What I am working on
*
In this thirsting night
(nothing)
*
My bed is a boat, the cat
a smooth black anchor
stone. Adrift under
malevolent stars.
Notebook (page 2 of 2)
“To the extent that the body is a wound, the sign is also nothing but a wound. Are we still capable, are we already capable of confronting the wound of the sign, this flaying where sense gets lost? Sense is lost in this pure sense that is also the wound. The wound closes the body. It multiplies its sense, and sense gets lost in it.”
Jean Luc Nancy, (1994)
‘Corpus’ trans Claudette Sartiliot in Thinking Bodies ed. MacCannell & Zakarin. Stanford: Stanford UP.
I seldom dream of him but when I do we are always dancing,
it is always a waltz, the old-fashioned kind
it is always light, filtered sunlight
and gardenias, and blond wooden floors.
(There is always a part of this that is for you).
The full text of Poetry NZ Yearbook 2 is now available online as a free PDF. The feature poet is Robert Sullivan, and the issue is packed full of too many poets – both established and new – for me to name here, along with essays by John Geraets, Janet Newman and Alistair Paterson, and a number of reviews. As the editor, Jack Ross, comments, this “is a gift to poetry-lovers everywhere”.
What I am reading: The Best American Poetry 2015, ed. Sherman Alexie
Look for me in: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine Vol 58 No 1, ed. Annemarie Jutel. You can view a PDF of my piece here.
This summer, the world lost David Lyndon Brown, a talented poet, writer, artist, teacher, and gorgeous man. The Spinoff has published Olwyn Stewart’s great essay on David and his writing, The champion figure skater who wrote wonderful stories – Farewell to David Lyndon Brown.
‘Not only were his paintings and stories anchored in a deep appreciation of art, truth and beauty, they were also the values that informed the choice of artefacts with which he surrounded himself, which in turn left their spoor in the art he produced and the stories that he told – as the old saying goes, “you build your house and your house builds you.”’ – Olwyn Stewart, 2016
What I am working on – ‘Adventures in the Country of Death’ sequence:
(I use a lot of grayscale in these works)
Some of these have appeared in various issues of Brief. [Read The Death of Porthos here].
What I am working on:
Alone in that city I felt its
beauty like a bruise
“To know that one does not write for the other, to know these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not – this is the beginning of writing.”
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse
1978:100 (trans. Richard Howard, Penguin)
