Just found out that Creative New Zealand have rejected my funding application for money to enable me to finish the new collection. Bah. And probably humbug too. I knew it was a bit of a long shot, but on the other hand I thought I ticked pretty well all of the relevant boxes. The hope …
Inspiration, breath and patience
Writing poems is like waiting for lightning to strike. But it's hard to order your life around that. – Stephen Dobyns from As the Poet Said … I was thinking about the business of inspiration. What a strange variation of it we seem to have as poets, and all the ways we complicate it. When I …
Things Teaching Has Taught Me
1. Build it, and they will come. Timetable it, and they might. Or not. Depends, really. 2. No matter how organised you think you are, you aren't. 3. Bulldog clips. 4. The class that you're sure will be really popular will take the full amount of time available to clear the minimum numbers threshold. 5. …
The Barbarians may have been Slightly Delayed
I know a lot of the posts I’ve done have been doom and gloom stories about the dire state of publishing; of poetry in particular, and literature in general. And I stand by my comments: things are very definitely not peachy. New Zealand writers make bugger-all, and poets negative bugger-all. And it’s the same all …
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Instructions, Windows, and Julia Copus
Having spent the last two weeks writing funding proposals (and with next week being number three), my own writing has taken a bit of a back seat. Times like this I find myself more and more relying on exercises to give my muse the jolt needed to get the lazy sod out of bed and …
A Dark Feathered Art 