill, a nice gentle undulating one. There was poem that stood out from the rest, he decided to use the same phrase (the green plastic toy) in every sentence. It was amazing, read aloud anyway. Such a crazy constraint and what impressive skill to pull it off in the way he did. I won't give it away. You'll have to read it or better yet buy the chapbook. Anyway, there was some really interesting and varied stuff, Joan and Sam were great and a typically incisive intro by Bill Manhire too.

Obviously the old chapbook budget didn't stretch to flying the American writers over, so when I get my hands on some copies I'll report back on them. I can't even remember exactly who they were, except Dora Malech was one of them (definitely got to get one of those) and an Andew someone? Anyway, stay tuned for those.

What a great way to start the week!

Recycled Books

2010-06-03T10:26:00.004+12:00

The "Mockingbird" House

A tank made out of books!
Why does everything look so great when it is made out of books? Is this the way of the future? When e-book readers have taken over, steel and would will be scarce, plastic extinct. Will I be building my house out of old readers digests?

A house out of books, now that would be cool.

Walt Whitman's Blog

2010-05-05T15:29:00.001+12:00

Walt Whitman has a blog

Some things never change I suppose

The art of list-making

2010-04-27T14:55:00.000+12:00

BBC News - The art of list-making

1) Start with a personal experience of list-making - like the time I wrote a list of things I didn't want to do that day. It was long.
2) Statistics on the wider use of list-making (include witticism on the nature of stereotyping and statistics) - should 25% of post, no more or single Rhodesian males between 27 and 29 years of age will get bored.
3) Add a picture - get more hits that way.
4) Sign up to Google Analytics to tracks radical increase of hits.
5) Conclude by writing a list as part of the discussion of lists. This is a defining moment and will be sure to increase hits even further.
6) Check the latest stats of hits.
7) Check again.
8) Reinforce to readers that it's not all about the hits. It's about the quality, the art. I write for me and me only. If someone else likes what I write, that is great, but essentially I'm here to please myself. Or at least organise myself. My thoughts. Organise my thoughts. Rationalise my thoughts. Make sure I don't get off topic. Focus I guess you could say. Yes focus. I like that.

Poetry Daily: A Dozen Rainy-Day Couplets, by Killian O'Donnell

2010-04-27T10:28:00.000+12:00

A cool Irish poem.

Poetry Daily: A Dozen Rainy-Day Couplets, by Killian O'Donnell

David Foster Wallace's first ever poem

2010-04-15T16:39:00.002+12:00

David Foster Wallace poem that he wrote when he was six.
God I hope no one ever does that to me.

Rae Armantrout wins Pulitzer!

2010-04-15T15:33:00.004+12:00

Rae Armantrout has won the Pulitzer with her wondeful book Versed.
Congratulations to her!

It was one of the better books I read last year. See here for my thoughts on it at the time. Although, having just read the post, I appear quite scathing. Must remember to be more balanced in the future. It really is a beautiful book.

J.D. Salinger

2010-03-08T19:19:00.004+13:00

Blow me down, if J.D. Salinger 'Glass Family' stories aren't the most intense, immediate, mysterious, theatrical and hilarious stories I've read in ages. I've always said I wanted to read Catcher in the Rye, but like so many other things, never did. Thanks Kate, for lending me Franny and Zooey and forcing the issue. The way Zooey spouts off new age eastern philosophy and then in the same breath berates his mother while she watches him shave is brilliant. I recommend Salinger to anybody. Of course, you have already been there haven't you, being far less stupid than me?

Ludmila’s Broken English

2010-01-12T14:43:00.003+13:00

Vernon God Little was one of my favourite books of 2004, so I went into DBC Pierre’s second novel, Ludmila’s Broken English expecting a lot, which is after all, what the second novel is supposedly about: expectation. I feel for Pierre in this novel, he obviously tried so hard to upstage VGL, adult characters, several settings, conjoined twins, a civil war in Ubilisk (a fictional Eastern European country). This had all the makings of something great.

The book has Pierre’s trademark metaphorical wizardry and odd, combative characters. The settings were great, with a kind of underbelly feeling - a rundown healthcare facility, seedy nightclubs, a wartorn town.

Ultimately though, the novel is let down by its action. Where VGL was tense and looming, a road trip to disaster, LBE seemed for the most part stuck in each scene. It chopped between two recently released twins in London and Ludmila, a young woman trying to escape poverty in Ubilisk. I’m not sure if this alternating format worked for Pierre, just as I was getting into one scene it would jump to another, the result was that nothing seemed to happen for a long time. I wasn’t really interested until the twins actually hopped on a plane and headed across Europe and the two worlds met. Up until then it seemed like a slow build-up and just didn’t have the pulling power that VGL (or most other novels) have.

It is unfair to compare the first and second novels of course, but even on it’s own I would have struggled to finish this book. And indeed, I did have to force myself. The blood spattered ending was bizarre too; characters suddenly dead who had been with us all the way through and a strange resolution which I won’t give away.

I liked Ludmila, she was obnoxious, intelligent and naive and seemed destined for disaster, much like Vernon in Pierre's previous novel. Although she always seemed like a secondary story to the twins, and I think here might lie one of the problems of the book. She seemed like the true heart of it and I don't think Pierre gave her enough texture to make her (and the book?) really come alive.

For me DBC Pierre is one of the most original writers around, and I'm willing to give him another couple of books' grace to really hit that sweet spot. Roll on the next one.

Somebody Loves Us All

2009-12-20T17:37:00.004+13:00

By Damien Wilkins (VUP 2009).

We talked about this at our newly formed book group last night. So I can't claim all of this, but we seemed to be in agreement about most of what was said.

Damien is of course a tutor at the IIML, so we all struggled to not hear his voice while reading it, or in my case imagine him and his wife as the main characters!

For most of this book not a lot happens, Paddy seems to have it together more or less. His mother has a strange accent related affliction, but it's not life threatening, Paddy buys a bike in a kind of second mid-life crisis, but this doesn't really annoy anyone else, his step-daughter doesn't really like him, but they tolerate each other, the father of a former patient and long-time listener suddenly disappears, but turns out to be on holiday. So what drives this book? It's a good question and I'm not sure I know. I guess for a lot of it we are waiting to see what bad stuff is going to happen, which can only carry you so far. There are several ominous moments, but they always seem to be averted at the last minute. And this seems to be a continuing theme through the book, that narrowly avoided disaster; the disruption of expectation. It seems like life in this book is a series of near-misses until eventually one doesn't miss, and this is likely to happen when you least expect, and it's about what you do during those near-misses that counts. Not what happens when the big one comes.

There is something in there about communication, about connection. What is that people are waiting for? Why don't they say that thing now? Paddy lives next door his mother, but hardly ever sees her, when she suddenly gets this condition, he feels it's better to leave her alone, live life as normal. He talks to the father of a former patient every week on the phone, they are hardly friends, but somehow this small routine is important to Paddy. I was never sure what all this added up to, but it seemed relevant. Is it something about all those things in life that don't add up to anything?

In a lot of ways this is a bit of an anti-story and I think in lesser hands it would have been a disaster. A woman who wakes up one morning speaking in a French accent is hardly a premise with longevity and Damien wisely avoids making that the central story. And having no real dramatic arc is a bold move, instead he brings us into the lives (and the minds) of Paddy and his family. And this is what drives the book forward, the mis-communication, the odd moments, Paddy's interpretation of it all. The peripheral characters like Tony Gorzo, Camille and Iyob. They are hilarious and all bounce off Paddy's own baffled view of the world and himself.

There is a lot in this book and I was never bored. Someone at the book group said they weren't so into the cycling scenes, but I didn't mind those, maybe being a cyclist myself helped there. Damien has such great characters and always something underlying, something subtle grating on the interactions, that we read on waiting for it all to erupt. Luckily Damien never lets that happen.

This passage seemed to say something about Damien's style:

There were other divisions. He the bathroom, but she vacuumed. He took things to the post office but she managed their join bank account, keeping an eye on the automatic payments and all other bills except those connected with their various insurances which were somehow his area despite the fact he'd overlooked a double payment on their car insurance for several months. This had all developed mysteriously, in some cases with a kind of illogic, and lying in bed, stunned by the dream he'd just had, it was nice to gather up a few domestic details.

I am not a man...I am Eric Cantona

2009-12-13T09:55:00.005+13:00

Looking for Eric is a Ken Loach film about a middle-aged football obsessed postman named Eric who is having a bit of a shit time. Luckily the philosophizing football legend, Eric Cantona, stops by for a joint and chat. This sets Eric on the path of redemption.

It was a weak story. There were heavy themes set up: youth gangs, men who walk out on their families, panic attacks, which was all fine and had the basis, if not a little melodramatic, of a good story. The problem was, all this was resolved in incredibly juvenile ways. I won't give it away, but let me just say, there is no way a psychopathic gangster would back down because of THAT! I guess if was a comedy, but it is a Ken Loach film, and surely those kind of grim situations need some kind of meaningful resolution?

Luckily, none of that matters, because Eric Cantona, the man, the actor, the legend was absolutely incredible. Oozing cool, style and wit, he was the movie. In fact I kind of wished he was the main character. Loved his beard too, are all French men so cool? Probably not, but Eric is.

It wasn't a bad movie, funny enough and saved by Cantona and the glimpses into Manchester life, but let's just say it had a few holes in the defence.

Video of Eric Cantona's infamous philosophy

Balls. Yay!

2009-11-14T11:43:00.003+13:00

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

Balls

2009-11-06T10:29:00.006+13:00

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

2009-11-03T14:47:00.009+13:00

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

2009-10-28T13:22:00.005+13:00

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

2009-10-18T11:00:00.002+13:00

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

2009-10-13T12:17:00.003+13:00

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

2009-10-08T09:08:00.002+13:00

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

2009-10-05T12:17:00.008+13:00

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...

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.
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.
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

2009-10-04T10:26:00.002+13:00

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

2009-09-30T10:49:00.006+13:00

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

2009-09-24T13:45:00.004+12:00

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

2009-09-23T08:26:00.006+12:00

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...

As is

2009-09-18T22:02:00.005+12:00

As is by James Galvin (Copper Canyon, 2009) - thanks Kay for lending it to me!

I don't think I've realised before how much Mr Galvin has influenced my own stuff (we had an intense but brief relaionship last year). I kind of thought I'd become some kind of Michael Palmer clone, but I think a lot of my stuff is actually closer to Galvin, like in the first poem of the book, A tiny yet nonexistent etching as seen through a magnifying glass:

Everything is drawn
With excruciating precision:
The grape arbor sheltering the children
Who are playing with a pig bladder,
The thatched roof of the cottage,
The boat pulled up on dry
Land, a curving jetty.
[...]

Similar tone, rhythm and enjambment I think. Although his control of register and syntax is so much better than mine.

So anyway, digging this book, and it seems like a nice return to existential form after X. Also I just noticed there is a poem at the back set in Wellington. I feel like I helped write it! Although the last time I painted a house I listened nonstop to The Brothers Johnson. Fuck that house was painted with LOVE.

Happy birthday Mr Seidel

2009-09-16T11:26:00.004+12:00

From the end of Sunrise (Poems 1959-2009) by Fred Seidel:

I wake beneath my hypnopompic erection,
Forty stanzas, forty Easters of life,
And smile, eyes full of tears, shaking with rage.

That was originally published in 1980, four years after Seidel turned 40. The poem has forty stanzas in it and seems to range around the world, Milan, Perth, New York - all the while counting down, like some kind of doomsday device. It seems like his poems from this time are a bit different too, less morbid I think, often ending on more of an upbeat note - young men's poems? I don't know. Maybe this fortieth birthday poem was his move away from all that?

Like I guess, if you look at the excerpt from The Last Poem in Book (see two posts previous) he is definitely concerned with a sudden conclusion. A scary sort of ending, the kind that might incline you to cry and shake with rage.

August Kleinzahler

2009-09-10T10:26:00.005+12:00

Been reading about August Kleinzahler in a review.

All of your ex-sweethearts are arranged in a chorus,
each in a pinafore with dazzling florets,
laughing themselves sick.

I love how this poem ends on the word 'sick' and he pulls it off.

And how in several poems he seems to address people in quite a confrontational way. It is good to see that, although I'm not sure I could do it. He seems interesting, but how much? I don't really know. I'll have to get a book at and have a proper go.

Not making a statement

2009-09-09T10:24:00.003+12:00

The ending of The Last Poem in the Book by Frederick Seidel (Poems 1959-2009. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. 2009).

[...]
I'm coming now.
I can't breathe.
I'm coming now to the conclusion that
Without a God. I'm coming now to the conclusion.

I love it how he never makes his conclusion on one level but does on another. Incredibly clever and sinuous. That age old thing in poetry where something is repeated, in this case in close proximity, and has a completely different meaning the second time. Beautiful and sad and has the truth of no truth.

A sudden freshness

2009-09-07T10:42:00.003+12:00

Printing reading journal today. Just spent three hours formatting it in MS Word. Yay!

A sudden freshness stirs then stills the air, the century.
The new jet-black conductor raises her batton.
The melody of a little white dog,
Dead long ago, starts the soft spring rain.

The Little White Dog, Frederick Seidel (Poems 1959-2009. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. 2009)

Circling back

2009-09-04T09:30:00.006+12:00

Letter 6, from Michael Palmer's Letters to Zanzotto (The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems, Carcanet UK, 1999):

Dear Z,
So we accused mimesis, accused

anemone
and the plasma of mud,

accused pleasure, sun
and the circle of shadow.

Yes! Mimesis and pleasure...

From Red Yellow Blue (Sarah's Eighth):

Now that you know all the words
and I have almost forgotten them

Or now that you have experienced rain
for days on end

and learned to paint with red, yellow and blue
those days which seem to have no end
[...]

Wormy metaphors

2009-09-02T11:10:00.002+12:00

A very felicitous eve,
Herr Doktor, and that's enough,
Though the brow in your palm may grieve

At the vernacular of light
(Omitting reefs of cloud) :
Empurpled garden grass;

The spruces' outstretched hands;
The twilight overfull
Of wormy metaphors.

Delightful Evening by Wallace Stevens (The Collected Poems. Vintage Books New York. 1990).

I like they way each line is interesting on its own in this poem and how it seems to be set against lazy adjectives. I'm not sure what 'Herr Doktor' refers too though? Given the time it was written (before 1936) it seems like it could be something to do with WWI maybe. I don't know. But the main focus seems to be on describing the night even if it is full of 'wormy metaphors'.

Gathering what falls

2009-09-01T18:27:00.002+12:00

Beauty makes me hopeless. I don't care why anymore I just want to get away. When I look at the city of Paris I long to wrap my legs around it. When I watch you dancing there is a heartless immensity like a sailor in a dead calm sea. Desires as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls.

On Hedonism, Anne Carson (Glass and God. Jonathon Cape Publishing, 1998). This is one of many 'On...' poems she wrote in a section of the book called 'Short Talks'. They read a bit like free-writing edited down into a poem. All brilliant, beautiful and unpredictable. So of course I tried to write some which turned out, blunt, boring and unimaginative, but ultimately not hopeless I think. Worth trying and maybe trying again?

Bad Google and bad language

2009-08-28T10:41:00.006+12:00

Just read this about google trying to steal NZ author's copyrights. Don't be evil, my arse!

I hadn't even heard about this but it makes me fucking angry. Why isn't this all over the news? Authors are going to end up like Hollywood scriptwriters before we know it. We'll be underpaid (even more so) and completely undervalued.

Deep breath...OK...

Back on the Michael Palmer buzz which is good I think. He's so dreamy.

Wrote my fifth poem for the week and quite possibly the only decent one. So five more next week and that's it. Or maybe not? Maybe I should keep going and do revision in the afternoons? I think that could work. Anyway my goal is five more next week. I'll be in Rotorua visiting my parents and mountain biking, so hopefully I can fit it in between soaks in their geothermal spa pool. Oh yeah, that's real art.

And something nice and ironic to end on from Mr Michael "McDreamy" Palmer (Company of Moths, New Directions, 2005):

Your Diamond Shoe

Don't write poems about what's going on.
Murderers and liars, dreams and desires,

they're always going on.
Leave them outside the poem.

Don't describe you sad-eyed summer home
or wide-eyed winter home.

Don't write about being homeless
or your home-away-from-home.

Don't write about war,
whether you're against of for,

it's the same fucking war.
[...]

That's the only time I've seen Palmer use an expletive I think. His language is usually so much more refined than that. I guess he was being ironic there too. Quite a different tone, objective and form from his usual stuff. I read in an interview of him the other day that Your Diamond Shoe was inspired by another poet, so I guess that explains that, but one of the interesting things that has plagued me since I read that interview was his objection to what he calls 'bad language' in poems. Which I couldn't figure out what he meant and obviously if he could define what exactly bad language is I could then stop using it. I don't think it is simply things like expletives or non-musical language though, but I guess it'd be more cliched or boring language maybe? Although perhaps there is something of a smoothness element in what he was saying - a beautiful language? Most of his poems seem to share that kind of ephemeral, languid tone that comes from the language he chooses, although I would hope he wouldn't close his reading to that.

So, Mr Palmer, explain yourself please, what is 'bad language' and how do we avoid it?

2009-08-26T09:32:00.001+12:00

A tail-wind and a full stomach - whatever

Brainpark

2009-08-25T11:41:00.003+12:00

Finished reading Anna Sanderson's Brainpark (VUP, 2006) which was recommended to me by a friend when I said I wanted something to read that was easy and cheery. It was definitely easy, not too sure about cheery, but I loved it. I finally get what all this 'personal essay' stuff is about. Her little things were so beautiful and inconclusive I wanted to read more and more of them. I remember reading one of Chloe's stories/essays last year and asking her why nothing really happened in it and why the narrator was so concealed - it seemed like just a description of a scene. I was comparing it to what I thought a short story was, with the whole beginning middle and end and characters, not really aware to the simple pleasure of describing a scene/moment in precise detail and ending it with an image, profound or not. And why I couldn't see that when I was supposedly writing poetry I have no idea.

Anna Sanderson's short pieces were precisely like that, descriptive, simple, beautiful. A reviewer for the listener called them 'burnt poetry' which I liked, unfortunately he seemed a little obsessed with placing her in a post-feminist world for the rest of the review.

Wrote a short thing today that started from a sentence. I like doing that. They go anywhere although often nowhere. So much fun. Was genuinely excited at the prospect of writing something, which I haven't felt for awhile.

We have two weeks of holidays over which I want to get as much new stuff done as possible. I don't care what it is about or where it goes because after that two weeks is over I am going to get down to some serious revision. Start reigning in the random stuff. I did that with one poem last week. It took me ages to figure out what the fuck the poem was doing, but when I got there, I think it came together OK.

Toto comes to the rescue

2009-08-21T09:42:00.007+12:00

Thank God for Robert Hass and his clear unintimidating prose. Here, he is using a scene from the Wizard of Oz to discuss Robert Creeley' s poetics in Twentieth Century Pleasures (Harper Collins, 1984):

I am thinking of the scene in which the wizard, a stern face on a huge screen, booms out his mighty definition of himself: I AM OZ; and Dorothy's little dog Toto, the only creature in the room not scared witless by the impressiveness of it all, trots up to the curtain and pulls it back, revealing a nervous man fiddling desperately at a control panel and speaking into a microphone. Language has such power that poets are always both the image on the screen and the figure at the controls who tries to act as a medium for that powerful projection.

In this case Bob is Toto I think and for the last three days I've felt a bit like the tin man, the scarecrow and the lion all rolled into one. That big fucking face on the screen!

No writing today

2009-08-19T11:12:00.005+12:00

If you write for the reasons I think I do, as a way of contemplating problems - scratching the itch of something you don't understand - there's an inbuilt reason to keep going, no matter how strong your doubts are. There's an internal pressure to go on, not because you think what you produce is going to be worth it, but beacause you need to know something that you can only know by writing it.

- Kate Grenville (Making Stories, 1993. Allen and Unwin, Sydney.)

So does that make 'knowing' writing invalid? Does the reader sense the writer is coming from that angle?

An unidentified friend of Fanny Howe's (The winter sun. 2009. Graywolf Pr.) said:

Poetry is backwards logic. You can't write poetry unless you have knowledge of, or taste for, this 'backwards' way of finding truth.

So it's also about how you want to solve a problem, discover something.

And Fanny herself calls writing

A vocation that has no name.

Stop! Thief!

2009-08-17T11:11:00.004+12:00

I was just reading over some of the stuff I have written recently to select a few I like (we have a rehearsal for our Writers on Mondays reading in only two days!) and I've noticed how much I borrow the tone of whoever I'm reading. I can almost read each poem and work out who I was reading that day. It's ridiculous, I feel like such a fake a lot of the time, like I'm just hanging on to the coat tails of someone else's writing.

I tried to write something called 'Biography of a day' thanks to Judith Thurman for that title (stealing again!), I'll have to remember to acknowledge her if it ever gets published. I trawled through heaps of news articles and not sure if I managed to create any kind of coherent narrative, but it was interesting to try.

The image and telling people what to think

2009-08-14T10:15:00.004+12:00

Benjamin and Bill have been collaborating under the expert guidance of Mr Robert Hass and his best friend Basho.

I do like the idea of the plain image. That thing that means nothing except itself. But it is so hard to write like that. I guess you have to really love the 'world' and feel your only goal is represent that world in imagistic words. But what about people, what about thinking, what about feeling? What if you want people to think and feel as much as see? Surely that is one of the great pleasures of being human. That we can think about our world on so many levels and reflect on our own ability to feel in way that goes beyond survival instinct. I guess the point Bob was trying to make is that the pure image removes all the ego of the writer, the sense that the writer is trying to tell us something, that what he has to say is somehow important. And I definitely feel his point there. So how do we write a sprawling philosophical poem that doesn't dictate> I guess there is that thing about more questions that answers. But is it satisfying to have nothing resolved?

Anyway, I wrote an imagistic poem, which is completely flawed and tells the story that I wanted to tell.

And Benjamin wanted to tell.

And Bob wanted to tell.

2009-08-13T09:13:00.002+12:00

'Every man's a rapist until he's done' - Frederik Seidel, Hair in a Net

Titles, titles

2009-08-13T09:03:00.002+12:00

I like the section title 'Wish List' or 'To Do List' or something like that. I think Benjamin might like that too.

The discovery of the inner world

2009-08-12T09:46:00.003+12:00

Read a Bob Hass essay ('Twentieth Century Pleasures', Harper Collins NY, 1997) about James Wright. He went into great detail about Wright's work on the self and his empathy with 'outsider' characters. Which was all very interesting. He also talked about a poem called 'The Undermining of the Defense Economy' which was a really lovely poem that as Bob described it

He tries to see what can be made to happen by saying beautiful things, by repeating his talismanic nouns and adjectives of the the discovery of the inner world.

So of course that sounded like a great exercise to do what Damien suggested when he read a metaphor I wrote a while ago and said - do more of those! Not sure if the poem is working, because I went for the brutal metaphor I think, the talismanic voodoo side of what Wright was doing, trying to make it fit into the Bill Nelson series. But it seems those kind of beautiful metaphors don't really work. I like the idea of relentless metaphor and adjectives though, it did make for a really interesting poem. So I will work on that one and try and bring it into line.

Other than that. I haven't written anything else this week.

James' workshop was interesting in that it highlighted the struggle with originality I think. He seems to be trying to do so many things in a fresh way he is struggling to progress and focus on one thing. I feel his pain.

Benjamin Nelson returns

2009-08-08T15:07:00.006+12:00

I've been thinking a lot over the last few days about how to make these 'Bill Nelson' poems work. I've been playing around with the titles to get the 'character/self' thing going and at the moment they are all named after famous fictional or at least mythological/religious character. Not sure it that is quite there yet though. Another thought I had the other night was to use an alter-ego. Maybe someone called Benjamin? I don't know if that would work either, it'd probably be less interesting. There is also the problem of the section heading, I think that will be crucial. I'm talking with Damien on Wednesday about it.

When I was seven I had a friend who's little brother was named Benjamin. He hated the name and forced everyone to call him Fred. I have no idea why. But at the time I liked the idea and asked everyone to call me Benjamin. I previously owned a goat called Dr Ben, so it was a name I liked and not completely theft. Or at least the kind of theft that involves taking peoples rubbish. Anyway, no one ever called me Benjamin, I guess they thought it was stupid, and I couldn't really be bothered forcing people.

Showed a few of them to Ashleigh and she suggested having some that aren't so brutal as some kind of relief for the reader, which is something to think about and might be worth trying. It might work in the scope of the complete/balanced self thing too, although part of me wants the self to be completely unbalanced and tyrannical just to highlight that aspect. She also suggested going all out on the bruality where possible which is probably something else to think about too.

Got some book vouchers the other day and had a splurge on a Robert Hass essay book (must remember to lend it to Sarah when I'm done) and Sport 37. I really wanted to buy the Michael Palmer essay book but they all seemed so academic and mostly critiques of people like Dante etc. which is cool, but I'm not sure if it is essential for me to own. I'd love it if he had a book on poetics - I'd buy that in a second. So I've got a few vouchers left and will wait to see what comes up to buy. Maybe Michelle Leggot's new book? I'd like a book called 100 Contemporary NZ Artists too, but it's like $60 - goodbye vouchers.

Has anyone got any must-haves they'd like to suggest?

from HEART ART by Frerderick Seidel

2009-08-05T10:07:00.004+12:00

starts...

A man is masturbating his heart out,
Swingin in the hammock of the Internet.
He rocks back and forth, his cursor points
And selects. He swings between repetitive extremes
Among the come-ons in the chat rooms.
But finally he clicks on one
World Wide Web woman who cares.

and then in the middle...

This is the story about humans taking over
The country. New York is outside
His study while he works. Paris is outside.
Outside the window is Bologna.
He logs on. He gets up.
He sits down. A car alarm goes off
Yoi yoi yoi yoi and yips as it suddenly stops.

and then at the end...

[...]
Here in the eastern United States,
A man is masturbating his art out.

An Ice Age that acts hot
Only because of the greenhouse effect
Is the sort of personality.
Beneath the dome of the depleted ozone, they stay cold.
Mastadons are mating on the Internet
Over the bones of dinosaur nuclear arms,
Mating with their hands.

'A man is masturbating his art out' - he certainly is.

2009-08-05T10:06:00.001+12:00

I don't know what to fucking write in this fucking thing.

Like a hare in pâté

2009-08-04T10:10:00.006+12:00

Yes, read more Seidel.

Wrote two things about Bill Nelson, neither of which I am happy with. I am tired. I have a massive bruise running down the inside of my right foot from the toe to the heel and I didn't sleep well because of that I think.

On further defence of Seidel defending himself, the only poem he has ever written titled Frederick Seidel (originally from The Cosmos Trilogy) although he does mention himself in quite a few poems. This poem has two characters, the 'I' and the 'him.' The 'he' is the poet in this poem and finds it both 'impossible to look or not to' and both characters live the same life of 'laziness and luxury'. The 'I' in the poem is the one who 'is seeking more Jerusalem, not less' (answering his anti-semitic critics?) and under torture confesses 'I do love / The sky above.' So it seems he is playing on the idea of the self and the narrator in the poem. Both are Frederik Seidel. One is the poet and one is the persona/narrator, while both are strikingly similar, they are also subtly different which is highlighted by the one direct comparison that differs:

[I]
Like a hare without a bone who sleeps in a pâté.

[He]
Like a hare still running from a gun in a pâté.

Seems like both hares are kind of forced to live in the pâté, while the persona is more comfortable and the poet is shit scared. I love those metaphors, they are so messy and yet so amazing. There is nothing beautiful or overwhelmingly true about them, but they exactly the kind of thing a hare sleeping in pâté might write. Brilliant. This is certainly a very telling poem and I'm glad he wrote it because it certainly clears up a few things for me although it doesn't go into why he takes on such a brutal persona, but I guess that can be read in a lot of his other stuff. That reminds me. I am planning to track down some kind of interview with him on the the internet. It's fairly likely there isn't one, but it's worth a look I think. I'd love to hear what he has to say himself. Apparently he never reads though. Bummer.

On a side note, my Swiss uncle was one of the first people in New Zealand (in the world?) to perfect seafood pâté. Apparently it's quite hard to get right. This was in the early eighties when I was a baby. It was my Mother's job to deliver boxes of the stuff in her VW Beetle and I would sit in the back in a car seat. This seems all a bit Wonder Years to me (I'm imagining perms, flares and light disco music), but I like the story.

The boogie man

2009-08-03T09:34:00.008+12:00

Up to Bill Nelson version number 7 at the moment, I think 10 might be a nice number to reach.
How about either 'Bill Nelson' as a section title? Or 'Not Bill Nelson'? Or something that hints at the thing I am trying to do? Yes I like the something that hints at the thing I am trying to do. If I only I knew what that something was?

Read the rest of Ooga Booga (Seidel's second most recent book contained in Poems 1959-2009). I read a scathing review of it the other day, basically saying that the Seidel's aesthetic that critics had been so praising (apparently Ooga Booga was a bit of a hit) was precisely the thing that made Seidel so bad. Her name is Ange Mlinko writing in The Nation and she said a lot of stuff like this:

Rich white man, American, womanizer: he cops to it all and invites us to scapegoat him. That by doing this he has garnered a large following is not surprising. I'm not a moralist, and it would be fruitless to pillory readers for the pleasure they get from Seidel: it makes perfect sense that a poetry that prizes the same dialectic of exhibitionism and voyeurism that popular culture does would resonate with readers who don't read much other poetry.

That paragraph is almost laughable in it's contradictions, but she probably represents a fairly large number of poets/reviewers out there. Those that think

poetry is some kind of higher art form above the common people (read popular culture)
poetry should be beautiful and nice and tell us how great the world is, despite everything

Seidel never does that and I love him for it. His aesthetic unease, his crazy, awkward rhyme schemes are yes, not something you would constantly want to read, but are incredibly appropriate for his subject matter and for me are part of the total package of his poetry. The poetry of unease maybe? It seems sometimes, like poetry is the only art form that can't be nasty. Why? Film, music, visual arts, dance, opera whatever all have the dark, immoral sub-genres or whatever. Why not poetry? Seidel's poetry is fresh and he is rare in that he is doing something truly different. I don't read too much of his stuff as autobiographical either. It seems he has created a persona for the purpose of his poetry to me. Maybe he has dones some of the stuff, but I think when it comes down to it the poetry's sensibilities do lie in what is right and wrong. This seems to come through in his political stuff, like in The Bush Administration (from Ooga Booga):

[...]
CENTCOM is drawing up war plans.
They will drop snow on Congo.
It will melt without leaving a trace, at great expense.
America will pay any price to whiten darkness.
My fellow citizen cicadas rise to the tops of the vanished Twin Towers
And float back down white as ashes
To introduce a new Ice Age.
The countless generations rise from the underground this afternoon
And fall like rain.
I never thought that I would live to see the towers fall again.

I mean I guess, it's the same voice in this poem as the others, so it would be difficult to say it is the 'real' Seidel coming through. But maybe highlighting the true injustice of the Bush Administration by taking this stand when he (his narrator) is so highly immoral is what he is trying to do. This character who sleeps with young woman with such relish and does all kind of horrible, hedonistic things still thinks the Bush Administration is immoral - what is that saying? What does it say about all the so called 'moral' elite who supported Bush, championed the war in Iraq? Who is the real Ooga Booga man there?

Shit, getting on a total political rant. Sorry.

It definitely provides food for thought anyway when thinking about what are we actually trying to do with poetry and how can we best go about doing it. There are many ways I guess and everyone has to find their own, but personally I think Seidel's way is damn exciting.

Spending a summer in Hawai'i

2009-07-31T11:05:00.004+12:00

Don't know anything today. Began with something and ended with nothing.

I just read Maxine Hong Kingston's Hawai'i One Summer (University of Hawai'i Press, 1998) which are great little essays/stories. I love the way she writes, kind of almost like a child discovering things. Beligerant and opinionated and intellectually fierce, but also just a child wondering about stuff. They are beautiful essays or whatever you want to call them. And her house in the Manoa Valley on O'ahu looked fucking amazing in the photographs, like some kind of buddhist jungle island retreat which I have the feeling (from her writing) it wasn't like, but the photos tell a different story. I wonder if the writing or the photos are the truth or neither?

Soft decaying galaxies...of course

2009-07-30T10:21:00.004+12:00

Read some more Seidel, wrote a poem and then read some of Vincent O'Sullivan's Further Convictions Pending (VUP, 2009). O'Sullivan is amazing. Beautiful use of language, and engaging little poems, some of them more accessible than others, but always quite surprising like in Being here:

It has to be a thin world surely if you ask for
an emblem at every turn, if you cannot see bees
arcing and mining the soft decaying galaxies
of the laden apricot tree without wanting
symbols - which of course are manifold - symbols
of so much else? [...]

Bees in 'soft decaying galaxies' - holy fuck, talk about blowing our little poetry reading minds out of the water. I think part of it is the manifest intelligence too. His poems don't dumb down language or make it 'relevant' or whatever, they are unashamedly talking about big things. Quite Wallace Stevensey in that regard and also doesn't not remind me of Michael Palmer's intelligence and mystery and beautiful, images, language and enjambment too. So yeah. Very impressed. Weird how I've kind of skipped over him before. How many other great NZ poets have I done that to?

Also, glad to here Sam Sampson won the Best First Book of Poems at the Montanas. I know that was like a week ago, but news is slow 'round here. Anyone of the three finalists (also Charlotte Simmonds and Amy Brown) deserved to win it, but you know, I guess I'm biased towards Sam's obliqueness. So well done him!

Half hour timeslots and the crumbling of reality

2009-07-29T14:36:00.004+12:00

I had a half hour to write something and I think I did. Another Bill Nelson poem which has become a way for me to enter the persona and then deviate from it, so that these poems will end up with different titles I think.
Note: I might have to add something like this as the last line
'I take out another cigarette
lit with a burning will.'
Another note: I quite like the title 'The Voyeur'
Not particularly startling or interesting, but it might fit these poems as a section title? Dunno. Needs some more thought.

Damien has put me onto reading Vincent O'Sullivan (his newer stuff) and it seems really good. Interesting, funny, verbal and a lot of depth. I never knew. Someone said he looks like a grumpy old man and they put him in the same category as C K Stead. But I don't really care who he is as long as the writing's good and it is. I'll read some more and report on that tomorrow.

I also just went to a conceptual exhibition at the Adam Gallery where some artist has got all the gallery staff (who apparently work in a building on the other side of campus) to move their whole office into one of the gallery spaces, complete with little doodakkies on their monitors, novelty mugs and half eaten bowls of lunch. Not to mention the staff are actually there working every day. When I first walked in I felt really weird, like I was intruding and a bit baffled. One of the staff thankfully informed me what the fuck was going on and it was a bit more relaxing after that. Strange though. There was also another room with a trianglur latticed pyramid made out of some kind of really thin wire or polymer, so when you first walk in you don't even really see it. It was beautiful and fragile and stunning in the half lit grey room. Nice. Then when I was walking out I saw sheets broken glass (with graffiti on?) piled on the floor by a window covered with plywood. By this stage I was ready to imagine almost anything as being part of the work (was I), so I assumed it was some clever commentary on something. But right outside the window was a tradesman's van with a ladder on top like he/it was there to replace the glass. Was that part of it too? Or a coincidence. And then I left walking back to the IIML and I couldn't help wondering if all the students walking past, the scooter lined up haphazardly on the grass, the two other tradesman's vans that roared past with little regard for the people walking around - were they all a part of it too? Where did the art stop and the real life begin. So yeah a good result for the Adam Art Gallery there I think, by breaking down that barrier between the gallery and the outside world, it did more breaking of the outside world than anything else I think.

Fuck, what a rant. Class now.

Personae and 'The Dark'

2009-07-28T08:52:00.004+12:00

Still reading Seidel, still writing stuff I would never want to read out.

I've heard people angst over not wanting to read out their 'dark' stuff which I don't think is that dark at all, not the particular person I'm thinking of anyway, more just a little angsty, as in embarrassing I spose, which for this person is a problem I think in light of her reputation as satirist. But whatever, I think I'm starting to like the idea of personae, as in completely ridiculous personae.

Bad poetry

2009-07-27T10:13:00.003+12:00

Going down a bad, bad road. Hopefully Damien can help me out tomorrow as to whether I should turn back or head cross-country for a while or what. It's so hard to write bad poetry that isn't bad, how the fuck does he do it? Maybe like this:

[...]
If you consent to life, as I do, condescendingly,
It seems you get to fuck unendingly.
The woman on my bed plays mozart heartrendingly.
I drank too much last night - as usual - mind-bendingly.
The body on the bed is all eyes as I prepare to mount it.
There's the body's usual hopefulness. The thing is to surmount it.

I'm standing at the window, after, looking out and looking back,
Looking past my floaters, my swimming specks of black.
I'm shitting on the ledge outside, moaning in my awful way.
I rap on the window to make myself fly away.
My body on the bed gets up, smiling at the gorgeous day.
The winter sunlight sparkles diamonds down on Broadway.

From Sunlight. In so many ways that should be, and kind of is, a terrible poem. But for some (disturbed?) reason I like it. I like the humour in it (mainly in the over-the-top rhyme I think), the beauty at the end, the mind bending leaps of point-of-view between him the bird and the body on the bed and the amazing philosophical insight - '...consenting to life, condescendingly.' So it's all those things which individually would not be enough to make the poem work I think, but together somehow do. I wonder if part of it is the freshness of it all too, if I am being a little blinded by the fact that I've never read anything like Seidel before and what I mean by that is, maybe there is a way to do it better or at least different. Like if I can figure out exactly what makes his stuff so fresh and use that in my own way. I guess I need to be weary that for Seidel, bad seems to be a complete package. Bad rhythm, bad metaphors, bad rhyme and of course horrible subject matter/characters.

Interestingly on that note the stuff from his first book Final Solutions is quite different in rhythm and tone I think, he doesn't have that humour and his poems are a bit more mysterious like in After the Party

A window sighs.
The row of houses stipples and sways
As if seen through the windshield after a downpour.
A brownstone tries to say something:
But the chimney is too small,
Is intimidated by the dark,
Its fireplaces never used
[...]

or from The Sickness:

The way a child's hands stare through glass
Under the frost, pining so much
They lag behind the child, they pass
Their two hours, patients and their visitors, and touch
Each other's hands with all their love
The huge scarred Chinaman, a yellow boxing glove
(His neck and head), spreads out his wife's left hand
[...]

So I think, rhythmically, very different and also much more subtle, not as overtly disgraceful or cheeky as the later stuff. Apparently he had a 17 year break between that book and his next and it shows. Long time not to publish anything though. He's making up for it now though by the look of it.

Lots of stuff to think about and potential minefields to avoid I think.

Frederick Seidel has arrived

2009-07-23T10:47:00.004+12:00

I wrote a poem about Milan today. Why? Because I had a photo of it from the time I was there of some political graffiti that I had never really considered the meaning of, and now, today, I suddenly realised what they were probably on about and the fact that I took a picture of it is quite ironic. Damn, irony, seems like such a dirty word these days.

And yes, I am reading Frederick Seidel. Good guess. Chris lent me her copy of his Poems 1959-2009 (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, NY, 2009). So excited, because I can't afford it right now and Chris hasn't even read it. So I'm incredibly grateful for that.

The poems are in reverse chronological order, so I started with his newest stuff from Evening Man (2008). Some of the end line rhyming ones I just couldn't get into. I guess I still have some of that modernist schooling in me that cringes whenever end rhymes come in. I'm sure he is doing it ironically or super-cleverly in some way. I guess I just have to figure out what that is. Funny how reverence can let you get away with stuff eh? If it was some so called 'lesser' poet, I don't think I'd be quite so favourable. However some of them are gorgeous and all, of course, a brutal and astonishing in almost every way. One of the ones I liked (Ode to Spring) I'd read on the internet somewhere, so I guess I'm not the only one. But here is a few lines from Bipolar Novemember, another that I liked:

I get a phone call from my dog who died,
But I don't really.
I don't hear anything.
Dear Jimmy, it is hard.
Dear dog, you were just a dog.
I am returning your call.

I have nothing to say.
I have nothing to add.
I have nothing to add to that.
I am saying hello to no.
How do you do, no!
I am retutning your call.

[...]

Absolutely fucking nuts. I love it!

And here is an example of a heavy rhyme part that tripped me to start with, but I am sure in time, I will come to love. Haha! The end of Coconut:

[...]
Happy birthday, Doctor Hart.
You stopped my heart.
You made it start.
You supply the Hart part. I'll supply the art part.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I guess that's what he wants.

So yeah, many more polarised opinions to come.

The Divine Inspiration of the Muse

2009-07-20T09:19:00.005+12:00

I found out today that a phrase I thought I had invented all on my own is in fact a literary cliche and has it's own wikipedia page to explain this and is even the title of several famous poems, including one by Walt Whitman. I won't say what it is because you'll probably laugh, but suffice to say it is something like the word dappled (according to wikipedia anyway). So I guess I've read it somewhere, - it sounds like it would be impossible not to - assimilated it and then promptly destroyed all the neural pathways linking it to anything else, so that when I was writing that poem it popped in there fooling me into thinking I'd had some kind of divine creative moment. Which I guess begs the question, do divine creative moment actually exist? Or are they just cliches that no one else has heard of? Do things only ever come in to being in a creative way by accident, typos, chance operations like Jackson Mac Low and others would have us believe?

I'm sure there is some message about artistic stealing and originality in there, but I don't know what it is or how it is supposed to help me. Anyone?

Lindsay vs. early Bob Hass: and the winner is...

2009-07-17T10:59:00.005+12:00

Another weird day. They seem to becoming more common than not. I did write though, so in that respect maybe it was good?

Anyway read some of Robert Hass' Field Guide (Yale University Pr. 1973) which is interesting, but to be perfectly honest not as good as Lindsay's poems I was reading yesterday. WTF? I don't know either, but Lindsay has had some kind of imaginative explosion in his new work that I for one wasn't expecting and am completely astounded by. I guess you can't knock Robert Hass for his skill or wise understatement, but these early poems of his certainly aren't what you would call wild and exciting, not in the same way that Lindsay's stuff is. I was coming down with a serious case of writer's envy reading his work. Anyway I won't talk about that anymore, because I haven't formulated all my notes and stuff on it.

That imaginative excitement, surprise maybe even surrealism does draw me in every time. I love it and it seems so few people have the gift for it. It's that kind of harnessing of random connection and metaphor and I say harnessing because it is not completely random there is method in it, but yeah at the same time completely and utterly original. I guess maybe that's what it is, the fact that I know for certain I have never read anything like that before and may never again. That is good art?

Getting Angry with Jackson Mac Low

2009-07-16T11:04:00.004+12:00

Struggle again today. This time I spent two hours browsing the interent on a semi-important errand. Not as important as the writing though, obviously. But after that I read a few things from that Jackson Mac Low best of that I bought awhile ago. Some of his stuff is so good and I mean the non-random stuff here. People always think of him as that guy who wrote chance poetry or whatever, but his other stuff, which admittedly is in the minority, is so good. Like inthe first section of phone (the later sections get more experimental and for me not part of the poem?):

Whenever I answer the phone
It's never you

Even if it was you
It'd never be you
Saying

Hello it's me
I love you so much
I can hardly wait to see you
Can I come over right now

Yes yes yes yes

So I hate the sound of the phone
& worse
To answer it

Hello hello
No I'm not me
I'm not here
I'll never be

Except for possibly the last line (I can't decide whether I love it or hate it) this is a beautiful, simple, philosophical and playful poem. Why couldn't he have written these instead of letting chance get in there and take over? Just because of some stupid buddhist commandment about refuting the ego? Sometimes an ego is needed I think. Someone has to do something after all. Someone has to do the writing and if you can do it as well as he can then why the fuck not! I feel kind of cheated that there isn't more of these.

So anyway, after reading Mac Low's work I wrote a silly thing about my most vivid memory from Standard Four which involved pencils, compasses and indiscriminate stabbings. Hmm.

The perfect lyric poem

2009-07-15T10:07:00.005+12:00

Nothing came today. I've been here 3 hours and nothing. I even tried to do the exercise that we have been set for a special workshop next week in the hope that exercises are limiting and therefore easy, but nope. Which I guess goes to show that the only thing stopping me writing is me. The little voice that whispers crap and reaches for the delete button.

I read some more Jorie Graham though and Michael Palmer. I've finally finished The Lion Bridge after, I think, about 18 months. Which, for me at least, has got to be some kind of record.

We are discussing Helen's reading package this afternoon about science and writing which should be interesting seeing as I've had a bit of science and software engineering background. I think it is quite a complicated issue, made more complicated by the fact that science isn't just one thing and can range from the naming of plants (botany) to the such hugely complex and unmeasurable theoretical concepts that they can only be represented by massive computer models (quantum physics?). It seems there is some space for poetry to meddle in there, but I would suggest it is more at one end of that spectrum than the other. That's not to say poetry can't try of course and can't dream. In fact I think poetry's ability to dream and make random, surprising connections is where sometimes it's strength lies with regards to science. It has the power of sci-fi, which I guess is the romantic end of science, where the ideas are born and before the real, nitty-gritty and (usually) mundane work is done. But who's to say someone can't write the perfect lyric poem that describes all the intricacies of string theory in some kind of perfect vortex of language?

I also read the thing I wrote yesterday that was kind of spawned from a Wallace Steven's line and it seems reasonably interesting. I might have to do that again. He seems like one of those writers who writes nice open, philosophical one-liners that a ripe for quoting and reinterpreting.

Back to school sale!

2009-07-14T08:47:00.004+12:00

Read Wallace Stevens' massively long poem The Man with the Blue Guitar. 33 different sections, all needing to be read incredibly slowly and carefully. Not that I did that. Some of it was quite elusive. I kind of got the general gist of 'the man with the blue guitar' being the writer, the artist not saying things 'as they are,' but as they could be, the bread as opposed to the stone. There was also some stuff in there about imagination, dreams and sleep/wakefulness too. The thing is I am pretty sure there was also at least another dozen or so things going on that I didn't get. I'll have to read it a few more time I think. Sheesh, he is so dense (not in the pre-teen slang kind of way) and so philosophical. I think sometimes he misses out on thoese lovely small details though, because the poem is so stripped back to it's symbolic, philosophical core. Maybe that's the post-domestic poetry coming out in me, the whole observational thing that I guess he was arguing against in the Blue Guitar, poetry not being about things 'as they are' or at least not in the factual, demonstratable sense.

First day of school today. So good to be back after so long in the wilderness. Can't wait to hear what everyone has/hasn't been up to.

Out of the oven and into the fridge

2009-07-10T11:09:00.004+12:00

Went to a cafe today for a change of scenery. It was very noisy and I was trying to read Jorie Graham. Laughable, so I wrote something about trying to read Jorie Graham in a cafe, stealing phrased from one of her poems. She is so good at phrases, they all seem so fresh and loaded like little pockets of holy-fuck. Definitely becoming more and more of a fan. The book I've been reading is her latest, Sea Change (2008, Carcanet). And it is beautiful, like in Root End:

The desire to imagine
the future.
Walking in the dark through a house you know by
heart. Calm. Knowing no one will be
out there.
Amazing
how you can move among
the underworld's
furniture

[...]

Wow. What a singularly gorgeous idea and image, one of those that-is-so-true moments. I want to be her. Although I noticed she has a kind of limited tone in her work. I find it is all that kind of ephemeral, beautiful kind of language that fits some poems and not others. Like she wrote a poem called Guantanamo where that kind of thing doesn't seem to work so well. I couldn't help but wonder if she could be more brutal or something. But fuck it, you can't change how you write and that poem is still good. I'm just being picky and letting my own preoccupations get in there.

Going to watch Mr. Bob Hass on video interview this afternoon. Should be nice, he seems like such a thoughtful and kind man I can't see him saying anything other than pure gold.

The Stevens/Douglas connection

2009-07-07T10:30:00.005+12:00

I got out a small Wallace Stevens book (Selected Poems. 1953. Faber and Faber Ltd.) yesterday and I've been reading that because I think he is the one from that era that I respect the most. I haven't been let down so far. He has some beautiful and, I think, varied music. Like he will have a line or two of really lovely rhyme that comes as a shock to the rest of the poem, but fits into the rhythm of it perfectly. He writes a kind of free verse that is incredibly controlled, so it seems almost form like. Maybe that is the definition of good free verse? The Worms at Heaven's Gate:

[...]
Here is an eye. And here are, one by one,
The lashes of that eye and its white lid.
Here is the cheek on which that lid declined,
And, finger after finger, here, the hand,
The genuis of that cheek. Here are the lips,
The bundle of the body and the feet.
[...]

That rhyme at the end of this section (and also the sound of the 'lid declined') is for me what makes this poem so special. It jumps out as a lovely piece of music, even though in a way he is describing quite a banal thing, using quite ordinary words. It's the syntax and the control that makes this so gorgeous.

And I wrote a found poem from the book I bought last week Completing the Circle by Roger Douglas. I'm not sure if it is working. I might show it to Damien etc and see what they think. Generally I don't like found poems. They have to be exceptional I think. I'm not sure this is. The most interesting thing about the book is that it is signed and he pressed so hard with the pen that you can see the indent of the signature all the way to page 9. Maybe I should write a poem about that? His solid grip or something?

Golden Days

2009-07-06T10:18:00.004+12:00

Back from Golden Bay where I tried to write some stuff, but didn't really get in the groove. I think being at home, at my own desk with my own blanket and my own heater really does help to get stuff out. How many times do I look up to find the morning has gone? I guess when your on holiday it's like you only give yourself an hour to two to rip something out before running off to the beach. Which is probably not a bad thing.

Em had quite a good poetry collection, so I read some of her 'Griffin poetry prize' books. Thanks Em! The 2004 (?) one was my favourite. It had Fanny Howe in it as an international finalist. Fuck her stuff is good. I'd never read longer things of hers either, but damn she is impressive. Also started Damien's book The Fainter which seems cool at this early stage. Other than that I was drinking coffee and Mussel Inn beer and checking out all the freaky natural stuff they have.

Only one more week till class starts again and I have to email 10 new things to Damien by Thursday, so I can't have any days off this week. Work, work.

Wrote another poem about sex and yo-yos today. What is wrong with me?

Workers unite!

2009-06-25T09:47:00.003+12:00

So wacked out some spaz based on the word agitprop and me following what it means.

Read some more of Seidel, finished the Earth section of the book, which is by and large based more on earth than off it. It is also more brutal: rape, stalking, overt chauvinism. And right at the end the really interesting poem Frederick Seidel which seems to be him answering all the people who call him anti-semitic, chauvinist, racist, red-neck whatever or is it?

I live a life of laziness and luxury,
Like a hare without a bone who sleeps in a pate.
I met a fellow who was so depressed
He never got dressed and never got undressed.

He lived a life of laziness and luxury.
He hid life away in poetry,
Like a hare running still running from a gun in pate.
He didn't talk much about himself because there wasn't much to say.

[...]

There are other examples but
A perfect example in his poetry is the what
Will save you factor.
The Jaws of Life cut the life crushed in the compactor

Out.
My life is a snout
Snuffling toward the truffle, life. Anyway!
It is a life of luxury. Don't put me out of my misery.

I am seeking more Jerusalem, not less.
And in the outtakes, after they pull my fingernails out, I confess:
I do love
The sky above.

So this one is interesting, the stuff in the middle kind of digresses into a scene with a naked woman and how the 'poet' can't but has to look.

Realism or lack-of-imaginationism?

2009-06-24T10:19:00.003+12:00

Well, Gomorrah wasn't that good. James came too and we both agreed it needed a little spice or something. I for one am definitely bored with the whole realism thing (like that French movie 'The Class' etc), in film anyway. I just can't get past the fact that I prefer stylised, imaginative cinema so much more. Like how less of a movie Pans Labyrinth would have been if it was a realist film about WWII? It's not that I don't like documentary or something (Helvetica is one of the coolest films I've seen in ages), but doco-fiction, I don't know, it seems so limiting. But I guess, it's super popular as far as film goes at the moment (literature too?) so maybe I'm completely missing something. Long live works of the imagination!

So I've been working on the penguin poem and have found some relief with going for more of an asterisk separated montage thing. So it's getting there. Thanks for the words of encouragement Helen!

And read some more of The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995 by Michael Palmer (Carcanet 1999). Maybe that has helped, having dependable old Mike on board. I don't know.

Gonna go for a bike ride this afternoon which will be nice and maybe watch a writer interview at the IIML if Helen is there and if not, I might anyway.

Does Senator Bill Nelson struggle to get up every morning?

2009-06-23T11:36:00.004+12:00

Firstly, check out this picture of Senator Bill Nelson (formerly of NASA). How cool is that NASA suit and the sculptured chin, hair and smile. Googling your own name is never much fun, unless I suspect you are Bill Nelson and so damn good looking. I want one of thos NASA suits, those zips look incredibly practical, although I'm not sure in which way, something to do with doing something mundane in zero gravity I'm sure.

Weird, weird day today. Been at it for fucking hours. I thought I had a good idea to start with about using 'The Penguin History of New Zealand' as a literal title for a poem (or at least the unspoken title of a poem), but I just couldn't get inside the head of a penguin. No surprises there I guess. So I fucked around for ages trying to make than work, then I read some stuff, read some other stuff, had a coffee, read some Seidel and bang, decided on something. Not sure what, but at least a place to start (the whole Unsettlement thing - brutality?) and something kind of came and it has a penguin at the end. Yay! Mission accomplished, but no, not really I don't think. Still don't like it and I don't feel comfortable about it. God, this writing process thing is fucked up. I wish I could work out some thing I could do that would work everytime. Wish I could collect all those clever little ideas and phrases and use those like Kate does or freewrite and come up with something astonishing like H does. Fuck, I don't know, what do I do? And why can't I do it?

So yeah read lots of little things today to try and get the engine going. Kate told me she reads for at least an hour before writing and doesn't allow herself any less, which seems like a good idea. I usually only do abotu 20 minutes maybe half an hour. Not today though, I did a bit of Sam Sampson, James Brown, History of NZ, Tusiata Avia and of course ol' Seidel.

I dunno. I just don't. Got to stay positive though.

I'm going to go and watch a film called Gomorrah this afternoon. It's supposed to be good and the sun is out, so not all bad.

Agitprop: Thing of Beauty

2009-06-22T12:16:00.005+12:00

My new Jackson Mac Low book arrived today. It's called Thing of Beauty and is his selected and new works. Only just got into obviously and mainly only read the foreword and a few of his early ones.

My favourte so far is What's the matter don't you like candy (not too sure about that title though) that he wrote in 1941:

[...]
I have been told that a child crying indicates the death of a songbird
I do not know whether to believe this, but I know crickets are often
affected by high temperatures
I would like to know what the bug is with long thin six legs who paused
fluttering up and down for a while just now and then
flew away
It might have something to do with the crying of children
[...]

He goes on like that for about two pages, the phrase: 'crying of children' is repeated all over the place and he builds it up through that repetition exploring all sorts of weird ideas and incidents around 'crying children.' It works though, I think, because of that matter-of-fact tone and the unusual places it goes.

Anyway, he is much more well known for his chance-operation poems or his 'systematic' type ones, where he uses two texts to create a new one. And the foreword goes into quite a bit of detail about why he went this way and it basically comes down to his buddhist belief about removing ego from art, although he later admitted there is as much ego in chance operation as in the traditional lyric poem. He also talks about politics (hello, back on that again) which is strange for someone who has pretty much no control over his how his work comes out. It sounds like he had very strong view on war and violence, but I wonder how many people would know that of him from his work (his earlier lyric poems were often heavily political)? I guess there is nothing wrong with that, but to talk about it so heavily in the introduction to a work spanning 50 years that could be interpreted in an almost infinite number of ways strikes me as a little strange. Perhaps he considered his rejection of the ego as his ultimate political statement? He does talk about poetry as being capable of change, but subversively so and not through direct agitprop argument which I agree with, but I'm still not sure he is doing that either:

The politically aware artist can hope that what gives her pleasure and what gives her pain will give others the kinds of pleasures and pains that may help engender more positive social arrangements [interesting that the artist is a 'she' like a boat].

Anyway, he has undoubtedly served post-modern poetry to no end and is an important figure and I should really hold judgement on the existence of politics or beauty (another thing he is said to hold dear) in his work until I've read the whole thing. All interesting stuff, I just wish the Frederick Seidel best of book was the same price. Times certainly are tough right now.

Politics, Szymborska and power

2009-06-19T09:31:00.007+12:00

Just to go back to yesterdays post about politics...

I've been doing some more research on it because I really want to know what this politics thing is.

There is this poem by Wislawa Szymborska, Children of Our Era (translated by JoannaTrzeciak and retrieved from www.poets.org):

We are children of our era;

our era is political.

All affairs, day and night,

yours, ours, theirs,

are political affairs.

Like it or not,

your genes have a political past,

your skin a political cast,

your eyes a political aspect.

What you say has a resonance;

what you are silent about is telling.

Either way, it's political.

[...]

Her position seems clear, although she does qualify with the first line of course, but isn't every era political in some way? The world is never devoid of problems. So I guess that didn't help much as far as defining what is political and what isn't. So I went to trusty old wikipedia which seems relatively well referenced in this case and had this to say:

Politics is the process by which groups of people make decisions. The term is generally applied to behaviour within civil governments, but politics has been observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions. It consists of "social relations involving authority or power"[1] and refers to the regulation of a political unit,[2] and to the methods and tactics used to formulate and apply policy.[3]

"Politics" ultimately comes from the Greek word "polis" meaning state or city. "Politikos" describes anything concerning the state or city affairs. In Latin, this was "politicus" and in French "politique". Thus it became "politics" in Middle English ( see the Concise Oxford Dictionary).

There is no academic consensus on the exact definition of "Politics", and what counts as political and what does not. Max Weber defined politics as the struggle for power.

So it seems power has something to do with it and group (or societies?) as well in which case, is there such a thing as personal politics which people talk about a lot. Can one person be political, or is politics by definition trying to convince people of something, thereby creating a group of people who (supposedly) agree on some issue. If that is true then I would be uneasy about calling any of my work political. I've never written a poem with the intention of convincing someone of something. I'll go back to what John Kinsella said about him wanting nothing more from his work than for it to be interesting. I'm the same, thought-provoking, but only for the purposes of entertainment (or art? - but that's another debate). So that seems clear.

I'd also be uneasy about having a struggle for power in my work. I find that kind of thing pathetic to be honest, the want of some people to control other people. I'm no anarchist by any means, and probably the opposite when it comes to ideas of state control, but it seems those things have no place in poetry. It isn't an exercise in power over the anything, over the reader, over the poem, over the poet. It just isn't like that for me. So maybe I am an anarchist when it comes to writing, I like the words to govern themselves or something, create some kind of rule free utopia without the need for an interfering, pesky poet to control them. I guess the key word there is utopia, in that it those ideas can never exist in the real world, even in the poetic world, but fuck me if I'm not going to try.

So yay! Down with politics! Up with art (entertainment - groan)! Now that sounds like politiking.

And morality? That is another topic. Maybe I'll google that tomorrow. Some pious person must have written a poem on it at some stage. In fact, wasn't there several centuries dedicated to it?

Nitrous oxide and politics

2009-06-17T10:09:00.008+12:00

I've been reading Kate Camp's manuscript and fuck has it what!

Direct injection overload!

And I wrote something today, that for the first time in ages was actually fun and seemed to have potential, but when I think about it (which I'm trying not to do) nothing has really changed. I had cereal and milk for breakfast instead of my usual toast, but how could that affect it? The writing is the same, the ideas are the same, the only difference being a bit of fuel additive in the tank. Nitrous oxide? Orange juice? Camp smoke?

Jay Parini in his essay The Politics of Poetry doesn't argue anything except that poets have always been political, most subvertly, some overtly and to ignore that in your own work (at least deliberately) is to risk becoming irrelevant.

What is politics? Putting yourself on the left or the right? The top or the bottom? Is it just caring about shit outside of your own small life? I'm not sure I've ever understood that. It seems there are people who are definitely political - join the party, have bumper stickers, signs on the front lawn - and then there are the people who focus on the small things - the unfairly imprisoned, the near-extinct bird - these people could be from any party and are likely to be from none, I guess they acknowledge what is right is never clear or simple. That is the kind of politics I like, but I don't like it being called politics which always seems to be about bigger overriding (broad stroked?) themes. Surely a poets' politics it's just the stuff of the world? Morality?

And on the topic of whether poetry ever made a difference, I don't think it has in the same way that a journalist never stopped a war. But poets can highlight things, explain things, use the politics of language as a tool. It doesn't change anything in the real world except highlight something that wasn't highlighted before. And that is one definition of a good poem I think.

Doctor Love

2009-06-16T11:52:00.004+12:00

Still working through The Cosmos Trilogy.

I've started on the Life on Earth section which are mostly more brutal and confronting and anchored in the real world (is the universe the real world?). He often has a redeeming ending though. I wouldn't say beautiful, because it is still vicious in many ways, but I guess it opens the poem up to being more than just disturbing, like at the end of Doctor Love that discusses oncology, breast cancer, bad film scripts, the commercialism of gene research, murder and then ends with this stanza:

In a soft East River breeze -- like glowing fireflies of snow.
Dear Hart, it is spring.
Cutting a person open
Is possible without pain.

Again, I don't really know how or why this poem works and maybe on some level it doesn't - I am always uncomfortable and in some ways resenting the poem I think.

His line-breaks and diction and syntax are tight but not neat and are crafted but not beautiful. So I guess if you were glancing over them you might see the harshness of them and not notice the skill behind it. Part of that might also be that there isn't a lot of reference to go by. His style seems quite unique (in my limited reading), like the kind of writer who doesn't really imitate other writers, although I've read elsewhere that early on he almost directly borrowed the aesthetics of Robert Lowell, so maybe it is more of a content thing? Maybe the content is dictating the feeling of aesthetic unease.

For an example there is this opening stanza from the same poem:

It was a treatment called
Doctor Love, after the main character.
One of the producers discovered
To our horror a real
[...]

I would think (one of) the normal ways to line break that out might be:

It was a treatment called Doctor Love,
After the main character.
One of the producers discovered to our horror
A real Dr. Love,
[...]

Now, I know some people might say, but what about free verse! In this day and age we can line break anywhere. This is post-modernism, what Seidel is doing is no different! But I think there is one overriding aesthetic that we still cling to and Seidel doesn't and that is that a poem is supposed to be a thing of beauty or at least a thing of irony, which is a kind of clever beauty I suppose. Seidel doesn't worry about that at all. His poems are uneasy, disquieting, disturbing. I guess like when the first horror movie came along? The early vampire movies? I don't know. But it seems he has figured out a way to do this, without being overly dramatic or judgemental, although his poems are loaded with judegmental language and he uses words like cancer and murder and cutting a person open, but he gets away with it. And maybe there is something in the aesthetics that allows him to do this. Maybe he isn't trying to make it into a thing of beauty which would seem wrong and he is giving the poem over to the content, letting that take control.

The Cosmos Trilogy

2009-06-15T09:49:00.004+12:00

So I've been reading the genius of Frederick Seidel (The Cosmos Trilogy. 2003. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. ISBN 0-374-52891-8). His poems are strange, slippery, all the same length, sometimes shallow, sometime incredibly deep, sometimes perplexing, but always interesting. I don't know what he does, but it works. I think it is tone partially - you never know where an image or metaphor will go, he doesn't set up expectations I guess, right from the first stanza we know this work will go places:

The wobbly flesh of an oyster
Out of its shell on the battlefield is the feel
Of spacetime
In the young universe.
[...]

I mean, how could you not want to read on after that first stanza from Black Stovepipe Hat. He has some brilliant metaphors too. Not those nice fluffy, sensitive kind that so many people do so well, you know the beautiful ones - his are harsh, flimsy, funny and ironic and most of all completely and utterly original. No one would have ever used those two things in that way before and to be honest not many people ever will again. One of those writers who makes you want to copy what he does, but not sure how to do it. It's almost like if I tried to copy his poem word for word it wouldn't come out as good (Starlight):

[...]
The universe is a single organism
Made of two
Or more individual,
Or many more than two, individual

Moving parts and blitzkrampf,
Explosive but balletic slow-mo
Of vast organs
Of ecstasy making sounds

The radio telescopes will hear
Billions of light-years from now,
The way whales croon
Whalesong through the ocean microphone

To an audience in the darkness far away.
To live your life
You have to use it up.
A star performs its nuclear core.
[...]

Fucking amazing. That is another thing he does too I think, he has these really long broken up sentences with so many things going on inside them that at first glance it seems like a whole bunch of disjunctive ideas, but when you begin to unravel it and put it all together, there is a method to it and the meaning starts to seep through. I like that and could be a good point for me to remember. He seems to be interested in unusual syntax and line breaks in a similar way to myself too, so maybe I can learn from this guy.

So a successful reading anyway. I haven't been this excited about finding a new poet (to me) in ages.

New books and Leigh Davis

2009-06-11T11:20:00.007+12:00

Wrote some more shite today. Yay!

Bought a massive pile of books yesterday, which has left me broke but excited.

I'll list them ay?

Bloodclot, Tusiata Avia
Favourite Monsters, James Brown
Everything Talks, Sam Sampson (been wanting to read some of his stuff for ages)
How to Live by the Sea, Lyn Davidson
The Fainter, Damien Wilkins

So much cool stuff to read and it's all from here!

OK then. Here comes the big spiel about Leigh Davis. Chris suggested that I check out his book Willy's Gazette (1983, Jack Books) mainly, I think, because he uses a central character (Willy) to hold a loose kind of narrative through the often mysterious and perplexing poems, most of which are title-less and don't have a clear beginning and end. I had no idea looking into him would open up such a can of worms.

Firstly, I've read about half of Willy's Gazette and I think I get the gist of where it is going, or, I guess, where it isn't going and indeed Willy does kind of hold it together, but other than that it seems to be an almost random assortment of lines, details, musing, dialogue, which don't seem to ever convey anything particularly concrete. It is set with an almost hypnotic, but not predictable, rhythm though which keeps you reading on kind of transfixed I guess. It is also printed quite weirdly in a type script on a large format book (roughly A4 size) and the cover is black with plain white lettering. There are some parts that have been through scored like you can do on a type-writer. I'm sure it was all wonderfully avant-garde at the time. Today it just seems a little shitty and hard to read, like the writer hasn't put much effort in. I dunno. I think the main thing is that it just isn't that inviting to read.

So anyway, I was interested in his use of disjunction and the kind of slipperiness of what was going on in any particular bit. So I looked him up on the Internet to find out more about him and to see if his stuff has changed since 1983. I read a weird almost combative interview with a guy from Landfall in 1985. It seemed Leigh was being asked to defend his controversial criticisms of Allen Curnow's and CK Stead's work that he published in his magazine And. The interviewer also asked him about how he views society as being poor readers of poetry, how they kind of swallow the 'traditionally' inspired stuff and most are quite unaccepting of avant-garde poetics and are not willing to let go of what they think a poem is or should be. Which in many ways is true I think, but they way he argued his points. Fuck me, he sounded like some kind of pseudo-intellectual fascist. I couldn't really follow his logic in most of it, partly because of my limited academic vocabulary, buy mainly I think because he was more interested in inciting than arguing. It was a bit all over the place and weird. So overall, I dunno, not impressed I guess. No wonder avant-garde poetry has such a bad name. That word is so dirty now. People seem to think of pompous wankers, which I guess many of them were. I think these days though, writers (and artists) seem less interested in arguing poetics and more interested in just creating and accepting the way everyone does their own thing.

For the issue of Blackmail Press I am helping to edit, we had a sentence - 'Good art is about resisting tradition' in the call for submissions. James in the class, who claims it was an accident, used this in an exercise we did, changing 'resisting' to 'resenting.' I was horrified that some people might mis-read it like that, subconsciously or something. And I guess that is highlighted again with regard to Leigh Davis - he seems to be all about 'resenting' rather than 'resisting,' there is a world of difference in those two things. I think resisting is about acknowledgement and respect and kind of leaning on tradition, but one where you are conscious of that and know that you have to push back to get anywhere. Resentment, is well, just bitter and I guess that would come across in your work.

2009-06-09T09:21:00.003+12:00

OK, super quick because I have to catch a bus in 10 minutes. Wrote something new today! Yay! First time in over a week and it's called 'On allowing myself to fail' so no prizes for guessing my method for putting pen to paper. So all good. Haven't read anything, but I'll be at the IIML for part of the afternoon and I'm hoping to track down some Frederick Seidel stuff and get into it.

Also, pretty close to finishing The Rehearsal. It is a fantastic book. I read a review by (I think?) the NY Times that said it was good and when Ellie learns to pack an emotional punch she will be great. Interesting comment (in relation to poetry too). Does writing need an emotional punch? Can it operate successfully on an intellectual level? Or is it just great to have both? But yeah, I think it is a great book, although I can't help wondering if it hammers home the whole 'performance as life' theme just a little too often. Dunno about that though. Maybe we wouldn't get it then? Or would we. Is just having the two different worlds enough to show this. The high school and the drama school. Do we get it, just from that?

Amazing insights though. Like the person who when thinking about death comes to the conclusion that they feel nothing and their life returns to normal pretty quickly. They don't have any amazing epiphanies or view life in a different way and they have to force themselves to feel sad. I have always wondered about the performances people put on around death. The few encounters I have had with it have always left me thinking more about myself than anything else. The kind of selfishness that no one ever seems to admit to. We have to be strong at those times. Why? It seems to be only truly incomprehensible thing humans have to deal with. Why can't we just be confused and ambivalent and selfish? Sorry, ranting. This isn't about literature any more.

History, language and influence

2009-06-08T12:21:00.008+12:00

Wrote the third part to the Unsettlement/Settlement poem today. Thanks Chris for suggesting this and also giving me the 'Morning, Noon and Night' exercise, which I didn't do, but helped with the three-parter thing.

Watched Michael Palmer reading at Berkeley's Lunch Poems series. He mentioned a poem called 'So' (I think?) by Wallace Stevens that inspired a series of poems of his called 'So 1 (2,3,4...)' which piqued my interested because I think I am also influenced by Wallace Stevens, although I haven't read much of his stuff. The reason I say that because some of the things I have read of his just look and sound a little similar to mine, although I'm sure I've never read them before. So I'll try and find the 'So' series, it would be great to read a series of poems by someone who directly influences me on someone who indirectly influences me.

And on that note, I've just finished reading another Jay Parini essay on 'Tradition and Originality' which talks about borrowing/stealing from your precursor. This seems to have become accepted for writers to do in even the most obvious of ways since Eliot wrote The Wasteland and there doesn't seem to be much argument about this, not by writers at least. The most interesting thing he mentioned though, was how contemporary writing seems to inform how the canon is read (he cited an Eliot essay on this), so that by reinterpreting the past we are actually altering it. So if Michael Palmer was to write a poem that is influenced by a Wallace Steven's poem, then we would read the Wallace Steven's poem in a different way, perhaps contextually, perhaps just by giving it more significance. So it is a two way street, which is nice.

But he went on to compare this with the nature of language itself, how all words and stolen from the past and reinterpreted, recontextualised every time we use them and it is just that poets are conscious of this process and actively seek to give old words new meanings, old poems new life. I like that too.

Poetry is "about" the past, in that poets understand that language itself is history and that words have slipped through time, undergone mutations, shifts in meaning; but each word is a palimpest as well: it contains multiple erasures, which underlie its current meaning, coloring it, giving it character and ambiguity and direction. A poem, in this sense, is also a palimpest, a "writing over" of previous poems, and therefore a gift to the future, where it will be misread, misdirected, even misplaced.

Also, I like that small phrase "language itself is history." That might give me some help with my history series I think, which I really don't want to be about 'history' in the sense of this is what has happened in the past. Maybe etymology (and influence?) is the key. I started down that direction in one of the poems, although not very successfully. Maybe I could pick some interesting words that are 'normally' associated with history and look up the etymology, writing the poem from there? So it becomes the history of the word I guess.

Metaphor, symbol and motif

2009-06-05T11:56:00.004+12:00

Nothing again today. I've been reading some stuff for a workshop with the guys from my old studio. Very interesting, makes me want to write some prose. Meeting with Chris in 2 hours and 4 minutes.

..three minutes later...

Actually, I will briefly talk about the Jay Parini essay I read yesterday about metaphor. It wasn't particularly engaging except he talked about the difference between symbol and metaphor and the major difference seemed to be that a symbol has an inherent metaphorical impact so that it doesn't need to be directly compared, like instead of saying 'her eyes, her diamonds' you could just say 'her diamonds sparkled' and supposedly if the symbol is well chosen the reader will get the significance.

So in that way are they cliched metaphors that don't need to be explained any more? Can they be fresh symbols? I guess they could, but they would need to be alluded to over a longer period, like in a novel or something, the repeating symbol of a cardboard box might come up, and even though there is no obvious cliche metaphor (like for say roses or diamonds) to associate with that the repetition might give it one. A prison, transport, empty packaging? But is that then a motif? What is the difference between a symbol and a motif?

Also, what about the idea that a symbol must firstly be an ordinary thing before it is a metaphor. i.e. The symbol in the story is firstly a thing, a flower, a gem before it is the metaphor, a woman, someones piercing eyes. Do metaphors only exist as a reference to something else? Do they ever exist on their own? Even though the reader should(?) know it is a metaphor, is the a split second when it comes to life as it's own being before being joined with the other thing?

I don't know. It is interesting to consider though.

Like a tortoise

2009-06-04T13:08:00.004+12:00

Haven't written anything new today. Just editing old stuff.

I'm not sure where I want to go next. All that stuff from the workshop is still sinking in. I don't want to rush it.

Meeting with Chris tomorrow, so hopefully that will help, but I think the main thing is to think about it a bit first. Read stuff maybe and just wait. I feel if I was to start writing right now I'd get frustrated that it was just the same as I was doing before and I don't want that, I want that excited feeling before I start. The new idea, the new angle.

I've been reading The Rehearsal. Which has been good. I wonder if James has read it? It reminds me a bit of his stuff, all those odd figures with titles instead of names. The power games. They have a similar tone/sensibility too I think. Like satirical I suppose, not in a crass kind of way, but subtly dark and ironic. I like it, the theme or whatever really comes through in books like that (Kafka like I s'pose) where the character are more like caricatures. Only on the surface though, they do get fleshed out, but keep their caricature-like extreme personalities.

Also, spent a large part of this morning drafting acceptance/rejection letters (is there a nicer word than rejection?) for BMP. The issue if looking fucking awesome if I don't say so myself. Quite a lot of really exciting stuff that makes my skin tingle. Can't wait for it to come out. I never thought it would be so exhilarating editing other peoples stuff.

It is a beautiful clear Wellington day today. I think I'm going to read some Jay Parini essays then go down to the park to kick a ball around for awhile.

Workshop come down

2009-06-03T11:18:00.004+12:00

I have been slack on this.

Had my first full workshop yesterday. I was really interested to hear the different things people focussed on. I don't think there was anything too surprising there. The issues I was expecting kind of came up. Not that I know how to solve them or anything:

Ambiguity/elusiveness. Still don't know what to do about this, in some ways I like the reader to bring their own experiences and wants to the poem, but I don't want that to completely fail, so I am reluctant to put in stuff that waves a flag saying 'this is what this poem is about', although the 'long' poem, Making nice things out of straw, which for me is just as elusive as the others seemed to be better received. Maybe this is to do with if you read something longer the meaning kind of soaks out of it a bit more. Rather than ending in a kind of abrupt way, leaving the reader hanging. Maybe long poems might be the answer. The other day someone was telling me how Amy Brown is doing her PhD in Melbourne and trying to create one epic poem in 3 years. Go the Cantos! But I don't think I want to go there. That seems a bit too much like a selfish challenge to me. The whole 'can I pull it off' thing, but a few that are 5 pages or so long would be nice I think. Concrete details are always good too I guess.
Tics. Like the repetition of sentences twisted around or negated to achieve an effect. Damien mentioned that too and I think I've started to hold back on that a bit with my later stuff. Well at least I hope I have.

And there was heaps of useful editing things and suggestions for confusing sentences and words etc. So that will all make it's way in there. Overall it was a great workshop and incredibly valuable.

Lindsay lent me Why poetry matters, by Jay Parini (2008, Yale University Pr.) which I think I had read one of the essays before, but I'm not sure where. So I look forward to reading the whole book, if I haven't done already - my memory is atrocious. Other than that though I haven't read too much other stuff. Everything seemed to be on hold while I waited for this workshop thing (and Queens Birthday weekend too). But over the holidays, damn, try and stop me!

Workshop. Sleep. Feed. Write. Read. Workshop.

2009-05-28T10:36:00.010+12:00

Wrote prose today. Started reading The Rehearsal by Ellie Catton (2008, VUP), thanks Liz for lending it to me! Perhaps (-> perchance? -> to fall(accidentally)?) there is residual inspiration left from Pip's story that I mentioned yesterday too. I was feeling a wee bit blue about line breaks, so maybe I need this?

The Rehearsal as of page 19 is intriguing. Liz told me she loved the use of language, but thought the story was so so. Which is more important I wonder? James and I were talking about this last night at the Katipo. I said there didn't seem to be any solutions for the problem of narrative. As in, how can we write a story that seems less 'story like' and more 'life like' but still remain entertaining. He talked a bit about the spiral method as is the story tightens in ever decreasing circles, perhaps crossing of the same points in time until we get to something in the middle. The crux? The truth? I don't know if this is really that much of a depature from the classic three act thing. Just mixed up a bit. I guess the question is, how do you elicit and emotional reponse from an audience? How do you play them and does there have to be chorus? I reckon there must be other ways out there, probably incredibly simple and yet undiscovered.

Damn it Sweden!

2009-05-27T11:24:00.004+12:00

Wrote a poem about Utah and snow and isolation. Very un-NZ. Don't know how it would fit with any of the others? Also trying to not drink coffee before writing, not sure if it has made any difference yet. I'll try it again tomorrow.

Read a really unusual story by Pip Adam in Hue and Cry 3 called Pushing, Pulling about a strange character called Douglas who seems to be going mad thinking and interacting with gravity, physics and geography. It is the way it is written though that is really interesting. The voice is so disjunctive and rich with surreal imagery that you can't but helped be convinced by his insanity. There are elephants, babies, ice-blocks, Belgium and superpowers. The world seems normal, but the way Douglas interacts with it is anything but. There are no regular prose type descriptions or dialogue betwen two characters, except with a wise feminine character called Sweden who he conjures up earlier in the story. It seemed a bit rambly, like one thing leads into another, Sweden will appear and then Douglas will be talkig to Sweden, but she pulls it off by making it about madness I guess and the way that thoughts progress like that. Amazing.

Muderous intent

2009-05-26T11:27:00.007+12:00

Wrote nothing today, nothing yesterday. I kind of tried, but it ended up being worse than nothing. I think the mini-manu-script I'm handing out today is taking its toll.

I've just been reading Lindsay's reading package and a fantastic essay called The Accidental Plagiarist (VQR, Spring 2007) by a guy called Erik Campbell. He is brilliant so funny and pop and insightful and for some reason morbid? The overarching theme I think was to do with the tradition of good artists 'stealing' from others (as T.S. Eliot once said). And I can't really disagree. Stealing is a part of it. Making it better is also a part of it. Bill Manhire was talking a while ago (and in his poem On Originality) about not only stealing from your literary forebears, but killing them off too. Eventually the aim is to use them to make better art (at least more relevant to contemporary audiences) at which point you have successfully killed them off. And that is kind of what he did with Robert Creeley at the start of his career and what I am trying to do with Michael Palmer I think. I love his work, a lot, but I want to love my work more. Stick a knife in a twist it and if I have to plagiarise the odd line, plunge that in, twist that then so be it.

The angel question?

2009-05-22T11:55:00.003+12:00

I haven't finished The Blind Singer yet but I did skip to the back and read the two essays that frame her final section The Angel Question. They are great, smoothly written, insightful essays and probably more like how I should tackle an essay which immediately makes me think, shit, maybe one of the essays I've written this year could end up in my manuscript. But there is something niggling at me, even as I say this. And that is the ability of an essay to steal the limelight. I think by creating a cohesive argument around what the poetry is (even obliquely) discussing, you remove a little of the mystery. Too many signposts?

So the idea is appealing. Especially with my 'History' section. But I just don't think I can do it.

I would love to write an essay with a series of quotes and insights by a fictional man named Derek Nohff.

Anyway...I've been putting my workshop package together and have ended up with 21 fairly full pages. I hope it's not too much for people. The whole thing is kind of all over the place except for the History section and the Straw epic, there is also my other mini-section, Endnotes, that I decided not to put a title on or a frame around to see if people can find it themselves. Probably not I imagine. They don't really have anything to do with each other, except that they are all relatively short and have the title as the last word. I dunno, if I even think they are a section. Some of the ones that were supposed to be in this section didn't even work trying to jam the title in at the end, not to say that where I could do that the poems work, but you know. It is a series I've attempted, so I thought it would be worth putting in.

The blind singer

2009-05-20T10:53:00.004+12:00

The Blind Singer (2009, VUP) is great and not what I was expecting which is always nice. It seems different from (admittedly the little amount of) Chris' work I've read previously. A bit more textural in it's language or something. Quite sensual, yet subtle and a little aloof which I like. She has those nice flat yet inclusive ending down too. She is great at rhythm and music which seems to come very naturally, although I'm sure it takes a lot of hard work. The end of Swan Song:

So then we tried to cultivate the art
of listening. Intent:
even the air in our bones
listening, so hard we heard their own high
hollow crack, crystals of river ice

re-forming. Now we grow old, and what
we've heard has ripened slowly
into song: one melancholy burst
to sear the earth
before we're gone.

Beautiful! I reckon it's in the top 10 NZ poetry books I've read and I'm only up to page 16, so more to come.

Making nice things out of straw

2009-05-19T10:42:00.003+12:00

I went to a book fair the other day and found a book called Making nice things out of straw by Eunice Svinicki (1976, David Mackay Company. ISBN 0-679-20452-0) which I just had to buy and I started writing a series of poems based on the chapter headings. Today I changed that idea slightly and I'm working on one big epic about straw making with a whole bunch of asterisk seperated sections inspired by each chapter. Fuck some weird shit has come out of it though. I have no idea where this one is going.

Saw Chris do a reading last night and she seems really into inspiration from things/words/ideas and combining that with other ideas to create really lovely multi-level metaphoric poems, much like Kate Camp does I think. So I've been wondering if I can do some of that. But I don't know how? I don't think I'm that smart. My metaphors seem to come from a much weirder less sensical place. But is that bad? In some ways I think it is, people don't get that fuck this poem is clever feeling. They get more of the fuck this poem is weird feeling. Control versus chaos maybe?

Thankyou Eunice though. This book is awesome and I can't believe no-one bought it before I did. Possibly the best title of a book I've seen in ages.

A question of place

2009-05-18T14:34:00.005+12:00

Been reading some Jorie Graham because it has to go back to the library soon. Some of her stuff is really nice, some of it unpenetrable. Well, maybe not unpenetrable, but it takes so much time and effort. And the look of it isn't even that inviting. I quite like that difficult poetry that at first glance seems like a walk in the park. Hers doesn't. Long lines, long stanzas, brackets, weird line breaks, indentations, lack of concrete imagery/narrative. I'm sure it all has a purpose and is carefully considered, but at first glance you are like phoar! and after reading the first couple of lines you have to have a real will power to go on. They aren't all like that though and some of her earlier stuff is definitely more in the imagistic lyric pool like Two Paintings by Gustav Klimt (Dream of the Unified Field. 1996. Carcanet Pr.):

Although what glitters
on the trees,
row after perfect row,
is merely
the injustice
of the world,

the chips on the bark of each
beech tree
catching the light, the sum
of the delays
is the beautiful, the human
beautiful,

body of flaws.
[...]

(n.b. indentaion missing) Lovely music and mix of imagery and abstract. Which I guess what she is known for. This is defintely one of her more conventional and accessible poems though.

Also been reading Kay's reading package (I found a picture of her, she's trying to hide but you cant get away from me! haha) about 'place' which inspired me to write a poem called History of this place (12) which tries to be as unplaceful, unhistoric and unspecific as possible. I think it came more from thinking about Allen Curnow's regionalism arguments about putting a frame around NZ in our writig as much as Kay's stuff. After hearing Bill Manhire talk about his poem 'On Originality' which I think is basically a response to RAK Mason poem about 'poets I want to follow them all' or something like that. So I guess I've become interested in the critical response poem, but don't I need more respect or something first? It's not even that I disagree with Curnow, at the time that is exactly what NZ literature needed. And do I know enough about those poets/poems to respond in that way, because surely people are going to criticise my criticism and they will have to stand up to it? Why do I do stuff like this? It seem to cause more problems than it resolves. Why couldn't I just write a nice poem about Wellington or something?

Perfect day for reading

2009-05-15T10:08:00.004+12:00

Very bad week. Had a few visitors which has screwed up the routine thing. Wednesday and Thursday were completely unproductive. Today I've written something, but it reflects the messed up schedule.

Read a really interesting essay in Hue and Cry by Tahi Moore. It was kind of standup comedy style of thing, finding the irony in the everyday, but it was a really interestig read. Quirky and insightful. So I was briefly inspired to write an essay which hasn't happened yet but maybe this afternoon if I feel like it.

Also read some more Michael Palmer and out loud too which I think makes a difference. I should do that more often. Same with my own stuff, the music is definitely different when read out loud. More obvious? Different speed? Less words skipped over? Dunno, but it helps anyway to 'get into it.'

The weather today is horrible. It's 10.30 am and it's almost as dark as night. Perfect day for reading.

Nothing

2009-05-13T13:14:00.001+12:00

Didn't write anything today. Haven't read anything today. Went for a mountain bike and now, so tired. The sun is shining and I think I might use it to relax for the hour or so before Pat's reading package class.

Lots of things

2009-05-12T10:13:00.004+12:00

Been reading Hue and Cry. Mainly fiction really and what do you know, I wrote a prose poem. The story I read was one by Anna Taylor that was full of drama and emotional gravitas (Isaac Newton's original word for gravity I found out today) and of course what I wrote was nothing like that at all. It was an absurd thing about a man-like bear who works in a call centre and drinks too much. It fitted in nicely with an earlier poem about a bear-like man who drank to much.

I also tried to write a family myth in non-fiction which came out so boring and un-storylike I think I should burn it. Which I might actually do if it wasn't electronic and therefore unburnable.

I think drinking too much coffee is getting to me. I should cut down. I wonder if that would change my writing? Would it change other things?

Went to see Ann Thwaite, the award winning biographer, talk about her latest book last night. She was dry. I don't really have anything to say about it, except that is where the family myth idea came from. Which may say something about something.

It's been great reading Lizzie's novel (sorry for calling it that Lizzie, but it is). I do get a little inbred with the whole poetry thing. Reading other stuff does engage different issues and that is good for my own work I think.

I'm drying out my cycle shorts on the electric oil heater which seems quite dangerous. I think I'll go and remove them now.

Pat's package

2009-05-08T09:59:00.004+12:00

Been reading Pat's reading package, where I think he wanted us to think about the role of constructing the

'writer's voice' as opposed to their 'human voice'. He gave us some stuff all with mention of a Hawk which he thought of as a metaphor for writers, swooping, scavenging, waiting (?) at distance from the 'real' world.

In a lot of the things he provided I got something else though, except for the memoir by Janet Frame, which definitely talked about her family and early life as piquing her interest in poetry, but it wasn't until the locksmith came along (Frank Sargeson?) that the 'writer' was truly unleashed. She also used a hawk metaphor. Is this the one that got Pat onto this topic?

Magaret Atwood and Lisel Mueller also talked quite clearly about those that are considered writers and those that consider themselves writers. I don't particularly thing is a clear distinction there though. It is, like most things, a continuum. Most good writers are never complete. Who was it who said he/she was only trying to write one poem, implying that everything else they had written was a delightful failure and perfection can never be achieved.

I wrote something interesting this morning. I tried to concentrate more on music and less on idea or story. I think I've been leaning that way lately at the expense of the music which I consider to be absolutley crucial to a good poem. Without that it might as well be prose. So yeah, it's a strange story of twins that came out of nowhere (the aural connection between words themselves?) and ended up as something with some merit, although I can tell the ending isn't right.

Also, for a digression journal, I've been doing little of that.

How about the rain? I dug the last trench yesterday. There was 30cm of water in the bottom, the clay bank behind running down like a lahar. I hope to fuck the wall lasts a few years. I'd feel really guilty if the whole things comes down.

P.S. Found a great photo of Pat on internet. Sorry Pat!

The problem of language

2009-05-07T10:07:00.004+12:00

Presented my reading package yesterday on 'Language'. It went pretty well. Some key things that came out of it for me was the idea of language as fossils or historical elements, in that you can (not exclusively) think of them as little time capsules of context, indicators of what people (societies? cultures?) have thought in the past. I like that. Opens up ideas on how to use that in my writing.

And also James talked about the problem of language. One essay written by an etymologist pointed out that because of the infinite ways that words can be connected together to mean new/different things that the writer has infinite power to create whatever they choose which is true, but she didn't really go into the area of the problems that causes with communication. How do you know that the brilliant original sentence you just wrote is going to be understood by anybody, maybe your connections are too random, maybe some people will get it and some won't, maybe the cultural context of your language is so different from someone elses they will miss crucial aspects? Should we keep this in mind and play it safe? That is the problem, how to communicate in an original and fresh way? There is no answer of course and I think it comes down to relishing the problem rather than being despaired by it. Like Bill Manhire said [paraphrased] poets like to strive for purity in their language, but the most interesting ones are those that fail.

Been hammering through my Rae Armantrout book and I'm loving some of them, I think my initial impressions from last week were a bit rash. I love this one. The ending is fantastic, Equals:

1
As if, after all,

the thing that comes to mind
squared
times inertia

equaled the "real."

2
One lizard
jammed headfirst

down the throat
of a second.

That last line is brought about so expertly, the syntax, the ridiculousness of the tone compared with the seriousness of the first section...brilliant.

Wrote three things today, one of them stupid and titleless, one has some potential, and the other semi-found poem about etymology I like, because pure chance came in and rescued it.

Music, music, music, it's all about music

2009-05-06T10:27:00.003+12:00

Just quickly, read a couple more from Company of Moths. Read them fast and the music really came alive. Like from a poem called The Turn:

So it is the lift, the shifting of earth, the turn
So it is the pleasure of green, so simply

we think, and then singing of stones
So it is the same mountain, yet otherwise

yet not entirely otherwise,
slant logic of the half-torn, final leaf,

twig across a sickle moon
[...]

Lovely! I think he partly acheives it with the heavy use of similar sounds, all the i's in there, then the f's etc. Just carries it along like a little boat.

Wrote some rubbish today. Completely directionless. Tried to write it out, but was still as directionless and pointless at the end as when I started. No music either I don't think?

The funny and the serious

2009-05-05T10:25:00.004+12:00

Damien gave me some stuff by Edwin Morgan yesterday, which was very kind of him. I can see why too. He does have a someway similar voice to my own:

- Although a poem is
undoubtedly a 'game'
it is not a game
And although now it is even
part of the game to say so,
making it a "'game'"
is spooky, and we'll
not play that

- Who are you kidding, said
the next card. You just played.
[...]

Heehee. So funny. I like the way he twists you around so many time you forget which way your facing and kind of fall over, but fall over laughing. Thanks Damien.

Also, got a couple of book of Jorie Graham's out which I'm not so excited about. So fucking deep and brainy, allusions to things I suspect I'll never know about. One of those poets I think I really want to get into, but just can't. I really do love plain language, not because I think it is better or anything, but because that is what I speak, read, understand. Other language just alludes me. In small doses it great, to find a new word, but with long complicated lines/sentences loaded with allusion and big words, I do fail to get into the poem. I get the feeling she is a Keats fan too and you can kind of see that in the way she writes. It is very classical in many ways. I will perservere with it though, and try and change all this. And for fairness sake, from Never (2002, Carcanet, UK. ISBN: 1-85754-621-0):

On a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison)[...]

Actually scrap all that. I'm wrong about the whole big word thing. I think it is more her tone or something that at first puts me off. But that little section is beautiful, describing the motion of the little fish without ever saying what the narrator is looking at. Requires further reading...

Feeling threatened

2009-05-04T09:55:00.002+12:00

Get on back that little pony.

Just reading an essay by James Longenbach in The art of the poetic line (2008, Graywolf Pr. ISBN: 978-1-55597-488-6). He's talking about the 'Sirens' section of James Joyce's Ulysses when he says Joyce suggests [when indulging in the aural pleasures of poetry] 'we ignore the seduction of plain sense at our own peril...Words mean something because they always threaten to sound like something else.'

I don't know if I completely understand what that last sentence is getting at. Is he saying words have added meaning if they sound like another word - rhyme, assonance etc? Is he saying words almost always sound like something else other than what they mean and this somehow gives them that meaning? Or when he says 'mean something' is actually saying 'are important'?

The whole previous paragraph is kind of getting at the point that meaning (in poetry) is useless without sound and vice-versa, but that last sentence is a bit perplexing. Maybe he is just saying those two things might be more connected than we think, that they have to work together to achieve either?

Anyway, it sounds like Joyce's Sirens section didn't really make sense unless it is put in context of the previous prose sections and the bit that came after. Which kind of sounds a little bit like cheating. How many poets get to write an accompanying prose section that explains of the strange words they gave chosen? But then context comes in many forms, and something as simple as a one word title can provide that kind of context, so I guess all poetry is working within a sphere of context of some sort. When a poet mentions sand and war, you could assume that he/she assumes that the reader might connect that to the one of the recent wars in the Middle East. But if he wrote 'wah wah wah, ssssssss and sssssss' would they get that? Probably not I'm guessing. So then it becomes like a cards face up, cards face down kind of thing. Which is an eternal problem.

So thanks for helping James! Although to be fair I haven't read all the essay. That will come this afternoon I think.

Is it bad to be writing in this journal if I haven't done any reading or writing today?

2009-05-01T10:18:00.002+12:00

Yes.

Bill Manhire inspires great and disastrous attempts at higher art

2009-04-30T09:43:00.004+12:00

It's only 9.30 but I can tell nothing is happening today. Bill Manhire talked to us yesterday and I was inspired by a lot of what he said, but this morning I tried to write something using 'another' text like he seems to be fond of doing, historical things, other non-poetry type things. Research I suppose. So I tried that and I don't think it is for me. I wrote something 'inspired' by The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1990, Dover Publications. ISBN: 0-486-26464-5).

Fucken hell. Bill mentioned several times that we need to change the source material intention to make it a poem otherwise what is the point, which is of course easier said than done. I guess it helps if you bring something else to it, like Bill seems quite fond of making other works into metaphors for writing like the Lightning poem. I guess I'm saying I didn't do that. Maybe I'm not at that stage yet. H.O.D. does have quite a weird, dark, imposing tone, so maybe that doesn't help if you are trying to help it escape itself into something else?

I also went heavy with the rhyme which Bill inspired too (he showed us a couple of new things which were sensational!). Although I've started geting into that a bit on my own. Such a tricky one.

In other news, I read a couple more Palmer (I really, really want to spell his name Psalmer. Is that wrong?). Anyway today is another write off, but I haven't had too many of those so far, so that's OK. I just feel weird, disconnected or something. Don't know why.

Sayonara.