the red room

Winter has settled into Wellington. I am still walking into town most mornings but I often resemble an eskimo and I’m sometimes stiff and cold by the time I arrive. I’ve been working from the central library with its high ceilings and glass walls (and easy access to oh-s0-trashy magazines). It is an open and airy space, warm and inhabited, and I look out over Civic Square. My office at university feels isolated. My head is too loud in that space. Life has been loud recently as well. I went to visit my friend and fellow poet, Joan, down in Takaka, have had stage one marking to finish and I am running two creative writing workshops next week for Massey in Palmerston North. Tomorrow I have to go to a funeral.

Above is a found poem on the lighthouse at the tip of the Mirimar Peninsula that my friend and I discovered while scouting for graffiti. Yes, we were walking on the dangerous causeway. I am five months into my doctorate and last week I submitted a ten thousand word essay on Christian Bök’s book Crystallography (1994) and twenty pages of new poetry to my supervisors. I have to admit to a fan-girl crush on Bök. His poetry is precise and constructed and he has interesting theoretical reasons for his work. At the moment some of my poetry could be accused of riffing his style but I see that as part of the learning process. I’ve had to redraft my thesis proposal (for the confirmation at the beginning of next year) because my topic, as expected, changed its focus once I started the actual analysis. For those dear geeks out there who want to know, this is my current research question,

“Is a new ecocritical examination valuable to reading of selected poems by Robert Hass, Hone Tuwhare and Christian Bök? Specifically, using a new ecocritical approach that considers “nature” to be both human and nonhuman and does not have a “green” objective, in what ways do selected works of poets Robert Hass, Hone Tuwhare and Christian Bök break down the traditional conceptual division between human and nonhuman and reconceptualise nature? Can their work be considered a new nature writing?”

It is hard to say how my work is progressing in terms of quality (that is really for my supervisors to judge) but I can say that the doctorate has transformed my writing practice. It took five months to relax into regular writing and develop an agreement with myself to write when I feel ready (I don’t like the word inspired because it suggests an outside actor and I see the feeling as a combination of being rested, focused and knowing where I want the poem to go) and to trust that those times of readiness will arise. There are few things I dislike more than trying to force out a poem.

That doesn’t mean that the process of writing hasn’t included hard work and frustration. A few weeks ago I spent five plus hours writing a poem but, at the end of the day, I only kept five lines. Five lines! The next day the poem came together into something that I really like which wouldn’t have happened if I’d beaten myself up for being unproductive. Another example is the poem I am writing at the moment about my relationship with my father. It is about two and a half pages (and will probably end up around six) and I’ve been working on it for the last three or four weeks. It has been this length for some time even though I am putting a lot of time into editing and being patient. While it doesn’t get much longer it is becoming clearer; it is revealing itself.

I think one of my previous posts talked about trust and I suppose I am discussing it again because trust seems an essential part of being a successful writer. When I say successful I don’t only mean producing quality poems but enjoying the experience of writing. You have to enjoy your life and be proud of your work. This is the main reason I agreed to give a reading tonight at the launch of the journal Hue & Cry. I am going to read The Holiday, the long narrative poem that was published earlier this year in Sport. It will take me around fifteen minutes to read. I am introverted and shy by nature which means that I will avoid speaking in front of large groups (by large I mean more than two people) with the same zeal that I avoid dental work and internal examinations. But at some point I have to publicly own my work and say, hey, this is worthwhile.