Late pregnancy and early motherhood have eroded my poetic commitments these last three months. I am remedying that, slowly, by taking up my duties again at both ends of the archive.
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From the category archives:
poems
In which I fight the spirit-deadening vagaries and vicissitudes of restructuring with Poetry!
Poetry! is of course the humanities graduate’s equivalent to Science!
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A wet afternoon brings with it sufficient headspace to honour my poetic commitments to Bat, Bean, Beam where, as a laureate, I am regrettably asynchronous.
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For better or for worst, I am catching up on my literary commitments.
This is in part enabled by the exhaustion of work and pregnancy, which means I am not tonight attending this event.
This, I should admit, is just one more thing in my list of good problems to have.
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One could argue that getting behind in your poetic commitments falls into the category of good problems to have. As mentioned earlier, I find that my lyrical confidence is decreasing rather than increasing at the moment, but there is only one solution to this and it is the opposite of not-writing.
I am struck by how my theme is largely stories about my family and my ancestors. Against the big themes I keep offering the small, or rather, intertwining the small with the big. I’m not sure why, but don’t suppose interpretation is particularly my responsibility in this regard. However, it may worth mentioning, with regard to what appears below, that I find images and stories from Pompeii too upsetting to consider directly. It’s a particular quirk of mine that has persisted since childhood, when it was part of a more generalised terror of disasters. (Gosh but I was easy to wind up in those days. I must remember that when I come to write on Giovanni’s more recent post about starting school.)
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I am not much enamoured of my lyrical gifts at the moment, but am writing my way through the funk in hope of producing something that’s less, to my reading, jejune. I can’t think of a better solution (ignoring the cheap seats’ solution which is always, stop for a while).
It is my hope that Giovanni’s readers’ results may vary.
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I have been enjoying Cilla McQueen’s “publication in many parts”, Serial, here at the New Zealand Poet Laureate website. I decided to try my hand at a homage to that style in response to Giovanni’s two posts on Haiti and Avatar.
I should note, too, that for someone who makes at least part of her living teaching Film Studies, my relationship to the cinema is surprisingly ambivalent. The scale of the spectacle in a movie theatre presents a physical barrier for me. Since my mid-teens I have been affected by irregular bouts of nausea and vertigo watching films of all kinds on the big screen, which, now compounded by pregnancy, makes cinema-viewing at present more or less impossible. So Avatar remains a no-go zone for me, which is why, in part, I’ve tried to come at Giovanni’s discussion from a rather more obtuse angle.
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In response to this post at Bat Bean Beam.
The fibreglass butterflies ascend
the front of the unit. There is aflower-shaped windmill with a
happy face, planted in the groundbelow. It rattles when it spins.
A small ceramic gardener displaysa length of butt-crack; china
flowers and toadstools inter-mingle with the pansies and
lobelia. Once I saw a golliwog.Hand-painted pins and badges stick
to the side of the letterbox likefungus, though the back flat’s
portion is completely bare.Tourists draw up in rental cars
sometimes, mostly visitors fromAsia. They take pleased photos,
stare at the proliferation. Youcan imagine the owners’ hands by
night, extending through the frontwindow, affixing objects man- and
home-made with all the happy slapand pop of a kitchen fridge-magnet,
a plastic suction-cup.
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In response to this post at Bat Bean Beam.
Draw out now
and bear unto
the governor of the feast –What I’ve got
you got to get
and put it in you –you! Take some time
to love me.
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For the first time since I began contributing to Giovanni’s site, I have struggled to make my contributions. To the owner himself, I gave this account:
I am learning grim things about from where my writerly inspiration comes. Four or five weeks of quiet times and really busy work was like being in the writer’s desert. Then today one of my dogs had an emergency trip to the vet and suddenly I’m 2010’s Philip Sydney. Fear and loathing, it seems, fear and loathing.
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