This is what I’m working on. The “in a blue heap” is from Yevtushenko’s poem Waiting (in translation).
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Sometimes I see a copy of a book I own, and stare at it for a moment, both comforted and lost. I rarely take them out – it’s like meeting someone who is no longer in love with you. Slide one from the shelf in greeting, turn a few pages, notice a new jacket and how age and distance have
& occasionally I find one of your books in there. Once at some bright evening I watched a quiet moth leave through an open sash window, into a night of rain and streetlight, unseen by anyone but you
This is what I am working on.
Here’s a fun feature in the Northern Advocate by poet and writer John Geraets (whose wonderful selected writing Everything’s Something in Place came out this year), with additional pieces by poets Aaron Robertson, Piet Nieuwland, and me:
“Interesting things are happening in the Whangārei writing scene. Whether public readings, writing and discussion groups or magazines to contribute to, there is much to take part in and a chance to enjoy the company of others” – John Geraets.
“My own practice of writing poetry is one of strange, random compulsions. Although, in general, I don’t think in words (I have to ‘translate’ thoughts from spatial images), the words in my poetry often seem to form by themselves — it’s like being inhabited by poems” – me.
Read online here, or, if you can’t access premium content, here is a pdf from the print edition: Write On! Northern Advocate, Sat August 10
from Self Portrait (after Francis Bacon):
movingly associative snail
an intestinal grey smudging my face
and telling you my incomprehensible symptoms
This is what I am working on:
Photo: Lindy Davis for Scene
Here’s an interview from Scene magazine (April 2018) – on a warm summer evening, the lovely Lindy Davis interviewed Piet Nieuwland, Martin Porter, Arthur Fairley, and me about poetry. It was fun.
indivisible, as if there is no passage between
the child that squatted here throwing
skeleton leaves into the eddy
and me standing braced against the black rock, staring into
the water and loving the water as if it is the water that I am like and not the stones,
those small stones shoved over one over one
another and stroked into sand in the end.
This is what I am working on:
What I am working on
*
In this thirsting night
(nothing)
*
My bed is a boat, the cat
a smooth black anchor
stone. Adrift under
malevolent stars.
