Masters of Creative Writing - Update

Well, I am about three weeks into my MA program and so far so good. It's been pretty intense. It's not so much been to do with external pressure from supervisors and so forth, but more the kind of pressure that my fellow students and I are putting on ourselves in the creative sense.

The aim of the year is to write a book of a 'publishable standard', which you know, well, that's pretty alarming. At the moment I am sleeping very restlessly, the way you can do when you start a new job. I head into fitful rest with lines of poetry, my own and others, running through my head and I wake to the same kind of thing, thinking 'oh, maybe I can change that line like THIS'. If it happens at night I have to get up and write it down, or it'll be gone come dawn.

I'm realising more and more what a difficult thing it is to produce quality art. Art that seems good to you very rarely seems good to others, or at least not in the way that you would hope it to impact the person reading or viewing it. You can have a magnificent, life altering vision in your head of how you want it to look and sound on paper but the execution of that is so very very difficult!

And how to portray all the nuances of life?! How to show the complexity of the thing that you want to express without making it seem like a contrived load of shit? And how to CHOOSE what to write about? And then HOW to actually write about that thing? !!?!?!?sdksljeih olasindfl nln 03-48690wu@#%$@#%$ !!!

Over the last few days I have been cursing myself for not having a better vocabulary and an extra 20 points on my IQ and have come to understand that I am at the very bottom of a huge creative mountain and that only years and years of hard work are going to get me to a place in which I feel I am reaching my potential. And that's O.K.

There are two possibilities at the moment for what I'd like my thesis / book to be about. 1) some kind of question about death and memory written by turning my dead relatives into symbiotic robot / human people who come back from a special futuristic governmental unit and are changed in good and not so good ways. haha. I'm serious though. And 2) I more straightforward collection of my poetry about observations of life / beauty / sadness, you know the drill.

Anywhooo, we shall see.

Girl Walking

She had a heart
of glass
inside it burned
the smallest
flame and

around that
flame orbited
a caravan of
dark things;

dogs without
eyes and

newborn babies
with teeth or

girls just walking
walking.

She walked along the
promenades and
lips
of beautiful places
as though
she
didn't guide
herself -

eyes always on
another
dark horizon.

And her eyes were
the colour of
milk.

Three

I don't know why
but
I imagined us,

three

dancing in
soft triangles
on the lawn.

Girls with
the chanting
rain

coming down like
jewellery
from the Honeymoon
sky.

We laughed
silent in the roaring
sheaves

long haired

wet skinned

bright phantoms of the
mind.

Conversation

It's all been locked by some incantation you and I made years ago. And now we can't remember. The lawn the hall our table our common places they're all sewn up. We feel fooled by our dark selves. We fling words at the backs of moving walls. Even talking doesn't seem to help. It seems to make things worse. In the hallway our words meet and spark and disappear but they haven't gone. In the air hang silent tumblers of language, new worlds with stronger locks. We'll never make the keys because lets face it, we just haven't got that kind of time. So we play scrabble by the fire each word feigning innocence while we flip our heads and laugh. We just imagined it! Life's so ..... ? so .... quaint?! But we didn't but it's not. We've lost the way and neither of us left red ribbons on the branches of gossipy trees. We sit at the table where the vast crucified web of conversations stretch and bounce between us, flinging your great-grandmothers teapot about. It's ringing like a telephone - and we don't answer.

After The Rain

The lavender sends
soft satellites out into
the botanical hum,
they orbit the
garden bobbing
on invisible
currents of heat
three feet off the
ground,
testing the days fabric
and
all around the bees
and cicada
charge summers
engine;
in their small chests
fibrous
cogs and wheels
ruffle furiously ....
at work consuming
and
regenerating the
hot cells of summers
dream.

You've Gotta Pick Your Battles

Who would've thought that mowing the lawn could yield so many life lessons.

Life lesson #1 : you can't mow every single little nook and cranny of the garden, if you try you'll go mad attempting to fit a huge propeller protected by a massive round steel guard into tiny right angles and 10cm circular spaces of long wavy show-offy grass. I kept envisioning a tiny little mower on a stick with a changeable head, like those sanders you see on informercials. OCD dream come true. Now that night has fallen and I am sitting here at the kitchen table having eaten my dinner, I still feel spiteful toward those grasses.

Life lesson #2 : doing work on and around the land is severely satisfying. It was so sunny today and all the birds were out. I saw a Kereru fly over head to the neighbour's Puriri tree. I saw a two Californian Quail cruising along in front of the bank, like little bowling pins. Once I'd finished mowing I looked out over my dominion, a little only child she-lord, and felt so satisfied by the neat rows of mown grass.

Life lesson #3 : if the mower weighs X and you way Y and and X's value happens to be a lot more than Y's, and Y tries to hang X over a hill to cut a bunch of long annoyingly wavy grass, the chances are Y will end up flying over X's handle bars, down into a dark bush and getting up to find a huge spider web wrapped around face. And then Y runs around screaming etc and X is lying with blades cutting furiously into thin air and Y's father Y comes out and says why are you down the bank with the mower ...... so yeah.

Life lesson #4 : getting hot is awesome because then you get to get cold again. Mowing in the sun, sweating, rolling down a hill, screaming, more mowing, followed by a swim and two ice cold beers. It's the yin yang effect baby; dynamic systems. The Korean's and Japanese have it so right with their bath houses, steam rooms, saunas and hot pools along side icy cold dipping pools.

Life lesson #5 : you get to smell the true essential smells of many of the plants in your garden when you mow because you accidentally (some times on purpose) mow over parts (or whole) of the plants and the heat of the mower and the hot summer air seems to diffuse these scents. piney, camphory, sweet, sagey etc.

Tomorrow I plan to help dad cut and move a fallen Lucitanica Pine for firewood ...... what deep / transcendental experiences await me?

The Checks - Candyman Shimmer (official music video)

have been obsessed with this Checks tune for a good while now!! Love love love it.

An Empty Room

Ramblings from last year ....
I am home again, again. It feels different every time. Outside tonight it is darkening. I have in front of me a glass of red wine, some blood red tulips sit on my desk. An old painting of some quietly pink orchids sits behind them. In the living room plays Dadawa, world music at it's best, at it's most soul opening. Sadly, it makes me want to take acid.

Here I am, sitting in another room, in another house, on another part of the earth. It doesn't really matter where the room is, I always feel as equally at home and not at home, as familiar and as alien.

My friend Mike wrote a poem about a lone person standing in a room which is empty. I imagine that the room is made of wood, wooden floors and walls painted white, without any decorations at all. Like Jackson Pollock's house on Long Island. But this one, the one in Mike's poem as imagined by me, looks over the ocean. Sits up on a hill and I imagine the lone person, whose face I never see because their back is always turned to me, looks out an open window to the ocean. And I imagine this person, this way, forever, in this empty room.

I think it says something about me, about the way I think. I can feel the wind coming into the house off of the ocean far below, a cold wind that channels in and touches all the empty places of the house. Moves the hair of the person standing at the window, who never moves. It's probably me, but it looks like Mike from where I am standing. I told Mike about this, and he said something which I hadn't pictured in my version of the poem. He said something about the room being furnished over time, with the things that you bring into your own life. I had imagined it coming from more of a zen point of view, as in not needing anything and in the essential truth of aloneness.

What he said gave me faith, because I think that the way I pictured his room, is the way that I picture myself. Alone. Eternally unmoving, unchanging, the wind making sure of it.

So, now that I am home again, I struggle to furnish the room of my life. I think about what I could possibly decorate it with, and nothing seems to feel right.

Masters of Creative Writing

I received the best possible news I could've hoped for late November just been. I've been writing, mainly poetry, since I was about 8 years old. It's always been something I've just kind of 'done', it's always come naturally for me and has been a great emotional aid in my life, especially during tumultuous times.

At the age of about 17 I became aware that one of New Zealand's most eminent poets, Bill Manhire (at that time his profile was still building toward the colossal form it takes on the New Zealand literary landscape presently) had created and was running a creative writing program at Victoria University in Wellington. Since then the mana of the course has grown and grown.

It's been something that I have often dreamed of as a kind of ultimate goal. It was a dream that sat somewhere on the outskirts of what I really thought I was capable of achieving, somewhere on a shelf along with traveling to the moon to look back at the earth and owning my own home in New Zealand, i.e; totally unattainable.

But what do you know, isn't life funny? I applied, and I got in! Dumbstruck, flabbergasted, discombobulated and rapturous don't even begin to describe what I felt when I opened my gmail account and saw the subject line from the IIML, "We are pleased to offer you a place in our program....". Talk about dreams do come true.

I think one of the biggest lessons I've learned from the whole experience, which is maybe not so much a lesson as an insight, is that I really do doubt myself and my talents. I am not saying I am superbly talented, but I do tend to undervalue myself. As soon as I had overcome the fully body shakes and desire to vomit upon reading my acceptance e-mail, I got to thinking and here's what I thought, "Well, If I got in, it can't be that hard to get into after all." My inner critic coming out in full force just to remind me that no matter what happens, I'm not that great. Thanks me.

So anyway, me, myself and I had a bit of a korero and I put ol' critic back in her place, which is outside in the swamp at night with all the outside lights off. I'm really proud to have gotten in, and I feel extremely lucky and thankful that I am someone who has a life where such a luxury is even possible. To spend so much on a year of post-grad study, to be able to afford it, to have a whole year to focus on nothing but something creative. I realise that not many have such an opportunity.

Thanks life.

One of the coolest things about the MACREW is the the IIML (International Institute of Modern Letters) is located in Glen Schaeffer House, a building which hangs on the edge of Mt. Victoria like an eagle's nest on a rocky outcrop of the Grand Canyon. The room in which we will hold our sessions is a huge glass cube looking out over the whole of Wellington Central and the harbour. Oh the bliss!!

In love with Choi Jeong Hwa

Watching the Auckland Art Gallery come into being has been a magical thing. As the months passed those who work in Central City were witness to the birth of this truly superb space which will surely become and remain a true part of the evolving heart of Auckland.

Not only is it visually stunning, it's also a feat of architecture; a space that offers scintillating newness, a space which is alive as it's various structures and levels interact with one another and a courageous design which seems to fly in the face of speculation that New Zealanders tend to doubt themselves in those crucial moments when bravery matters the most. It's a building which to me reflects how modern Aucklanders feel about themselves and their rapidly changing physical, social, cultural and emotional landscape. And if we take the gallery as a symbol of those things, the feelings must be good.

But the true Pièce de résistance of Toi o Tāmaki are Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa's two works; Flower Chandelier and Red. To have chosen two such playful and joyous sculptures says something of the team working at the gallery. They blow me away each and every day as I stroll my way to work, red especially. Complete adoration and thanks to the amazing team who've created such an incredible gallery, and to Mr. Hwa whose work inspires me to keep creating.

Korea fighting!