So, I’ve spent most of today thinking about the epigraphs in Daniel Deronda. (I know, I know—it’s what you think about every day too.) I think my copy of the book is going to be in a pretty dire state by the time this paper is written. Supposedly within two weeks—how am I going to get all this thinking done in two weeks?

I sat down with them this morning (at Baked and Wired, as usual). I typed them all out over the last week or two, and with my printouts I started to scribble all over them.

Somehow, it seems like there are so many in other languages—but it’s only 12 out of the 73. Five in French, five in German, two in Italian. The German and Italian ones are the most interesting for me. Out of the 61 leftovers that are in English, 30 were written by George Eliot herself (next most-used author is, appropriately, Shakespeare at five, followed by Wordsworth at four) and five are actually translated from other languages—including one each from French and Italian. It’s an odd body of material. An odd lot of numbers I’ve got—it reminds me of the end of last semester, when I was suddenly driven to counting pages and illustrations in Bleak House, figuring out that Esther Summerson actually spends twice as much time outside of Bleak House as she does in it. Here I’ve made lists not just of the epigraphs, but also which characters are in each chapter, so I can try to sort out if there are patterns in her use of epigraphs between the English plot and the Jewish plot. It all makes for an odd game of literary detective-itis. Was that more than you ever wanted to know about the epigraphs of Daniel Deronda?

It’s times like these that I wonder what intensive study of literature has driven me to? But I think I’m the only page-counter/epigraph-mapper in the department… Nonetheless, I do really enjoy it. And figuring out the patterns is strangely satisfying. I’m sure, however, it’s changed the way I read. I remember the first time I read Middlemarch I skipped about half the epigraphs. Ah, the foolhardiness of youth…

Looking for images of George Eliot, I’m not sure whether I’m pleased or alarmed to find Eliot-quoting magnets for sale.

A few days ago I was exhausted and so glad that classes would be over. Monday night, though, I had my last class with the Liberal Studies group I’ve been a TA for, and I’m really sad that I won’t be working with them again. Though I’m hoping I’ll see them in the writing center, or in other classes if I’m TAing again next year.

I don’t think I’m going to be good for much over the next two weeks. Well, except coffee drinking. The Baked and Wired crew will be sure to get sick of me!

I finished Daniel Deronda last night, sobbing. George Eliot is amazing.

I have to write an erudite paper on it today. Now I have to find that erudite strain in myself...

It’s been quite a few days—I’m exhausted, and in recuperation.

I haven’t been sleeping consistently—odd hours, not enough and then making up for it later. It’s got me a little bit out of whack. On Thursday, following my final Contemporary Poetry class, I was pretty shattered. But, I had to push on and go to the Library of Congress for the reading.

Unfortunately, I was cranky. Things that I would normally have found charming grated on me a bit—this was both being tired and hungry (my food intake on Thursday was appalling. Damn finals season) and also sitting near the infamous Library of Congress Poetry Readings Laugher. A loud laugh at the slightest thing that could be construed to have an iota of humour in it. It wasn’t pretty.

Charles Simic gave an intro that indicated he, Mark Strand and Charles Wright had all known each other for over forty years. Ah! The camaraderie of old men! See, I’m recovering my normally sunny disposition, because once again I find this lovely, adorable. At the time, it made me cranky. But it seems the reading blooms after the fact, and my mind is revising the whole experience. It’s nice that readings, like books, are allowed these afterlives…

At the time, though, crankiness. While that is slowly being revised, it seems to have left at least one lasting mark. Mark Strand read this poem, and the information he gave beforehand blew me away. He quoted Apollinaire and his question—“Who will be the first person to forget a continent?” His poem was about the forgetters. It kind of followed the trajectory of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” This does strike me as a brave move—and I don’t think any poem can really bear the comparison. I completely understand the impulse to take the Apollinaire quote and imagine it into being—and yet, the poem can’t live up to the suggestion of the quote. In everything it leaves unsaid, the Apollinaire allows for some kind of hugeness that unfortunately the Strand didn’t quite have—Strand’s poem in comparison was “a mere bagatelle.” Cranky? I love Mark Strand. I will continue to love Mark Strand. I apologise for being cranky.

Charles Wright was great. I loved his southern accent. I didn’t take in a lot at the time—so tired, so hungry—but, after the fact, it seems it did sink in, and is now starting to resurface. Thank god! I may have been cranky, but it didn’t mar the transmission.

Yesterday, recuperation in earnest. Unfortunately, my body just wouldn’t get up after only 6 hours of sleep, so I missed the dawn service. Only the second in several years. I feel bad about it—I think it would have been wonderful to attend it in DC. I suppose there’s always next year… But I did tell all the lovely folks at Baked and Wired that it was Anzac Day, and I like to think that Meg made my caffe latte with extra love. I read Daniel Deronda for a while, and then, on a whim went to see a film.

Two films, actually. I snuck into the second. I also got invited to a free preview screening of a new Spike Lee film on Tuesday night. Score!

I saw In Bruges first. In a way, it seemed like two—or maybe even three—films to me—first this drifting film that was beautifully shot, and explored the morality of two very different hitmen. Contrary to Anthony Lane of the New Yorker (! I like to take on the New Yorker when I can…) I found both Colin Farrell—at least in the first hour or so—really did match Brendan Gleeson, and that lingering over their faces, the minutiae of their reactions was beautiful - almost mesmerising. Then turned into a slightly surreal midget comedy, and tightly choreographed cat-and-mouse carnage. That first section, where the two characters are wandering around Bruges, having their very different reactions to the city, as the viewer is trying to come to terms with the morality of the two, sold me. The rest—well, really quite engaging to watch once, but I feel no need to watch it again. Still, some of it will linger.

Then—Smart People. I was disappointed—well, except for when Ellen Page was on screen. (I find it very difficult to be disappointed by Page.) The developments were okay, but there wasn’t enough justification for any of it. The relationship between the two main characters—I don’t understand the why of it. Besides the weird thrall of a former professor. Thomas Hayden Church was worth watching, besides Page. But—huh? Even the professor’s son, a very underdeveloped character—out of the blue he sells a poem to the New Yorker? Um. Okay. It was extreme-lite The Squid and the Whale. I loved The Squid and the Whale. This, not so much. Plus, they didn't seem so smart.

The rest of this weekend really revolves around Daniel Deronda. I just finished the penultimate book of the novel. I am taking some time before jumping into the rest of it—it’s hit me with such an extreme force. I both dread writing my final paper, and can’t wait to jump into it. How to touch this monument?

At the end of tomorrow, my life will seem much simpler, even though I’ll still have a major paper left to write on Daniel Deronda. Tonight I hand in one final paper, tomorrow another. Plus I get to go to a poetry reading tomorrow night at the Library of Congress. (Mark Strand and Charles Wright. When I went to the Adelaide Writers’ Festival in 2002, Mark Strand had had to cancel: now I get to see him.) There’s also a reading this weekend at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian. So, while I’ll still be working on the final touches of the semester, I’m really pleased that I’ll be able to transition into thinking more exclusively about poetry. I just spent the morning writing about Pound’s first canto—of, duh!, The Cantos, and it was an oddly pleasurable experience. Perhaps because it gave me a chance to revisit all his absolute statements in The ABC of Reading, which—as well as finding admonishing and inspiring as well—I always find quite amusing. Homer is not to be translated. Go out and learn Ancient Greek, philistine, or you will never truly understand his greatness!

I’m hoping at the end of classes my late nights will come to an end, and I will get onto something like normal hours. It’s strange to me to suddenly be a night owl.

ANZAC day in two days time. I wonder if I should convince someone to have a dawn observance of the fact with me? At least the weather here is lovely. Dawn might not seem quite so cruel if the weather is still nice… I haven’t heard anything from the Centre of Australian and New Zealand Studies here (it’s our centre, so I’m spelling it our way, in spite of Georgetown… this spelling malarky gets complicated sometimes). Normally they have a ANZAC lecture that is the centrepiece of their yearly events—last year, for instance, Thomas Keneally gave it. There is meant to be a talk by a New Zealander this year—but no word. I checked their website, and nothing there either. Still, the Australian and New Zealand Embassies have organised a Dawn Service at the Korean War Veterans Memorial. I’ll just have to drag myself out of bed!

I just talked to someone for a few minutes and they didn’t pick up my accent. This has got me a little worried (especially since I go to sleep to either Australian Radio National or the clipped tones of the BBC world service…)

I am telling myself that one of the following must be true:

• he heard an accent but had no idea where it was from, and so internally denied it
• he is so used to hearing foreign accents that it doesn’t even register anymore
• he is so self-absorbed that he doesn’t actually hear what anyone else says, ever
• we were talking while waiting for coffee, so perhaps, like me, his brain doesn’t kick in until post-caffeination.

I talk with Australians here. I listen to Australians. And whatever Pete says about a slight change in my R’s (although not, apparently, my piratical Arrs) I do still sound Australian. So there.

I've got one paper (Milton) fully drafted, but really need to get to work on the other. (I feel like I'm cheering myself on.) I don't think I'll touch my second paper until tomorrow, though, as I also have a lot of Daniel Deronda left to read before 4pm tomorrow. I think I got excited about the prospect of reading whatever I wanted in the summer a little early... My brain is not allowed to switch off for a few more weeks. There are still things to juggle before I get to lie still.

A friend I correspond with is in Chile at the moment. Though he doesn't have time to go to the Atacama desert (the desert I most want to visit) I'm still very jealous. He's near the Atacama. It's got me dreaming of nomadism. Another friend is about to go to Europe for seven weeks. While her trip sounds a little too whirlwind for me (I like to travel slow, talk with people, do a little bit of wandering, a little bit of gazing at artistic things, a little bit of relaxing...) I am hungry to get out of town for a bit. But just writing "Atacama" makes my mind rove... Panama draws closer by the day.

I want to read the New Yorker, do crosswords and drink coffee. Not much longer!

It’s time to get into gear—the next week is going to involve a lot of writing. I can’t say this is exactly bad: writing papers on things that interest me and that I’m passionate about is, after all, really pretty great as a “job” (albeit an extremely poorly paid one…) it’s just the stress of wanting to articulate things clearly, and unknotting all the tangled thoughts that surround the writing process. Especially when it’s these critical papers. Once I’m there doing it, it’s really very pleasurable—but there are so many things I find to do before sitting down. That period of settling to write is the most stressful part! Plus I have a creative piece I want to try to put down on paper this weekend. And a birthday party to attend as well. So this weekend should see about 5000 words and a few glasses of wine if all goes according to plan.

The weather is suddenly glorious. Flowers are everywhere. I wander around and see tulips, daffodils, pansies, bluebells… It’s hard to imagine being unhappy when the days are like this. I think everyone is, like me, trying to find strategies to study where we can either be outside or close enough to outside that it’s just about the same. The daffodils, especially, have had me thinking about Wordsworth. A small bout of hayfever had me on the same track—I used to want to write an essay about the Romantics (especially W.W. and Dorothy) and their walks around the natural world, and to make the point that clearly they didn’t suffer from hayfever. The problem is that there’s not a lot else to say than just that! I’m settling down. I think it was just the sudden decisive swing to perfect weather that threw my body off. Now I feel happy.

So: the day must go on. Imagine! In a few short weeks I’ll be able to travel, read anything I like, write poems and other bits and pieces. I’ll be at leisure! How delightfully irresponsible. I wonder how many projects I’ll make up for myself?

In preparation for having three weeks away, I'm getting ahead on my writings for the Independence Day Project. This works well because April is such a slow month for independence. (That is an odd statement to make!) So everything is writing at the moment - final papers, Independence Day entries, occasional scribblings... There's no shortage of things to, as my mother would say, "keep me out of mischief."

13 May is marked - if not on my calendar, then definitely in my mind - as the day on which I will be finished with this semester. The idea of summer is vast - the months roll out ahead. Some of that time will be in DC - well, most likely two months, though I'm hoping for some day/weekend trips out of town... But it will be book-ended by travel, and I'm anticipating a glorious few months of writing poems and making things. Scribbling again.

Today is Zimbabwe's independence day, and it seems strange to think of independence under dictatorship - though this is the case with many African nations. Reading the news on the BBC website this morning I was struck by the fact that dock workers in South Africa are refusing to upload a shipment of arms from China that are destined for Zimbabwe.

Will spend some time this afternoon writing on Milton, as well as reading Daniel Deronda. At either end of this planned study time I have administrative things - a writing center meeting and lunch (which, looking at my watch, I should start heading towards) and then one of our graduate program's "town hall meetings." I may actually go out tonight instead of acting the recluse as has been usual of late...

One of my 20 x 200 purchases arrived two days ago - Don Hamerman's "Mossball." It is beautiful. One day I'll be able to get it framed and look at it constantly. Happy days. Hamerman began collecting lost baseballs that he found while walking his dog, and eventually photographed them. I liked this one when I saw it, but it took some time for it to really grow on me. Now I adore it - there was another baseball that went with it. The more I look at the two images, the more I like them, but it's "Mossball" that I keep wanting to look at.

It’s going to be a very busy few days—besides the end of semester insanity (we’re all living in a state of denial, because if we think about how much there is to do we want to cry…) the Lannan symposium, which started this evening, goes until Thursday. This year’s symposium is takes the theme “Let Freedom Ring: Art and Democracy in the King Years,” and a number of people involved in the civil rights/black freedom movement in the 1960s are assembled at Georgetown. There is something amazing about having so many people in the one place.

This evening, after the keynote by Vincent Harding, there was a reading featuring
Haki Madhubuti, Eugene Redmond and Amiri Baraka. It was certainly an occasion where no-one would have suggested that politics and poetry should be kept separate! Politics was not just part of the poems themselves, but the readers talked about Barack Obama, and follow-up questions also focussed on Obama. While the fierce support of Obama was no surprise, I was a bit disappointed at the language used to disparage the other candidates. Mainly because I hate that aspect of politics. I was particularly happy to hear Baraka read—all three, though, were very engaging, with a very biting sense of humour.

The days are seeming longer and longer—there’s so much to do! I’m trying to make sure I write at least two pages a day towards all my final papers. If I can keep that up, then I can keep my head above water.

George Eliot's epigraph for the opening chapter. No, it's not the longest.

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even Science, the strict measure, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars’ unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle, but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, too, reckons backwards as well as forwards, divide his unit billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off in medias res. No retrospect will take us to the true beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which out story sets out.

—George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

Yesterday, an exhibition opening at Addison/Ripley Fine Art in Georgetown—some work by the Colombian artist Ana Mercedes Hoyos.

I’m still a neophyte when it comes to contemporary art practice around the world, so it was a pleasure to see this work—Hoyos is considered the foremost contemporary Colombian artist, and though this was a small exhibition, it showed a range of her work with photographs, paintings, sculpture (an amazing—huge—steel banana that looked like a canoe. No, it wasn’t yellow) and drawing.

Other than the beautiful sculpture, it was the photographs that I loved—really large photographs of faces. This picture particularly mesmerised me—I spent a lot of time standing in front of it, wandering elsewhere, returning, standing in front of it. Seeing all the different lines in its composition, wondering at the amazing colour of it and the details of this woman’s face.

If you don't start buying art when you can't afford it you'll never start.

—Helen Hughes

A recent anthology from the Dalkey Archive—Contemporary Russian Poetry: An Anthology. At nearly 500 pages, this bilingual anthology introduces a new generation of Russian poets to English language readers. In celebration of its release, the Dalkey Archive has organised a number of readings in different cities, including a recent reading on 6 April in DC at Bridge Street Books. Though Bridge Street Books provides only a small space for readings, when the event is poetry-related one hardly expects a packed house—so it was a pleasant problem to find that downstairs it was “standing room only” and a group of listeners crowded upstairs to look down on proceedings too.

It would be nice if all readings of work in translation could be presented the way this reading was organised: each poem was read twice, by two different readers—once in Russian (by one of the anthologised poets) and once in English. Give that the audience was a mixture of Russian and English speakers this method was important, but it also allowed us to hear the rhythms of the poems as they were read in the Russian—this element was quite muted in comparison in the English translations. While I suspect this was partly a result of the reading styles (and, perhaps, the amount of singsong English language listeners tolerate) it was also clear that many of the rhythmic elements and patterns of the Russian originals had not been fully captured in the translations. The gap between the two provided a simple lesson on what is “lost in translation.” The poets present in DC for the reading were Evgeny Bunimovich (the editor of the anthology), Elena Fanailova, Yuli Gugolev and Alexei Tsvetkov. Each poet read from their own work, and Bunimovich, Fanailova and Gugolev each presented work by other poets represented in the anthology as well—a gesture that promoted the work of other poets and in some measure gave the audience an idea of the diversity of work captured in the book.

In introducing the anthology, Evgeny Bunimovich gave some background to the project, indicating that the idea for the anthology first arose when he was talking with poets in DC some years ago. The general rules for the anthology were as follows: poets would be born after 1950; poets would be still alive; poets would be living in Russia. The rules weren’t hard and fast—Bunimovich advised that there were a lot of poets who deviated. Nonetheless, this was a useful set of parameters in creating the anthology—that the majority of included poets still live in Russia means that nearly all of the work captured in the book are new to English-speaking audiences.

Bunimovich opened the reading with an untitled poem of his own, the opening lines of which ran:

It’s no longer awful knowing why they go on about God.
The time is coming when our ranks will thin.
The product of my country, my family, my time,
I stand wrapped in cellophane with a price stamped on my side.

Given that this touches on many of the themes poets in the anthology return to (religion, nation, era, ancestry) this was an appropriate starting place. (The Russians in the audience nodded appreciatively.) He read four of his own poems, including a haiku that had been written as part of a haiku-dialogue with Yuli Gugolev—a touch which added to the notion of a poetic community not simply within the pages of this collection, but among Russian poets in general. The fact that this haiku (“just three lines in all/ of which two are already spent/ so life will pass by”) also functions as a commentary on the form of a haiku broadened the scope of the reading—after Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva or the novels of Solzhenitsynit’s easy to imagine readers who don’t make it a general practice to keep up with world literature to have a ghetto-ised, Stalinised view of the trends and subject matter of Russian literature. Bunimovich also read two poems by the poet Ivan Zhdandov, “Before the Word” and “Transfiguration.”

Elena Fanailova read two of her own poems—“Freud and Korczak” (“The worst thing about murder/ Is not that a friend or lover/ Suddenly becomes a useless victim…) and “As if a caged little beast is running”—as well as one poem each by three women represented in the anthology. (I suppose the rationalisation here is that through Fanailova’s reading we could hear these poems in the female voice.) She read Elena Shvarts’s “Tract on the Indivisibility of Love and Fear,” Olga Sedakova’s “The Earth” and Maria Stepanova’s “The Morning Sun Arises in the Morning.” The highlight of these poems was my introduction to Elena Shvarts’s work, whose poem “Tract on the Indivisibility of Love and Fear” opens:

Deaf man: If a bomb goes off,
you think, “I can’t hear.”
(Don’t enter the dark room,
don’t light a candle,
God might be near.)

Looking into the anthology after the reading, I’ve been enjoying the way she uses voices—in this poem in particular (The next stanza is the speech of a blind man).

Yuli Gugolev read two of his own poems—including the piece “From The Book of Four Precepts,” the poem in which the rhythms in the Russian came out most strongly, seeming near impossible to reproduce in the English—though the translator did a good job, and the English reader was able to replicate the rhythms at some points in his delivery of the poem. Gugolev also read a poem by Aleksander Eremenko, “The Empty Diagram of Complicated Woods”—a poem that, thankfully, became more concrete beyond the complicated emptiness of the opening.

The reading was rounded off by a single poem from Alexei Tsvetkov, who read a poem that is not included in the anthology. He only read the English, and he paused at the beginning to find the poem (“Love Letter”) on his mobile phone. It was a slightly disappointing way to end—I had grown used to hearing the Russian ahead of the English, and I liked to know that at I would have a chance to revisit the poems in the book. Tsvetkov’s poem—read from a small bluish screen—was an ephemeral moment preceding the rush of people chatting, greeting, finishing the wine that was left and departing the scene

I am going to Panama. I just booked a ticket, so no turning back. Next up: finding a place to get Yellow Fever shots. Turning my Italian into Spanish, as if by magic. I thought I'd learn some Spanish from my bilingual edition of Lorca. Panama? I hear they have a canal. Oh, and entire town nestled into the crater of an ancient (of course extinct) volcano. And, both turtles and golden frogs.

I haven’t figured out the dates, but I am definitely going somewhere when I hand in my final paper. I also haven’t figured out the place. In fact, nothing is figured, but that I have itchy feet, and want to throw myself into someplace different before I come back to Georgetown for the teaching I’ll be doing in July. I won’t have all the time up til July free, because I’ll need to be in DC to develop the syllabus and I should be working in the writing center in the summer too (assuming it does open again this summer… it all feels a little un-pinned down.) Also, my friend Helen needs to leave the US to come back in on a tourist visa now when her studies at Georgetown finish, in order do a Melbourne University art history class in New York, which may mean a joint trip. Though I think, after a particular place in Mexico’s San Luis Potosi that she wants to go to, she’s more interested in desert islands than deserts.

Candidates? Well:

-Fly into Costa Rica and then go down to Panama.

-Fly in Mexico or Guatemala (a cheaper flight) and then go in search of a surrealist park that Helen wants to see.

-Fly into El Paso and then enter Mexico via Ciudad Juarez, and maybe head down to the Copper Canyon region.

-Live the dream I dreamt for Spring Break—a bit of Texas (desert-y Texas), New Mexico, Utah, and maybe some Arizona and Colorado too.

Going up to areas of Canada I don’t already know is also a cheap-ish possibility.

They’re my primary interests right now. I’ll probably have about three weeks I can afford to be away. How strange! Tomorrow I should stop by the health service and find out what shots cost, in case Panama wins the day. (Yellow Fever shot… also precautionary anti-Malarial medication.)

In the mean time: studies. It all continues.

I’ll find time later to write a few words about a poetry reading I attended Sunday night, but at the moment my mind is firmly ensconced in: Anne Carson, Carolyn Forché, George Eliot and Milton. I read Book X of Paradise Lost earlier today and I’m thinking my way through the short paper I’ll write on it for tomorrow, about the sounds associated with the punishment both of the denizens of hell (I just like the word denizens) and of Adam and Eve.

I spoke to Professor Ragussis yesterday, and he’s very happy for me to work on the epigraphs in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda—I’m so glad. I remember being fascinated by the epigraphs in Middlemarch—and the opening epigraph of Daniel Deronda is a doozy—and Eliot-authored. (It reminds me in its quite sweeping address of the opening paragraph of Middlemarch, and due to its length it almost seems like more of a first paragraph and an epigraph.) So, I have to read Bakhtin and some other bits and pieces, find embedded quotations within chapters, and see how the dialogue between these and the epigraphs works. As Cher in Clueless would say with a squeak, “Ooh! Project!” Yes, I realise that I really do know how to bring the tone down again. It’s not all lofty heights in my mind…

I’m excited by a new anthology from Graywolf Press, New European Poets. (Also, incidentally, the press publishing Monica Youn, who I saw read at the Library of Congress a while ago.) The book has an amazing array of poets, and covers (I think) all the countries of Europe except those tiny enclaves San Marino, Andorra and Monaco. (I don’t entirely know what’s going to happen when I get to these places in the Independence Day Project. I don’t want to admit defeat!) The only thing that I do find a little depressing is its design. The cover looks like a green “European Poetry for Dummies” or a computer manual. I’m going to solve this for my own copy by covering it in plain brown paper and then decorating. (I wonder if I have tape in this apartment?)

I’m in love, recently, with the art project 20 x 200. Limited edition prints (beautiful quality) of arts of work for $20. Well, $28.50 once you add in the postage etc. Which, though it increases the price by almost 50 percent, doesn’t make it less of a bargain.

Early this afternoon, along with Paradise Lost, I read a book about deserts—another desolate landscape, so I suppose I could connect the two by more than their happening to dovetail in my reading. Terry Tempest Williams. I’ve long wanted to read more of her work. Perhaps in the summer. Though I was thinking, when I go away, I may just take something ancient with me. I’m thinking of following Kapuściński’s example and going with Herodotus. How very English Patient of me.

Oh, and some good news from home. I’ll have a couple of poems coming out in ALR soon. Lovely.

In welcome/no vacancy, Five Islands—in what I believe is the final series of New Poets—introduces the work of Ella Holcombe in book form. Born in 1982, she is ahead of the curve for getting a first book out in Australia, where there is no shortage of poets vying for the attention of publishers willing to touch poetry. This book, and a short stack of newer poems, attractively arranged in a makeshift chapbook, recently arrived in my letterbox.

Holcombe is a poet of the ordinary—but it is the ordinary transformed. In the newer work she sent me—all prose poems—the perspective of the poems is foremost: two poems entitled “From above the earth”, as well as, among others, “From the porch” and “In the pines.” These titles angle the poems such that the details she chooses from the milieu she portrays take on an almost disembodied quality.

“In a small cabin in the woods a man is nearly finished fucking a woman who may or may not be his wife when he hears a knock at the door.”

Setting the scene from her omniscient position “above the earth,” the objects of the cabin impinge on the narrative, which becomes almost secondary, as the attention shifts to the cabin—

“Between the man and the turning doorknob there is a bundle of newspapers tied with string, one skating shoe, a tine of paint a roll of canvas. As the doorknob turns one final time the man will build a raft from these things.”

The poem—as is the case with many of these poems—has a stop-time effect. The turn of a doorknob, normally a quick action: yet here the narrator and the man survey the scene. It slips into the surrealistic with the mention of the raft. The debris of the everyday is transformed. These newer poems are full of such debris, alongside the patchwork of memory. Between portraits, there are poems that seem a continuation from the work in welcome/no vacancy that introduce a more direct perspective: “I,” “we” are interlaced with the outside view.

In welcome/no vacancy the reader sees the seeds of the concern with the ordinary that, on occasion, blossoms into the surreal. Here most of the poems are lineated, though a few prose poems are slipped in too. Given the more recent abundance of prose poems, I’m interested that this direction is not the primary form of her first book, but is a looming presence in it.

The book has a beautiful design—from the cover image by Bill Emory, which accords perfectly with the title, to the bio which in itself is a willed perspective:

“Ella Holcombe was born in 1982 and spent the first three years of her life in a caravan in the wilds of Kinglake. It snowed and her grandmother worried that Ella would perish.

“She didn’t.

“Ella now lives in Brunswick (VIC) with a bunch of stray boys and a large orange snail.”


This whimsy, on the front inside flap, carries into the poems. (I’ve said it before, but I’m so glad this these books have perfect binding and better design principles than earlier New Poets Series.) Emotion is mediated by the domestic scene, as in “Flying at the wind”:


and I couldn’t believe
you were leaving

back at the house we fed the chooks
collected the eggs, drank black coffee
toast thick with jam


In other poems, Holcombe experiments with form—the narrative poem “Dictionary” includes word collisions (“onehundredandone”) and her own punctuation to indicate dialogue with:


/not gonna be in those books anyway but / she says / they’re not dirty books/

she grins a half grin
/dirty retarded bitch/ she says


Some poems aren’t successful in their entirety, though all offer points of interest, and the promise of future work—the newer poems do start to fulfil that promise. One poem that does strike me is “Seven reasons for leaving you.” This title could indicate an emotional-laden piece—yet Holcombe swerves from that, only allowing a sense of suffocation to slip into her second reason (“My heart stopped beating/ I remembered how to breathe”). In the rest (and why is it that seven is such an attractive number to me? Perhaps its Empson and Kundera that have won me over…) the “you” of the title seems almost incidental, the reasons wilfully light—for instance “A grey-hatted man was talking loudly/ about telecommunications.” The form of couplets seems to suit Holcombes sensibility, and the list form adds to the whimsy of her reasons.

The New Poets series is, besides, something of a testing ground—at a limit of 32 pages, these books hover between chapbooks and full-length collections. A good number of New Poets poets have become integral parts of the Australian poetry scene—MTC Cronin and Peter Minter in particular exemplify the successes of New Poets. Nonetheless, there have been a large number of misses with the series too. It has been a laudable endeavour, though many poets have bypassed the New Poets route with their first collections— Kate Fagan, Luke Beesley, Aidan Coleman, Jaya Savige to name a few. I wonder if, in reality, New Poets has often brought out collections from poets who are, in reality, not quite ready for a complete collection?

That aside, I’m glad they’ve given Ella Holcombe a start, and with her precocity, I’m looking forward to reading more of her work soon. Perhaps that’s the best indication of the success of the collection? I’m intrigued to see what comes next in her development.

I’ve just spent quite a bit of time—and quite a lot of words—writing about lines 68-69 of Ezra Pound’s Canto I: after sticking to Book 11 of the Odyssey thus far Pound interrupts the poem to write:





"Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus.
In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer."

Turns out that—shame on him (yes, I’ve read your ABC of Reading, Ezzie)—Pound has been using Divus’s sixteenth century translation of Homer into Latin instead of the original ancient Greek. How could he live with himself?

It also turns out I was able to write a whole page on just those two lines, and what they do to the poem. I know Ezra was a bad man, and then recanted via psychobabble his fascism in a quite pathetic manner, but, well, I like his poetry. Though these days I like his pronouncements in books like How to Read more. I keep meaning to go to St Elizabeth’s and see where he lived for all those years.

I’m one hundred pages into Daniel Deronda—one eighth of the way through—and Deronda himself appeared only in the first chapter and has since gone away. (There was a hint he may have participated in the action of Chapter 2, but he wasn’t, so to speak, on stage.) In the mean time, Eliot gives us Gwendolen Harleth. She fascinates me—largely because, in spite of her arrogance and almost banal wish to be different, she has the most interesting reaction when she receives an avowal of love:

“Gwendolen herself could not have foreseen that she should feel this way. It was all a sudden, new experience to her. The day before she had been quite aware that her cousin was in love with her—she did not mind how much, so that he said nothing about it; and if any one had asked her why she objected to love-making speeches, she would have said laughingly, ‘Oh, I am tired of them all in the books.’ But now the life of passion had begun negatively in her. She felt passionately averse to this volunteered love.”

Later she is reduced to uncontrollable sobbing—which, yes, is oh so nineteenth century, but also seems right. She cannot bear to be loved. And I suppose a heroine who cannot bear to be loved is not so interesting in the twenty-first century landscape, but in the nineteenth century, I do find it rather striking. Especially as its not (overall) satirical (Eliot does have a wicked tongue—pen—at times) like, for instance Vanity Fair. She certainly has a dose of Becky Sharp in her—but what else is there? See? Eliot’s got me hooked. Jolly old Mary Ann Evans.

(Which reminds me, too, of a letter Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell sent her—praising one of her novels, but rounding off with the sentiment: “But I wish—oh! how I wish—that you were Mrs Lewes.)

(Which, in turn, reminds me that George Henry Lewes wrote a rather scathing bit about the character of Esther in Bleak House.)

(And you don’t want to know where musings on Dickens, Esther and Bleak House could take me.)

Getting into the final weeks of the semester, and deciding once and for all exactly what I’m writing all those final papers on. Oh papers, they do keep me busy. I slept in dreadfully today, when I had been planning to mostly work on homework all day. Well—better late than… So, I will most likely duck out soon for some sushi (a craving) but am planning to spend the evening largely at my desk. Maybe some knitting in between thinking through the work I’m doing. (Yes, it’s only the fourth day of return to knitting and already it’s part of the day I look forward to.)

So—I think I’ll flit between poetry and George Eliot for a while. Though it’s likely that I’ll still write my final paper for National Identity and the Nineteenth Century novel, I’m thinking of switching to George Eliot—an act of love, shall we say. I’m still only 50 or so pages in, but I think I’ll spend a few hours on it tonight. Professor Ragussis is interested in the way the novels we’ve been studying use texts—letters, newspapers etc. I was thinking if I do work on George Eliot I can look both at these texts, but also at the epigraphs she uses for each chapter—her epigraphs have always fascinated me. I will probably talk to him about it next week. So some thinking about it over the next few days.

A handful of poems rejected this morning, though with a note “we hope you’ll submit more.” Oh well. I don’t really understand all the ins and outs of poets and their grouping here. It’s okay. I’m learning. Still, I do finally have something coming out here (I had a contract arrive a few days ago, and have to remember to mail that back over the weekend) and a journal at home has asked me to write something too. So—a few little things to do while the end of semester closes in. At least I’ll be writing about poetry for two of the subjects, which I think will be a grounding force.

I looked up the weather yesterday morning specifically to find out whether I should take an umbrella—seeing that, yes, it would be raining, I of course forgot to put the umbrella in my bag. The result was that arrived home completely soaked. This was okay—I wasn’t particularly cold, and I don’t mind being wet. But arriving in this bedraggled state, it made me feel particularly happy to find a couple of treats in the mail: first, a print of a photograph I ordered a week ago from 20 x 200 which is beautiful—currently sitting on my bookshelf still in its envelope, while I decide whether I’ll get it framed at the moment, or maybe later. Second, and much more of a treat, as it was somewhat unexpected (despite my sending a letter a week ago…) was a letter from Brandon Lussier. As well as taking gorgeous photographs of his gorgeous dog, Brandon writes poetry, and also translates verse from Estonian. Such a joy! So—another little thing for the list, in between writing papers, knitting and eating sushi.

Cupcakes are a great source of joy. I branched out at Baked and Wired today, and instead of my habitual caffé latte (I’m braving a few days without coffee…) I had a cup of “Eden” tea. (Appropriate after all this Milton, I think.) Certainly Edenic. The small joys.

I’m jealous of Ivy Alvarez—she’s off writing in Spain, which she’ll follow up with a little travelling/touring. I have itchy feet, even as the contract for the course I’ll be teaching at Georgetown in the summer shows up in my mail, announcing: “Yes! You will be tied in DC for at least a month and a half of the summer…” The cheap flights to Panama and Costa Rica are looking increasingly attractive… I may have been reading too much Bruce Chatwin. Is there any such thing as too much Bruce Chatwin? I long for big empty spaces.

Instead: my desk.

A gap of over a week in the Independence Day Project. I scarcely know what to do with myself. I should probably get a head start on the next few nations. Senegal today. I remember meeting Senegalese people in Firenze, selling umbrellas on the street. I thought it was somehow lovely that whenever it started to rain, the prices of umbrellas went down instead of up. I also remember how puzzled the umbrella sellers were that I wanted to walk around in the rain—I’d had too long a stretch of summer. The variation was wonderful.

So, I’ve started knitting again. Some of friends have seen the blanket I made, sewing together patches I had knitted while travelling around North America and Europe in 2003. I have two friends here, Marie and Rebecca, who do a lot of knitting, and watching them has given me an urge to start again myself. So, I found the nearest yarn store and bought needles and a small selection of yarns. The 2003 blanket was colourful—in each country I bought wool that was a colour that for me represented the country: the pale blue of a still-snowy Montreal spring; the lush green of Cambridge’s fields, as on a walk to Grandchester, the shiraz-pink sunset of Corsica, the tomato-red and dazzling yellow of Italy… Well, this is an American blanket, and so there will be reds, whites and blues—but not the normal reds whites and blues of the flag. I want to play with it a little. This is, too, inspired by Lisa Blas’s exhibition “Meet me at the Mason Dixon,” which was also a patchwork derived from nomadism. I’m hoping that I will be able to travel more, and as I go to buy wool (and, a rule, only real—not synthetic—yarns this time) as I go. I think I’ll have to play with the often-jingoistic aspect of American patriotism. And I think it will be calming, for the moments I’m not buried in reading.

One day I’d like to knit a large desert blanket, with all the desert colours. Another year.

The Li-Young Lee quotes, if you are wondering, come from the fact that I’ve been reading the book of interviews while sitting at Barnes and Noble, not buying it. And an awareness that one of the things this hotchpotch of a blog is for me is a notebook. My notebooks are full of quotes. So—apparently a blog of all things. Or simply a blog of the chaos (the secret city?) of my mind.

A brief respite from Independence Days—after Iran today, it’s Senegal this Friday, and then a whole week off. The first half of the year is comparatively light when it comes to National Days. September—with 29—will keep me on my toes.

I’m trying to make some plans for getting out of DC in the summer—I had a slightly crazy notion of going to Costa Rica or Panama as soon as my final paper is in, before I come back to Georgetown to teach in the summer, but I don’t think I’ll have quite enough time to organise it—though Central America will happen before I go home. I feel it. Instead, I’m really thinking about the Four Corners area. Dreaming, really. As usual, I’ve got deserts on my mind.

I think I will start Daniel Deronda tonight. Though I will treat myself to some Lorca first, most likely. Have been reading more Bruce Chatwin too. It seems strange to me that it’s taken so long for me to really fall in love with travel writing—though I think I was always seeking out a very specific kind of travel writing, that is almost anthropological in its scope. Or just plain magical, like the Travels of Sir John Mandeville.

"For me so much of poetry and the making of poetry have to do with a willingness to wait for something to yield itself. It’s a powerlessness that one allows to occur. In my own life I feel as if I do a lot of waiting, and it seems to me a proper posture of the heart, or the mind, waiting for the poem to arrive. Or waiting for a final shapeliness to occur in my own life. Or waiting for a god to show himself. Waiting for the dead to come back."

—Li-Young Lee, from the interview “Waiting for a Final Shapeliness to Occur” in Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee.