poems

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 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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