Ruby Street

I nterior morning register exaggerates daily danger S tairs renew windows organise east balance T herefore to end where existence enters K nowledge's internal conclusions vibrates considered rain G iven yesterday's regulations the ash began C ollapse of forms an outside possibility A bundance equips fabric this outside broken U ntil my night taste equips hours L etters depending dust too many problems M orning fixed in newspaper more cold C hronometer drops ash. Here's the rise! Hey now, maybe they're like Eileen Tabios's hay(na)ku .

I'm leaning on each hour and now the hours get darker have to finish up the loose ends I can so I can travel meetings in Melbourne meetings in Hobart all the decisions of packing unable to predict Melbourne weather and to breath the Tasmanian air after all these years

If the night comes underneath cloud courses the end to refresh within marks of rain to fly night immediate but nervous with probability constant loss in direction that beginning strength, sky these lists verify storm, tolerance pretty commerce exceeds everything the interior moors traffic, writing it castrati, tremolo whirrs of construction a fine strap of sweat sighs and nerves and the jokes green ones to each morning's expenses slowly, exactly everything rigid, hurt distant protection moved far from lucent cut noon the lobby quiets the fist's mark ashes leached of the original rose colour a zone of another way raises light elasticity is more than advisable to distil payments of the hour

I feel like hiding this week. Quietly. Why is there no quiet? OK, given there is no quiet, I'm hiding behind my Grado SR-60s. Rather my noise, if it must. Last night listened to Bill Evans, Waltz for Debby . That was what I needed. Tonight, Freeform's Audiotourism. Vietnam and China remix album. I read somewhere it's a good album to listen to with headphones. They were right. Preparing for holiday is wearing. The world is full of stuff, full of forms, and the drag of technology. I couldn't get time off for a funeral today. I have no time, only noise. Hiding in the bass tonight, and the ambient noise of China and Vietnam.

The subject of every conversation planet-wise birds further travel planes dash moments sleepers pass into other zones cargo leaves us here for water the original message loss

What can I say? The reading in Canberra went well, but the overshadowing of other things. I know that regret is a useless emotion but today, to find out I should have gone - who cares about visiting hours? - and now ... too late. Goodbye always too late.

For the first time since about 1994, I think, my name is no longer mentioned anywhere on the Sydney Star Observer masthead. I've been reviewer, columnist, staff journalist and board member almost continuously since that time, for nearly ten years. I'll still be doing the odd film review but no longer consistently enough to rate a regular mention. An era has passed for me. Reading the Star this week, Thursday 18 MArch, SSO 705, I came upon this article about texts commissioned for a new orchestral work, Seven Last Words , by George Lenz for the Australian Chamber Orchestra. The writers include poets David Malouf (he will always be a poet to me), Dorothy Porter and Peter Goldsworthy. And maybe cartoonist Michael Leunig also is doing poetry for this one as well. Here's what Malouf said to Star editor, Marcus O'Donnell: "Malouf offers seven short poems, all versions of the Emperor Hadrian’s short poem to his departing soul. Soul, small wandering one, My...

I've tried it with grids but I usually fail. I'm pretty visual but not with graphs and xy axes. The only exam I remember failing was maths. But here's a bit of discussion about poetry grids, from Josh Corey , Aaron McCollough and Kasey Mohammad . It's part of the discussion about poetic reception, about where we place poems and how we read them. We or I? Hmm. There's something in this that reminds me of those psychological graphs, and variables like introversion/extraversion and Myers-Briggs tests, which I always found deeply worrying yet fascinate many people. I always scored near the middle - what does that say? I go along with Kasey. Poems exist in time and space, which, stated like that, is the bleeding obvious. But more specifically, their effects will be different if, say, they are encountered on the page or read live or on a CD or radio/TV. And will depend on what page they are read - print v. web; magazine v. monograph v. anthology. That is, varying ...

"I was heading off with fists in tattered pockets; My overcoat also becoming idealised; I rambled under the sky, Muse, your supplicant; Oh! So fantastic! What exquisite loves I dreamed. A gaping hole in my only pair of trousers ... -- Tom Thumb the dreamer, I sowed rhymes while wandering ..." - Arthur Rimbaud , from 'Ma Boheme' (A fantasy), trans by John Kinsella "On the road again, one fist in the hole I've poked in a trouser pocket, my topcoat notional as the sky I'm wrapped in, muse, your slave, your liege lieutenant. Oh my! The affairs I've had a hand in through that hole in my pants, Tom Thumb at his dopey dreamwork. ..." - Arthur Rimbaud , from 'Ma Boheme' (A Gipsy's Life), trans by David Malouf

movements of dust the same music that shakes I is distracted walls the wind is smooth colours the song, that one will have GONE soon uncounted morbidities of day the color of which will GONE soon (some transformations of a previous poem)

The real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air but to walk on earth. - Thich Nhat Hanh

"Let us walk back now. Let us walk back to the city of time, let us abandon the violin-maker making his circuits around the cottage ... the cottage is sinking back in its valley, we walk along a peculiar music, walk back to the city of time." - Alex Skovron , from 'The Violin-maker, the Forest and the Clock' in The Man and the Map

a baroque needle figuring intricacies through my body the very arch of music dust makes me tremble I'm scattered by the walls singing the wind outside sweet day soon gone colours uncounted shadow soft soon gone

taking today easy - a day undecided in the sky - walking is good, walking and talking with Annette - our doubts, irritations and disappointments with 'the art world', 'poetry inc' - but you can't escape cant, gossip, ego parades, buggeration - how we're in it anyway, and not innocents, though neither of us good hustlers also a visit to the past - someone I knew so many years ago, lived with/ flatmate/ friend - the books, the music - how the past, though gone, is resonance - no new thought, it's only as it happens that I think it - the folds in time there may be a storm - the rumble at the moment is a plane but its echo under clouds presages rain - I've smelled rain all day and the birds are ansty - Annette doesn't believe me but there is so much water in the air, the grey clouds moving and a strange stillness underneath the suburban tick-tock

Been a strange tough old week. Maybe just the product of getting into things after being so unwell. I managed last week by listening to Miles Davis at the Blackhawk San Francisco (the full Friday and Saturday night sets). Miles at his most exuberant, post Coltrane pre Shorter. This week I'm having to chill down a bit with Bill Evans - the Waltz for Debby live at the Village Vanguard album. Both live albums and the sound of the two is just ... there. Make me breath better. Even though they are cds, it does make you long for the days of analogue, warm and bright.

I feel good. Had my hair 'done' this evening. Coloured and snipped and styled. Weight off my shoulders and all that. On the way home, reading on the train, which eventually came (Sydney has no discernable train timetable anymore, it's a mixture of potluck and anarchy), I lighted upon this quote in the street press: "Do your hair in different styles, makes people notice." - James Brown Is that right on, or what? Get down!! I'm serious, a do is important!!

Indifference as a strategy.

cathedrals of light corners of human company light the escort of dark texture of space leaves scatter on the lines of our life coming and going and what we leave behind our indentations, signatures Some notes after the end of Annette's exhibition.

... negative sublime ... rhapsodic quotidian ... no originary meaning

"... that the noise is only beginning to rise. (And yet how quiet here.)" - Michael Palmer in Chicago Review , 49.2, Summer 2003, p74

I had a small epiphany yesterday. Yes, the world changed and everything stayed the same. I had chosen to read some old poems, 1990s poems of mine, at a reading. And they actually weren't bad, they didn't make me cringe, they worked according to some audience comments. These were poems I didn't include in 2002's Selected and now I have a twinge of regret. OK, I know that regret is a useless emotion but I've never been a subscriber to economical theories. It made me look again at what I've been doing all these years and how much all that is still a part of what I am doing though I've been recently in love with doing 'new things'. It also made me think about how one's work is received (or not, as the case may be). Everyone's a critic, of course, including oneself, but I wonder how useful reviews are, for the poet being reviewed, that is. A review isn't critique, a review is a once-off, a toss-off in many cases - I know, as I've...

I've been at home sick on-and-off for about three weeks. I've mostly been able to function at work, just a day off here and there, until this week when everything crumpled inside me. Staying in bed finally brought out strange memories, childhood memories for me. Probably because my window looks out into the Japanese maple's leafy green (dappled green, truly it is but you can't say that kind of thing these days, can you?) and also green painted lintels and bars. It's all very green with bright yellow blue sun in the background. When I was a kiddie at home sick, or with a long illness like measles, it was the same, the sense of green in the foreground at the window and sun backing up. Then there's all the life happening, noises of cars and builders and passers-by, so close yet distant because you're stuck inside. This gives it all a kind of echo effect. I wrote this during the week, posted elsewhere but I'll place it here as well: the knocki...

Just been reading one of my favourite magazines, The Wire - "We're on the outside looking out." - John Zorn , quoted by David Stubbs "Epiphanies ruin everything, all the while leaving everything intact. The world you once knew has now gone for good, yet still it refuses to lie in ruins before you. It is consequently in the nature of an epiphany to illuminate its subject rather than the other way round. Its significance remains reflected at best. I can't imagine anyone wanting to stand for too long in so treacherous a light, but that's probably just me." - Pianist Ken Hollings on first hearing Martin Denny's Quiet Village in 1981. "I can't undersand why people are frightened by new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." - John Cage

And congratulations to Australian poet, Dorothy Porter , for winning not only the John Bray Poetry Award but the overall Premier's Award in the 2004 South Australian Festival Awards for Literature. The work is a verse novel, Wild Surmise . The Premier's Award is for the best overall published work and the works in consideration are those that have already won prizes in the categories of children's literature. Fiction, innovation, multi-media, non-fiction and poetry. On receiving the Premier's Award, Dorothy said, 'this is an extraordinary honour and one in my most wildest and conceited dreams I never thought I would get it … It's a win for poetry … Existence is a miracle, poetry is its hymn, but conscious of that existence is a real gift, and apart from music, poetry is its most rapturous expression.' She dedicated the 2004 Premier's Award to the memory one of Australia's greatest poets, Bruce Beaver. He died late last month at the age of 76, f...