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...
