Back from the launch of Before the Sirocco in Wellington. It was a good night – heaps of people turned up, and included a large junior contingent from Christchurch. (Well done everyone!) Met lots of people who's names and poems I've been familiar with for the last few years, and generally had a ball. …
Before the Sirocco – launch ahoy!
Well it's finally done: the 2008 NZPS anthology Before the Sirocco is now officially out of my hands. I've even submitted my expenses claim. It's been an interesting task. Certainly much easier this time around – you always forget just how much donkey-work there is. Things like checking names and addresses, entering data onto lists. Printing. Posting. …
Epigrams and limericks and rhyming games – oh my!
My second session with the new Creative Writing course group. (Hi guys!) Today we were looking at the way that rhyme works in modern poetry, so we did the usual theoretical stuff (defining "perfect", "slant", "masculine", "feminine", "light", "eye/sight" and "wrenched" rhymes), using Carol Ann Duffy's Betrothal, Don Paterson's Imperial and Archibald McLeish's Ars Poetica as examples. …
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Collaborative poems
Yesterday was the final class in my first series of tutoring for CPIT. Good fun! Although got through the material a lot faster than I expected. (Either I'm a brilliant teacher, or they were desperate to get me to shut up and go home...) One of the things that we did – a couple of …
Titles for the anthology
I've pretty much finished my selections for the anthology now. There are a few on the cusp, which will depend on things like how many lines I need to fill at the end of poems that require a second page. So now it's time to think about picking a title. Traditionally, the title comes from …
A Dark Feathered Art 