tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54591642011-11-19T17:00:47.933+11:00Alison Croggon's weblogA weblog of random thinkings about poetry and anything else.Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.comBlogger581100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-60221306706861507772011-07-08T11:53:00.002+10:002011-07-08T11:55:48.272+10:00In a restaurantOf course, the real disaster is always one’s own death. The immortal slave was seen dining with a merchant prince, archduke of the electronic dreamwaves, executor of sharemarkets, poker machines and two flies up a wall, potentate of the demesne of tittle-tattle, authority of virtual hope and manufactured despair, a man as sensual and fragrant as money, with a sleekness that purses the lips of Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-43893700397556907902006-10-27T19:24:00.000+10:002006-10-28T08:56:41.861+10:00*We were woken too early, before the moths had died in the streets,before the buds had hardened in the frost, when stars are hurtfuland famished. They took us through gardens and past the hallswhere once we had lingered, past the houses and doused markets.Our footsteps echoed back like iron. Of course we were frightened,that was a given, of course we remembered photographs we had studiedthat thenAlison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1098141186334718152004-10-19T09:00:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:14:06.300+10:00Well, then...
Fellow poet Andrew Burke told me off about this blog a couple of weeks ago. "Wassa matter boy, you asleep at the wheel?" he said, with his accustomed grace and wit. Well, I haven't written in this blog for around six months, so I guess it's not so much a problem of being asleep as of having too many wheels. Though as I type this, I am remembering what fun it is to write in this Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1086340560583407552004-06-04T19:11:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:14:06.228+10:00More blogging
I have been toying for a few weeks with the idea of starting a theatre blog. The idea was that I would start an independent reviewing blog after I had finished the novel. Well, the problem with ideas is that they nag you until you do something, and rather unexpectedly, I found myself today launching my new career as a theatre blogger (highly paid, as usual).
I therefore didn't doAlison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1085546245467718332004-05-26T14:19:00.001+10:002006-10-19T17:14:06.151+10:00When doves die
This blog - Rafah Today - is amazing. Although it is the writings of Mohammed, a Palestinian student, clearly hurriedly typed and sent from a laptop, there is something about its clear-eyed humanity which reminds me of some of the reportage of Ryszard Kapuschinski (whose book Imperium is one of my favourites, because he knows that facts are only part of reality and are often a Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1085475425146090212004-05-25T18:14:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:14:05.996+10:00Quagmire? Squagmire...
Quagmire seems too clean a word for the mess that the Bush administration has made of their attempted colonisation of Iraq. Corruption, incompetence, violence conducted with impunity, gross sexual abuse - and now the almost unbelievable possibility that the whole thing was set up by Iran to get rid of an inconvenient neighbour. Meanwhile the US administration seems to beAlison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1085275492192836872004-05-23T11:24:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:14:05.894+10:00Old stuff
Going through my files, seduced by the idle moments and endless procrastinations of writing, I found this speech I gave when asked to read an event for East Timor, shortly after that country voted for its independence from Indonesia in 1999, with horrific results. So I thought I would post it here, as the dilemmas it outlines are as current to me, five years later, as they were then.
Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1084177599884688672004-05-10T18:26:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:14:00.955+10:00Why novelists are the most boring people on earth
I have never seen a successful dramatisation of a writer's life. That's because what writers do is really, really boring. Especially if they are writing novels. All you do is sit down and write some words. The next day you try to write some more. Some days it is like pulling teeth. Other days you can put your feet up after an hour because Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1084080779036557552004-05-09T15:01:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:14:00.898+10:00A question of terminology
There are, we have been reliably informed by Donald Rumsfeld, more and worse images to come of torture in Iraq prisons. According to the Independent, "They are said to include Iraqi guards raping young boys, and American soldiers having sex with a female detainee, 'acting inappropriately' with a corpse and beating an Iraqi detainee close to death."
Well, this is grim Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1083983471626099732004-05-08T12:26:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:14:00.841+10:00PS
Back to delinquent blogging, I'm afraid, as the NOVEL takes precedence, getting there getting there - The Riddle now completed and I guess the next thing I see is proofs, The Gift now officially out in the UK, and The Crow well and truly started. Just finshed my first week on it.
This is the book where all the big battles happen. I guess the surrounding material is appropriate.
My hero isAlison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1083982082191203692004-05-08T11:37:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:14:00.780+10:00War war war words words words
I don't much like living in these times, though to be honest, I can't think of many times that would have been better. The Napoleonic Wars? Then they hadn't invented headache tablets, and people were just as savage. The 19th century? Then the evil empire was British, busy bringing civilisation to the savages and drug dealing opium in China. Have there been any Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1083226485645718682004-04-29T18:14:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:14:00.719+10:00Last exit
So, Hubert Selby Jnr, one of the great writers of 20C America, has shuffled off his mortal coil. As I said on Poetryetc today, "It wasn't his writing that was obscene, it was the realities his writing revealed: and he was conscious of the difference. I don't think anyone has written the link between homophobia and misogyny more clearly than in the central story about the union Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1083020387543413892004-04-27T08:58:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:14:00.662+10:00Sterne thought
I'm quite certain that if Laurence Sterne lived now, he would be a blogger.
Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1082953922814645902004-04-26T13:53:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:14:00.597+10:00American dreaming
Since reading with any concentration is beyond me at the moment, last night I sat up until 2am watching Volker Schlondorff's classic film of Death of a Salesman. Actually, feeling idle, I put on the documentary that comes with the dvd, Private Conversations, which is an illustration of everything that's irritating about Dustin Hoffman (is there a more mannered or Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1082877988503280662004-04-25T17:21:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:14:00.536+10:00To Put To Shame My Limping Prose
"There are so many things to say. If there was no identity no one could be governed, but everybody is governed by everybody and that is why they make no master-pieces, and also why governing has nothing to do with master-pieces. And that is why governing is occupying but not interesting, governments are occupying but not interesting because master-pieces are Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1082799052631131082004-04-24T19:30:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:14:00.480+10:00Love et cetera
I'm not alone in the writing of love poems as a visceral response to a violent world. Stephen Vincent writes me: Yes, I think big life (love) urges are impulsively taking over my work in the face of all this terrible reaper business. "Collective punishment" - we are getting it in spades from these power mad terror folks and I know I am reacting on some kind of primal level." SoAlison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1082675661438878482004-04-23T09:07:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:14:00.424+10:00Rain
It's been raining for hours, a gentle rain, no wind, and the air still warm. I woke up and the rain was steady on the roof, and it is just easing off, now only the leaves outside my window flicking up from single drops. I had almost forgotten what the rain was like, it seems like a long time.
Still absolutely blank. The rain is very restful on the blankness. The ground is breathing outAlison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1082533198397856732004-04-21T17:39:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:14:00.366+10:00Another poem
No more than a day’s trivia, a phone
silent, a grey sky, a distant
sough of wind, and further still
the sounds of mourning, every leaf
attentive and calm, the diffuse light
mocking your restlessness:
you may sit there now, biting down
the answerless questions, but you know
that is merely evasion, and your flesh
a sourceless echo, comfortless
against the stellar cold.
Your words Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1082425551051405762004-04-20T11:43:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:14:00.307+10:00A poem
tomorrow the birds with yellow tongues
will fly in stony ground
tomorrow the gestures of children
will write themselves across different airs
the play will begin again with strange limbs
the clouds will distribute new myths
to every class of creature
fossils with fangs and claws are hiding
in the mineral depths of every eye -
will they glance through the purities?
will they lie down Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1082329158835740142004-04-19T08:53:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:14:00.246+10:00Divine discontent
Having just outed myself as a Modernist Romantic...
A friend tells me that he believes there is nothing more important to do right now than to write love poems, but he finds instead he is writing poems which are social and cultural critiques. As for me, I have this constant desire to write something terribly incisive and critical about the contemporary moment, and all I end Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1082247503791064182004-04-18T09:29:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:14:00.181+10:00Stalker
I was having a very blank day yesterday, so I decided to watch Tarkovsky's film Stalker. I think the last time I saw it was around five or six years ago, when I made Emma Lew watch it with me. I think Emma was bored beyond description. However, I find myself totally compelled by this film; I guess one aspect is its extraordinary visual beauty. The opening scenes, in black of white, Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1082159611572118742004-04-17T09:19:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:14:00.122+10:00Growing up
The zeitgeist has got a little darker in the past month. Times like these I read as much as I can about current affairs, but find myself becoming more and more mute. So many words spilt in so much argument, and still power talks loudest of all. So, I read, and ponder the eternal nature of human stupidity, and how far we've come since Montaigne observed that "Man is certainly stark Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1082110905643999572004-04-16T20:10:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:14:00.052+10:00Delinquent blogging
Back again...after how long? It's been a time of shadows and confusions, and I've been thinking nothing very clearly. (This seems to suggest that there are times without shadows and confusions, when I think very clearly indeed - which on reflection strikes me as manifestly inaccurate - I guess it's all relative -) Well, that is how it goes sometimes. In terms of activity, Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1077002675547644562004-02-17T18:22:00.000+11:002006-10-19T17:13:59.985+10:00Narrative
Thinking about narrative, which has been preoccupying me more and more. Not only because I spent a large part of last year writing it, and will spend a deal of time this year also, but also because it seems to me that narrative underpins much more of what I do than I realised and much of what I find interesting.
On the one hand, I have been writing fantasy, a mode of narrative which Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1067142385091152712003-10-26T15:20:00.000+11:002006-10-19T17:13:59.916+10:00Au revoir
For anyone who's been checking on this blog, I realise the irony of this heading. Folks, I have just been too distracted, and now I am coping with pre-flight nerves as I'm heading off to Paris tomorrow, on my way to the UK for a reading tour, with a slight detour in Iceland (check out my diary or Arc's website for details.
I am no good at reflective typing in internet cafes, so Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1066258002275244022003-10-16T08:43:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:59.860+10:00The Australian Way
Masochistically, this morning I was reading the great Australian columnist Greg Sheridan who, in an article of unusual mawkishness even for him, reveals this deep truth:
To watch the Bali memorials and commemorations this past week was to be struck by their quintessentially Australian quality. There was no great poetry but there was great sentiment.
and concludes:
The Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1065867671145311202003-10-11T19:53:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:59.800+10:00Readings more random
The only book I have been reading with any kind of regularity recently is James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (written by himself, with a detail of curious traditionary facts, and other evidence, by the editor). I have been reading it at random, picking it up and beginning where the page falls open. The introduction, by John Wain, is Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1065741531409020532003-10-10T09:04:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:59.741+10:00Trouserless
Thinking today, as I often do when I count the coins in my wallet, of Dosteovsky writing to someone asking for money because otherwise he would end up with no trousers. I have never believed in the romance of the garret, no one who has been seriously broke does. Work is done in spite of such things, not because of them. Oh, I have been more broke: I console myself at such times Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1065158575445161562003-10-03T15:11:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:59.679+10:00Another dream poem
birds are gathering silently
along the rooflines
leaping and returning
in restless circles
even such squabbles as entertain them
evaporate in the feverish sky
it is as if a doom
clouds over them
inevitable as the soft night
who is a small boy running up the street
when he reaches the end
the game is over
then lovers leave their blood
to cool on the stems of briars
the lameAlison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1065090259966355352003-10-02T19:25:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:59.622+10:00Today, today, today
Sometimes I understand that I don't have enough solitude. I have never been able to function very well without at least some. Aloneness has never been a problem for me, although loneliness is; but that is another matter altogether. (It puzzles me that French doesn't have separate words for aloneness and loneliness, it seems such a necessary distinction.) So, for the firstAlison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1063757361298949902003-09-17T09:37:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:59.565+10:00A note from Alice Springs
From the diary, September 7
Strange how almost entirely out of words I've been lately. Words are supposed to be my business. I guess visiting here reinforces this, I appear in the guise of The Professional Writer, which I suppose I am, and which seems also, from my point of view, an especially meaningless epithet.
I am sitting here, at the Mercure Diplomat Hotel (Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1063749954989929582003-09-17T07:53:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:59.497+10:00Return from the Black Lagoon
My blog has been nagging me: when I started it, I wondered if I would just let it peter out, through lack of time or energy, and for the past few weeks that looked likely. Thanks to those who have asked me when I was going to start it again - one is never sure whether these things are read. So here I am again. Since finishing The Riddle, I have just been a sad blobAlison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1059262885916121282003-07-27T09:41:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:59.436+10:00Notes
I've been steadily reading through Bernard Malamud's novels and short stories over the past month or so. I don't understand why he's virtually forgotten: he must be one of the major American writers of the past fifty years. He seems to be out of print: certainly you can't buy his books here. Before I read him, I vaguely thought he was a "popular" novelist of no particular worth, along the Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1058826528751575662003-07-22T08:28:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:59.357+10:00d'Arcier throws sponge
Found BFD's statement (click "A conclusion of the Festival 2003") on the Avignon Festival site. He says in part:
We have demonstrated our solidarity in the early days, since there had been negotiations even before the draft agreement was edited, and the festival had already written an open letter (in mid-June), which had been signed by more than 2500 people. Then, when Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1058759244816397642003-07-21T13:47:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:59.297+10:00Talking of the French...
Whom I mentioned in passing... I should also mention the ructions going on at the moment about their funding system. In place is a particularly enlightened unemployment system which takes into account the itinerant nature of artist's work, and it is this which is under threat under Chirac's government. I am told that the new measures would ensure that most of the fundingAlison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1058752046572943132003-07-21T11:47:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:59.238+10:00For the record
I lost my cool yesterday and wrote to Andrew Bolt, the Herald Sun columnist at large who has been pursuing a disgraceful campaign against the arts (see the blog entry Artist, Wanker, Traitor, written on June 15). My email, quoting the parts of one of Bolt's columns which I found particularly incendiary, is below:
Bolt said: What is the point of art like this? Of art without an Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1058503984378745262003-07-18T14:53:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:59.180+10:00Nothing much
Which is where my head is. This morning I went into Penguin Books to meet Suzanne Wilson, my editor there. She had just finished reading The Riddle, and her responses were good: it's a million miles from the first draft of The Gift (it went through five drafts and I had to rewrite the final quarter completely) and she thinks editing will be relatively straightforward. Her only Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1058311172691940212003-07-16T09:19:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:59.122+10:00Narrative
Thinking about narrative, which has been preoccupying me more and more. Not only because I have spent a large part of this year writing it, but also because it seems to me that narrative underpins much more of what I do than I realised.
On the one hand, I have been writing fantasy, a mode of narrative which is ancient - mythmaking for modern times. Its contemporary form is inflected Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1058152219450402392003-07-14T13:10:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:59.064+10:00Cross dressing
The issue of dress as a means of controlling women has got me thoughtful. The mediaeval text Mirouer aux Dames (Mirror for Ladies) not untypically criticises women for their abberant dress, and especially for dressing up in men's clothes, and therefore blurring the absolute value of male authority. The desire to control female dress is linked to a fear of the language of women, Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1058057143364172922003-07-13T10:45:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:59.004+10:00This and that
Just back from a sojourn in Ballarat - my home town, if I can be said to have one - certainly where I spend most of my childhood, from seven to fifteen. It was very pleasant to be out in the country, although I have become so urban that I can't imagine ever living there again. Mostly, besides eating, I looked at the bird life: wedgetailed eagles being harrassed by magpies, and blueAlison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1057553975036678512003-07-07T14:59:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:58.928+10:00Words, words, words...
The word is "stuffed". If this blog has been neglected, to which I plead guilty, it's not because I've been swanning around filing my non-existent fingernails. It's because I've been giving myself RSI. First I finished THE NOVEL but scarcely had I swallowed a peach schnapps in celebration than I had to move on and write two papers, in consequence of my suddenly being Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1056273747504717982003-06-22T19:22:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:58.856+10:00Potter
Too depleted of words - even my logorrhea can't cope. The Riddle will be finished in a week, barring acts of god or influenza, and I feel myself taking a deep breath before I write the final chapters. But I no longer feel as if I am flagging in an endurance race, with the hardest part still to run. In the past few days I have solved the book; its metaphors make sense now, and its Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1055981984438771252003-06-19T10:19:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:58.624+10:00Thursday already...
How did June go by so fast? June 1 seems like yesterday. Ten days to the end of the month and my theoretical freedom, but now I really feel that I am hacking away at the coalface of the imagination. I suppose it's good for the book that I feel so drained, since my character is too, but I think method writing is going too far (it makes me think of Laurence Olivier and his Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1055832893300341412003-06-17T16:54:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:58.569+10:00Found poem
Step 1. Insert the Locking nuts (3)&(8) into the pre-drilled holes located in board (B)(C) and board (O)(N)(S), then screw the Connector (4)(9) into boards (A) and (M)(N)(O), when join board (A) to board (B)(C) lock the Locking nuts into position, please note that it's important to make sure the Locking nuts is securely locked into position and the two panels are securely attached.
Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1055751214333772102003-06-16T18:13:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:58.512+10:00Ho hum
So much for big resolutions about writing reams of prose - not a word today. Various domestic distractions like desk building and rearranging the boys' bedroom and so on and so forth got in the way. And my head is too full of other stuff. Well, there's always tomorrow... or maybe this evening. Who knows? Maybe I'm leaping ahead of myself, I just want this book finished so much that I Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1055650968311882022003-06-15T14:22:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:58.447+10:00Artist, wanker, traitor
Liz Jones, artistic director of La Mama Theatre, sent me two newspaper articles in the post a couple of days ago. One is an article in the Weekend Australian, from May 24, about Stephen Sewell's new play at Playbox, a derivation it seems of Brecht's Fear and Misery in the Third Reich, in which Liz is quoted as saying, of the general political attitudes of the hundreds of Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1055579107889957682003-06-14T18:25:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:58.385+10:00More about feeling
Margie Cronin (some of whose poems can be seen at the current Shearsman) sent on this quote from Peter Boyle. It's from his translations of Montejo's Fragmentario, and is almost another phrasing of what I was wondering below:
"The crime against life," Archibald MacLeish said, "the worst of all crimes, is not to feel." Not to feel the world, not to feel life in its numerous Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1055555161917683822003-06-14T11:46:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:58.329+10:00Me me me memememememe
One of the advantages of writing a blog is that I can talk about me with perfect justification (who's to say I can't? yah yah! And I can be unfair if I want to!) Well, there are those who maintain that I talk of nothing else, and perhaps they are right, though I think it's unfair (well, I would, wouldn't I?): you could as easily say Aime Cesaire talked only of himself, or Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1055495865952664052003-06-13T19:17:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:58.271+10:00The illusion of progress
I spent the day with the Winterking in the Ice Palace, slow going but going right, I think. I keep hoping that the story will pick me up by the scruff of the neck, as it sometimes does, and then it will just get written, or write itself; but at the moment the story is giving itself to me with a lamentable miserliness. Which shows that the plotting is the least of it: I Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1055380336869459962003-06-12T11:12:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:58.212+10:00Erotics 2
"I have grown weary of the poets, the old and the new: they are all seem to me superficial and shallow seas.
They have not thought deeply enough: therefore their feeling - has not plumbed the depths...
The poet's spirit wants spectators, even if they are only buffaloes!
But I have grown weary of this spirit: and I see the day when it will grow weary of itself.
Already I have seen the Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1055290737424651432003-06-11T10:18:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:58.156+10:00Moral Hazard
A quick aside - yesterday I finally read Kate Jennings' novel Moral Hazard, which has been on my "to do" list for longer than I care to remember. Interesting that the review in Salon also feels it has to excavate this novel from a niche of "smallness", as I felt necessary, rightly or wrongly, with Mairead Byrne's work: there is clearly a weight of discourse which presses against Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1055288440206311362003-06-11T09:40:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:58.100+10:00Some letters
All hail to osteopaths, those competent hands gently ribboning the spine so everything goes crrrrick and back into place. May they be blessed forever, amen. Yes, my neck is back where it should be, and that means no more procrastinating. I am now 12,000 words behind my quota, so I better get on with it.
Today I'll post a couple of interesting responses from Anny Ballardini and Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1055205019578494212003-06-10T10:30:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:58.041+10:00Ow
I woke this morning with a head which felt as if someone was sticking knives into it. So much for grand ambition: humbled by the body once again. Today I was going to sketch what I meant by "feeling", starting with Nietzsche's dig at poets in Thus Spake Zarathustra and heading towards Antonio Damasio, but such grand ambitions are utterly beyond me today. Not to mention writing The Novel: Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1055123870657315602003-06-09T11:57:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:57.984+10:00An Erotics 1
I have been embroiled in a fierce argument stemming from my speculative suggestion that an erotics of poetry might be a fruitful way to read poems. If it can be dignified with the term "argument", since the abuse I've attracted has been, to my mind, the reverse of argument: incurious, ungenerous (my insistence on speculation, for example, being read as my not really having thought Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1055062694181343502003-06-08T18:58:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:57.928+10:00Nelson & the Huruburu Bird
I spent a good part of my day off from The World of Prose browsing Mairead Byrne's collection Nelson & the Huruburu Bird (Wild Honey Press). It is like a slap in the face from a cold river: a thoroughly enjoyable plunge into a mind of fluid muscle, that leaves you tingling and alive. Byrne writes an erotic poetry that pleasures in everything: riding on a bus, the Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1055039768121929842003-06-08T12:36:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:57.872+10:00Films &c
Last night was the wrap party for Missing Tom, the film Daniel Keene (my husband) wrote for Alkinos Tsilimidos. The party was a blast: it was held at a pub in Port Melbourne (with a very loud Greek band) and it was great to be among a bunch of people, talking to friends I haven't seen for ages, and not sitting on front of the computer wondering what was going to happen next to Maerad..Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1054958388030512752003-06-07T13:59:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:57.817+10:00The Riddle
At the moment I am supposed to be writing the next instalment of my fantasy series. It's now at Part 4, or page 320, whichever seems more impressively long. The Gift, which came out last year in Australia and will be published in the UK next May, was the first, and No 2, The Riddle, has split like an amoeba into two parts, after it became very clear that the book I was initially Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5459164.post-1054952385983242322003-06-07T12:19:00.000+10:002006-10-19T17:13:57.762+10:00An Introduction and Excuse
This is all Trevor Joyce's fault. Some months ago he suggested I leap on the blogging bandwagon, and formalise slightly the thinking about poetry and its many associated issues (everything) which appears in bits and pieces on mailing lists. I demurred, for a number of reasons: I am writing two novels this year, and so the thought of anything more formalised than a Alison Croggonnoreply@blogger.com0