what i've been doing ...

The 'what I've been doing' conversation could go on for a while, especially given that, in this space, it's been a long time between drinks. For the nonce, I'll narrow it down to one small corner of 'what I've been doing recently'. One version can be seen in a few poems that were published in March this year in John Tranter's new Journal of Poetics Research. Here they are:

Five poems in Journal of Poetics Research

The older poem is 'Free Hand: A Kind of Thinking'. As well as, obviously, being a kind of ars poetica, it's length and its syntactic energies are different to the other poems, especially the first three. These may, or may not, appear in print later this year. I presume you can tell they are more stripped back, obviously shorter, full of questions and even imperatives (not so much in these but in others I've been writing), less image-driven, impatient. Whether I'll continue in this vein much longer, I don't know. It's one of my current experiments.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

vale Jackson Mac Low 1922-2004

Belatedly, wanting to acknowledge the passing of Jackson Mac Low last week. There's an obituary at The New York Times and here's more info on Mac Low . The poem below is from his series of Light Poems. 1ST LIGHT POEM: FOR IRIS -- 10 JUNE 1962 The light of a student-lamp sapphire light shimmer the light of a smoking-lamp Light from the Magellanic Clouds the light of a Nernst lamp the light of a naphtha-lamp light from meteorites Evanescent light ether the light of an electric lamp extra light Citrine light kineographic light the light of a Kitson lamp kindly light Ice light irradiation ignition altar light The light of a spotlight a sunbeam sunrise solar light Mustard-oil light
Read more

Questions, but no answers: while editing a manuscript

I’m in the process of editing something so all these strange questions come for me. I have no answers. Well, not exactly. And not while I’m in the midst of this process. What might a book be saying or declaring? Is what it’s not saying as important? But how can we know what it’s not saying? Does a book actually say anything? Didn’t someone write? Well, did they? OK, does even the writer know what they re saying? Could you write a book about what the book isn’t about? What are the words not saying? Is it the words, each of them, or the phrases, or the sentences or lines? Who is or isn’t in the poem? Who is knocking on the door to come into the poem? (Oh, so, here’s a metaphor!) Who doesn’t give a shit? Are these simply random, stumbling questions? Are any questions random? Is it a return of the repressed? What are the book’s gestures? ‘Wo es war, soll ich werden’, anyone? Is the book a symptom of something? So, the book
Read more

here and now

Image
There’s a new anthology of Australian poetry just hit the decks. I think the official publication date was early January, but there were plenty copies in bookshops before Christmas. I bought one in one of my favourite bookshops, Kinokuniya, in Sydney, in December. There’s some discussion about it going on Laurie Duggan’s blog , especially about the cover. I’m not so keen on the cover but others I know think that it’s fine. And there is always going to be the usual argument about who is in and who is out, and why. I've been left out of enough anthologies and been in a few (I'm in this one, for instance), and have said my piece on that a few times too many in the past, so perhaps it's not the place to join that discussion for the moment. I’m more interested in John Kinsella’s comment in one of his introductory essays (you can read all of this essay on the Penguin website ): “The publication or presentation of innovative verse-novels, prose poetry, hypertextual poetry, multim
Read more