The angel question?

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

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

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.