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?

A few frivolities:

On the weekend, I gave myself my first completely solo haircut. I’ve had good feedback so far. And, yes, I’m glad to save the $50 + it would cost to get it done by someone else in DC. I went the route of first cutting it in a ponytail, though in reality my hair is too thick for that, and then tidied up from there. Opinions? (The very sexy decor of the Georgetown Writing Center lies in the background.)

St Patrick’s Day. Yes, I made the effort to wear green. The thing I love about St Patrick’s Day, though, is that it is also the assigned birthday of our family friend Tram. She was born in Vietnam, and doesn’t actually know the date of her birthday. My dad took it upon himself to give her a birthday, and St Patrick’s Day is the day. It makes me happy.

A week ago Sir Walter Scott and I weren’t getting along so well. Our relationship is improving—the second volume of Waverley is somehow more engaging than the first. Or maybe Professor Ragussis has piqued my interest more.

My friend Amy Espeseth said she felt really famous when I mentioned her on my blog previously. So, I’m mentioning her again. You should look out for a novel from her sometime in the future. It’ll be something special.

After what I saw almost as a challenge from Hazel last week, I dropped in at The Bean Counter on the weekend to try their coffee. Good stuff! This reminded me that there are many more cafés to try out around Georgetown, before I swear complete allegiance to one. But then, I’ve never sworn complete allegiance to a single café. Within a few blocks of each other in Carlton, you would be equally likely to find me at Tiamo, Trotters or Big Harvest. I miss Big Harvest’s spectacular muffins.

I found a beautiful poetry anthology on the weekend—Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond. It helped me fill in some gaps by finding some poets for countries I didn’t have “covered” for the Independence Day Project.

This week I need to look for a poem from Namibia. I have a list of poets—good start—it’s just a matter of choosing the poem.

Speaking of African poets, Dennis Brutus will be in DC next weekend for the Split This Rock poetry festival. I’ve been reading some of his work recently, and I’m excited I’ll have a chance to see him.

Still some catching up to do today—more of Waverley to read before 4pm. I have faith it’ll get done. Based on the experience that I somehow always do.

Kevin Rabalais was interviewed on Ramona Koval’s program recently. His first book, the novel The Landscape of Desire, was released by Scribe at the end of February. It’s already been getting wonderful reviews. Listen to the interview. Read the book. Support an exciting new writer. And, yes, he’s a friend of mine. I admire the seriousness that both he and his wife Jennifer Levasseur display regarding their writing.

Speaking of interviews, I may also be the subject of an interview soon. I’ll keep you posted if it’s happening.

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 was quite a day—mostly spent at the Library of Congress, after a coffee at my new favourite DC café, Baked and Wired, (red velvet cupcakes, “manly” quiche and great coffee) and ending with whiskey, mussels and chocolate mousse at Bistro du Coin, home at midnight.

Yesterday I participated in a master class with Charles Simic, the current poet laureate of the United States. In an hour and a half he looked at one poem apiece from about fifteen poets from the DC area. Apparently it hadn’t been well-advertised, which, ironically, is how I came to hear about it: one of the staff of the Library of Congress emailed David Gewanter last week because the class wasn’t full, and he forwarded the information to us students. I seem to have been the only one to follow up (I guess because so any people were out of town this week—and those who weren’t work fulltime, so couldn’t make a daytime class) and so I found myself in the room with a group of poets I hadn’t met before. There was one that looked youngish, but I felt like I was the youngest by quite a lot of years. (I thought this experience would have ended years ago...) There’s no shortage of poets in DC, that’s for sure…

What I liked about the class was that Simic was much more interested in the poems than in the poets. I guess for most people (those wanting to make a personal impression on the poet laureate in order to help with their careers) this may have been a little frustrating, but I found it wonderful how much his attention was on the words themselves. I was pleased that he seemed to like my poem (“Fat Ben Jonson”—written for the lovely Anne Brumley, then in the throes on the aforementioned fat, literary man) though he did point out that, self-indulgently, I had probably used the word “fat” too many times. It was just such a satisfying word at the time. Still, he was right.

The other thing that I really valued was that we were all there to listen to his comments, and so no-one was trying to one-up everyone else.

I also got a chance to write a new poem while I was drinking a post-class coffee. Ah, coffee.

After a few hours break, I went back to attend last night’s reading by this year’s winners of the Witter Bynner award, Matthew Thorburn and Monica Youn.

This was one of the best readings I’ve ever been to—both poets have published one book (Thorburn’s is Subject to Change and Youn’s is Barter), and each have second manuscripts that appear to be ready to go. There was such energy and playfulness—even exuberance—in their work. The audience was also clearly there with them—there was a lot of laughter.

I bought both poets first books (again, hopefully in the coming months some more email interviews will unravel) and last night, on the way to Bistro du Coin, I read a third of Thorburn’s book. Again, I’m hoping sometime I’ll find a moment to at least post a brief review. Sometime.

I’ve been realising just how many very good poets there are in America that we never hear about in Australia—it’s such a pity. Even big names don’t get much press at home. It’s still the case that most poetry is published by small presses—so of course a huge number of very fine poets don’t get distribution outside of America. It’s exciting discovering these poets—I hope other people will discover them too.

First: some news. It looks like "THE BOOK" is moving forward. I mean, I've heard from the publisher who is "keen to publish it" - but I'm sure there are lots of things that can happen between now and whenever an actual publication may happen. I got the email yesterday - after spending the morning working on a bunch of poems that had been in my "problem pile" (I solved a few problems too!) - and I gasped, nearly cried, then went to meet Lisa to see a film. (Charlie Bartlett. Fun. A great rendition of my favourite Cat Stevens song: "If you want to sing out, sing out." Steals shamelessly from the superior Rushmore.) Then last night, some wine to celebrate - though I feel like celebrating could be premature. Can you tell I'm a novice?

It seems unreal - it's been so long. When I start to feel like it's happening, I'll most likely update.

I had plans for getting out of town this week, but it hasn't happened. I may still go for a day or two over the weekend - I just can't decide. My brain has been a bit addled today, so I've been fiddling with collage materials, thinking about a poem and wandering around in the sunlight.

In the past few days I took the opportunity to go to the Corcoran and Phillips Galleries: both have large (and impressive) holdings of modern and contemporary art. Of the two, I found the Phillips collection more exciting: both had on special exhibitions that covered the breadth of the collections. I guess the Phillips partly appealed more because it was more geared to the modern and contemporary, while the Corcoran's exhibition placed modern works alongside nineteenth century pieces. But more than that, there were a large number of individual works I wanted to spend time with in the Phillips Collection - and a Rothko room, with a beautiful deep blue-green and burgundy canvas, and a red and orange canvas on perpendicular walls. A Robert Motherwell print called "Australia," in black and ochre. Photographs. So much stimulus!

The best part for me, though, was the fact that both collections had on display paintings by Joan Mitchell, who - almost solely through reproductions - has been one of my favourite painters for years now. I've seen these paintings in books (I always wanted to make A3 sized colour photocopies of a couple, to keep them close at hand...) and finally I got to sit in front of them.

Joan Mitchell's canvases are so huge. I like this photo on the cover of a monograph about her work: the physicality of the act of painting these canvases, and the fact that she didn't, like Jackson Pollack, lay them flat on the ground. The painting in this photo is her largest work either. She's such a wonderful colourist - and I feel that she makes real sense of the space of these large canvases. There is a lot of light and movement, and even while they remain abstract they suggest their subjects wonderfully even without the titles.

The weather has been lovely the last few days. Spring is here!

The next few days I have a lot of reading to do. At last: my first experience of Sir Walter Scott. I have to read Waverley for National Identity and the Nineteenth Century Novel. Also, after having just spent six weeks discussing various poets who are considered "modernist" in my Modern and Contemporary poetry class, I have to write a paper on four poems, using the poems to try to define modernism... Define modernism? Sure, easy as ABC. Next week is the UVA conference too, so I've got to get that paper in shape - I booked a hostel, and am hoping I've begged a ride. So -it's business as usual, and more so. With maybe a few poems thrown in as well. Fingers crossed for sanity.

Tomorrow I meet the Poet Laureate. Fingers crossed I don't swoon.

I recently twice had the privilege of seeing the poet Carolyn Forché speak and read from her work. Later this year Forché’s memoir is being published, and I have to say I’m thrilled that this is the case. The memoir is addressed to the poet Ilya Kaminsky—a former student of Forché’s (who, incidentally, did his Bachelor's degree at Georgetown) whose first book, Dancing in Odessa, I’ve read recently. (There should be a review of the book and his reading at Georgetown as part of the Lannan series sometime soon.)

As well as being considered one of the best poets writing in the America today, Forché is also widely known for her commitment to work in human rights: in 1978 she went to El Salvador, writing poems at the same time as working with human rights networks to document what was happening in El Salvador. The portion of her book she read touched on this experience: it was an account of her visit to an El Salvadoran jail during which she witnessed men being kept in boxes—she afterwards learned that some men were kept in these boxes for months at a time. It was amazing—in an awful way. To hear that read in the author’s voice, ahead of its publication, was a real privilege.

This time in El Salvador was the beginning of a long career dedicated to the cause of human rights, and, too, to the work of poets working out of what she terms conditions of extremities. To listen to Forché talk about her career is to realise how little most people ever do. In addition to her direct work in the human rights fields, she has translated the work of other poets, and encouraged her students to get involved in translation: one effect of her teaching is that she has former students scattered all over the world. I understand this—sometimes people tell me they don’t understand how I do as much as I do, but when I hear Forché speak, I feel that I’m not doing enough. I at least feel that the Independence Day Project is doing a little both to increase my knowledge and also to contribute to a sense of poetry in the world.

As a result of this dedication to human rights and the poetry that emerges out of these conditions of extremity she put together the anthology Against Forgetting: I’ve been reading it on and off over the last few months—there’s so much to discover. (All I can say is buy it: buy it now.)

She read, too, a new poem: this was also dedicated to Kaminsky, as she recently took him back to his native city Odessa: I wish I had been able to take down the poem, but instead it washed over me. I look forward to her next book of verse too—I saw her speak in 2003 in San Francisco when her last book was being launched at City Lights. At the time I couldn’t stretch to a hardback, so I bought The Angel of History, which I read a few days later in Central Park. When I had finished that, I went to a bookshop and read the whole of the then-new Blue Hour over a coffee. (There is definitely an advantage to the chain bookstores: they can be used as libraries.) Blue Hour contains an amazing “abecedary” poem—the longest of its kind I have read in English, and a tour de force.

One of the things she talked about that fascinated me more than anything was the way she talked about Paul Celan: talking about how, out of World War II, he chose to write in this German language that had been broken by Nazism. Celan has been an important poet to me for quite some time—I especially appreciate John Felstiner’s translations, which at times coil back into that broken German. German—another language I have to learn, just so I can see how Celan refigures it in his work.

Between studies I continue running from event to event—this past weekend was no exception.

Friday night I saw the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater perform at the Kennedy Center: they have an annual engagement to perform in DC, and at each performance the repertoire was slightly different. I saw The Winter in Lisbon, The Road of Phoebe Snow and Revelations—the latter being their signature work, and one that was choreographed by Ailey himself. The company began with a performance in March 1958 and promotes African-American cultural experience and modern dance.

As is often the case with the cheap seats, I was a long way away from the action—I could still see plenty, but it wasn’t as exhilarating as those experiences of being up close to the dancers, as I was last year when I somehow managed to get front row seats for the Australian Ballet's performance of Don Quixote with Ethan Stiefel. The first two performances were less compelling to me than Revelations: I think because I didn’t have the same emotional response. The music and the dancing was incredibly fun, but I didn’t feel as much was at stake as in Revelations, which took my breath away. Though they perform it nearly 300 times a year, it showed no signs of staleness, and the duet “Fix Me, Jesus” was the highlight for me. The only problem with this being that my emotional peak came so close to the start that the rest of the performance ebbed a little from those moments in “Fix Me, Jesus” where I felt myself leaning forward, utterly absorbed.

Also on the weekend I visited the modern collection at the National Gallery of Art—a surprisingly small selection is on view—and, unexpectedly, fell in love with Miró’s “The Farm.” The detail of it, its oddity—somehow the whole thing was perfect. I need to think about it, study it more—I hope there’ll be a poem to come from it.

I also got to see Brancusi’s “Bird in Space” in marble finally—the collection had two, one brass, one marble—something about marble sculpture gets to me in a way that castings in bronze—or brass—do, though in another way brass seems the perfect material for “Bird in Space”—or rather, brass is a material that Brancusi made his own. Whenever I think of Brancusi I also think of a couple from a poem by the wonderful Elena Knox: “It’s not a Brancusi/ excuse me.” In fact, wandering around the gallery, so avidly looking, I thought I might try to do a little series of couplets on artists: an Ogden Nash take on painters and sculptors. Though at the moment that’s just another idea for the notebook—ah!—the notebook is growing fat with things to revisit.

Wandering back to the East Building, I saw another couple of exhibitions: one “Impressed by Light,” 19th century British photographs. There were some absolutely beautiful pieces here—especially some of the sepia-toned Scottish and Alpine landscapes. (Talk about the sublime…) I was also struck by a room of images from travel—especially those from the “east.” I love looking at photographs so much—and these photographs were so beautifully printed. I wonder if it’s something about the flatness, the smoothness of the medium? It reminds me of the quote from Frank Stella about his paintings—and their surfaces—which has fascinated me for so long—“I wanted to keep the paint as good as it was in the can.” At the same time, though, I find I can’t spend as much time with a photograph as I can with a painting, where I get up close and look at the brushwork. Perhaps its simply the way were all look at photographs.

Speaking of smoothness of surfaces, I also saw an exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg’s prints. Rauschenberg has been a bit of a favourite of mine for years now—from the crazy combines to his early screen prints. This exhibition, while being a cross section of the work he has done in prints over his career (and, oddly, also a cardboard door that the National Gallery decided to bring out for the occasion) it gave me a chance to see what he’s been doing more recently. Some of my reactions were mixed: at their best, those prints are these amazing collisions. Some of works in the exhibition though seemed akin to collages of the early twentieth century that had been presented in print form. While I would not object to taking any of them home with me (Ha! I wish!) I did feel that there were repetitions, and sometimes I didn’t know what to do with them.

A few years ago, while I was looking for a housemate, I met a girl studying printmaking at RMIT. She was surprised by my enthusiasm for the print process—and it’s true that I love prints. Etchings, lithographs, silkscreen, woodcuts. They all fascinate me. The smoothness and seeming simplicity attract me.

Recently a couple of chapbooks came my way. See below for a review.

etherdome press, run by Elizabeth Robinson from Boulder, Colorado and Colleen Lookingbill from San Francisco, California produces chapbooks featuring the work of poets who have not previously published a book or chapbook. Two titles for 2008 are Anne Heide’s Specimen, Specimens and Renata Ewing’s double-bill flip-chapbook (start from either end) Somewhere Near West of Ideal and Frankenstein Poems. Chapbooks often work as a testing ground for material, and both these books seem to fit that mode. etherdome's productions are simple yet attractive.

Anne Heide lives in Denver and edits the poetry journal CAB/NET. In her chapbook Specimen, Specimens she presents pointillistic poems—the presentation of some of the verse in this collection echoes this approach to language such as the enigmatic first series of poems, such as the in the opening lines of “Specimen”:

Finger stuck in the sky          if there is nothing for me here

to capture, there is nothing       for me here.

From these relatively structured lines, Heide’s verse seem to break down into parts and singular utterances, such as:

   A bloom                        pours
 
out of the sound         I’d spoken.
 
 A little tragedy.            A fringe on the end of it. 

 An upright               recognition.

(Apologies for the imperfect formatting...)

Evocative as this verse can be, it is also difficult to grasp at moments: such that it is difficult to ascertain if the poet intends the opening seven pages a single poem or a series. There are nice effects achieved in these pages, but this seems to be a poetry in the realm of Gertrude Stein: these words collide to make meaning; I can’t help but feel that this meaning is abstracted. Fringed tragedy, upright recognition: sometimes these abstractions leaving little for the reader to grasp.

In the second series of poems, “Specimens” Heine’s working method is contracted into smaller spaces, so concise it becomes elliptical. Small boxes of justified text, dated as if diary entries, lie alongside more traditional poems. The dated texts strike me as somewhat more successful, if only because they seem distillations of emotional information. Phrases such as “Out from my mouth is a map I’ve/ drawn hoarsely, split in half” create feeling, and Heine’s craft is obvious —but I do wish there were something concrete here to hold on to. Without an anchor, they seem ephemeral.


Renata Ewing’s poems create narratives: her Frankstein Poems draw on Mary Shelley’s work, while Somewhere Near West of Ideal draws on her family heritage to create a sonnet sequence. While overall the Frankenstein poems are a more successful collection, Somewhere Near West of Ideal contains the very good poem “New Year 2007” which opens

Undetected, he slipped back to white wine.
But when the malignant nodule lurking
like an alien egg beneath his skin
was found, he launched into full-time boozing.

Here Ewing is not so intent on perfect adherence to the sonnet form she has chosen (Shakespearean), and her half-rhymes contribute to the cohesion of the whole. The mixture of medical terminology, colloquial language and the sense of the “alien” that we feel about disease is beautifully balanced here.

In the other poems of Somewhere Near West of Ideal, Ewing is not so successful. I sense that in her adherence to the iambic pentameter and rhyme scheme of the sonnet, she cannot loosen up sufficiently, and a series of end-stopped lines undermine the effect. Not surprisingly, she doesn’t tap into the same emotional intensity when writing of her more distant relatives as when she addresses her father, whose memory the collection is dedicated to.

In Frankenstein Poems she is more successful, hopping into the narrative of Frankenstein, writing from the voices of the stories, writing outward to Mary Shelley and including a portrait of Shelley in Geneva. Her forms range from tight 3-syllable line structures to dense longer lines, and the subject matter of Shelley’s novel seems to provide her with a freedom not evident in many of the poems of the other collection included here. In “Creature to Justine (at the gallows)” she finds a slower speed in a string of single syllable words, “Twelve thing tones the church clock strikes, death’s flat chords” while in “Elizabeth” the pace quickens, with words broken over lines:

To succeed
at ambi
tion or e
vil? Of which
am I ca
pable?

The series ends with the best of all, her “Creature (alone in the Arctic) who tells us “I hunger/ hunger, still.” These poems display Ewing’s potential, and do leave the reader interested in seeing more.

It’s been a busy week—between classes I’ve been to see a couple of authors speak and read from their work.

The first event was the Lannan reading at Georgetown on Tuesday night. Poets Laura Moriarty and Elizabeth Robinson first participated in a seminar discussing poetics with the theme of “Serial: Open Forms” and then read from their work later the same evening. Seriality was a well-chosen topic—I felt it allowed a lot of scope to discuss the work both poets were doing. Elizabeth Robinson's most recent books are Under that Silky Roof and Apostrophe. Laura Moriarty's A Semblance: Selected and New Poems 1975-2007 is just out.

In discussing poetics, I was struck by the moment that Elizabeth Robinson reported that losing control over the medium of poetry had turned out to be one of the most useful things to happen to her in the development of her writing. I’ve been thinking that through—thinking how that moment of lost control is followed by a moment of reformulation. A new solution has to be found. Robinson talked about the series as an attractive form: she used a lot of terms borrowed from music, and I could see how the serial format becomes linked to a modern conception of the theme and variations format, where the metamorphosis is constant: the material revisited is not necessarily the original form of the theme, but each previous reincarnation/reinterpretation of the original material. As such, it really is an open form that creates and reinterprets points of return.

Laura Moriarty opened her discussion with a quote from Billie Holiday: “I do a lot of travelling with my voice” and then explored the theme of community. In thinking through community, one of her major points of reference was the poet Jack Spicer—who also worked in serial forms, and developed his own theories of seriality. Later at the reading, she read a work that specifically engaged with Spicer and his neighbourhood.

Moriarty was talking about a quite specific community of poets—larger those in the Bay Area around San Francisco. In 2003 when I was visiting San Francisco I got to view a little slice of this community in action.

In thinking through this idea of community, and how it relates to poetics, Moriarty talked about the new book she has just finished, A tonalist - which is also the name of a blog she writes.. Again, a term borrowed from music. (Are we all indebted to music?) She described this work as a long, discursive poem, in which she writes in conversation with the community she I part of—writing about and reviewing the work of others within her community over the course of the poem.

The open discussion following these introductions by the poets really focussed on community, and what it means to participate in a living poetic community. Engagement with other poets, production of chapbooks, running of readings—all of those things.

The reading that followed was in many ways exemplary of these poetics—although I wonder if poetics always in some way describe an unattainable ideal. There must be something to strive for in order for each new poem to have a point, and each poem surely falls a little short—and perhaps in those gaps creates the moments of interest (or, potentially, frustration). I find the Lannan series fascinating, as its something of an open discussion.

On Wednesday Nadeem Aslam, the author of Season of the Rainbirds and Maps for Lost Lovers, spoke as part of the Georgetown Writers series that David Gewanter has put together. He read from his new novel The Wasted Vigil, which will be published on 2 September by Knopf in the US, and Faber & Faber in the UK. This latest novel is set in Afghanistan: Aslam grew up in a family of journalists, and was born and lived for fourteen years in Pakistan. During this time, he said, it was impossible to remain unaware of Afghanistan, during the period of the Soviet invasion. When he was fourteen his family moved to England, where he has been based ever since.

The sections of the new novel he read were packed with sensory information—Gewanter described in Maps for Lost Lovers a “wild imaginative energy” going on amid the story of ethnic relations and immigrant relations in Britain. That same energy was apparent in The Wasted Vigil—I felt almost saturated in this rich language, which, amid the appeal to the sense, wound in history and politics. I’ve wanted to read Maps for Lost Lovers for some time, and this reading has spurred me on in my determination to do so.

Aslam described living with an awareness from a young age that he was always going to be a writer—at the same time, the move to the UK had an impact upon that. Having grown up speaking Urdu, he now learned English—and in school he did better in the sciences which relied less on having perfect English skills, which he was still developing. He ended up in University, reading sciences when one day he had realised that now his English was good enough to write—and that “if I wanted to write, I could drop out”—which he did.

Answering questions following his reading, Aslam described a fascination process whereby he writes the story and then consults the repository of notebooks he has kept over the last several years, to see if he can insert the material he has gathered in those notebooks—images, occurrences—into the story.

He describes himself as quite compulsive—he says he spends 15 hours a day working on his writing: not just the act of writing itself, but the reading and thinking and problem solving that goes on around writing. He reads Urdu everyday still—talking about how this feeds into his craft in English he said that he doesn’t just have the 26 letters of the English alphabet—but he has a larger alphabet available to him, a larger conception of language.

He has had the idea for The Wasted Vigil in mind for a long time—in fact, after he finished his first novel, he tossed a coin to decide if he would work on Maps for Lost Lovers or The Wasted Vigil next. I love that chance can still play a large part in the production of art.

I expect over the coming months new corners of the library will get to be quite familiar. I’m glad I’ve started to isolate the work I’m interested in for my final projects so early in the semester—I can chip away at those essays as I go from now, trying to figure out how I’m going to move around the texts I’m interested in. I was surprised when I went into the library that the Maria Edgeworth section was so small. It seems people are only starting to get interested in her now.

After spending this morning completing my list of world Independence Days, and their equivalent celebrations, I found that the initial information I’d found on Nepal’s national holiday was wrong, and this in fact took place yesterday, on 19 February. With any luck, now that I’ve got it sorted, delay in posting should be minimal from now on.

Speaking of the Independence Day Project, I’m looking hard for a poem by a poet from Brunei. It’s proving to be my most difficult search so far. (That said, initially I thought from searching on the internet that finding a good translation of a good Nepali poet was going to be difficult—and then I found a beautiful anthology.) I’m hoping that, as time goes on, some more people might get involved and send suggestions. Or am I in dreamland?

I sometimes am amazed that I’ve found time to keep juggling all these things—but at the moment all the balls are still staying up in the air. It makes me think of a juggler I used to know, Brian, who was studying at NICA. He was practising juggling seven balls when I met him. One falls, they all fall.

Not that I’m anticipating a crash! I have a lot of practice at this.

I have a few other interesting bits to catch up on here, but I think they might have to wait a few days—I’ve seen three very interesting writers speak this week.

I wanted, too, as a kind of reminder to myself to record the list I made at the start of this year as to the things I wanted to get done this year. I make these lists every year, and there are always a few that fall by the wayside, but a lot of things that I manage to fit in. This year’s list is as follows:

• Apply for PhD Programs
• Write 20 poems
• Give 4 conference papers
• Visit 10 or more states in the US
• Go rock climbing
• Blog at least once a week
• Visit all the Smithsonian museums
• Take dance lessons again
• Start taking photographs again
• Cook more

Obviously some of these are more prosaic than others (yes, on the day-to-day front, I’ve been cooking a lot. And glad of it too.) Overall, though, it seems like a list that is fairly rounded—it encompasses all the types of things I love. And I’m pleased to say, since the start of the year I’ve written about 5 poems—they’re not all finished (far from it) but they all have something happening in them. I’m looking forward to some time to work through them. Time? I’ll find it someday, somewhere.

I'm giving two conference papers in March (one, as already mentioned, at the University of Virginia, the second at the University of Rhode Island) and then I'll wait until next semester - I'll probably try to do one in then. I've been chipping away at most of these things...

I had a paper accepted for a conference at University of Virginia - UVA is a great university, so I feel like this is a great opportunity. The conference is on 13-14 March, so I'd better get cracking and write a new version of this paper soon - most likely that'll happen over Spring Break. The paper is, broadly, on intersections between "thing theory" and travel theory. (Yes, I think the first has a preposterous enough title to warrant the would-be air-quotes-on-the-page.) I wrote about Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland at the end of last year - for this paper I'll be cutting that in half, and adding a little comparison to how Samuel Johnson's traveller compares to Bruce Chatwin's in The Songlines. Yes, I realise that sounds a little crazy, but I have ideas...

Speaking of Spring Break, I was having a Spring Break breakdown over the weekend - trying to decide where on earth to go. I was dreaming of New Mexico and El Paso, Texas, but it's just not going to happen. It's too extravagant - and there are two conferences I'm going to in March, so I'll need to save a little to get to both of these. Instead it looks like it will be West Virginia: Harper's Ferry, which is very pretty. I'm thinking however of hiring a car for a few days, and driving around West Virginia a little bit - I found a list of ghost towns in the state, and thought that could be interesting. Hopefully a plan will crystallise in the next few days...

I have been busy (as ever) lately—hopping from one thing to the next, and then studying in between. A few highlights:

Last week, Scott Heath, a member of the English department, spoke as part of the Georgetown Writers’ Series on performance poetry, slams and “the archive.” He also performed a number of poems. He explained a lot about the dynamics of slams in the US, and how there are distinct slam styles that vary from city to city. For instance: New York slam poetry has a different rhythm to Detroit slam. He’s been in DC for a few years, and is starting to catch on to the scene here.

I was interested to confirm that the saying that I’ve heard in Australia is definitely one that comes from the US slam scene—“He tried to win with poetry.” Page poetry of course isn’t likely to win the day: a slam is a performance. In showing us what it’s all about—and he did preface it with the disclaimer that he hadn’t slammed in a few years (though he previously participated in National teams)—Heath gave examples of the types of moves—almost a choreography, or perhaps something that reinvents the movements of Elizabethan oratorical handbooks—the slam poet makes, and a number of times he sang. Apparently singing (provided you can do it well) is always a crowd pleaser.

Slams here—the big ones at least—sound like they’re a lot stricter on the rules. Slams I’ve been to in Melbourne felt like glorified open mike events, and as the judging was always based on audience response, it was always the poems about sex or football that won. (What can I say? Even in a poetry crowd, we’re pretty predictable!) In the US, the rules are enforced: a strict 3 minutes time limit. There are five judges picked from whoever in the audience volunteers, and all the slam poets can vet the judges, to ensure there are no friends or enemies on the panel. Also, the poetry is a lot more sophisticated than poetry I’ve heard at slams in Australia. It really is text that’s designed for performance, and it tackles a range of issues. Like in hip-hop, there are some amazing rhythms built into the language. I’m hoping I’ll get to go to a high level slam event sometime while I’m here.

Heath also talked about some collaborative work he’s doing with a musician in recording his poetry. What fascinated me was that he referred to this as “the archive”—perhaps because he simply didn’t have a clear idea of who the eventual audience for this work was going to be. It reminded me of conversations I used to have at the conservatorium with the other composers. Adrian Watkins, who was then recording and performing under the moniker of White Sirens, said that for him the recording was the end point his musical endeavour. Performance was great, but ultimately, what he wanted was this immutable product, the CD. At that time I was working quite a bit with electro-acoustic music, but what interested me the most was the intersection between a pre-meditated electronic backdrop and a live performer: and the experience of that as a live event. I have recordings of the performances, but the problem with recordings is that they flatten space. If I go back to music, space will be the major thing I want to explore. I’m hoping to ask Scott about this notion of the archive—I may report back.

On Saturday morning, Helen Hughes (a fellow Australian in DC—my own kind!) and I went to see an exhibition at the Kennedy Center: Japan! Culture and Hyper-Culture. It was fascinating: we saw three installations, as well as a few pieces in the foyer to the center.

The first installation we saw was Reiko Sudo’s work of giant suspended textile fish. (I have to admit, when I first saw them their shape reminded me of cannons) and, in a little room behind these, there was a projection of a fish pond on the ground. Some people walked through the fish pond—after all, it was only coloured light—but I was struck how so many people, myself included, skirted the edge of the pond.

Next we saw Yayoi Kusama’s installations Day and Night: the first, Day, was a room painted yellow with black spots everywhere, and large, amorphous balloons suspended from the ceiling, and odd, blobby shapes emerging from the floor. The second, Night, was the reverse of this: black walls and yellow spots. It was interesting to see how much my mood changed between the two rooms. (I don’t think it was just the claustrophobia caused by the large number of people in the Night room.)

Between these two rooms was a work by Tadao Ando: Four Cubes to Contemplate Our Environment, consisting of glass cubes covered in words (Water, Rubbish, CO2, and Future?) filled with different things: empty plastic water bottles, aluminium cans crushed into blocks and stacked, a video projected on the ground and—emptiness. There was something wonderful in circling all these.

Saturday night saw me at Politics and Prose bookshop, where Anne Enright, author of last year’s Booker Prize winner The Gathering, was speaking. It took me a while to find my way to the shop, as I hadn’t ventured that far up Connecticut before, but I’m glad I braved it. Enright read from her book for about half and hour and then answered a lot of questions. I think she’s still recovering from her newfound fame: her publishers initially published a run of 8000 copies of The Gathering. Since she won the Booker (which of course prompted a reprinting) the book has sold over 230,000 copies.

It was a convivial event, and I have a copy of the book now, which I hope I will eventually get to read (oh… time) although not a lot stayed with me from the question time—one woman made the comment that when she read a book with such beautiful prose she always despaired of writing herself. Enright responded that writers don’t write these books, or not straight away. First they write 17 books, starting with a terrible one, and getting increasingly better. Something to hold onto. I got a feel for her humor (dark, Irish) and I look forward to reading her work. I have to admit that hearing prose read is usually a frustrating experience for me. I’m so used to the compactness of poetry, that when I hear prose I want to slash it and find the one page poem. Brutal.

Nonetheless, I love to sit down and read. I played hooky from my study on Friday night and spend the whole evening reading Curtis Sittenfeld’s second book—I had hoped to interview her on Tuesday, but it’s not happening. Despite the fact that the interview is not-to-be, I have to admit I enjoyed the book, although The Man of My Dreams has got to be the worst title on earth! There were a lot of things to like about the book—a lot of crispness, and a real feel for the way a character develops—but I did feel, in finishing, that it was a book that made a point.

I feel like I’m starting to find a balance in which I can get a little poetry written, and also read and think through the type of work I'm doing for classes. Best of all, I feel like I’m already starting to hone my paper topic for one of my final essays for the semester, even though it won’t be due until May or so.

I've been getting really interested in Maria Edgeworth, especially after reading Ennui, which I feel is a less clean novel that Belinda, but also a much more interesting one. I think one of the reasons for this much be that, with Maria Edgeworth’s own interest in her own Irish heritage, her Irish novels have something at stake. Ennui turns on a weird plot twist—one that shouldn’t work (two babies switched at birth) but does, because of the questions it raises about class and nationality, and how these identities are formed. At the moment I’m trying to tease out what position the only Scots character, Mr McLeod, plays in the text. From there I want to start looking at letters, at literacy and both the naming and renaming that occurs in the novel, but also the specifically French names and motifs that occur. So, I feel that Maria Edgeworth and I will be spending some time together over the coming months. Best of all (well, best of all to a nerd like me) is the fact that I think a lot of my research and thinking will tie nicely into the things I want to think through for my thesis, starting in September, on nineteenth century British representations of Australia, and their relationship to national identity.

Spring break is creeping up on me, and I’m starting to think I’m just not going to make it to Louisiana. (Sad—I just haven’t lined it up early enough. Perhaps it can still happen a little later in the year.) So, I’m thinking of finding somewhere a little closer, and setting off for a few days by myself.

I’ve been thinking through poems a lot—partly because I’ve been studying poems in my Modern & Contemporary Poetry & Poetics subject, and also more generally because I’m trying to make a little time for it each week. I’ve been asking David Gewanter to give me assignments—strictures—so I sit down and write something each week. Even if they begin as an exercise, of course I end up getting absorbed and spending some real time on it. Today I got a chance to sit down and look through some recent pieces of work, and I feel like he talked so concretely about the work each poem was doing. There was something so refreshing about it. It made me want to break apart my poems—break apart language—and get somewhere new. I feel that I’ve had an overwhelming schedule lately, so it was nice to sit down and think about this all in a concentrated way. Also, I feel that over Christmas I finished (for perhaps the eighth time) a manuscript, and now I feel like I’m casting about, trying to see what sticks in terms of new subjects. Some of the things I’ve been playing with for a long time—the Hansel and Gretel poems—could end up being pretty drastically re-formed. There’s something lovely in this.

I’ve managed to keep Sunday a complete blank for now. I’m still wondering if I can get myself out of town for the day—someplace not too far away, but distinctly non-DC. Fingers crossed.

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.

Last week Ammiel Alcalay, the current holder of the Lannan Chair in Poetics at Georgetown, gave a reading as part of the Lannan series - I attended this, as well as the seminar that proceeded it. It was a fascinating evening (albeit a bit hectic for me - as in between attending these, I had to run back to the library where I was holding office hours for my students) and one thing that emerged for me was the generosity of Alcalay.

To begin the seminar discussion, he read one of his poems from his book From the Warring Factions, a work that is dedicated to the memory of Srebrenica, and that is made up of collage - of the bringing together of fragments of found texts (from the Aeneid to speeches by Dick Cheney): this is prat of what he described as a long term project thinking through how to deal with documents. Having written a prior book that opened a space between the documentary and the created, but placing a narrator to create an intentional discrepancy, when he came to write From the Warring Factions he felt that the only way to write the book was if all the text were appropriated. The result is a polyphonic work that echoes not merely the conflict in Balkans, but that can be read in reference to other conflicts. The reading of this poem, and discussion of his method produced an interesting discussion in the seminar, and it left me wondering if in some ways the merit of Alcalay's working method lies in a certain instability in his text: that the polyphony could shift over time, and the amassed language be transferred, transformed for the reader.

Alcalay has done a lot of translating - he is probably best known as the translator of Semezdin Mehmedinović's Sarajevo Blues. During the seminar, he spoke about his involvement in translation (and the New York Translation Collective) and during the reading he read works by other writers he has translated, reading both poetry and prose.

He's also written essays, and I'm hoping to find some time to read some of these prose pieces in the coming weeks - while he's at Georgetown, I'm going to set up an interview with him too (check back... it may take some time, but it will happen) - but I want to spend some more time reading him, and the poets he has translated before I get to that stage.

It's got me thinking about lots of different things - as usual. Ways of experimenting with my own writing, subject matter, the importance of translation... The discovery of a new poet is a fascinating moment.

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.