Loss of a pet
June 29, 2009
No obituary
Presented to us in a terrier’s mouth,
he squirmed his way back into being
through a tight vice of punctures.
Dinny (the dog’s near dinner).
An experimental dish who charmed
with his monomania for grass.
Grass in and grass out,
pelleted, my weed and feed,
my murmuring mower of lawn.
Tonight we return him to grass
and precious green will sprout
from pink, once eager mouth.
No obituary for a guinea pig
that simple vegetarian of soul.
None, that it, save this.
Madness and punctuation
May 29, 2009
Am I mad? Sometimes I think that I have a particular disease that makes my eyes see things that others don’t: the misplaced apostrophes with their little bracketed eyelids smiling as if to say ‘Yes, we’re here, it’s true’ or more accurately, ‘Yes, were here, its’ true’. (Insert long scream of Munchian proportions. I actually saw an its’ the other day. Them’s true words.)
Am I the only person still to wince,
to feel as if she had been pinched
by the claws of these evil crabs
with their crooked apostrophes?
Scuttlers’ of near illiteracy
I drown in your misplaced seas’.
(Of course that won’t work unless I used a font with nice curved apostrophes like claws. Please just use your imaginations…)
As for me, I think vodka is the only answer. It’s a nice blank canvas of a drink, punctuated by a neat, oval full-stop of a single olive, with no apostrophes in sight.
Cheers’ (Scream…)
Had we but world enough and time
April 3, 2009
How long to wait before assuming a piece has been rejected? When do bad manners or sloppy practices or simple overwork slide over into the world of too long, allowing a conscientious writer or poet to submit her work elsewhere? How do we decide where to send our poetry?
As to the latter, well, I went through a stage of deciding merely by name. I thought that if a journal had an imaginative title, it was probably likely to publish interesting work. Sometimes I did this sight unseen, and have been very pleased. Shakespeare’s Monkey Revue, for example, attracted just because of that title, and the journal didn’t disappoint when I saw it.
I have been advised to take a more sensible approach to where I try and place work. I am grateful for that advice, from a very well-respected and, more importantly, accomplished poet. There is a definite hierarchy of literary journals in my homeland Australia (and elsewhere of course). But I am not a poet because I want to build a career, or because I want a sparkling CV. On the contrary; poetry should be an escape from that type of world. I love the idea of people who like poetry reading my work, rather than worrying about status.
A similar question is: how much time should one put into trying to receive funding for one’s artistic endeavours? Some poets seem to spend as much time writing applications as sonnets. They might as well get ‘a real job’ and write in their spare time, so relentlessly do they work at chasing the Government dollar. And the whingeing! It’s as if they think they’re Shostakovich and the funding body is run directly by Uncle Joe, when they lack both talent and any real cause for grievance. (For my mythical foreign reader, most funding in Oz is public, not philanthropic.)
One would be mad to ignore the possibility of assistance in pursuing one’s art, but equally insane to sacrifice art for the pursuit of money.
But here’s a funny little one about the way poets often work for free:
Will work for print
I can do sarcastic.
I can do elegaic,
but controlled, you know,
no red hearts or roses
strewing graves.
I am indeed bereft
of the word bereft.
I’ve dabbled in spiritual.
I do a very good dog:
snuffling, truffling, worshipping
at a scented shrine, one leg cocked.
I can even do decent rhymes
if pushed. And if there were time
I’m sure I could run to a novel
in verse. (But that might be cheating.)
So for all your poetic needs
call the number on the little
paper tags fringing the bottom
of this hula page. And ask for me.
P.S. Cottier
Joy (or at least a certain satisfaction) should be the poet’s main reward. If one is lucky enough to have enough, why complain? People write poetry in jails and where there is virtually no hope of publication. This, surely, is what any art should be about? Something that even the sloppiest journal editor can never steal? (Let’s end where we started, with a bracing question mark.)
bats, owls, hedging your bets
February 2, 2009
‘There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast. Some men, like bats or owls, have better eyes for the darkness than for the light.’ Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers
I see even better than you, Mr Dickens...
Who do we compare ourselves with when writing? During the process itself, all comparison should surely be banned. But upon reflection, it’s inevitable that some influences become clear, and that some assessment of ourselves against others takes place. This self-criticism is the only kind that really matters, after all.
It would of course, be hugely unproductive for a novelist to set out to be ‘as good as Dickens’ or a poet to set herself up as the next Milton. Unless one is psychotic, such reckless confidence would be bound to end in failure. But if one just occasionally finds a teaspoon of the richness of invention shown by Boz, or a tinge of his humour, that should be more than enough. (It’s hard to imagine any comparison with Milton bringing comfort. Apart from a mythical creature who is writing several volumes on the history of physics and the creation of the universe in rolling, unstoppable Big Bang rhyme. And if you are that person, the word ‘ambitious’ is probably apposite, dear little Satan of science.)
To look at one’s writing and say ‘it’s not as good as X’ (if X is not a joke) is to look at things through the night-coloured glasses Dickens evokes in the quotation given above. Far better to say does this represent a development of my own voice? Your own voice is inevitably formed by the previous words of others, but this should be a liberation, not a restriction.
At the same time, until you have read and continue to read as much as you possible can of writers good and bad, you will not have the framework for honestly assessing your own work. Creative writing courses that encourage people to ‘write what they know’ without seeking to increase their knowledge of literature are hideous aberrations. To write is to enter the maze of all that has been written before:
‘…mazes intricate,
Eccentric, intervolved, yet regular
…when most irregular they seem’
(Milton)
You’re never going to get out of that maze. Most will sit and look at single leaves growing on the hedges making up the maze, and try to describe them, rather than reaching the centre where Milton and Dickens (and others) are having an endless Pickwickian picnic. (Milton at a picnic is a terrifying idea, incidentally.) Given they do this carefully and respectfully, with humour, emotion, inventiveness, or with hedge-trimming satire, nothing could be more valuable. If we just blunder along, relying on nothing but luck, the result will probably be less than enlightening.
I am not Emily Dickinson, nor was meant to be
January 26, 2009
As I approach the launch of my first book, I can’t help regretting the loss of my exclusive relationship with the poems inside it. Once it was just me and these works, with no third parties looking over our shoulders. Of course, I am pleased to be published. But one part of me, a part that I have shamelessly nurtured over the years, prefers the life of fantasy and dreams to the real world of readers and print.
It’s a well-worn trope (I bought it at the second-hand trope store) to compare a book with a baby. I always suspect a hidden insult to reside in this sort of comparison, at least when applied to the writings of women. It’s as if the work is less an intellectual endeavour than an extension of biology; poet as womb. Of course that is to ignore the intellectual aspects of pregnancy, and the fact that in advanced societies at least, the continuation of pregnancy is a willed act, no longer a question of mere chance. But there is something about the way my book now has a life of its own that does recall childbirth, in all its terrifying complexity.
I admire Emily Dickinson for her steadfast refusal to seek publication once she understood that it would mean compromise. That and the fact that she was unique and seemingly almost timeless in the invention of her own poetic language. But we can’t all be solitary geniuses, can we? (Most of us aren’t any sort of genius at all, not even noisy, self-promoting ones.) And publication, that rendering of the personal into the public sphere, the changing of monologue into dialogue, is necessary, if our conversations are to stretch beyond our immediate community.
All very serious. But here is a poem written about my first book. You can see why I say I am not Emily. But, on the other hand, so what?
The poet addresses her first book
Oh my little treasure, with your spine just like a real spine
and your two short footnotes; smooth, appropriate and small.
I would swaddle you in gossamer, rock you in a golden crib.
All too soon you’ll be waddling out amongst dangerous critics
(if one so angelic and slim could ever so perambulate.)
Strange readers may not see your brilliance, and overlook you
for the thicker, slicker, tarmac roads of easy fattening prose.
Those lard-backs, perched like obese babushka dolls
above the Muse’s cuter, lighter, cuddle-worthy spawn.
Hush, dear bookie. Drink deep.
No-one will ever love you as I do.
P.S. Cottier
PS Cottier 