Geoff Cochrane come on down

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

Roman numerals

& spiky carburettors

clog the drains.

As I pass the Cenotaph

a cold wind soaps my cheek.

[...]

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

[...]

The purple gloom

of a dire Friday,

and here we are sans God

lights stuck in us like darts

lights like stings all over

Gelid chrome deflects the pinging hail

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