November 2006 Archives

pretty soon the man who is paid to monitor the humidity, temperature and wind chill factor will notice the optimum nexus of these atmospheric variables and declare nabe season. now, i love a good shabu shabu, but i still call it winter.

pretty soon the final exams for the term will be marked with hands cramping up on red pens, the loose ends of classes ignored and paid leave signed off. the favoured destinations these holidays seem to be china and vietnam. i never really got on to the whole organising a holiday in a timely fashion thing. the truth is that ive been kinda flaky through november anyway.

pretty soon it'll be the third excuse for a valentine's day like celebration here. we've had the real feb 14th, then white day, and now xmas. they cant get enjoy of the cheezy romance, oh well, who cant. im working that day anyway, maybe thumb twiddling with some serious sudoku action going on. as you can tell, im not that chuffed about the idea.

still, ive got options im sitting on until they expire. the current one is loading up a backpack and taking the milk-run local trains on a special 5 day ticket to, well, where ever. i'll have a pay check, an out of date lonely planet and a whole bunch of country music on the ipod. should be an interesting contrast against the japanese backwaters. country music... the music of pain... maybe i should go to korea

come
take off your toil,
unlace the lips
of your uniform's smile

i will wash it
along with mine
scrub out the sighs
and hang our sodden spirits
on the line, just

come
to this room i keep warm
it has no roof, no floor
no walls
but my arms.

Writing is one of the habits I've sustained the longest. The knack for stupid, irrelevant and lengthy comments probably outdistances it, but I'd like to de-prioritise that one for now. At least writing beats my smoking track record. I think I remember writing my first short story when i was 9 or 10 years old, then my first poem at 12. My parents may be able to share some earlier examples/anecdotes, but I prefer to leave them out of these discussions of ours.

Moving on, I pursued the usual early teen, bad (see "horrific') verse years, slowly starting to pay less attention to my angst and more to the images, the words. An early fixation on John Keats and Emily Dickinson may not have helped the self absorption, but later discovering e. e. cummings, Charles Bukowski and a Melbourne poet/artist/drummer by the name of Cameron Potts helped bookend what I thought I was doing. By around 15 or 16, I was sometimes writing pieces that weren't too painfully embarrassing to read later on. One thing that must be noted is that while I had a few poets for a base reference, plus my brother's Norton's Anthology of Poetry 3rd edition, the staple input of verse I received was from indie and alternate music; meter set to G C D.

I guess the pleasures of headphonic verse chorus verse were a contributing factor to my current amateurdom. Sure, I tried my hand at setting words to chords and note noodlings, but it never really worked out. I knew the ye olde minstrel had evolved into the 3 piece band. The sonnets, sestinas, epics, odes, et cetera were/are mostly unpalatable. The poet might write, but the audience is a Greek chorus singing "I don't get it". So the path I set out on was focussed on the Image, for poetry's sake, and Simplicity. No iambic pentagrameters, no clock gear rhymes. I've held cummings up as an major influence for experimenting with layout, but he had mastered forms before he went on breaking them, hence I'm not really of the same school. But that just leads me to the second factor of my amateurdom - laziness.

I've never had the motivation or self-discipline to sit down with the closed forms and make my own ideas work with them. I an play with words and layout, following what I think works, but I've never worked to make any "respectable" poetry. I'm disappointed in myself slightly, but I still love my amateur ways. My poetical laziness still requires a lot of effort and generates a lot of frustration. My ways have still failed me though. I still hear that chorus of "I don't get it" and I'm not a one man aesthetical movement. Like any human, I see and feel things in my own way, an like any human raised at the longer end of the Enlightenment's tooth, I record them believing in the uniqueness of the individual.

And so, this is where it has brought me; the blogging of an amateur while he's still a young man (did I mention the hairs I'm starting to find on my black clothes? Eeeek!) All I can add about my creative work is a quote whose origin I can't reference due to a rather large distance between me and my bookshelf (see: moving continents). It was from an anthology of Western haiku, and while pertaining to haiku, I believe it may serve as a key to my efforts or, in fact, poetry in general, that a poem is "an open door which appears to be closed". For me, all the rhythms, rhymes, offsides and technical fouls are secondary to the Image - just try walking in.

n.b. tis not a cry for validation, just a statement of perceived fact. jaa, mata.

Technically, this passes the whole 50 year threshold of copyright theory , and i cleansed the bad luck / evil spirits at a thus focussed temple this evening, so may i present...... Stephen Crane!!!

'In the desert'

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial
Who, squatting upon the ground
Held his heart in his hands
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter - bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.:"

And while you ponder whatever you want to ponder, may i say that if whatever evil corporate DRM hound comes sniffing about your idle recollections of this, blame it on me... at least it was typed faithfully.

Anyone who has visited my blog before may notice a wee addition... I actually managed to insert a Links bit into the sidebar without breaking it! Having been so inept and befuddled by all this coding/tagging/css stuff before, I'm quite chuffed. Yes, yes, Mr Pittman, its been a long time coming. Hopefully more aesthetic touches will be incoming once i nick the code from some other sites.

One other mention is the first link in my shiny new bit. I was greatly disheartened to realise that I'm now past that arbitrarily devised age for what constitutes a "young writer" in Australia. Therefore, there go a lot of options for getting off my rather lazy writer's posterior and trying to accomplish something with my work. One major fear is that I'm really just an amateur. I'm guessing thats more of a reality though. My vector is, however, I decided that all i could do instead of hording files that just get deleted when a hard drive crashes or having very nicely re-written final drafts in my notebooks, i might go ahead and set up an online collection. Now, I don't mean to slight the fantabulous Concrete Journals, Mr Pittman for his generosity or the other gifted writers around journals.concrete.org.au. I didn't feel right aobut clogging my blog with old pieces and I don't have the know how to separate my categories and pages and all that other movable type, blog stuff right. I so I started up Silence Fiction Press. I'm really sorry. Still, even that was a challenge to organise. Still, it's there. New works still come here first, old stuff and edits go there.

I hope I can be forgiven for my ineptitude and cheap ways around it.

they emerged from your early
ardent months into the next
doused and salted
the earth exhausted of its blush
while all of us leant from your arms
to the shade

and after the bedsheets in bin bags
return from the laundrette
and spent, you walk us with
soft palms, faithful smiles...
the trees allude with menstrual leaves to
desertion

even while they
with their
synchronised seeding
delicately
nurse their
your
fruits down
hill.