(Sorry, couldn’t resist the pun.) I came across an interesting review on Stuff the other day – it’s for an app called Write Or Die. The basic idea is simple: it nags you to write. You get to choose the target (number of words or elapsed time), and the punishment (ranging from gentle nudges to …
Winter workshop 2012 – Dead Poets
I’ve managed to wangle some money from Creative Communities (thank you CCC!) to help defray the costs, so as long as I can get eight of you to confirm, I will be offering a winter Reading for Writing course based on (drumroll please) … Yep, that’s right, Dead Poets. Or, to misquote Monty Python, poems by …
Wellington, on a good day night
Back home again after a quick trip to Wellington, where I was the guest poet at the April NZPS meeting. The whole thing takes place upstairs at the Thistle Inn, which is a gorgeous old building on Mulgrave St. All timber floors and branching corridors and rooms tucked around corners and down passageways. Apparently it’s …
Adrienne Rich dies
I'm a bit late with the news, but none the less – one of the heroes of contemporary women's poetry, the marvellous, incomparable, irreplaceable Adrienne Rich, has died. She was 82. For those writers of my generation or younger, it’s easy to forget just how damn hard poets like Rich worked to make a space …
Tuesday poem – “Fault”
A mistake. An error of judgement. A penalty brought against a quiet city. Stroll through the park, lunchtime almost over. A defect, a small disappointment. A summer day laden with clouds, grey light that softens the walls, the stone and brick, the glass. Less than expected. Someone to blame. A sparrow rests lightly on the …
A Dark Feathered Art 