Ruby Street

“I was the world in which I walked.” - Wallace Stevens , from "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon"

Interesting post by Seth Abramson about, essentially 'secondhand' emotional weight v. surprise in the poem. He says, "the capacity of poetry to express emotional weight is often at odds with the capacity of poetry to surprise both reader and author" . By surprise, could that also be lightness, a kind of mobility, shape-changing, dancing, freedom (if that's a word one can ever use, apart from that Kristofferson song), rather than all this gravitas that I know, at times, I heavy myself with?

on paper the scrawl and overscrawl yesterday's list what was I thinking? now enumerated with three different colours of ink of what was to hand swelling as if thought had become action

"... an empty drawer is unimaginable. It can only be thought of." Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space , Beacon Press, Boston, 1964, p. xxxiii.

Seasons, cloud banks, grave routes The stillness within wandering The traces of us Roads are sidetrips, doors another weather Who thinks of the rose in the dark? The symbolic, just a dark plate To be roadworthy in ways and means How to know White dust haloes round your feet The city’s memories in bullet holes, wreathes and chisel marks A half moon, again A tiredness between sleep Those beliefs in old landscapes ... This is a little something from a sequence I'm working on; some parts of it are based around my recent meanderings around the world. The above extract was worked up from notes written while in Paris (hence references to white dust, cemeteries and bullet holes etc) in September/October during the northern hemisphere's autumn (as in, they do seasons differently up there).

And who could forget the immortal words of The Goons on the subject of walking. Just a little late for this seasonal time, here's the first verse: I'm walking backwards for Christmas, Across the Irish Sea, I'm walking backwards for Christmas, It's the only thing for me. I've tried walking sideways, And walking to the front, But people just look at me, And say it's a publicity stunt. I'm walking backwards for Christmas, To prove that I love you.

And just some bits and pieces before the year ends, mainly a bit of skiting. 4W 18 , which was published in November, featured the winner of the Booranga Prize for best poem in the issue , which was none other than me, myself, I. To read the winning poem, The Beautiful Anxiety , you'll have to buy the mag for the moment. But here's a taste: ... and distinguish the cold of it, dropt on sun shadows within the petrochemical hum it’s erotic scent, a ghost of ash passing stars, and a kind of subliminal speech among legends of flowers and birds, roses ... - from 'The Beautiful Anxiety', Jill Jones *** Also, the annual Newcastle Poetry Prize was announced in December. No, I did not win that one - the winner was Mark Treddinick for his poem Eclogues - but two of my poems were included in the anthology. Again, you should get the anthology for the whole nine metres, but here's a line or nine from mine: ... The birds do not care which is why we watch them. Rather than knot u...

My wild field catalogue of flowers Grows in my rhymes as thick as showers Tedious and long as they may be To some, they never weary me The wood and mead and field of grain I coud hunt oer and oer again And talk to every blossom wild Fond as a parent to a child And cull them in my childish joy from "May", John Clare

Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi Long seeking it through others, I was far from reaching it. Now I go by myself; I meet it everywhere. It is just I myself, And I am not itself. Understanding this way, I can be as I am. Tung-Shan (Tozan) (806-869) (from Two Zen Classics , Katsuki Sekida. Weatherhill. New York, 1995.)

My shadow keeps me company this moonlit evening Abbas Kiarostami (Trans. by Ahmad Karimi-Hakkad and Michael Beard) A short extract from poems by Iranian film maker, Kiarostami.

Yes, absent for a while. My computer melt-down caused a blog quietness (though not 'quietude'). Also, 2007 has not been one of the best of years, and one aspect was the worst of years. However, life, work, art (techne, poesis, scratching words), pleasures and drudges, pottering with and without guilt, keep me going onwards. The strains of technology leave their traces. More noise on ruby street, anyway.