January 2013
3 posts
Hi, Sports Fans!: Redirect
I have to admit that few people who know me well would use the words “sports fan” to describe me. I’m appreciative of sports, of the rigor with which the athlete trains his or her body and even find a great deal of beauty in the enterprise. It’s not uncommon to see great dramas unfold on the field, and I love that idea of a huge number of people sharing a transcendent moment. And yet it’s rare...
Salvage Art: Redirection
When I was growing up, all the women in my house were using needles. I’ve always had a fascination with the needle, the magic power of the needle. The needle is used to repair damage. It’s a claim to forgiveness. It is never aggressive, it’s not a pin.
—Louise Bourgeois
Last week I went to see the exhibition of Louise Bourgeois’s late works currently on display at Heide in Melbourne. It...
Redirection
I can only say that I am a creature of fits and starts, of ebb and flow. Finding myself ready to return to a blog, I also find that my blog is out of date. I am no longer the Sydney City Poet, though I want to continue with many of the threads I picked up with that role. I hope that in time that someone else will have the opportunity to pick up the mantle of the “City Poet” and no doubt whoever...
July 2012
1 post
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Hibernation
As a blogger I have been, apparently, feeling rather ursine and gone into something like a hibernation mode for the winter. Which is not to say that I haven’t been writing, reading, thinking, attending—but that I have been recording more in my own diary and notebooks than I have in the public space of a blog. I can only hope that, in person, I haven’t seemed too bearish to friends.
I suspect my...
May 2012
3 posts
1 tag
Going Home
“Right or wrong, this is the road and we are on it.”
This is Gertrude Stein speaking to Alice B. Toklas—though I admit I have found it in Jeanette Winterson’s book Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Unlike Winterson, I somehow haven’t yet made it to this particular part of the section of “S” in the modern library, though I own a copy of Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and am once...
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“So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated...”
– —Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
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Co-Signed, K
During my first year living in Ann Arbor, I was inspired by a group of poets in the year above me who, as the WCWPCCS (the Washtenaw County Women’s Poetry Collective and Casserole Society), published a chapbook of collaborative poems. Though others made appearances in it (including male poets) the primary collaborators were Amy Berkowitz, Beth Divis, Emma Gorenberg, Kellen Grady, Elisa McCool and...
April 2012
5 posts
1 tag
Poems Revisited: “Mothers and Daughters” by David...
I often think that it is in the final line of a poem that the reader’s relationship to a poem really begins: it’s the last line that sends a reader back to the beginning of a poem that they will really love. These endings may open the poem out, resist a definitive “reading”, or they may feel like everything shuts up tight, a sprung trap. I’ve certainly heard arguments for both, and there are...
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“To believe that any appreciation implies a unified theory of value in art, to...”
– Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry
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On Being Taught
Many years ago I wrote a poem dedicated to one of my teachers that ended with the lines “Still I seem to need so much teaching/ still I am so unteachable.” Besides giving the poem as a small gift, I haven’t done anything else with it except, I hope, build on whatever skill I had at the time I wrote it.
Since that time, I suspect the sentiment of these lines has stayed true, though I have come...
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Quotation, Context, Connotation
Around ten years ago, as a startlingly unknowing undergraduate, I took a class boldly titled “Literary Classics.” The thing I remember most clearly about this class was feedback I received on my first essay: do not, I was told, quote an author’s summing up of his opposing argument as if the author was supporting your own argument. When Harold Bloom gathers his not inconsiderable pith to sum up...
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No Words
If you have ever read a poem or novel or literary essay and loved it, then you, too, value literature: you don’t need to spend every waking hour dedicated to the temple of words in bookish idolatry to say that a work made of words has enriched your life.
Weirdly, I am quoting myself. On Tuesday night, after hearing about the cancellation of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards I wanted...
March 2012
5 posts
Double Duty Report, Redux
With the posting of the last of four blog posts at Southerly I’ve completed my month of guest blogging for this publication—and with great thanks to Southerly for asking me to write for them. Effectively the pieces I wrote for Southerly are pieces that I might have otherwise posted here as entries in my “Diary of City Poet” pieces—ie, they are essays musing about elements of the writing and...
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Second Draft
They say all writing is rewriting; what they don’t say is that rewriting—yes, vital—often feels like stasis.
When I talk with writer friends about what constitutes a “good day’s work” we will nearly all say that the best feeling is to have written something new. To go back to something old—whether it’s looking over something that appeared on paper only the day before, or pulling a piece out of...
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Poems Revisited: "A Consumer's Report" by Peter...
When Peter Porter died in 2010, I found that many friends outside Australia—who regularly read poetry—were not at all familiar with his work. I shared with them a small number of his poems to whet their appetites: among those I chose was “A Consumer’s Report,” which proved a hit among friends and students alike. This poem initiates the reader into its modus operandi from the outset, with the...
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Double Duty Report
As well as continuing on with this site, I have also been asked to be a guest-blogger for the journal Southerly for the month of March. I’ll be posting there once a week all month—the first piece, musing on my attraction to reading the biographies of other writers—is now online. Nonetheless, I’ll still be posting here—there are more interviews, Poems Revisited essays and “diary” entries to...
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Writerly Ancestry, or Influence and Anxiety
I love to argue with the literary critic Harold Bloom: my copy of his The Western Canon, for instance, is incredibly dog-eared, edge-worn and marked up. Especially the lists at the back, his extensive proposal for a canon of Western literature. I bring up Harold Bloom because he’s the one that introduced that phrase, with his book of that title, The Anxiety of Influence. As poets, we are almost...
February 2012
5 posts
2 tags
On Translation, Poet Translators and the Creation...
Poet, Editor and Translator Michael Hulse
A number of years ago I ran into an acquaintance in the library (he worked there; I merely frequented the place) and he asked what I’d been reading lately. I mentioned that I had recently begun reading a lot of Polish poetry. His response was that he didn’t really respond to the work of Cseslaw Milosz. This event has stood out for me for a long time...
“Language is not the dress but the incarnation of thought.”
– William Wordsworth
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Poets + Picnic
I am delighted to be included in the line up for this year’s Poets’ Picnic run by Woollhara Municipal Council and the Woollhara Library, taking place this coming Tuesday evening, 21 February. I’d heard about this annual event from a number of people, and was honoured to be invited to contribute to the reading, taking place at twilight in the Blackburn Gardens. It’s a free event, and sure to be...
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Being an Enthusiastic Reader, or Hey! I could do...
I hit upon one of my central reading experiences when I was writing about walking: whatever I read about I want to experience in life as well as books. In some cases, I just feel like I already know how to do something, but in others it really is the case that I read something and want to know what it felt like. I was one of those children forever feeling around in the back of wardrobes, just in...
Poems Revisited: "Clancy of the Overflow" by A. B....
Nearly everyone has one or two “best-loved” poems, the pieces that feature in each reader’s “personal anthology.” While I can’t speak definitively, I would expect many of these poems to be classics of the kind that the Norton Anthologists would always be certain to include—I know, for instance, many people who cite Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 (“Let us not to the marriage of true minds/ admit...
January 2012
4 posts
1 tag
On Writing Letters
When I was starting out as a writer, my mother took me to talk with a journalist-friend-of-the-family: this visit had a practical purpose, as we wanted to find out if there was any chance of my fulfilling my “work experience” week at the newspaper she worked for. More importantly, though, it was a chance for me to talk more generally with someone who made their living from words. I think I...
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“The poem is an effort to express a knowledge imperfectly felt, to articulate...”
– Richard Wilbur
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“I could have called it Violence!”: A conversation...
Though I have admired Maria Takolander’s poetry for a number of years now, I only got in touch with her a couple of months ago when I decided I’d like to write about her poem “Geography Lessons” in my Poems Revisited series. When this email exchange took place I was soon to travel to Melbourne, so I asked Maria if I might be able to interview her as well. Over a brisk weekend visiting my parents...
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On Slow Time
Joel McCrea as film director John Lloyd Sullivan watches a film in jail in Sullivan’s Travels
This past week I went to the cinema to see the new Alexander Payne film The Descendants on its opening day. I could easily write a review of this film—and perhaps, another time, I will—but what struck me was my experience of slow time in the watching of this movie. When I say “slow time” I don’t...
December 2011
9 posts
2 tags
The Reading Round-up: December in Books
My books are split between cities: I hope this is the last month I will have this problem as I plan to finally ship the most important parts of my library (vast; even the important parts are more voluminous than seems healthy) to Sydney in January. I don’t have the piles of books all assembled in front of me, so this reconstruction will have to do for now.
Now a regular part of my life, I have...
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Walking
I’ve been fascinated by Charles Dickens for a long time, and two things always stand out most: that wherever he travelled, whatever tourism wonders he took in, he always sought out the local prison; and that he was an inveterate walker, often taking in 20 miles a day of the London streets. I imagine that without such extreme walking he would have found it difficult to write his long intricately...
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Poems Revisited: "The Art of Disappearing" by...
When Sarah Holland-Batt’s debut volume Aria appeared in 2008, it made a welcome addition to Australian poetry. This fully formed new voice gave readers a fully realised first book: among other things, the architecture of that book was a particular strength. The final poem “The Art of Disappearing” sends readers out of Aria with the mind opened. Reading its simple catalogue and seemingly artless...
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Ice in Time for Christmas
Image: Frank Hurley’s “A radiant Turret lit by the midsummer midnight sun”
__________________________
The ice was all between
The ice was here, the ice was there The ice was all around
- Coleridge, from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Though it’s summer here, I’m preparing for ice: this Tuesday (20th December) at 6pm writer...
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“But I’ve always loved the stories about Shelley going around Oxford...”
– Elizabeth Bishop, letter to Robert Lowell 30/6/48
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Cook, Eat, Write
Last week I suddenly succumbed to my obsessive nature. A single thought lodged in my mind, and it had nothing to do with writing. It was this: “Learn to make a Texas Chili!” Or did it have to do with writing?
Recently the poet Felicity Plunkett gave this year’s “minislec” for the Red Room Company, and she talked about, among other (more serious?) things, “procrasti-baking” and the fact that many...
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Poetry at Sappho's: Tuesday 13 December
On Tuesday 13th December (that’s tomorrow!) I will be reading at Sappho’s Bookstore in Glebe with a troika of lovely, talented ladies—Pip Smith, Felicity Plunkett and Fiona Wright. The reading is free, and I’ll have copies of Fire Season available there as well. As always at Sappho’s, there’s an open mic too.
I spent some of this afternoon pulling out poems and deciding what to read,...
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On Conducting an Interview, or Think Fast!
Walter Cronkite Interviews Frank Sinatra
I first started to interview people—especially poets—because for a long time I have loved reading interviews. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m especially a fan of the Paris Review’s “Writers at Work” series. I remembered when I first discovered these interviews, and read through all the second hand copies of the collected interviews I could find. Those I...
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Review: The Forest of Sure Things by Megan-Snyder...
It’s relatively easy to hear about the major books by the major poets coming out around the world; similarly, within Australia’s writing community, it’s easy enough to keep up with the newer names emerging. What we don’t often get to read about are the volumes published by independent presses internationally—especially those that focus on poetry. In addition to the essays and interviews on this...
November 2011
10 posts
2 tags
The Reading Round-up: November in Books
This month has seen me chewing over books for specific purposes: for reviews, for background before conducting interviews and for research both for my own poetry and to prepare public presentations. Nonetheless, I’ve carved out a little time for reading for pure leisure as well, and as ever the resulting reading list is varied.
Over the whole of the past month I’ve spent a lot of time with Best...
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“It’s a lifelong task for an artist, and for us critics as well, to stay...”
– Dana Stevens, Slate, “The Movie Club,” 9 January 2010
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Poems Revisited: “Liam” by Judith Beveridge
When all is said and done, poets love words. I have read many poems that were clearly written in part to catalogue a beloved lexicon, a set of “shoptalk,” and these poems are almost always in some way playful; fanciful. I have also contemplated that old saw about the Eskimos many a time: that they have many, many terms for snow. What I enjoy so much about Judith Beveridge’s poem “Liam” touches...
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Practising Imitation
In “Ego Dominus Tuus” W. B. Yeats writes “A style is found by sedentary toil/ And by the imitation of great masters.” This is a much-quoted maxim, one which I have recently come to think about more and more as I have become increasingly fascinated by the process of imitation in my own practice. Placed alongside T. S. Eliot’s famous quip that “good poets borrow, great poets steal,” these words...
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Upcoming: Woollahra Local Writers' Word Festival
The above image show New South Head Road over a century ago, in 1908. Want to compare the view this weekend?
Things seem to be getting busy in the life of this City Poet; and while last Saturday I had the pleasure of hearing someone else read my words at the inaugural “Acting on Ink” performance at the State Library of NSW (alongside wonderful poems by Robert Adamson, Jennifer Maiden, Cate...
Collaborating with a Work of Art
The above image shows poet Frank O’Hara with Robert Motherwell, René d’Harnoncourt and Nelson Rockefeller at the Museum of Modern Art’s Robert Motherwell exhibition, curated by O’Hara. Among O’Hara’s poems drawing on art is the wonderful “Why I am Not a Painter.”
As you most likely already know, as the Sydney City Poet my work this year includes the writing of a series of poems in...
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“The place of reading is a kind of yonder world, a place that is neither here nor...”
– Siri Hustvedt, from “Yonder,” Yonder: Essays
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Meeting in the Hungry Middle: A Conversation with...
I first met Kent MacCarter in 2005 when we shared a dinner of rabbit together at a dinner party hosted by a mutual friend. It was my first rabbit, and also my first exposure to the names of a number of American poets Kent threw out during the conversation that evening. We were intermittently in contact after that, but my recent return from studies in the USA—Kent hails from Montana (by way of...
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Poems Revisited: “The President” by John Mateer
I imagine there are moments in everyone’s lives in which they experience or witness an event that seem so highly distilled that it is already something like a poem or other work of art. That was my first reaction to reading John Mateer’s “The President,” the opening poem of his latest collection Southern Barbarians. And yet, these moments that seem to arrive as poems are difficult to write: while...
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Event Management for Poets, or Finding Balance
I am in the process of organising the first real “event”—a reading—for my role as the Sydney City Poet. To be held at 6pm in the evening on 10 November in Wendy Whiteley’s garden in Lavender Bay, the reading will feature the first of the six poems I am writing in my official capacity, alongside short readings by Robert Adamson, Judith Beveridge, Martin Harrison and Fiona Wright. With these poets...
October 2011
10 posts
2 tags
The Reading Roundup: October in Books
As is the case with so many people, I go through phases when I am reading a lot and phases when I scarcely seem to glance at a new book. Perhaps it is the real arrival of springtime, or the feeling of settling into my office and new home, but I am reading a lot at present. Though I plan to write some more formal reviews of things on the office desk and bedside table, I thought I would map out my...
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'Tis the Season: Thoughts on Anthologies
We are, it seems, in the middle of “Anthology Season” in Australia. So far there doesn’t seem to be a Hallmark card or a supermarket display to clue everyone into this, but nonetheless those in the know can tell you: the anthologies are upon us.
Of course this time of year sees us anticipating the release of the Black Inc trio of Best Australian Essays, Best Australian Short Stories and—of...
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“When Odysseus speaks of the measureless sea and the boundless earth, it is all...”
– Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, translated by Michael Hulse
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"All these poems around the word fell:" An...
“All these poems around the word fell:” An Interview with Luke Beesley
Though I’ve known the poet, artist and musician Luke Beesley for ten years, I only recently visited the home he shares with his partner Zoe and son Ari in Northcote for the first time since he moved to Melbourne from Brisbane four years ago. Walking in the door of the apartment I was greeted by bookshelves stuffed with...
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Teaching Poems, or Who's that Poet Laureate?
I suspect I sound like a broken record when it comes to teaching: preparing to teach a once-off class for the first time in six months, once again I found myself returning to the notion of pleasure. True, from my ritualistic caffe latte to the occasional hour with Vogue in the bathtub, I try to include small pleasures in each day, but poetry is one of those greatest pleasures for me, and when I...
