•
- What’s to feel guilty about? (1/9/2022-22/3/23)
- All I want (2/9/22-8/4/23)
- Chemwash (3/9/22-11/4/23)
- Southampton (4/9/22-12/4/23)
- Painting the house (5/9/22-14/4/23)
- Gallowglass (6/9/22-28/1/24)
- Soap bubbles (7/9/22-29/1/24)
- Tekeli-li (8/9/22-3/2/24)
- Attendre et espérer (9/9/22-3/2/24)
- Her partner (10/9/22-14/3/24)
- Zealandia (11/9/22-2/2/24)
- Catullus 101 (12/9/22-28/5/23)
- Our backyard (13/9/22-3/2/24)
- Prisoners of K. Rd. (14/9/22-3/2/24)
- Greens (15/9/22-6/2/24)
- Hundertwasser blues (16/9/22-6/2/24)
- All that you love will be carried away (17/9/22-7/2/24)
- My mother’s rose bushes (18/9/22-2/4/23)
- Spartacus (19/9/22-2/5/23)
- Nice (20/9/22-7/2/24)
- Wolf (21/9/22-5/7/23)
- Soft (22/9/22-5/7/23)
- Tax (23/9/22-8/2/24)
- Hoodrats (24/9/22-12/2/24)
- Is time travel possible? (25/9/22-12/2/24)
- The Great Impostor (26/9/22-13/2/24)
- The Most Dangerous Game (27/9/22-13/2/24)
- Time cops (for Bryan Walpert) (28/9/22-14/2/24)
- India twenty years ago (29/9/22-14/2/24)
- Insignificance (30/9/22-15/2/24)
- Kimono (1/10/22-15/2/24)
- My new revolving bookshelf (2/10/22-5/7/23)
- The House on the Strand (3/10/22-16/2/24)
- Kirikiriroa (4/10/22-5/7/23)
- The usual suspects (5/10/22-16/2/24)
- Rogue Male (6/10/22-8/5/23)
- Pandemonium (7/10/22-17/2/24)
- Rear Window (8/10/22-17/2/24)
- Insomnia (9/10/22-18/2/24)
- He parked up (10/10/22-5/7/23)
- Leicester Kyle (11/10/22-18/2/24)
- Strangers on a train (12/10/22-20/2/24)
- Emotionally labile (13/10/22-4/1/23)
- Pizzagate (14/10/22-20/2/24)
- Coming Forth by Day (15/10/22-21/2/24)
- You can’t win (16/10/22-21/2/24)
- Weather (17/10/22-22/2/24)
- From Russia with Love (18/10/22-22/2/24)
- Pick-ups (19/10/22-23/2/24)
- Not everything is an anecdote (20/10/22-23/2/24)
- In my dream last night (21/10/22-5/7/23)
- The Bard (22/10/22-24/2/24)
- The Sixties (23/10/22-24/2/24)
- Towards the end (24/10/22-25/2/24)
- Coming in from the cold (25/10/22-11/7/2023)
- Big pink (26/10/22-11/7/2023)
- The vaults (27/10/22-25/2/24)
- You need to get a job (28/10/22-26/2/24)
- Get out of the way! (29/10/22-26/2/24)
- Rain (30/10/22-27/2/24)
- Mnemonics (31/10/22-8/5/23)
- Fiction is lies (1/11/22-27/2/24)
- Why do you write? (2/11/22-28/2/24)
- Déjà vu all over again (3/11/22-28/2/24)
- Frack away (4/11/22-29/2/24)
- Zero’s ritual (5/11/22-9/5/23)
- This morning (6/11/22-11/7/2023)
- Dancing fool (7/11/22-11/7/2023)
- Social media manners (8/11/22-29/2/24)
- Trawling the subconscious (9/11/22-3/3/24)
- Under the knife (10/11/22-3/3/24)
- Trivial pursuits (11/11/22-4/3/24)
- Mutual Forgiveness (12/11/22-27/5/23)
- Ancient Apocalypse (13-11-22-11/7/2023)
- When people are anxious (14/11/22-11/7/2023)
- I miss it sometimes (15/11/22-11/7/2023)
- I used to quote (16/11/22-11/7/2023)
- The inverse ninja law (17/11/22-11/7/2023)
- So does this mean World War III? (18/11/22-11/7/2023)
- Domestic politics (19/11/22-27/5/23)
- Last days (20/11/22-4/3/24)
- Life and Fate (21/11/22-5/3/24)
- Houseboat Days (22/11/22-12/7/2023)
- The Ballad of the Great Storm (23/11/22-5/7/23)
- Just then (24/11/22-27/5/23)
- Bronwyn asked me (25/11/22-5/7/23)
- Crash (26/11/22-5/3/24)
- Power cut (27/11/22-27/5/23)
- An evening’s viewing (28/11/22-6/3/24)
- Gaslighting (29/11/22-5/7/23)
- Talking sideways (30/11/22-6/3/24)
- Where are you from? (1/12/22-7/3/24)
- Why I write (2/12/22-7/3/24)
- The key (3/12/22-27/5/23)
- Living history (4/12/22-8/3/24)
- Heavy Rescue 401 (5/12/22-8/3/24)
- Catfish or cats? (6/12/22-27/5/23)
- The Killing Floor (7/12/22-5/7/23)
- Bronwyn (8/12/22-5/7/23)
- Experimental (9/12/22-8/2/24)
- BECN (9/12/22-5/7/23)
- "Zero at the Bone." The Imaginary Museum (23/4/23)
- "The Zero Suite." Papyri (2/5/23)
- The reference to Andromache's baby Astyanax being frightened by his father Hector's plume is from Homer's Iliad [Bk 6, ll.466-502].
- Astyanax's death at the hands of Achilles' son Neoptolemus is reported in Euripides' Trojan Women [ll.719-25].
- The last two lines of the poem are a paraphrase of the quote below:
Someone has said that the death of a mouse by cancer is the whole sack of Rome by the Goths
- Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915) - "Word-hoard" [Old English: wordhord] refers to the "collection of words and phrases a poet can draw on when crafting tales" [Old English Wordhoard: Old English Word of the Day].
- The quote "friend good ..." comes from James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein (1935) rather than Mary Shelley's novel.
- The reference to Schopenhauer is to the following passage, quoted by Robert Lowell as the epigraph to his poem 'To Speak of the Woe that is in Marriage':
'It is the future generation that presses into being by means of these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours.'
- Robert Lowell, Life Studies (1959) - "The scoriac rivers that roll ..." is quoted from Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Ulalume" [cf. Poetry and Tales. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. The Library of America, 19 (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984): 89-91.].
- Edgar Allan Poe, The The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Edited with an Introduction and Commentary, Including Jules Verne’s Sequel Le Sphinx des Glaces. 1838 & 1897. Ed. Harold Beaver. 1975. The Penguin English Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980): 238-39:
March 22. The darkness had materially increased, relieved only by the glare of the water thrown back from the white curtain before us. Many gigantic and pallidly white birds flew continuously now from beyond the veil, and their scream was the eternal Tekeli-li! as they retreated from our vision. Hereupon Nu-Nu stirred in the bottom of the boat; but, upon touching him, we found his spirit departed. And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.
- '"I did hear she was a very lovely Queen to all of us and she did respect our Māori culture,” said 12-year-old Maisha.' - Laura Bicker, "How Maori remember the Queen." BBC News (September 15, 2022).
- "The Zero Suite." Papyri (2/5/23)
- C. Valerius Catullus, Carmina 101:
Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
et mutam nequiquam adloquerer cinerem,
quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum,
heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi.
nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum
tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu
atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.
[Through many nations and through many seas borne, I come, brother, for these sad funeral rites, that I may give the last gifts to the dead, and may vainly speak to your silent ashes, since fortune has taken yourself away from me. Ah, poor brother, undeservedly snatched from me. But now receive these gifts, which have been handed down in the ancient manner of ancestors, the sad gifts to the grave, drenched with a brother's tears, and for ever, brother, hail and farewell.]
- Leonard C. Smithers, trans. The Carmina of Gaius Valerius Catullus (London: Smithers, 1894): 285. - 10 Oct 2022:
Dear Maddy,
I should probably be honest and admit that I have the fear where Poetry Live is concerned. The last time I read there I was accosted by a strange man with a faux Scottish accent who demanded to know why I thought I was 'so famous' and who pursued me down the street after the reading. The previous time was a bit challenging also. I agreed to the reading this time because I'd told myself I was over all that, but it seems I'm not. So, while there are some family events coming up, the truth of the matter is that my new resolution is to evade known sources of tension rather than the more orthodox 'facing your fears'. I hope that makes sense. So, no, it's probably best to take me off the list of potential readers. I do apologise for wasting your time in this manner, but I was sincere in thinking I could do it this time. I'm sure some more robust reader can easily be found, however.best, jack - "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away" is the title of a short story by Stephen King, originally published in the January 29, 2001 issue of The New Yorker. It was also included in King's collection Everything's Eventual (2002).
- Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2024: Revelations [Issue #58]. Ed. Tracey Slaughter. ISBN 978-1-99-101670-6. Auckland: Massey University Press, 2024: 119-20.
- The quote from Kourage comes from Laura Bicker, "How Maori remember the Queen." BBC News (September 15, 2022).
- The quote in italics comes from the much-debated last lines of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925):
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further … And one fine morning —
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. - Simone de Beauvoir's Faut-il brûler Sade? (Les temps modernes, 1951-52) was translated into English as Must We Burn Sade? in 1953.
- The reference is to Geoffrey Household's classic thriller Rogue Male (1939), filmed for television by the BBC in 1976, directed by Clive Donner, with a star turn by Peter O'Toole.
- "Troy Town." The Imaginary Museum (17/2/24).
- Stormy Weather. Live Encounters Aotearoa New Zealand Poets & Writers Special Edition. Guest Ed. Lincoln Jaques. Live Encounters: Free Online Magazine from Planet Earth. Ed. Mark Ulyseas (April 2023).
- Titirangi Poets Ezine No.24 (11 December 2023).
- "PhD Days." The Imaginary Museum (12/9/23).
- The reference is to the Netflix TV series The Crown (6 series: 2016-2023), created by Peter Morgan, about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II.
- The reference is to George Orwell's essay Why I write, first published in the Summer 1946 edition of Gangrel, edited by J. B. Pick and Charles Neil.
- The reference is to a sequence near the end of Michael Moore's 2002 documentary Bowling for Columbine where he claims Canada is so safe that nobody bothers to lock their doors.
- "Poetry Shelf Monday Poem.” Paula Green. NZ Poetry Shelf: a poetry page with reviews, interviews, and other things (22/4/24))
- The reference is to Auckland jeweller Renee Bevan's work the world is a giant pearl (2013):
Ariadne served her purpose lending the ball of string the minotaur bared his neck as anticipated failing to hoist the white sails not inadvertent but expedient like those moments when you feel two answers hovering in the air and choose the one which commits you to least what do you think of my haircut? does this colour suit me? did you like my book? a lack of light that shows up in the dark
(1/9/2022-22/3/23)
•
is for every moment of every day to be constant bliss for Zero Astyanax cringing from his daddy’s helmet safe in his mother’s arms Andromache watching enslaved as Achilles’ son throws her baby off the walls if only I could wish away fast cars on the road trespassing neighbour cats basements with tempting doors shut after her lead nails poison baits the loss of a furry friend is the sack of Troy by the Greeks
(2/9/22-8/4/23)
Publications:
Notes:
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Building the word-hoard brick by brick masking the books with towels when the water blaster comes and takes much longer than we thought possible but he cleaned our letter box as thanks for using the phone the truth is we were hiding inside because neither of us could bear the sight of his colostomy bag I had to go out on the roof myself To throw down the bit of tarpaulin he’d missed he offered to put up the ladder once more but I couldn’t stand it we’d been sitting behind pulled curtains in fear of hearing the same story over and over again Five times in a row once (I counted) and yet we liked him he had a lovely smile and was touchingly grateful for anything however small we offered
(3/9/22-11/4/23)
Notes:
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I struck up a conversation on the plane as we descended to Heathrow the fellow next to me Australian asked where I was staying and whether I wanted to meet up for a drink he gave me his phone number I was too gauche just to leave it at that so though I didn’t want to I rang him later to cancel the date in the course of my excuses I mentioned going south to see some cousins near Portsmouth I’m going to be down that way myself maybe we should get together there instead? I didn’t say yes but ended up giving him the address just in case when I arrived at the train station my cousins said he was already there it ruined my visit he sat there like a gargoyle finally I realised I’d have to go there seemed no other way to get him out so we went off in his car to see the sights inside the local church he wouldn’t put coins in the collection box I asked him why not? he said why would he? I told him my cousins suspected he might be an axe murderer after that he dropped me off at the station and we went our separate ways what was it all about? was he grooming me for something or just lonely in a foreign land? who knows? I don’t
(4/9/22-12/4/23)
•
You have to wash down the walls choose colours book the scaffolders barricade the windows make sure that the car’s out on the road arrange a rec room with couch and table kettle toilet access if you’re Bronwyn that is my parents put it off repeatedly until the window sills were peeling frames all rotten hinges rusty now it’s up to us rose red or pink whichever sounds better that’s our choice green for the trimmings pohutukawa red for the front door people round here devotees of beige and cream will hate it for lowering property values D’you think you’re on a desert island? Yes we do
(5/9/22-14/4/23)
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My father’s guest brought his son along a boy of about my age maybe seven or eight? we ran around the yard for an hour or two A week or so later a knock at the door he was back and wanted to play again I didn’t want to It was late dinner was over I finally went to the door at my parents’ urging and told him to go away he wouldn’t he stormed and raged I could see how much he’d looked forward to visiting his new friend I had nothing to say knew what I’d done was horrible but there was no other way I couldn’t face running around in the dark with this boy I scarcely knew the pain of such scenes when you see someone you’ve met once or twice but have nothing to say to them if you save some one’s life you’re responsible for them if you speak to them you’re linked forever what does Frankenstein’s monster say? friend good we belong dead
(6/9/22-28/1/24)
Notes:
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I don’t really remember what happened I just know that Hutchinson one of my friends invited a group of us to come round and play in the bush near his home after much excitement and build-up we all turned up with our plastic guns and headed for the trees I recall crouching in a ditch waiting for something then [blank] crying bitterly all the way home the day was a failure but why? my fault no doubt (default position) perhaps a play fight turned into a real one it is the future generation that presses into being by means of these soap bubbles said Schopenhauer sometimes I think he might be right and I should cut myself some slack
(7/9/22-29/1/24)
Notes:
•
I suppose that it’s part of the paradox
of being a collector
of anything
say you mention a book
and the person
you’re talking to asks to borrow it?
in the interests
of the free dissemination of knowledge
you pretty much have to say yes
then you forget
just who it was you lent it to
or they forget who they borrowed it from
unless you’re organised that is
and write it down in your diary
then start the long countdown
after a month or two
you can issue the first reminder
oh did I borrow that from you?
no I haven’t finished it yet
– give it back!
I want to shout
on one occasion
I actually bought a new copy
and gave it to a colleague of mine
to stop her asking
to borrow my book again
for the umpteenth time
most times the animosity starts quickly
I deserve it
so much more
so how could you think it belongs to you?
or else it must have been
somebody else who took it
in the case of my Penguin paperback of Poe’s
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
after many denials
and claims it had already been returned
it eventually came back
with a dented back
and a haunted look
as if it had seen
something akin to
the scoriac rivers that roll
that groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
in the realms of the boreal pole
Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!
(8/9/22-3/2/24)
Notes:
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i.m. Elizabeth Regina (1926-2022) The closest I came was in ‘86 when I walked downtown on a whim to watch the Queen do her walk-by by the time I got there the crowd was quite thick still I managed to find a place near the front but wouldn’t you know it? the Duke took one side and she took the other and I was on his side unfortunately as he came closer I began to fear that he’d ask me something and I’d make even more of a fool of myself than usual and in fact he did seize me with a steely glare and started to speak … to the man over my shoulder some comment about his work clothes or his profession with his customary lack of charm I could see all the crowds on the other side revelling in being in her radioactive glow the Queen if not of hearts of all our memories when I got back to my shared office in the English Department my colleague Rochelle asked Jack are you a royalist? as if it were some communicable disease not really no then went into the spiel I learned at my mothers’ knee about the perils of Presidential power and the superior merits of good-for nothing monarchs which I doubt I agree with now but still like most other people today it’s hard to hold anything specific against her after seventy years in a thankless job or as Monte Cristo put it wait and hope it’s hard to imagine anyone else doing either with such aplomb and dignity
(9/9/22-3/2/24)
Notes:
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is a tohunga she told us tohunga are the kind of people you see on K Rd talking to themselves they tell the tales of objects her partner was in the supermarket when she saw an iceberg lettuce that wanted to be hers she bought it and started to eat it as she walked down the street but wouldn’t you know it? people who saw her started to offer her things a builder said he had some sesame seeds she could scatter on it another offered tomatoes another a slice of bread just like stone soup you start off with a stone and water then add the rest as the Queen said after 9-11 grief is the price we pay for love helping each other out is what we do
(10/9/22-14/7/23)
•
The last country to be settled by humans
with the possible exception of Easter Island
we balance somewhat precariously here
very deep are the depths
but when you dig
you don’t find humans
after the first millennium or so
we do have stars
mind you
and the remains of an very old continent
we like to call Zealandia
Aotearoa
land of the long white cloud
certainly has more glamour
and must sound so fresh and new
to those with pyramids
vitrified forts
and barrow mounds
when I visited Britain
with my parents in ‘81
my father saw pa-sites everywhere
his eyes were conditioned to spot
the kumara patches
and palisade pits
of his native land
(11/9/22-2/2/24)
•
Sometimes you wake up with The Fear rain pelting down outside thunderclaps provoking cat shenanigans what Simon called free-floating anxiety does deconstruction help? I’m told that speaking through the words of other people’s poems can help you make your own ten years ago I might have thought the same my remedy now is hanging on all dressed and shod and ready for the day I wait for what will happen anyway
(12/9/22-28/5/23)
Publications:
Notes:
•
across the creek could certainly be said to be somewhat overgrown my father liked to think of it as the last enclave of native bush in bourgeois Mairangi Bay the birds certainly approve tuis kingfishers kereru but crossing the concrete bridge this morning I saw another tree had fallen in last week’s storms blocking the path to the fallen wattle which marks the boundary between us and next door crashing through the vines I thought a machete might be needed in future far off I saw my goal our last big tree a dead dry pine shrouded in old man’s beard it seemed unreachable the only way there by vaulting over slippery snaking boughs like the impenetrable jungles that hid Mayan cities for a thousand years
(13/9/22-3/2/24)
•
The last time I read at Poetry Live I was walking away from the venue when one of the other readers accosted me What makes you famous? I’m just as good as you Why don’t they feature me instead? he’d read out some poems in a faux-Scottish accent I’m not quite sure why but then even R. A. K. Mason was given to ventriloquising in Scots sometimes go figure what do you mean famous? can’t you see I’m a complete nobody? – you’ve published books yeah but nobody reads them or buys them either nobody’s ‘famous’ if you want to be well-known try getting your face on TV poetry’s not about that – why do it then? good question but if you have to ask it you’d probably better give up anyway
(14/9/22-3/2/24)
Notes:
•
•
We started off with Poland
then came Highland
till it turned out
it wasn’t guaranteed
to last on bare boards
without cracking
for more than a year or so
then came Avocado
as a last resort
I never realised till I saw it
against the pink we’d chosen
as our primary shade
how much I could hate a colour
it reminded me of M*A*S*H
the muddy olive
bootlocker green
of that war surplus tent
we used to camp in as kids
ant-trailing boxes
from our bottle-green
station wagon
lifting the tent-poles
on command
but the bottom line is
we’re the ones
who have to live with it
so it’s back to Poland
I’m afraid
however lolly-like it looks
the flag of a free people
waving proudly
over the Nazi tanks
in 1939
that’s good enough for me
(15/9/22-6/2/24)
•
Beckoning us through Whangārei’s spring sunshine its labyrinthine ways led to a vegan salad but just as I was prating about how well it ‘drew the waterfront together’ and classed up the whole joint on the way out of town three police cars passed us sirens wailing cutting off a van with black vest-wearing skinhead boys inside it drugs? domestic violence? the cops just waved us through but we could see them setting up a roadblock round the scene behind us as we headed back to Auckland we saw some flash cars hooning north as fast as wheels would carry them wait till you see what’s waiting round the next bend guys you got a beeg surprise coming to you
(16/9/22-6/2/24)
•
That writhing feeling of extreme embarrassment at contemplation of past errors what if we hadn’t done them? but what if those other worthy things we did as well depend on them? the only question then is the ratio of self-loathing to mild self-toleration in any case I remember advanced thinkers among my set at church when I was a kid explaining how God sees things instantaneously like a wargamer above a sand-table what we see as a set of choices on a forking road He sees all at once so to talk of changing the past is scarcely practical it’s always already happened as I’ve said before
(17/9/22-7/2/24)
Notes:
Pruning them back was just the start soil had to be dug out on every side spades placed like levers under the thorns leaned on like Archimedes time and again till with a mandrake groan they gave up the ghost we hustled them onto the lawn but I got scared that they’d somehow re-root themselves so shifted them onto the concrete floor one looked like a lung with arteries attached another like a beating heart all night I could hear them scratching on the windows longing to get in resume their reign punish the usurpers the scaffolders will be here on Wednesday next and after that other plants less inimical ones? will take their place after the last pit was emptied Zero the cat pissed and shat in the empty hole as if to confirm our victory
(18/9/22-2/4/23)
Publications:
•
‘I’m Spartacus!’ – Dalton Trumbo I guess that’s what this is about facing your fears on paper if you can’t admit them there then where? Spartacus the cat took his last trip to the vet yesterday what words can you find for that? he was 19 but he hung on till his folks went away then even with three aunties there sank into a decline last night I came into the bedroom Bronwyn was packing Are you leaving me? I’ve had enough of your shit she said then seeing my face No of course not just packing away some jewellery she gave me a hug it’s us for life but the fears are always there somehow just under the surface saying them can help send them away
(19/9/22-2/5/23)
•
She was still crying when I walked into the Tourist Information office on the Square in Christchurch what’s wrong? I asked – that man who was in here before he came in and I asked if I could help he didn’t answer just waited for my European colleague to be free – we’re not all like that was all I could find to say to the young Asian woman another colleague hurried in what’s wrong? she outlined again what had happened as the colleague fixed on me a nuclear stare not him he’s nice no another man he’s gone I didn’t know what else to say or do just repeated we’re not all like that – some people are mean to us because of our skin colour 11-year-old Kourage told the BBC reporter if they get to know us more they will see that we are nice
(20/9/22-8/2/24)
Notes:
•
The game was to race around the bach at Bethells Beach but first we had to claim a totem animal I can’t recall why wolf said my brother faster than light so some of us others who’d been thinking wolf as well were shit out of luck I think that I may have compromised on tiger I am after all a Scorpio Tiger something feline anyway then he wanted to pace out the whole course first somewhat un-wolf-like some of us thought and had to be told that that would defeat the purpose of the game but what if I slipped and fell? what if? I think Bronwyn’s brother won
(21/9/22-5/7/23)
•
We’re always on the lookout for book-troughs and bookends for my growing collection this time it was a revolving bookcase one metre high 70 centimetres in diameter I know because the shopkeeper made me measure it with her own tape-measure in the middle she prompted not the side this was to see if it’d fit into the car the consensus was it wouldn’t I wasn’t quite so sure it didn’t after that she got the owner on the phone Are you going up to Auckland anytime soon? Yes he’s already bought it I hadn’t but I wanted to so he needs to have it delivered we settled on next Sunday they think you’re soft confided Bronwyn as we drove away – what do you mean? the way she told you tilt it this way not that way as we tried to wrestle it in the fact she didn’t think you could back into that parking space outside the shop come to think of it I did notice a bit of an village-idiot vibe in the way they spoke to me am I soft? If so it doesn’t worry me more interested in dreaming of all the books I can squeeze into those shelves
(22/9/22-5/7/23)
Every year I have to do my mother’s taxes every year I put it off to the last possible moment It’s not that it’s so difficult to do just that there are always some documents unobtainable except by her in person (bank regulations) and since she never knows what to ask for this causes complications somehow I always muddle through with the help of our kindly accountants her only source of income is a rental property up the hill let at a quarter of the market rate to a friend of the family who’s persuaded her to lower it still further to cover her bills the friend hopes the house will be left to her by my mother she’s wrong we’ve told her but my mother’s most recent will includes a substantial bequest enough to cover her moving out and paying the deposit on a new place we’re terrified otherwise she’ll carry out her threat to kill herself rather than leave I don’t like emotional blackmail but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand she’s lived there so long she feels as if it’s hers
(23/9/22-8/2/24)
The hoodrat culture (roadmen in the UK eshays in Oz) may be misunderstood don’t link it automatically to ramraids and beatings up of other kids or so we’re told it’s okay if you know one of them not so good if not last night with all the scaffolding up for the painters debris tools electric chargers in the garage open doors all round every creak became a prowler each set of voices an apocalypse somehow it all evaporates when morning comes that nameless dread felt through the broken floor
(24/9/22-12/2/24)
No
is the straight answer
but there’re any number of complex
in-and-outs
concerning wormholes
parallel universes
and tachyons
when you talk to physicists
about it
but then there’s the other kind
the inner journey
each of us shuttles up and down
our personal time-stream
moment to moment
so we beat on
boats against the current
borne back ceaselessly
into the past
this morning all the clocks
went back one hour
I hardly noticed
having set my watch back last night
woke at the usual time
around 4.30
only to stare into the dark
pick up a novel
to shut up
that insistent
nagging voice
till morning comes
(25/9/22-12/2/24)
Notes:
•
So when I asked the roofing man Karl a wiry little Australian what to do about the TV aerial he looked at me as if I was mad oh sure we can take that down for you but what I wanted to ask was do we need it to get TV? I had a vague idea It all comes through the internet now being digital so agreed in what I hoped was a knowing way no TV today apparently you do need an aerial to get your free-to-air TV that aerial is lying in a tangled heap on the lawn because I was too scared to reveal my ignorance and wanted to look like a normal human who knows such things I do seem to have managed to reach most of the programmes we watch through the online streaming services of the various channels so all is well but when will I learn to stop trying to act like a solid citizen and admit to being a timorous ignorant clod?
(26/9/22-13/2/24)
•
Never confess to a crime in writing
I used to tell the students
in my life writing course
they laughed
no I’m serious
I’d say
it’ll turn up at the bottom of a suitcase
or on an abandoned PC
and when the lawyers
for your ex-spouse
or your employer
winkle it out somehow
you have to imagine yourself
listening to it being read out
in open court
no always begin with
‘a friend told me this story’
or ‘I heard somewhere about someone who’ …
so listening to disgraced he-man
Armie Hammer’s
private text messages
on television last night
the ones where he said he wanted to be
a cannibal
and tie girls up
and force them to cook pieces
of their own skin
and eat them
I thought of all those books
by Burroughs Ballard Bataille
those ‘legitimate responses to the chaos
of the fin-de-siècle’
the difference is
they had the sense
to package their mad ravings
deniably
you can’t place trammels
on the mind
in the age of Freud
or the unconscious will rise
and eat you up
but don’t leave a paper trail
in propria persona
must we burn de Sade?
it would appear so
yes
(27/9/22-13/2/24)
Notes:
•
(for Bryan Walpert) Last night in the library the question arose whether time is real or simply a psychological illusion confined to creatures stuck on our paygrade Boethius last of the Romans in prison waiting for death was told by his angelic visitor Philosophy to think of time as an eternal present seen by God while we are forced to crawl through every moment individually hence free will but since He sees us taking each decision hence determinism clever convincing? Eternalism or Presentism the physicists call them is time a hard surface we could touch if only we could get back? or is it an ethereal twist of nothingness gone as soon as apprehended as most of us suspect?
(28/9/22-14/2/24)
•
Our common bond was P. G. Wodehouse I know how that must sound to the class-conscious but Wodehouse’s idle hands and aristos seem more like fictional conceits than people when you grow up in the Antipodes Meera my superlatively kind hostess in Bangalore had an abiding love for Wodehouse and wasn’t at all surprised to hear I’d found cheap reprints of some of his almost unobtainable pre-Jeeves pre-Emsworth school novels in Cape Comorin at the tip of India I remember once when she went out she left me sitting in front of the video with instructions to rewatch An Ideal Husband it is not the perfect but rather the imperfect who have need of love as Rupert Everett expressed it an uncanonical addition to Oscar’s text
(29/9/22-14/2/24)
•
The first time I really felt it was one afternoon in England in the train looking out the window at the chimneys of the nuclear power station that sense of being dwarfed of nothingness we’d been brought up on a diet of ‘every little bit helps’ and ‘one person can make a difference’ and all that but something about those huge blank curves against the landscape gave it the lie so now crouching beside the television as it bleats about the latest Russian plans for Ukraine 500-year floods in Florida (yeah right) I feel it again good-will determination anything you like but sometimes in the path of the glacier all you can do is run
(30/9/22-15/2/24)
•
It’s called the Kimono shop by those of us who frequent it a warehouse-sized emporium in Penrose full of every Japanese garment and trinket imaginable in long serried rows some the wedding kimonos for instance are priced steeply others $5 or less I bought some old postcards and a guide to Japan from 1966 the date of some of those old paperback novels I love to read Kōbō Abe Osamu Dazai Shūshako Endō it felt like an out-of-body experience getting there a labyrinth of twists and turns guided by Kylie our Australian-accented cyborg street-guide voice and then the dusty perfumed smell of the kimono where do they come from? hand-sewn each one unique retrieved from dumps and skips apparently exotic ambassadors spreading their own delight
(1/10/22-15/2/24)
•
comes today we found it in an antique shop in Paeroa it took me a while to notice the price tag on it after browsing through the motley crew of books it then held such a strange white elephant the kind of thing you see in period films when they cut to the gentleman’s club what fantasies it panders to the kind of thing that Sherlock Holmes would idly spin after a dose of his best cocaine it poured all yesterday this morning’s fine I hope we can manoeuvre it in in time
(2/10/22-5/7/23)
•
When we first moved in ten years ago strange things would happen from time to time a handful of change strewn over the floor inside a locked room the persistent sense when down in the basement that the voices and creaks heard overhead don’t sound like subsidence especially when you know that nobody’s home but I did grow up here and eventually it began to tone down again now repainted in art deco colours rose and green and red the house seems to be waking up again after sixty years of white we get cries of approval over the front fence while critics go by with their faces averted the old doc would turn in his grave well take it from me he hasn’t The new doc me feels closer to him than anyone would he approve of the change? not really no would he like to see those peeling window-frames and plaster walls brought back from the brink? undoubtedly yes
(3/10/22-16/2/24)
•
Walking down through the layers of time by the Waikato river my sister-in-law heard the voices of some who were not at rest the closest I’ve got to that is in the Hamilton Gardens the overgrown stretch with the freemasonry emblems from Mozart’s Zauberflöte there’s something strange in those dark doors that open into light even the café takes some navigation before coming out by the lake
(4/10/22-5/7/23)
•
Were all in evidence this afternoon as I spoke to my friend’s class about my lack of imagination how I envy those people who can make stuff up and make it sound convincing not me events from my life rearranged slightly is the best that I can do which came in quite handy when it turned out that – as well as my images – my PowerPoint notes had been visible to the online students all along they included some quotes from emails I’d been sent about the audience the news reached my friend as she was about to back out from a tight parking place which made her pause just long enough to crash into me as I drove past no damage to either of us luckily since cars are basically plastic shells and they were only going 3 km per hour but a nasty shock nevertheless which took us a few rounds of tapas to drown as we looked out over the Waikato in flood past a bearded portrait of someone who may well have been Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Tūruki
(5/10/22-16/2/24)
•
A rude awakening this morning as the music started blaring in our windows the painters are here! on the back of a polar blast it’s going to clear up after 8 am they said not on the news-sites I read so I’m seizing a couple of seconds to type at maximum speed having ushered Zero miaowing vociferously to her little tent in the far bedroom and packed up my stuff to be swathed in drop-cloths poised on the floor of my lair improvising a weapon to transfix the enemy like Peter O’Toole in the film
(6/10/22-8/5/23)
•
Notes:
•
yesterday when we arrived home from errands improvised to get us out of there to find the door blocked with a plank a broken front window another window broken down the back (one broken by the painters the other by the carpenters) but what bugged me most was finding my internet gone because the wifi plug had been busted by a slamming door who did it? not me not me not me they said maybe a gust of wind they said till Steve the builder to the scepticism of all bent back the prongs with his little hand plyers and lo and behold it worked!
(7/10/22-17/2/24)
•
A friend of mine set up a camera in the back of her car and drove down the hill to the beach and back art film scoffed her boyfriend and yet there was something so strange in the way it bucked and leapt as it recorded the unchanging mountains behind with no hint of the wild sea in front Benjamin’s angel of history does that sweeps on looking back unable to help as the rubble and graves pile up they used to project it at rock concerts
(8/10/22-17/2/24)
Publications:
•
Sleep is a high-wire balancing act those of us prone to waking in the wee hours with our minds alive to a million nagging voices take refuge in some type of self-hypnosis in my case remembering the titles of Conrad’s novels in order of publication Dickens ditto or Shakespeare’s plays arranged by genre 10 histories 11 tragedies 12 comedies plus the 4 late romances until the chatter dies down a bit last night being told to switch to my other side was quite enough room to toss and turn is paramount even if you don’t need to toss and turn at that particular moment Just saying this much is dangerous anything could be too much when it comes to getting to sleep each night
(9/10/22-18/2/24)
•
by the end of the road then texted Bronwyn to confirm that he’d arrived she had to tell me to go to ground while she walked up to collect THE ITEM you’ll know it when you see it later she showed it to her sister glad cries could be heard from the bedroom then some curses something had gone wrong No no we’ve fixed it finally the great day came when WOLFIE was revealed a strange string puppet made from household items during lockdown by a puppeteer of Bronwyn’s acquaintance I try to pat him where he hangs beside the bed have added a seagull feather to his topknot what does he think of it all? he doesn’t say
(10/10/22-5/7/23)
•
We were sitting at the dinner table Leicester David and me as ‘The Lark Ascending’ by Vaughan Williams came on the radio the other two started to talk discussing when they’d first heard it and other thoughts along those lines as I tried in vain to listen to it Leicester then shifted to the stars above how some townie had told him that they could see them too but I like to see all of them he’d replied but isn’t it just a question of degree? I asked you may see more of them here but nobody can see them all he exploded that’s a very foolish statement of course I know I can’t see them all (then why did you say so? I added silently) but then it’s typical of the stupid and silly things you say I’m tired of it and I’m not going to put up with it anymore David tried to put out the fire I tried to apologise he would not be mollified I was never invited back there again years later, talking to his cousin Dave who was living next door to us in Auckland I mentioned that Leicester could be difficult at times that’s very true he said with a little grimace and I couldn’t help guessing he’d felt the rough side of his tongue as well
(11/10/22-18/2/24)
•
I remember one Christmas in Britain travelling down to Essex to see my brother working in in the hospital there then back up to Scotland for New Year most of all I remember standing in that long queue snaking right round the platform at King’s Cross as the announcement boomed out if you haven’t reserved a seat then please leave the line this train is fully booked but I had nowhere else to go no money no friends in London so kept on standing there then climbed on the train and wandered up and down it clocking all of the seats in every carriage marked with little cardboard slips until I found one that wasn’t I sat down in it the lady sitting next to me said that the person who’d booked the seat was probably joining the train later on but I was welcome to sit there for the time being until they gazumped me the train left we rolled through the endless back gardens and kitchen windows of London then out into the long green tunnels of sidings station after station we got into conversation she and I she worked as an entertainer on cruise ships singing covers and some of her own songs she lent me a cassette of her music to play on my Walkman easy-listening stuff I praised it I lent her my own cassette of (I imagine) U2 no-one got on no-one displaced me by some strange miracle I managed to stay in that seat all the way to Inverness much to the disbelief of my cousins and everyone who’s heard the story since and the moral? sometimes when you really need them to things don’t go wrong but then on the other hand quite often they do
(12/10/22-20/2/24)
•
that was the phrase they used for my father after his stroke he’d tear up at the slightest mention of wartime sacrifice or heroic deeds it improved him said my mother he’d been too buttoned up stiff upper lip as he counselled patients in their darkest hour but now it’s me I just have to hear Churchill’s gravelly voice or a burst of patriotic music and I’m awash embarrassing yes but if you can’t cry sometimes what good are you?
(13/10/22-4/1/23)
Publications:
•
They’d ordered pizza I recall which took quite some time to arrive all the while I was calculating times so long to walk across campus so long to eat when would we have to start off so as not to miss kick-off? eventually I worked out we’d have to leave just before it arrived it arrived we bolted it down none of the others could not see what the issue was – neither can I now – but I got my way with a slice or two inside us we started off to hear the nice Irish academic I’d met a few days before give his Bloomsday speech on the meaning of Ulysses in the modern world the moment we got there I thought what an ass to come in the first place let alone hurry our dinner for this it isn’t that it was bad just who the hell cares? what makes it an issue? what is this weird clock which goes off inside me the closer I get to leaving time? which makes me count backwards from every appointment is it madness? conditioning? other people don’t have it can be fashionably late hours late sometimes not me I hope it’s not catching but suspect that it is it saps the enjoyment one might otherwise feel in an evening stroll through a leafy campus perhaps the real answer is never to go out
(14/10/22-20/2/24)
•
When I was a kid at primary school the teacher took us every other week to observe the progress on a house being built nearby foundations first then joists then cladding at last one day the thing was finished ready to receive its freight of folk now as I look out over the bay I’m clocked by a huge crane labelled TEAK as it hoists lackadaisically large pallets of brick from the old parking lot soon to be an apartment block there’ve been months when it hasn’t moved at all one wall went up but then no more what’s gone wrong? is it market volatility or just a shortage of materials? I sit here like a pharaoh watching his tomb inch up in time he hopes for his ascension
(15/10/22-21/2/24)
•
Walking on footpaths is a dangerous thing coming back from brunch with my mother our Saturday ritual we found the way blocked by a woman on a stool a young woman was kneeling in front of her an elderly man stood to one side parked cars blocked all other egress we tried to go round he glared at us there’s been a fall he amplified the young woman asked about a doctor I said the medical centre’s just round the corner (I have lived here for fifty years) we know she said we live just opposite on Penzance Street the man glared angrily I thought of offering my services if help was needed but he looked as though he thought I was horning in my mother too who’s 92 needed her own brand of help so on we went leaving the unfolding drama behind later on well into evening people were piling up down there unable to pass through the barrier
(16/10/22-21/2/24)
•
You become a bit of a weather prophet round here whether you like it or not sniffing the air each morning noting the clouds ignoring the complex weather maps so glibly expounded by perky clothes-horses on the news bearing in mind what a wise old Aucklander said to me once it mostly stays the same for a week one week of rain one week of shine that scent of drizzle is decisive it’ll turn to driving rain is the same true of emotional weather? those complex calculations of tone was that remark really barbed? is the fact that my last email didn’t get a response significant or are things trucking on as ever after twenty-odd years?
(17/10/22-22/2/24)
•
Our Russian class went on a school trip to visit a Soviet ship in the harbour the sailors tried to show us around but we stood there dumb till I ventured a few phrases in Russian the captain was much impressed and told me I should come to study in the worker’s republic I lacked the aplomb to answer in kind a year or so later we hosted a visit from the Russian ambassador who offered to answer our questions about the Soviet Union I asked about the case of the poet Boris Pasternak he replied that the reason only some of his work was available there was because his later writings lacked objectivity Solzhenitsyn by contrast an enemy of the people had been justly deported all this was recited with a stone-cold glare our teacher congratulated me later on asking the hard questions in this case the hard questions were the easy ones
(18/10/22-22/2/24)
•
Every Sunday and every second Wednesday my mother is picked up by a friend from church the friend said she was looking shabby so we bought her new clothes the friend wants her standing outside by a certain time so Bronwyn goes over to dress her and send her down the drive the friend would like money for petrol so we’ve added discreet envelopes but my mum looks so happy as she drives off in the car now the friend would like her to sing solo in the end-of-the-year church concert my mother can’t sing and is intensely shy where does helpfulness end and oppression begin? when your own strongly-held views seem always to accord with the voice of the Lord?
(19/10/22-23/2/24)
•
i.m. Kendrick Smithyman (1922-1995) Don’t share your thoughts or stories about your own experience said the self-help guru about listening not talking at your friends guilty! and yet I’d say I was acting on an earlier theory that discourse hereabouts was based exclusively on anecdote in Kendrick Smithyman’s poetry for instance stories are told whose meaning is obscure and yet when broken down turns out to bear rich fruit a culture of laconic non-feeling-sharing men when I lamented the loss of some of his weirder tales to his wife Margaret look through the poems they’re all there was her reply not everything is an anecdote Steve Martin shouts at John Candy in Planes Trains and Automobiles mind you when you can see your interlocutor reading the sickbag it should give you a hint that something’s wrong
(20/10/22-23/2/24)
•
I was stranded
on a half-submerged campus
trying to get back to
the dining hall
diverted endlessly
by sundry obstacles
this morning
the gardeners are coming
with a couple of lemon trees
to top off two months
of frustrating work
on the roof
the scaffolding
the outside paint
the rotten windows
Bronwyn was in a bus
that reversed into a canal
in her dream
the significance of water
in these parts
is not exactly Freudian
the creek at the bottom of our garden
is undercutting its banks
and one day soon will flood
as it did forty years ago
(21/10/22-5/7/23)
•
Someone said studying Shakespeare was a relic of the colonial past in a Creative New Zealand report on funding a new employee for a Shakespeare-in-schools project the world erupted in scorn columnists fulminated cancel culture blackwashing the bard and so on meanwhile in the eye of the storm the CNZ communications team were kept up till midnight explaining the simple facts of the case to outlets who love to say CNZ refused comment or we hadn’t heard back before going to press eventually the PM decided just to give them the cash surely it is rather odd that in New Zealand half a world away the works of this playwright should be seen to outweigh all other cultural input no Dante no Genji no Homer can compare but then as he (whoever he was) once said (or rather as one of his characters said) it is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing
(22/10/22-24/2/24)
•
My brother sent me a card for my upcoming sixtieth birthday it’s printed with ‘Jack’ which led me to imagine a cavernous warehouse of cards each with a different name matched to a particular year in this case 1962 the number of things that were happening then is astonishing the Cuban missile crisis Lawrence of Arabia Marilyn Monroe’s overdose Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich but for me the strangest thing of all is that my sublit vision of the sixties remains intact I remember watching the Vietnam war on our black-and-white TV walking barefoot everywhere to the dairy on the corner long days on the beach and it doesn’t look sepia in my head not distant by a heartbeat but tangible concrete there
(23/10/22-24/2/24)
•
my father’s only tales were of old humiliations the time they asked him to give a talk on some medical subject at the hospital where he worked he offered an eye-witness account of the leper island Molokaʻi which he’d explored and photographed extensively that’s of no interest whatsoever not at all what we’re looking for said the officious organiser or the time he was asked to describe the WWII defence works of the East Coast Bays to a local history group he’d been charting them for decades having watched them built in the first place as a boy on Deep Creek Road the moment he started to speak a man walked in and started to greet everyone and after he’d finished with that asked what was the talk this week? Doctor Ross was just about to begin Oh I don’t have time to stay he said making an equally loquacious exit my father had hardly got going when the chair stood up and said that was all they had time for that week but it’d been a real treat and they hoped to have hm back again my father bit back the retort not this side of hell these things went around in his head in those last days no happy memories of the love and respect of his patients who still tell us stories about him as they pass by the front fence but as Julia Roberts puts it in Pretty Woman the bad stuff is easier to believe
(24/10/22-25/2/24)
•
I read an article today which claimed the best way to address the subject of climate change was with humour mock weather reports detailing unsurvivable temperatures best not to venture out midday and nuanced story lines including family values and hope because heaven forbid we should stop insulting people’s intelligence with patronising lies you’ve got to sugar-coat the facts with contexts point out the benefits of a wine industry shifting polewards Siberian muscatels are flooding the market now it’s not that I find the idea laughable or even necessarily wrong and I understand that intense fear is disabling for any who can be made to feel it but don’t panic as a doctrine only really works when there’s nothing to panic about
(25/10/22-11/7/2023)
•
The lawnmower man came round yesterday to check the ground for bolts left over from the scaffolding ran into one the other day cost me 11,000 dollars very bold he said of the colour whose idea was that? mine said Bronwyn which isn’t entirely true it was a mutual decision based on my hatred for ochre and the obvious need for an Art Deco colour I’m from Napier she went on and this is what houses there look like he wasn’t convinced sooner you than me he muttered John the painter said it’s a homosexual colour Bronwyn but hey whatever floats your boat every day passers-by stop to gawp at an Auckland house which isn’t white or mauve it radiates at night you can see it in the dark at dawn it looks like Petra rose-red city half as old as time we like to call it coral it is a lot of look
(26/10/22-11/7/2023)
•
of internet bookshops
must be groaning
with obsolete stock
sometimes you order them
and out they shuffle
from some unimaginable stack
like magic
increasingly though
the order’s recorded
the card is charged
and then you wait
and wait
you learn to read clues
the sudden disappearance
of the book
from the site
the failure of the postal tracker
to advance
to dispatch of your prize
no wonder I sit here
in my empire of shelves
gloating like Fáfnir
on top of my hoard
they’re here
they’re catalogued
I can generally
(not always)
find them
the mystery of their contents
crystallised
in unforgiving print
(27/10/22-25/2/24)
•
in a charity shop preferably one that doesn’t sell books so David Howard when he heard I’d finished all 66 novels by Stephen King like so many authors he underestimates the need for actual readers to validate your product as the discussion proceeded he revealed that he seldom read fiction (except Joseph Conrad) because of his inability to identify let alone empathise with imaginary people biographies and histories were more his bag which makes sense unless you acknowledge a biography is just a version of a life I’ve read three biographies of Thomas De Quincey two were entitled ‘the opium eater’ I’d swear they concerned quite different people as for Dickens don’t get me started Forster Johnson Ackroyd Tomalin Slater Oh sure they overlap but only in the sense that novels with similar plots and characters overlap David Copperfield and Great Expectations Bag of Bones and Duma Key the hazy reality we’re forced to live in dissolves into endless jumpcuts do you have to film everything? asked Warren Beatty as he realised belatedly that going out with Madonna meant guest-starring in In Bed with Madonna
(28/10/22-26/2/24)
•
he shouted
at the little girl
prattling artlessly
as was her wont
accustomed to obedience
she jumped
as he brought his spade down
on a snake
Sydney 1930s
one of my mother’s stories
that comes up
repeatedly
two or three times in a row
sometimes
why?
she certainly loved her father
treasures his views
on pretty much everything
food no sauces
flowers only roses
about her mother
she’s more equivocal
she often intones
something told her
by one of her aunts
you never knew your mother
a serious illness
maybe a miscarriage?
in Fiji
robbed her
of much of her past
strangely enough
she sees her mother’s memory loss
as far worse than her own
even though
she can’t answer direct questions
it puts it right out of my head!
or remember an outing
half an hour later
her mother stands in
for all that’s lost
a set of vague traumas
we’re glad she’s forgotten
the car accident
where one of them died
(29/10/22-26/2/24)
•
offers the biggest test
so far
of the new order
is the garage leaking
despite its new roof?
alas yes
has the new front garden
washed down the drain?
no
those heavy beach stones
we gathered in Raglan
for an art workshop
have done their job
the bark’s still there
is the creek flowing
despite its overgrown banks
the tangle of trash
around the culverts?
I haven’t dared check
is the rusty old water tank
we bought in ‘98
during the drought
overflowing
into the basement
yet?
not sure I’ll drain it
in due course
are the sea levels rising
down by the beach?
of course
this house was built
on a tidal creek
so it is a bit hopeless
futile as King Canute
(30/10/22-27/2/24)
•
Yesterday I left the hot tap running on the cat’s plate and the light on in the storeroom before going up for my nap I’ve got too many dementia sufferers in my life already said Bronwyn better get it together or I’m putting you out to grass fair enough it’s not that I haven’t noticed in my last semester teaching I found I couldn’t improvise so readily the names and quotes wouldn’t come the way they used to and now half the people I meet disappear from my mind the moment they turn around their names especially but I do have my methods reciting the Kings and Queens of England first off then Shakespeare’s plays Dickens’ novels in order the American presidents any gaps can be filled in next day so far anyway
(31/10/22-8/5/23)
•
so the argument goes and wasting your time on lies is absurd so all fiction is absurd but isn’t reality absurd as well? which means that fiction which purports to imitate reality a mirror dawdling down a lane (Stendhal) is an absurdity aping another absurdity which seems to add up by double jeopardy to something very grave but at this point the argument in a circle turns into a vortex sucking you in to a logic-chopping there’s always more space at the infinite hotel proposition so perhaps the term ‘black comedy’ would suit us better? to live in a dustbin eating scrap seemed to Nagg and Nell a most eminent domain in Beckett’s Endgame or better still just grin and bear it like a
(1/11/22-27/2/24)
•
asked a fellow-guest at my colleague’s flat all those years ago no doubt meant as a polite (albeit perfunctory) question but I was rather sick of that routine have you published anything? yes would you like a list? would I have heard of you? well that depends just how familiar are you with the alt-poetry scene? this time I chose to take it seriously trying to come up with reasons for staying alive in my defence I was in a pretty dark place at the time but even so I knew how pompous it sounded the fact that it happened to be true is neither here nor there and the bad manners inherent in my answer more apparent than in the facile and probably not ill-meant question don’t ask if you don’t want to know is still a good maxim though so it’s hard to regret it Why do I write now? I guess it’s a habit it makes me feel better and sometimes I permit myself to hope it might do someone else some good as well
(2/11/22-28/2/24)
•
I read a self-righteous piece this morning on why Putin must be stopped otherwise the author opines we’re entering a period where aggressive invasions of other nation’s territory on the flimsiest pretexts can be allowed to succeed I remember twenty years back meeting some Aussies who couldn’t repress their envy of us New Zealanders because our then Prime Minister Helen Clark hadn’t signed up for the invasion of Iraq to root out all those weapons of mass destruction which turned out not to be there the Gulf of Tonkin the undeclared war on North Vietnam the rollcall began to unspool in my head my ineffectual sentimental radicalism through a lifetime of strife and pain of course I agree about Putin but please just for a moment take a good look at yourself stop editorialising and name-calling on the edge of the pit
(3/11/22-28/2/24)
•
I really don’t care
do u?
the horrible thing is
when I hear such heresies
I can understand why
somebody said it
so much futile energy
applied to quite possibly
insoluble problems
does get wearing
hence
at that drunken dinner-party
where our hostess revealed
she supported Kim Dotcom’s
internet party
because he had a big pool
and she hoped to be invited
to swim in it
I could see the pointlessness
of argument
still every time
I turn on the tele
to see some monstrous gas-guzzler
busting its way
through fragile streams
up sand-dunes
frangible gullies
join the ranger lifestyle
live life large
that sick feeling of indignation
at pricks who smash shit
for the sake of it
comes back to the surface again
so yes I’ll sign your petition
but unless you grew up loving trees
poking through rockpools
(now picked clean)
trying not to step into
other poor creatures’ business
It’s hard to feel much hope
(4/11/22-29/2/24)
•
has flexibilities within it for instance having got us up at 6 am she’s then prepared to bed down in the warm spot but only for a while after a snack and possibly a trip outside she sits on the stairs and waits not silently for me to make my way up to the office on gloomy days she beds down in the chair behind my desk on sunny days she marches down the hall pausing to rub certain iconic books with interesting corners and jumps up on the guest room bed by then striped by a sunbeam she may stay there till early afternoon or conversely come down for morning tea it’s hard to say if she sees us as her kittens or her parents certainly our lack of cool embarrasses her profoundly on occasion both I think
(5/11/22-9/5/23)
•
for instance we started off with croissants dripping with butter and jam then moved on to presents a handmade card with a poem inscribed on it beside a special print made in a workshop some six weeks ago plus a book on ancient manuscripts this afternoon we’re off to see a film about a lost Mars Rover that wanted to call home but the main event the birthday lunch won’t be till tomorrow my mother and my brother will be there I don’t know about you but when it comes to going the extra mile to make you feel just a little bit special it don’t come better than that thanks Bronwyn I didn’t think I could love you more but it seems I can
(6/11/22-11/7/23)
•
for days we’ve been charting his movements step by step my brother’s in residence in the bach in our back garden ostensibly for a conference and to see our mum who lives across the street but actually to crash my birthday so we suspect yesterday it came to a head my mother was driven home from church by her best friend the two sat in the car talking and praying and – who knows? singing hymns perhaps my brother went over to collect her and stood there beside the car they took no notice he waited for a while then started to dance waving his arms like a dervish eventually my mother climbed out of the car and he bent over to have some words with her friend to introduce himself? to warn her off? we couldn’t hear today he’s expected for lunch before going home to Dunedin we hope he won’t dance or have a tantrum who knows? the jury’s out
(7/11/22-11/7/23)
•
Something about the algorithms
inspires us to send
birthday best wishes
not only to those we know well
and would like to be with
but also to people
whose feed
we’ve somehow chanced upon
the etiquette
used to confuse me
I didn’t know whether to thank
people or whether that
would embarrass them
never such innocence again
now I take care
to acknowledge each one
throw in some folksy
reference
add exclamation marks
because if I just stuck to those
who sent birthday cards
the tally would be too depressingly slim
it’s a bit more complex
when it comes to complete strangers
whom I’ve never
at least to my knowledge
met
those I just like
I can’t quite bring myself
to thank them by name
you have to retain some sense
of life offscreen
of the actual bar
or classroom
or venue
where we used to hang out
(8/11/22-29/2/24)
•
I was at a committee meeting
chaired by my ex
as each matter was resolved
the department heads involved
would leave
until there were only two of us left
at this point she decided
to close proceedings
what about me? I said
what about you? she replied
I’ve been patiently waiting
till all this other stuff
was settled
before we could get to
my issues
no time for that now
was her reply
so when’s the next meeting?
she looked blank
we have half an hour left
on the clock
I haven’t said anything
about it yet
but now …
that’s ridiculous
she broke in
you’ve said plenty
but not about this
I riposted
about their issues
and how do you think it will sound
if I report
that you said the whole thing
was ridiculous?
at that point I woke up
earlier in the night I’d dreamed
that a ruffian
was reaching in the window
at us
that jolted me awake
and it took quite some time
to get back to sleep
prophetic?
of what?
further developments
expected tonight
(9/11/22-3/3/24)
•
This morning I go under the knife to excise a boil that’s been itchy and sore on the back of my leg for quite a while but is it malignant? my GP Francesco who claims to be an authority on such matters has pooh-poohed such fears of mine previously this time though he's persuaded me to let him remove it for testing even though he’s ‘almost sure’ it’s benign it reminds me a bit of that H. G. Wells story where the scalpel slips and the patient shoots off into interstellar space faster and faster till the universe starts to coalesce into the gleam of a great jewel on an infinitely large hand always liked that one but would prefer not to experience it personally
(10/11/22-3/3/24)
•
This morning’s errands included dropping by the medical clinic to replace the bandage on yesterday’s incision with a waterproof one it had felt a little bit scratchy during the night but the actual removal was more along the lines of those ‘mummy’ll give you a lollipop if you’re good’ swift tugs at the follicles the real issue though was how to wrangle my big umbrella through the beating rain and wind without it turning inside out whilst carrying two takeaway coffees and a couple of scones all night I’d been pondering whether to wear shorts to assist with bandage removal or jeans to keep off the rain I feel quite exhausted and the day’s not yet begun
(11/11/22-4/3/24)
•
of each vice
These are the gates of paradise
– William Blake
If we had a bigger landing
we could display Steven’s coat
on the stairs
yesterday four packages arrived
from Wellington
the cream
of Bronwyn’s
She Shed
textile show
at the Petone Settlers’ Museum
rugs blankets dolls
and now the house
is full of bubble-wrap
and boxes
and a desperate quest
to find some space
to set up
the Kiwi equivalent
of Antony Gormley’s
Angel of the North
it’d seem a bit crazier
if it weren’t for the fact
that I spent all yesterday
reconfiguring
my Children’s Books
bookcase
in double rows
too many pretty things
in the world
too little restraint
on our part
the cat
sits by and purrs
(12/11/22-27/5/23)
•
Notes:
"She Shed: Contemporary Wool Craft is a capsule exhibition assembled by Blumhardt curator Dr Bronwyn Lloyd - writer, crafter, and textile collector. She Shed is Lloyd’s dream space of wool craft, featuring the work of seven contemporary makers she most admires: Vita Cochran, Lizzy Leckie, Caroline McQuarrie, Rona Ngahuia Osborne, Steven Park, Daegan Wells, and Georgina May Young, at the Petone Settlers Museum.
This exhibition is presented in conjunction with Threads: Textiles Festival, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington from 16-20 March 2022."
•
For weeks I’ve been waiting clicking on Netflix willing it to appear coming Friday Friday came and went it wasn’t there on Saturday it finally manifested Ancient Apocalypse by Graham Hancock Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age was my favourite among his books but even as a group they seemed a cut above the usuals aliens-made-Stonehenge loads of old tosh monocular undoubtedly but it was spectacular we saw him climbing the rugged slopes of Gunung Padang in Java marvelled at the size of the fallen temple till he started to chat with the geologist who’d dated its lower levels to 11,000 BCE which somehow proved to Hancock though not all those scholars and academics who are always conspiring to thwart him that it might in fact be 24,000 years old the word Atlantis was never mentioned though it hung in the background like a distant star Mu neither but then I saw his pugnacious bulldog face on Joe Rogan’s podcast chatting about his theories why put that on screen? is it all a part of Pizzagate? will Q Anon be making further announcements soon? a comfortable bask in pretty shots of ancient pyramids turns into one more x-ray of an egotist’s insides
(13/11/22-11/7/23)
•
you shouldn’t do something they’re not always wrong my mother’s driving for example the last straw for her was not knocking off someone else’s side mirror driving up our own street nor the fact that not only did she not stop and go back nowhere to park she claimed no what did it was turning out of the garage where they’d patched up her car and realising she didn’t know which way to go next just how do you find home? I suppose she would have braked if you hadn’t shouted stop mused one of my brothers to the other when they returned from a last-minute Christmas shopping run maybe the other opined last night in my dream they were both insisting that I let her drive as we lurched round the streets in an automotive death roll
(14/11/22-11/7/23)
•
sailing under the bridge In our little kestrel trailer sailor on our way down-harbour to anchor off Chelsea go in for a swim eat our lunch on the deck then the long beat home tacking across to the wharves down into Ngataringa Bay to pick up the mooring sometimes it got quite rough I remember once we ended up missing the buoy and smashed instead into the sea wall my father leapt overboard to hold the boat off the jagged teeth of the planks while the rest of us cowered like deck cargo unable to help years later my cousin bought just the same boat and invited me for a sail we sailed out to Rangitoto on the way we slipped a stay and I’ll always remember hanging over the side trying to rethread the bolt as we headed for the rocks under North Head I felt as cool as a cucumber my marriage had recently broken up leaving me walking wounded a watery grave seemed the least of my concerns
(15/11/22-11/7/2023)
•
that thing from Chekhov about how the pistol in a story must be fired in my first-year writing lectures – by which he meant that anything you single out for mention must have some function in the plot what can a gun do but shoot? until one student hearing this saw red and stormed up to the secretary’s office to beard me in my den unfortunately I wasn’t there probably having lunch so he had to content himself with ranting about what a lie it was how many things could be done with a pistol and how I should be shot after that strangely we made friends or sort of he was a fan of Lord Byron and used to drop by my office for a loud harangue leaning in from the corridor which irritated my colleagues especially as he used to shout you can’t really tell me you mark them the same as us them meaning Asian students I just don’t believe it in what passed for a confiding tone it was in vain to protest how excellent was the grammar of language-school trained students how divergent and fascinating the ideas of students from different cultural backgrounds eventually he changed his name and left town for undisclosed reasons only to emerge a few years later as one of our Masters students until he flamed out the pistol in a story must be fired
(16/11/22-11/7/2023)
•
the fewer there are the greater their effectiveness I was walking down the drive outside our house when I saw a woman lying on her back on the asphalt I walked up to her Are you all right? I guessed she must have fallen from her parked car above on the level of the road I’m fine she said I just can’t seem to get up Shall I get a doctor? I asked No I’m fine I just need to rest for a while all my life I’d been hearing not to move accident victims she said she was not in pain and I don’t carry a phone so I went into the house to fetch my father a retired GP he got his bag by now a little group had gathered a loud decisive man was giving orders ringing an ambulance she was moaning in pain no-one paid the slightest attention to my dad as he asked her the usual questions where’s the pain? can you feel your legs? the man with the phone was the man in charge I saw for the first time that my father had shrunk into an old man afterwards he went on about how wisely the loud man had reacted but I knew what he meant how shamed he felt
(17/11/22-11/7/2023)
•
asked Bronwyn as the news came in that a Russian missile had fallen on Poland and killed two people thankfully no but the need to deny it took me back half a century to the school library committee of which I was head where the hottest topic was whether anything except nuclear disarmament was worth discussing given the imminent probability of ending up as radioactive dust but then in the 80s the discourse moved on somehow not that anything was resolved mind you but we all just tacitly agreed not to bring it up till the fall of the Berlin wall Ceaușescu and wife slumped in a heap in their back garden the tanks in Prague stopped with flowers the tanks in Moscow halted by an alcoholic with attitude was it all for nothing? Sadly it seems so yes but then as Homer Simpson remarked at the end of a worse than usual set of disasters Marge my friend I haven’t learned a thing
(18/11/22-11/7/2023)
Publications:
•
Zero is discontented today she woke up on the wrong side of the bed and has been roaming around unable to settle we’ve tried her on her usual haunts the basket on my office couch on top of the pillows in the guest bedroom sniffing around the lawn no soap I see her pupils widening and a lash in her tail Bronwyn says somebody’s getting a fanging this morning and I don’t want it to be me I hear that Vladimir Putin has been busy opening new buildings and talking a lot about the weather lately as his forces retreat from Kherson somebody’s getting a fanging soon and he doesn’t want it to be him
(19/11/22-27/5/23)
•
The last days of twitter the last days of détente like Cai Guo-Qiang’s sky ladder a seven-year-old doco we watched last night as an apocalyptic rainstorm lashed the house that sense of let-down as he achieved his 21-year goal of lifting mankind to the heavens for the benefit of his 100-year-old grannie too ill to be there who died a month later and his dear old dad a calligrapher and book-collector I helped him burn his books during the cultural revolution said Cai it took three days and nights and yet in retrospect a time of hope submerged in our darker out-of-season hundred-year storms the reign of Xi the reign of Putin the reign of Trump trying to pull off that Grover Cleveland trick one more dive at the greasy pig
(20/11/22-4/3/24)
•
I suppose all the comparisons with War and Peace conspired to put me off I read Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate some years ago but don’t remember all that much about it now its prequel Stalingrad retitled For a Just Cause by Stalinist censors has been translated too it’s odd to encounter the same set of shabby disreputable people gazing up at the dawn sky in confidence that Soviet truth and justice will prevail over Fascist lies while awkward details such as the undeniable advance of the Hitlerite hordes despite the consummate professionalism of the Red Army under their wise master Marshall Timoshenko pass unremarked strange too that there were quite so many wreckers and saboteurs ready on the first day of the invasion you’d almost think they hadn’t noticed the rising sun of the Socialist future through all those years of the man-made famine in Ukraine as an appetiser for the great purges I suppose I’ll keep reading anyway
(21/11/22-5/3/24)
•
In my dream I was talking to a group of students about the genesis of Poetry NZ back in the day in Palmerston North I asked them to write me a haiku – making sure that they knew what that was – then collected all their emails for next time so loud was the din of the next class invading I could hardly hear myself think let alone make out the crabbed scrawl on the notes they gave me I suppose it’s a reaction to hearing of Bronwyn’s workmate who when told we were going to see Emily asked who’s Emily Brontë? have I started teaching again in my dreams? a relief then to be woken by clattering dishes this morning the old life done
(22/11/22-12/7/2023)
Publications:
•
Despite the extreme weather events forecast over the last few days the roofing contractors at the supermarket next door neglected to tie down their sheet metal so as the wind rose in febrile gusts it began to roll up and slam against the scaffolding until we began to fear for the lives of those in the carpark not to mention of course our own windows Bronwyn went over to talk to the manager who shrugged and said he’d give the contractors a ring to see if they had anyone willing to go up on the roof in a storm somehow this didn’t reassure us so I got onto the online help desk and asked the bot what to do next it suggested I collect more plastic farm pieces which I felt was a little irrelevant so when it offered to pass me to an actual human being I gladly agreed and started a dialogue with a certain Jenny who got my name phone number address and sundry other details before passing it on to the relevant authorities a couple of hours later we saw a rather disgruntled man wandering around their rooftop with a length of blue tape he seems to have flattened the sheets out again said Bronwyn our last sight of him was gesticulating and yelling on the phone but what he was actually saying we could not hear
(23/11/22-5/7/23)
•
as Emily Brontë
channelled their mother
her sceptical sisters
were almost converted from disbelief
The china mask she wore
was buried unburied
worn
reflected
screamed at
a little like chivvying
our cat
down the corridor
each morning
she’ll either sleep in the study
or the bedroom
but she isn’t sure which
till she’s tried them both
repeatedly
I wondered how anyone could ever imagine
unquiet slumbers
for the sleepers in that quiet earth
despite the anachronisms
and general absurdity
I have to admit
the tears were streaming down my face
as the poor girl breathed her last
(24/11/22-27/5/23)
•
Notes:
The reference is Frances O'Connor's 2022 film Emily, starring Emma Mackey as Emily Brontë.
•
to read her a poem last thing last night it’s our new thing ghost stories or poems rather than stupefying ourselves with one more sit-com it was a bit of a risk but I tried her on Wordsworth’s ‘We are Seven’ The little Maid would have her will and said “Nay, we are seven!” after a bit of discussion about the poet’s somewhat peremptory manner in quizzing the girl and the general sentimentality her verdict was what a wuss I have to admit she has a point there is something repellent there beneath the saccharine and yet that’s how I used to think myself until I switched off the critic-o-meter one weekend when I read an old collected poems arranged by date you just have to give them time stop looking for obvious beauties and open your heart instead
(25/11/22-5/7/23)
•
Usually when I’m in a bookshop
I can reach up and ease out books
from even the highest shelve
after all I’m six feet tall
in Hard-to-Find though
the shelves reach up to heaven
ecclesiastical ceilings
so I couldn’t quite manage
the B’s in Biography
there was some kind of step ladder
over in the corner
but the small wooden stool was nearer
so I moved it into place
and reached up to the Brontës
then the stool shifted
two of its three legs
were somewhat misaligned
and threatened to topple
I managed to readjust
– no twisted ankle
or embarrassing fall backwards
into the graphic novels –
and it did have the side effect
of showing me a biography
of J. G. Ballard
I hadn’t known existed
after I’d climbed down
and bought my books
and left the shop
I started to wonder
what chain reaction I’d begun
would others climb up
on that temptingly placed stool?
would they have the same luck
in correcting its wobble?
might not some sprain
or broken bone ensue?
and if so would it be my fault
or that of the stool’s creator
or the shop owner’s for leaving it there
or for piling their stock so high
or Juliet Barker’s for writing such a big fat book
on the Brontës
or J. G. Ballard’s for his explorations
of the fetishistic significance
of any crash?
(26/11/22-5/3/24)
•
I guess I would give us about a B+ for our prowess yesterday when the power went off halfway through CSI just as we were about to learn the identity of the strangely branded slave who’d been injected with somebody else’s eyeball we do have a cupboard for candles with lots of matches so that was no problem we improvised some Victorian home entertainment I read out a ghost story and an old poem from the Ingoldsby Legends by now it was pitch dark and we could see all the neighbours prowling around trying hard not to look afraid that things would never go back to normal we didn’t join them but went off to bed instead the cat accepted the situation with her usual calm to be honest I’m not really sure she noticed till the power came back to the accompaniment of loud cheers and crashing machinery the moment we’d settled and taken out our books
(27/11/22-27/5/23)
•
Serial killers family dysfunction haunted pasts it’s as if the whole world – or the section of it that watches television – is caught in a nightmare from which it cannot awake but is it all bad? the mummy of a lion cub unearthed in Saqqara by adept archaeologists not led by some white saviour from the well-funded west the under-dog digger who unearthed the ship at Sutton Hoo a few small acts of kindness Wednesday Addams befriending a bespectacled nerd a hand reaching out to help you stand up
(28/11/22-6/3/24)
•
so we’re told is the word of the year when it comes to online searches next comes oligarch omicron cancel culture and rather oddly sentient no doubt inspired by the software engineer who claimed his AI system had developed independent thought if only! it’s hard to imagine it doing a worse job than we do with our god-given intellect a little lower than the angels but then my own choices of word furry or Bronwyn were never likely to go global but for emotion and intelligence they beat the others flat
(29/11/22-5/7/23)
•
I remember once recommending the rehabilitation of clichés to an aspiring writer at a poetry workshop only to be rebuked by another attendee I see what you mean but she isn’t at that level there’s the dilemma do you talk down from the dizzying height of your own wit and erudition? or do you simply nudge your neighbour and try to share something that made you smile or think? having grown up in a family of braying megalomaniacs sure of their own distinction ‘the smartest guys in the room’ (like Enron executives) I always instinctively shy away from any automatic presupposition of ignorance on my interlocutor’s part and honestly have never observed any great advantage to be gained from condescension
(30/11/22-6/3/24)
•
Clearly there are no coincidences I mean what are the odds? catching up with The Crown last night on tele we saw a staged birthday party for someone named Susan married to the head of the BBC whose reactionary views about ‘Britishness’ were to say the least somewhat guyed in context then this morning I read in the news the transcript of a conversation between this ‘Susan’ and the Black director of a UK charity – where are you from? I’m from the UK I was born here – no where are you from? where are your people from? my ‘people’? – yes where did you come from? I’m of African / British / Caribbean heritage – oh I see you’re from the Caribbean now it seems that Susan has resigned though we don’t hear of any apology if I hadn’t heard the same conversation a thousand times I guess I’d be surprised ‘I’m a New Zealander’ but where are you from? never directed at a white person they’re always from ‘here’ anyone Black or Asian is from somewhere else
(1/12/22-7/3/24)
Notes:
•
I have no idea how to write a book without violence in it states the aptly-named Stephen Hunter author of Point of Impact I’m sorry to say that’s not my problem in my case writing a book without a self-questioning nameless protagonist hard to distinguish from the author intent on working out some personal trauma is almost unthinkable as usual George Orwell puts it most succinctly his four motives for writing were 1/ egotism 2/ an abstract love of words & language 3/ desire to feel less alone 4/ political purposes one once potent in me has now fallen off almost to nil as has three to tell you the truth I don’t really want most people reading my books but I do enjoy solving the conceptual problem of how to put things so clearly that nobody thinks you’re even ‘writing’ at all as for four I hardly think about it but perhaps it’s behind that stubborn sense of duty that keeps me scribbling although at times there seem more reasons to stop
(2/12/22-7/3/24)
Notes:
•
Bronwyn has a habit of walking out of the house leaving the front door open when she thinks she’ll be right back in practice of course she gets distracted till after a while I notice the draft and go over and close it which means that eventually she’ll be pounding on the door to be let back in as she never carries a key it puts me in mind of the Michael Moore documentary where he tested out his theory that Canadians don’t lock their doors by walking straight into a stranger’s front room sure enough it wasn’t locked and the people inside though somewhat bemused seem friendly enough to the shabby shyster Zero too like other cats meows to go out then meows to come in then changes her mind and wants out again Seriously though do we live in a world where doors can be left open? I wish we did
(3/12/22-27/5/23)
Notes:
•
i.m. Anne Mairi Ross (1961-1991)
How many Princess Di’s
have died for us
on screen?
Elizabeth Debicki
Kristen Stewart
Naomi Watts
and then there are
the tell-all documentaries
with the survivors
posed against old clips
of their younger
cooler selves
the more you see
the less you feel convinced
you’re hearing the real story
recalling family events
or arguments
one’s forced to acknowledge
how much of it depends
on point-of-view
a certain tone of voice
a contemptuous grunt
how little was ever
actually said
by
or to
the dead
(4/12/22-8/3/24)
•
My latest reality pash is filmed on ‘the busiest highway in North America’ outside Toronto snaking through the Great Lakes the stoic Canadians who staff the nation’s highways are very family-oriented it’s hard to count the father-and-son teams setting up their rotators and flatbeds beside each crash trucks on their backs on their sides in snow drifts snared in forest glades with cargos of copper wire rolls of paper frozen yeast even once compacted garbage there’s something about it the sense of camaraderie a common purpose which makes them dangle above Lake Erie to haul out a crane I see myself there a mere foot-soldier not yet in the business of calculating vectors walking with a line over my shoulder walking from the shoulder of the road into the trees
(5/12/22-8/3/24)
•
Seeing Zero by her plate today sitting as close as she physically could her head flung up appealingly was of course irresistible but reminded me sharply of another cat in the same kitchen twenty-five years ago Poupousse named for yet another cat who knocked over a vase deliberately to spite an intruder (my mother-in-law) while her human was out of the room our Poupousse was a greedy cat or rather she took a simple joy in a plate of food that look of sublime satisfaction as she tucked in was really something to see and the constant peevish attempts to interrupt her by head boy cat Ilya were impatiently swatted away her earlier identity had been as Mitzi living over the fence with a young family of importunate children so she peddled her papers elsewhere we knocked on doors up and down the street to find out where she came from but it never occurred to us to try one street over till one of the family walking by years later spotted her lying in our front yard double identities pulling up stakes and shifting to richer ground are second nature to our furry friends we call such people grifters tricksters identity thieves perhaps we should just call them cats?
(6/12/22-27/5/23)
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A woman was whinging about how only two people turned up to her book-signing though forty said they were coming on the online invite this sparked off a chorus of you think that’s bad? what about this? from the likes of Neil Gaiman Jodi Picoult Margaret Atwood and other celebs Atwood said that not only did nobody come but the one person who did approach her wanted to buy scotch tape it got me to thinking about my own slew of embarrassing events readings where the readers outnumbered the audience launches where nobody bought the book and the person giving the launch speech admitted to not having read it but still recommended we get it ‘because it’s an important book’ so why do you do it? asked Bronwyn – Sigmund Freud had some useful theories I said but at least the writing must be fun? not really I replied the agony of getting it down then working through it all again and again the fear of falling short of being laughed at then why? to be honest I don’t really know I’m just glad that some people do where would I be without the books they write?
(7/12/22-5/7/23)
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has to go and have tea with someone she knew at school she doesn’t want to they don’t have much in common don’t move in the same circles then or now and there’s no earthly reason why this woman keeps ringing her up to invite herself to lunch except that she nourishes a fantasy of school as the best time of her life has written herself a retrospective dazzling past and Bronwyn is part of that Just tell her that something’s come up I say as I’ve often said before say you’re going to be busy for the next couple of weeks leading up to Christmas I can’t she says it’d be like kicking a puppy I can’t cause anyone pain she blames it on being brought up a good Catholic girl Our Lady is always watching I keep ranting on ignoring the fact that I too have old school chums I need to keep seeing and the few that I’ve actually dumped come thronging back to haunt me in the long watches of the night above all though I thank whatever gods may be that someone indoctrinated Bronwyn with this particular dogma which leads her to forgive my own transgressions again and again world without end again
(8/12/22-5/7/23)
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His fiction is uncompromisingly experimental his book Ghost Stories may well be his most accessible I was a bit disconcerted to find that ‘uncompromisingly experimental’ line in my publisher’s write-up on Facebook tired of airport books? bored by Tom Clancy and Dan Brown? wearied by puerile web sites? seeking a challenge? try a “novel” by Dr Jack Ross said Michael Morrissey a few years further back à propos of The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis it’s hard to remember why I felt it so necessary to print half the pages upside down it certainly caused pain to the printers who had to redo the whole first run I suppose it was just that the first time I picked up a book with half its pages in Farsi hand-drawn dream maps and diagrams of the compound where the ‘action’ was feigned to take place it gave me a kick like I just can’t describe after that texts within texts print windows surrounded by pictures concrete poems imbedded like plums in Jack Horner’s pie were all that attracted me but passion dies and the puritan fervour falls away till you find yourself left-siding everything because you’re so much more interested in what you’re saying than how to say it and the need for such scaffolding seems lost like left luggage in an old train station where the ghosts of ambition have gone to rest
(9/12/22-8/2/24)
Publications:
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Bronwyn gave me a necklace made by Renee Bevan for my birthday or perhaps a necklet If you think it’s unmanly you can wear it under your shirt I thought it’d be bigger somehow like dog-tags a small lozenge made of silver on the front it says BE on the back CN be seen? beacon? it seems to be saying something about not hiding your light under a bushel quite fitting from the creator of wearing the world like a pearl I wear it with pride
(9/12/22-5/7/23)
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