Not Given Lightly

I’m flattered—really flattered—when bloggers and students and friends refer to me as literary or even literate.  I mean it.  It’s struck me in the last few days, as it seems to do seasonally, how I don’t belong to a community of poets, novelists or even critics, at least as these things might be conventionally recognised.  I have no stellar contacts nor networks to my name; I am not of the scene, as I perceive it.

For the most part, I am content with this, given that I suspect my nature to be fringe dwelling, the same retreat to the margins that sees my ancestors barely visible in the historical record (Elizabeth and Henry, my  ancestors who came to Australia at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, vanish somewhere after attending their elder son’s wedding in Dunedin; not even a death certificate can be found).  At the same time, however, I happen upon the blogs of poets, the beauty and detail that I remember from my thesis-writing days, and wonder that I haven’t at least tried to insinuate myself into such a community, with no explanation other than an erratic creative work ethic and what might be called interdisciplinary diffidence.

In truth, I find contentment enough in keeping these pages and chipping away at my manuscript, and I think of my fellow-travellers in these enterprises as sharing in one kind of poesis, the act of making.  From the trace of my ancestors and the archives of Robin Hyde—not to mention the criticism of Michele Leggott—I learned to cherish fragments, which are reflected even in the gaps in my literary education (I can quote Auden but not Heaney and know more of Hyde than Frame, and so on).  Friends and acquaintances lament my love of what might be called bad art, but what I usually deem cultural production, the great equaliser.

So I thank you for your links and your words, your fellow-travelling and your wry observations, fellow makers all, our foibles and failings and recording of the common moment contributing to this textual uprising of chattering thoughts, this zeitgeist, this most uncollective of unconsciousnesses.  Here’s to our abundance, our partialness, our incompletions, all held in these ephemeral cohesions of data that, when push comes to shove, may yet disappear as photos in a house fire.

(Chapter Two of my PhD, back in the day, turned on a reading of “Spoil”, a poem about the short-term nature of so much human record.  You can read the poem here.)

Tagged as: reading, thinking, writing