Ruby Street

I am trialling Google's web page builder and, for something to put there, built a site-in-progress called off the street . Essentially it's poems I've published on this blog arranged by loose categories. I am not posting any ruby street poems that have been published elsewhere or are being currently submitted elsewhere. I've left most of them in the form they appeared on the blog with a little tweaking, mainly of titles and a tiny bit of punctuation. I've also decided not to arrange them in chronological order, so as to disentangle them from da blog where you can read them and everything else in order, of course. I've made a start but still have some way to go in sorting it all out. Google claims it's wysiwyg but, inevitably, it ain't. One of my browsers is an older version of Safari and I had to do a bit of tweaking to get it to look OK, and even so, it's not quite what I intended. Seems OK in Firefox. I will test on other machines over time. Any f...

Who’s to minister the repetition of logos or conserve the limits of voice in the glide toward afternoon? Into the revolve goes an alignment stars, priorities, the highest commissions. ‘Reality is somewhere else’. Pale green bricks glowed at midday the handiwork of winter is foiled in the machine. How would you pick up stakes, the degree of grain? As if time causes money, yellow internal walls, bedrock data a glint on the window. Timetables for the end of the world as we know it, are continuous, as long as it’s written down near the bottom line, the broken one. (Have you or have you not delivered?) Interests are driven by internal or mixed-up confusion. So there’s too much of almost nothing while a centrifuge is humming — the risk is the outcome.

I was also interested in Ron Silliman's analysis of a survey of the online reading & publishing habits of poets conducted by Simmons B. Buntin for Terrain.org . Among many fascinating things he noted (his blog has a number of postings on this survey), there was the advice of 'don't enter competitions' . Well, I have done both (ie entered and deliberately shunned). Am I doing the wrong thing, either way? I realise that the kinds of poetry competitions that prevail in the USA, and which I presume Ron is referring to, are a little different to here. I suspect it's partly connected to the foetry business (no, I won't provide the website, it's been overdone). The large Australian literary prizes, as opposed to competitions, are run either through state government agencies (I once managed the NSW Premier's) or large trust funds. One's publisher enters a book (though individuals can also do so), so far as I know very few require fees (I can only think ...

Ron Silliman's blog has been better to read recently. I was only skipping by there for a while, not truly pausing and reading. There was something about it and the comments that turned me off. Maybe the relentless sense of USAmerican-ness, the insularity of it and the comments ... well it was, in many cases, their sheer inanity (inane is fine but wears real thin real quick) or slanderous ego-driven ungenerous shoutiness which made me roll my eyes. Maybe it's a US thang and I don't get it. I know others that don't get it either, but that's by-the-by. But I was interested in a couple of things. To engage with The Da Vinci Code phenomena , for instance. I know it almost de rigeur to find the whole Dan Brown thing rather tedious and to poo-poo the book. Ron says that " The Da Vinci Code is to great literature what Indiana Jones is to great cinema". Well. I think that's insulting to Indiana Jones myself, but one gets the general drift. However, I did re...

Ach, the poets are all insane, we’ve had a gutful Of piddling excuses about how the cat Swallowed the form delivered with as much éclat As some ancient rhymer trying to pull the wool Over the pentameter, or some doomy wastrel Murmuring by the hour in the internet hells ...

The OBAN 06 anthology is now on-line. I've just come across it so haven't had a chance to explore what everyone has written. Will do this weekend. But I see they did not put up my photo alongside the poem I sent. It wasn't in the right format most likely and maybe never arrived digitally intact, so I am posting it here. It's a view looking down from the Stewart Island cemetery, Rakiura.

I've had a couple of 'moments' recently. Those times when out of unpleasantness, a new direction comes. It may not be good or bad, but it's forward (I think). One thing I've done is to step away for a little while from lists and ease the sheer amount of material arriving in my inbox. One of the triggers was a small unpleasantness which got my back up and I bought into with my own nerve up (again, born of other matters). But that great teacher, hindsight, allowed me to see it as maybe for the best. I have been using the blog more, getting into a different mix, so to speak, as one way of dealing with 'the moment' (more on that soon). Of course, I still like to get mail and responses. And I note that comments keep coming. Everything is out there. What to do with it all. On my wall, straight in front of me, I have blutacked five postcards showing Paris streets. Each is accompanied by the picture of a writer who lived in one of these streets. I often particularly...