I’ve been a bit exhausted lately—what I imagine Ezra Pound’s “emotional anaemia” must feel like. Attending a reading that was part of Split This Rock last night helped—I heard Brian Gilmore, Susan Tichy, Semezdin Mehmedinović, Jimmy Santiago Baca and Patricia Smith. I like these readings that have a lot of featured poets—they seem to keep my attention with relatively the swift changeover to a new voice. (I guess I’m more of a reader than a listener, generally.)

I skipped most of the first night of the festival—I went to the opening with Sonia Sanchez, which was something of a disappointment to me. Sanchez spent more time talking in a fairly rambling fashion (and, to my mind, extolling her own work and opinions) than reading her poems. I’ve only read a little of he work, but I feel that what I have read was stronger than the two pieces she performed. The opening was at Bus Boys and Poets (my first visit there) and it was really too small for the turnout (a pleasant problem at a poetry reading to be sure) and so I felt a little oppressed by the crowd. I just didn’t have it in me to head up to another reading at the Bell Multicultural High School, so I went home and did crosswords. It’s a pity I missed the reading—it would have been nice to see E Ethelbert Miller read again (and to see if my blogging warranted another hug) and to hear the work of a new crop of poets, but I was feeling a little “fragile,” so home I went.

Similarly, I skipped the panels yesterday and wandered around, then sat down with my copy of Milton, rereading the first few books of Paradise Lost—I felt like I couldn’t quite take all the talk… I’ve often felt frustrated with talk about social action—I just want to get out and do things. It’s different when it’s the more personal, educating narratives. Hearing Carolyn Forché speak, for instance, is at once horrifying, amazing, energizing, inspiring. She is reading tonight, in what is a stellar lineup—I have high hopes.

I was so pleased to finally meet Semezdin Mehmedinović, whose work I’ve admired for a while now. I was reading his two books available in English (Sarajevo Blues and Nine Alexandrias) a while ago and fell in love. It made me feel possibilities for a looseness and ease that interests me, in the voice itself (as translated by Ammiel Alcalay). And then the poems - devastating. When I spoke to him after the reading, I mentioned that I’d like to interview him, and he gave me his details. Again, I have to find that elusive time.

I was interested to hear Jimmy Santiago Baca, because he’s a big name, with a fascinating background: sentenced to five years in a maximum security prison for drug possession when he was twenty-one, he learned to read and write, and it was there that his interest in poetry really began. I was actually most interested in his talk in between the pieces he read. He mentioned that recently he’d been on a trip around the world, meeting poets everywhere, and getting recorded interviews in many, many different countries and languages. He talked about a sense that so many countries—and therefore their poets—seemed to be suffering from pervasive post-traumatic stress, and the poets responded by wanting to give and give. The interviews (over a hundred of them) need to be translated into English: I don’t know where these will end up, but I’m so interested to read them if they surface somewhere accessible.

Patricia Smith’s work was new to me, and I’m so glad that I got to experience it: she finished with a poem written in response to Hurricane Katrina, and the 34 residents of a nursing home that were left behind and died. As she was introducing it she said “the poem is long—but the stanzas are short,” which for some reason was charming! The poem was in 34 sections, the voices of the dead: it was a beautiful elegy for these forgotten people. Her next book as a whole addresses the aftermath of Katrina. If this is an example of the work she’s doing with that, then I’ll be interested to read the book as a whole when it comes out. Again, I’m hoping that an interview will emerge—we talked about finding a time in between two readings today to have a brief chat.

The festival has also been my first real opportunity to explore the U Street neighbourhood—I get the impression that it’s more of a nighttime area than a daytime place, but it’s been great wandering around. I don’t know why exactly I hadn’t made it over there earlier, but I hadn’t. I really love the multicultural areas of DC though, and am looking forward to getting to know the area better.

Speaking of things to look forward too, I’m excited that Siri Hustvedt’s new novel, The Sorrows of an American, will be coming out on the first of April. I wonder if I’ll be able to make some out-of-university time as the final phase of the semester starts kicking in to read it…

Some days I feel like perhaps I’m a little crazy. I’ve been coming to the realisation that I’m happier writing on poetry than I am on prose—when I’m writing about poetry, I’m (obviously) thinking about poetry. I feel that it’s more likely to lead me back into my own writing. This means that I’m thinking about what exactly to do with my thesis next year… The work I’d like to do on Dickens is, I feel, an important project—and it’s less about Dickens than about Australian national identity (yes, I’m feeling a little self-exiled these days, and have become, perhaps, more Australian than ever) which appeals to me. But—I want to write about our poets, and promote contemporary writing that is exciting. I’ve thinking and talking and wondering. (Perhaps I can do some smaller papers on Dickens. I don’t know if I would be able to get hold of the materials I need to do the kind of large-scale study I have in mind anyway. The records I need are most likely all in Australia.)

Speaking of writing on poetry, I’ve been having some slightly crazy thoughts on Milton’s Paradise Lost. These emerged from thinking so much about travel literature recently—and I was thinking of the ways Milton employs aspects of travel writing in the poem. And then—perhaps crazier—I’ve been listening to a lot of (Australian) Radio National podcasts as I’ve been going to sleep, including a few science shows. The most recent one was talking about solid light and the idea that at a critical point light crystallises. This got me thinking about the ways Milton uses light and darkness in the text, including light that “pierces.” But thinking it through I just couldn’t figure out how to turn either into a paper in the next month, and instead it looks like I’ll be looking at patterns of silence and sound in the text. At times I start to realise that I have “grad school brain.” But then, I don’t exactly think it’s even a normal grad student reaction to listen to a science show and think “Ah! Milton!” so perhaps I just have my own (extremely idiosyncratic) brain.

Today I’m seeing a face from home—like ships that meet in the night, I’m going to have an hour or so with Elena Knox, who’s passing through DC on her way to elsewhere. She has three hours at Union Station, and I’ll spend about half of that with her. There’ll no doubt be food, talk, and possibly a (very) quick interview—I want to catch up with the creative force that is Elena, and hear all about what she’s up to with her writing and performance.

Also today, the beginning of the Split This Rock poetry festival—more poets to meet. There’s an exciting line up over the next few days. I just hope that my (sometimes delicate) energy holds up and that I actually get some university work done at the same time!

I went looking for poetry from Pacific islands yesterday—I found a lot, which was lovely, but am particularly keen to find a poem/poet from the Marshall Islands. Anybody got a suggestion?

It’s been a week of just barely keeping up (or, in a few cases, catching up) but it’s been a good week.

Tuesday was another Lannan reading—E Ethelbert Miller and Ilya Kaminsky. Both the seminar and the reading were great. I’m so glad that I have the combination of my poetry class with David Gewanter and a lot of readings that I can go to this semester. I’m feeling words as very tactile objects right now—it’s a beautiful experience. I’m still finding it difficult to find time to write myself (and when I do, I feel like I’m not quite reaching the place I want to go) but at the same time, it’s been a really fruitful time for editing work that had been in the unfinished pile for a long time.

The theme for the latest Lannan reading was “Ancestors,” which proved an interesting starting point. Miller talked about poets that he has known personally whose work he tries to keep alive: he likes to include a few poems by these poets when he does a reading, and this was no exception, with work from, among others, June Jordon and Charles Bukowski included in his reading. I always find this a generous act on the part of poets: I suppose it is so rare that you have an audience for your own poems, that to use some of that time promoting the work of others is a lovely thing. He read a series of poems on Iraq that were particularly moving—I’d like to see these in print.

Miller also gave me an odd moment that pierced what I thought was relative anonymity—upon entering the seminar (early, as usual) he greeted me with “Ah! The blogger!” and gave me a hug. He wouldn’t tell me how he found this little blog, nor how long he has been reading it, but it was a lovely moment to realise that there are occasional readers beyond the audience I was aware of. I have a copy of his most recent book—How We Sleep on the Nights We Don’t Make Love—that I’ll be reading soon—and it looks like a (face-to-face!) interview will materialise, in between the juggling of everything I find myself doing.

Ilya Kaminsky was equally wonderful. I’m already a fan of his book (once again, Dancing in Odessa. If you haven’t read it, do.) In the seminar I was particularly fascinated—and delighted—by the approach he took to ancestors, which was so text-based. In particular, the way he looked at the continental European poets that I love so much—Zbigniew Herbert for instance. (I have to say it once again: I love the Polish poets so much. There is so much at work in their poems.) He traced the movement of ideas and forms from a poem by one poet into a poem by another: unfurling genealogies that he had obviously thought deeply about.

His reading was also a treat: eccentric and musical. Kaminsky speaks with a Russian accent, and this is particularly strong when he is reading his poems. Aware of this, he distributed copies of his book for the audience to follow as he read. I had brought my own copy with me, but I laid it aside—I already knew the poems, and while I didn’t catch everything, I wanted to listen to the rhythms that came out in his reading, that I felt in my own reading, but not quite as strongly. This is, I suppose, because I had the meaning-making foremost in my mind—and because I didn’t read most of the poems aloud. Hearing him read, it was rhythm that I wanted to think about the most, and it came out beautifully.

On Wednesday, I put on my academic hat again, and headed to Charlottesville for a conference at UVA—“Things Matter.” Last year I wrote a paper on Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, and the notion of a mental cabinet of curiosities. I had rewritten this paper to include Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, thinking through aspects of travel writing as an experiential “thing” that acts as both journey and souvenir for the reader. I wasn’t sure if I had spiralled into abstractions until I presented it, but I got a good reaction.

What I saw of Charlottesville was lovely, but as it was really all about the conference, I have to go back sometime for a more leisurely visit. And I have to get to Monticello.

Attending the panel following mine, I met four girls who are doing interesting work in nineteenth century literature—Emily Madsen (her paper was on the image of the black doll that appears in three illustrations in Dickens’ Bleak House), K. Irene Rieger (she was looking at nineteenth and twentieth century texts and nostalgia—she had a lot of fascinating information about hair jewellery that made me want to look into the phenomenon) Christen Mucher (a paper about the “ginger nut” in Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, that unfolded into an investigation of the relationship between the Caribbean and the US) and Eugenia Gonzalez (writing on “the doll” in Vernon Lee’s story of the same name). It was a really rich experience—both to see what graduate conferences are like in the US, and also to meet people. The standard was really very high.

Rewriting my paper, it made me interested in doing some more work on travel literature—particularly some early travel texts from Australia. Another little island of material to connect with my work at some time.

The other exciting aspect of the conference was that the keynote speaker was (the almost impossibly hip) Bill Brown from the University of Chicago, who edited the issue of Critical Inquiry entitled Things, and a few years ago also published the book A Sense of Objects. Working on Henry James and systems of collecting, his work was particularly inspiring. Similarly, I found the collection of essays on “Things” just as I was starting to get really interested in the subject.

In his keynote he talked about the art of Brian Jungen—I wasn’t familiar with the artist before, but I was fascinated. I have to read more. The masks he made using deconstructed sneakers are beautiful. Last week (gosh! only last week?) I was making collages, and looking at art again made me want to get right back into making things. I started thinking about the number of things I could recycle, transform. Brown talked about the desire of materials to be transformed—I felt myself responding.

He also mentioned that in the book that this writing is going to be a part of, he has written on Walter de Maria. I asked him if he is also writing on other earthworks artists, Robert Smithson in particular. I’m always excited when I get a chance to talk about—think about—Smithson in any way. I feel like an interrogation of Smithson, and the way he uses entropy as a subject for his work, is such a fruitful area to look into. And it reminded me again (travel being on my mind) of my determination to get to the site of the Spiral Jetty in Utah. One day.

Upcoming this week is Ilya Kaminsky's reading at Georgetown as part of the Lannan series - also reading is E. Ethelbert Miller, who I'll have to familiarise myself with before then. In the mean time, I've recently read Kaminsky's wonderful first book, Dancing in Odessa - which, when I find that elusive time, I plan to review here.

If you're in DC, come to hear Kaminsky and Miller read: Tuesday 11 March, 8pm at Copley Hall, Georgetown University.

Yesterday morning Condoleezza Rice spoke at Georgetown university on “Transformational Diplomacy.” In the spirit of getting as much out of this DC experience as I can, I decided I'd go to the speech: I don’t agree with a lot of her politics, but I can’t help admiring her for everything she has achieved. There is, too, still an excitement for me that Georgetown brings in people of this caliber—that I have the opportunity to attend these events for free.

That said, I’m not sure what I got out of the experience. Getting into the event in the first place was an ordeal: the doors opened at 8.45 for an event due to start at 10.45. Why? Not only in anticipation of the crowds (in fact, the hall was not entirely full) but to clear security. We weren’t allowed to bring in backpacks (this is a school, right?), computers or cameras, had to remove coats to go through the security checkpoint... I got to the hall at 9.15, and at 10 (the point at which they turned people away—you had to have cleared security 45 minutes in advance or you couldn't get in) had my seat. So, I sat reading William Carlos Williams's poems for three quarters of an hour.

There were some dissonances for me in the speech: for a start, Rice framed her speech as though she were only addressing Americans. While this might not seem unusual at an American university, she addressed her remarks several times to the School of Foreign Service, which attracts a large number of international students to Georgetown.

Of course there was politicking in there—that was always going to be the case. Talking about attempting resolutions to situations that required diplomatic interventions, Rice referred obliquely to the inevitability of “short-term tensions” (how short is short-term?); she referred to moves made by Bush’s administration as “historic”—without irony; at one point she referred to resources being used up by government in the 1990s (no, she didn’t mention Clinton by name—after all, he attended Georgetown). There was the kind of alliteration and snappy rhetoric that a good speechwriter can produce once he gets a good cup of coffee in him.

Nonetheless, a sentiment I really valued was one central to her vision of an effective diplomatic corps: her aim, she said, is “not just recruiting the best and brightest—but making them better and brighter.”

Wisconsin Death Trip at the Gonda theatre on campus. Apparently over course of the performances the show has changed shape - what I saw was a different version to what people saw the week before. I guess, like an out of town opening, they were able to use these performances to gauge reactions.

My reaction was extremely positive. A friend from English found the narrative a little too fragmented, but that didn't bother me. It wasn't, just like the book wasn't, a single narrative, but a way of imagining the trials of a community. I felt there was a lot to like here. The music was great: I would probably put it in the category of music theatre rather than "folk opera," as Tim Raphael (the director and writer) billed it, but it wasn't in any way cheesy: I feel that it really imagined how something like the musical could be theatre art, rather than glitz. That said, while I understood the rationale for the musical eclecticism (while one might imagine that late nineteenth century Wisconsin would be a fairly homogenous group in terms of ethnicity, that wasn't true: the musical ragbag was meant to reflect this) I felt that there could have been a greater unity to the music: using the different styles, but blending them a little more, to mirror the way different people came to be part of one community.

For the most part the students acting were great: they were obviously very taken with the material, and wanted to serve it well. There were moments at the start where, as the ghosts of the community arose, a few of the actors were oddly stiff or overdramatic: they ruptured the surface, the texture on stage, so that you couldn't help being distracted by their awkward postures. I wonder if this was simply warming into it, or reflective of the fact that they are, after all, student actors.

It's exciting that after Tim Raphael had been thinking about how to do this for so long it got to appear for the first time at Georgetown. It's made me want to see more student theatre (although I've been warned some of it is terrible) - but then, I'm also more generally getting involved with seeing stuff around DC. I'm getting so busy - frazzled - with university work, that it's great to put that aside for a breather now and then and jump into something cultural.

I've been feeling a little homesick today - though I'm not sure where I locate that homesickness. I'm both homesick for Australia, but also for poetry. The scraps I've been writing feel like a salvation - and while I'm writing them, I feel like I'm creating something strong. It's that rapture of concentration. But I'm finding often I have trouble gaining perspective on what I've written, because somehow being in a different country, my poetry has a different life. I wrote a poem in short sections recently - I don't like to say fragments, because really they were each fully formed (as best I can currently do, that is) - and when I was discussing it with some people today, they told me (after some discussion) that they were confused by the word "dam": in the US, it doesn't refer to the gigantic, muddy puddles that I remember from home. "Oh, ditches," they said. Yet, the poem can't change. Can I be read here?

I've been remedying homesickness by reading Nicolas Rothwell's book Another Country. Even though I'm reading about Central Australia - because it's a place I've never been, instead in my head I'm thinking about the landscapes between Cowra and Dubbo - the parts of the "country" that I do know. But, too, it's teaching me about the regions that I haven't felt emotionally able to come at before: somehow the centre was always too vast. But now my absence is, I guess, vaster. I get so busy that it takes time for me to remember I need space to think about home.

A friend - Kevin Rabalais - is launching his first book, the novel The Landscape of Desire in Melbourne at the end of this month. I wish I could be there (I'm hoping to get a copy fairly soon after the launch, and perhaps I can spend part of the Easter weekend reading it. For those of you who are in Melbourne, the launch is on 28 February at The Avenue bookstore in Albert Park. The book is being launched by Alex Miller. I've known Kevin for a few years now, and I'm so excited to see his book becoming a reality. He and his partner Jennifer Levasseur are, among my friends, two of those most dedicated to the craft of writing.

It's been a New York weekend - or, as I billed it recently, it was my reunion with New York: I went up for the weekend, and stayed at the same hostel I stayed at in 2003. I came by bus on Friday morning - quite a cramped affair, with free wi-fi that worked some of the time. I got up to New York and it was raining (as it was in DC... I nearly fell down the steps of the local bus that took me to Dupont to catch the New York bus). I'm sure all this would have been fine, but I woke up Friday morning to find I had a cold - sore throat, exhaustion, aches... usual, miserable affair. I thanked god for the dissolvable aspirins that mum had mailed over last year. (They don't have dissolvable aspirin here. But I thought they have everything? I hear you ask. You heard it here first.) So for the last 48 hours I've been dosing myself, and sleeping as much as possible (on one of those super-skinny, squeaky hostel dorm beds...) and, during those moments in between, I caught up with Ivy Alvarez, wandered around the city, and crashed into the AWP conference.

I came up specifically for Ivy: it's been a few years since we have seen each other, and she's definitely gone on to bigger and better things with the publication of her first full-length book, Mortal. It's that book that brought her to New York, from Cardiff where she's been living for the past few years. Her publisher, Red Morning Press, participated in the AWP conference, and so Ivy came to town to support her publisher, promote her book and give a reading. I got the invitation to the reading a few months ago and determined that, since I hadn't previously made it to New York since I've been in DC (nor anywhere else, except Tennessee - and yes, that counts as somewhere) I would absolutely make it up to see the reading. Last time I was in New York, I saw Richard Howard and Maxine Kumin read as part of a series by the Dia Center for the Arts.

This was not that. This reading was East Village post-grunge at the 11th Street Bar. Yes, all the poets reading had published books - but not many of them should have them, based on the poems they read last night. Seriously - there are only so many sensitive, bearded, converse-wearing, thick-rimmed glasses spokesmen and their female counterparts (complete with batwing eyeliner) I can take. Ivy was great - she was succinct, well-presented and she chose work that both makes an impact in a single reading, and invites rereading. There were one or two other moments that I was pleased with, but somehow the whole evening had the feeling of an open-mike night. I may just have become a curmudgeonly old lady right then and there. Oh well. I suppose it was going to happen some time.

There was one author, Nickole Brown, who I've been thinking about a bit since the reading - I have a feeling her book Sister would be worth a proper look - and maybe sometime, in amidst the pile of other things I've got going on - I'll find some time to give her work some proper attention.

The AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) conference was something else. I really didn't have much idea about it (this is where being an Australian writer, not an American one, gives me perhaps a little reason for my ignorance...) but it was huge. Publishers and writing programs had tables, and as I was rushing through during their last few hours, a lot of people had reduced book prices even further than the already-discounted AWP prices. There ended up being a few things I couldn't say no to (an anthology of Polish poems, Ilya Kaminsky's book Dancing in Odessa) and a few more things I ended up getting free, so I came back to DC with a small stash of things to keep me busy, when classes aren't already threatening to take over my life. I'm hoping that reviews and other bits and pieces - including a small interview with Ivy will be forthcoming soon. Stay tuned.

Speaking of classes, the flu wiped out a lot of my planned study for the weekend, so now that I'm home I have a lot of Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl to read. I've promised myself a treat if I can get through three quarters of it in four hours. On your marks. Get set. Etc.