You should click on this altered image to enlarge it
and scroll around in it if you want to read the text.
Altered from a photo of the Wooster Group by Paula Court.
26.2.09
22.2.09
Pride History Group is launching their latest booklet, Out and About: Sydney's Lesbian Social Scene 1960s-1980s. Based on oral history - interviews with women who were part of the scene - and including many historic photographs, this booklet explores the bars, social groups, dances and parties frequented by Sydney lesbians from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Saturday 28th February at 2pm
Fitzroy Room, Rex Centre,
58a Macleay St, Kings Cross
(entry off Fitzroy Gardens) near the fountain
phone for directions if you get lost : 0409446482
rsvp: phg@unwired.com.au by Thursday 26th February 2009
20.2.09
10.2.09
Some poems of mine are included in new editions of Roger Humes’ Other Voices International Project
Anny Ballardini’s Poet's Corner - Fieralingue
And at last, and only three and a half months late,
Jacket Issue 36 is complete and ready to read.
cleaning up - from the fridge door -
3.2.09
It was the mid-fifties - I suppose it could have been Fantasia or something by Charlie Chaplin, films I saw around the same time, but I’ve always remembered (or thought) that the first film I ever saw was Jedda, in Toowoomba, Queensland, with my parents and, probably, although I can’t recall them being there, my older sister and brother. The cinema (was it ‘The Empire’ or ‘The Strand’?) was packed and so our seats were in the front stalls, close to what seemed an absolutely gigantic picture screen to a seven year old child. I was mesmerised and, terrified. I don’t think the system of rating films deemed suitable to audience age had yet been considered in Australia. Perhaps I’ve remembered it as my ‘first film’ because it was such an overwhelming and powerful film and it was in full brand-new technicolour too.
Urban Cinefile explains the film : “Determined to tell a story that could be told only in Australia by Australians, Charles Chauvel made Jedda, the first Australian feature film to use Aboriginal actors in the lead roles and the first to be filmed in colour.
Set in the Northern Territory, it is the tragic story of a young Aboriginal girl of the Arrente tribe, adopted by a white woman, Sarah McCann, as a surrogate for her own baby who has died. She names the baby Jedda after a wild bird and raises her as a white child, isolating her from Aboriginal contact.
But when Marbuck, an Aboriginal man seeking work arrives on the station, Jedda is fascinated by him. Marbuck takes the half-willing teenage girl as his captive, returning to his tribal lands, only to find he is rejected by his tribe for breaking the marriage traditions.
The two are hounded from the tribe and chased by the men from Jedda's home station, until Marbuck is driven mad, and falls over a cliff to his death, together with Jedda.”
Some years ago, the dvd release of Jedda in 2004, prompted journalist Paul Kalina to reassess the film in an article in The Age Newspaper.
Earlier this week the Australian national public radio broadcast a
re-engagement with Jedda on the indigenous program AWAYE! with plenty of fascinating, insightful commentary about the making of the film and the thoughts, then and now, of the Aboriginal actors involved in the production and the prevailing societal attitudes to Aboriginal people around that time. Listening to the program, I remembered the powerful effect the film had on me as a very young girl, and I thought about how extraordinary change - tinged of course with a kind of informed and reflective plus ça change - can be, experientially, over half a century. Everything has changed - Jedda the film is almost a historical curiosity, but a formidable one.
31.1.09
24.1.09
In mid-December I read some poems into the telephone from my recently published book True Thoughts and was interviewed for Writers Radio by Cath Kenneally. To listen to the broadcast click here.
Cath Kenneally21.1.09
19.1.09
American Memories, Melbourne
(not quite after Hope Mirrlees)
I want a panorama
SOUTH - WEST
CACAO BLOOKER
GOG & MAGOG
green art deco bakelite in the national gallery
FITZROY (ST ASPEN SHIRAZ)
BRUNSWICK (SQUAWKING MAGPIE SAUVIGNON BLANC)
PARLIAMENTARY MUSEUM (HAZELGROVE PINOT NOIR)
creak chug creak chug creak chug under Princes Bridge on the Yarra
CASTLEMAINE ROCK
Greek woman tearing the gig posters from the lightpole
outside her son’s bar
Going down Madam ?
follow the commemorative brass plaques in the footpath
a golden mile must be almost two kilometres
ne rien faire walk slowly doing nothing
for approximately two hours
WARAKURNA ARTISTS at Alcaston Gallery in Fitzroy until Saturday
discover why Melbourne is called ‘marvellous’
a grey mouse running through green & purple wisteria vines
TIN BOX BUILDINGS
attached to creaking weatherboard cottages
the awful HARD art of the minimal
strikes here and
strikes again in Montréal, actually strikes TWICE in Montréal
at the Museum of Contemporary Art and at the Musée des Beaux Arts
too!
DUCRAY ICTYANE
créme émolliente hydratante blow wind blow
buy Magic Gloves at Dollarama
red wine and voodoo at RUBIS ROUGE
in the USA public toilets flush automatically which can be alarming
all announcers have Spanish accents
the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry is really realism
Ron Silliman’s VOG is Voice Over Guy, Voice Of God, Very Ordinary Glory
Vital Organs Grim …
on the SILVER STAR 91
from Philadelphia Pennysylvania to Richmond Virginia
(Dixie Hummingbirds, Cab Calloway, Ruth Brown, Amos Milburn)
the suitcase keys
are in
the alternative medicine pill bottle
GREAT DISMAL SWAMP
Henry ‘Box’ Brown
mailed himself to freedom
in a big box labelled ‘Dry Goods’ - from Virginia to Philadelphia in 1849
on the NORTHEAST REGIONAL 94
from Richmond Virginia to Washington District Columbia
(Elizabeth Cotten, Duke Ellington, Marvin Gaye)
innumerable Stars & Stripes innumerable
Famous American Female Poet :
‘What you might need to know is that you might not make it
But if you do, you might have needed an astrolabe
or a two-bit smile or smirk, this is a style
that could get you a cup of coffee’
AMERICAN coffee ??
old worms in the woodwork
old hooks on the hat rack
old bottomless cups depleted
TIPPING drives me crazy -
quoted price
+Value Added Tax
+15%
bring a pocket calculator
As Portentous As The Opening Chords Of A Big Bob Dylan Ballad
the prescience of the dead
Yours truly, Your paranormal host,
Adelaide
hooray at last here’s the panorama coming up now
discover all the charms of ELEGANT and CONTEMPORARY
melbourne
cross the west gate bridge for AMAZING city views
observe the yarra river's BUSTLING ACTIVITY
see queen victoria market, fitzroy gardens
and albert park, home to the australian formula one grand prix.
visit the HISTORIC shrine of remembrance
stroll along southbank's waterfront precinct
this city has it ALL - discover it for yourself
pour boire, merci, thank you, tip
taxi to lax
KOONS RUSCHA CHEECH the CHICANO
JaMaiCan LeMoNaDe woo you never know
HeY HeY VLaMinCK !
Maurice Vlaminck’s portrait in oilpaint of Guillaume Apollinaire
white women smiling into the air
Michael Jackson and his monkey
NO POETRY MEETING TODAY - EVERYONE IS WORKING
greasy screen at the mex internet café grill
too dangerous
to walk south
down the SAN DIEGO freeway
Almost Completely Finished With Pop Art Finally
call the paramedics
The quote from the ‘Famous American Female Poet’
is from Above The Leaders by Alice Notley (Veer Books, 2008)
17.1.09
Another year has begun and it's definitely time to begin it, so I've been sorting through some box files and folders and throwing out old clippings, photocopies, maps, pictures, postcards. Allow me a little personal indulgence - here, from the piles of files is a tiny sample from hundreds of bits and pieces. Remember, if you click on the images you can enlarge them. I'll start with a set of the card game 'Happy Families' I made, with my mother Jean, when I was seven years old. You can view the entire pack here. Clunkily cut cardboard, dribbly watercolour - I wasn't anywhere close to being even a 'budding' artist but there were hours of fun up ahead playing cards.
Little images or notes found or clipped or kept, like one of my father's military notebooks, or a scrap of paper, a ticket, a jigsaw piece, a label popped into a pocket, placed in a notebook and later saved in a box file :
click any of the images (except Her Grumpy Majesty) to enlarge them
16.1.09
Now now now
The Now now festival is on again this weekend.
For further information and tickets to events click here
12.1.09
Cover illustration by Julia Wolfson.Ekleksographia is an independent international poetry magazine edited, produced and published by Jesse Glass, Daniel Sendecki and a revolving panel of editors. The publication revolves completely around their efforts and therefore maintains a somewhat irregular publication schedule, averaging about 2 issues a year. Ekleksographia employs a 'revolving editor' system—the magazine retains a panel of editors, each of which edits one issue every so often.
Ekleksographia is published as an Ahadada Books cooperative publication. Editors and contributors are asked actively to contribute both their talents and their time to the publication.
Ekleksographia is an exercise in asymmetrical publishing, and is a shoe (or even two!) thrown at the spotlit shrug and yawn.
This issue was curated by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa. Jane's third book of poems, EXHIBIT C, has been published by Ahadada (autumn, 2008). Her other poetry books are Skin Museum (2006) and Aquiline (2007).
Contributors to Volume 1:
Frances Presley | Cyril Wong | Pam Brown | Michael Rothenberg
Cynthia Hogue | Joel Chace | Elisabeth Frost
Takako Arai (trans. Jeffrey Angles) | Alan Botsford | Harriet Tarlo
Samuel Day Wharton | Michael Crake
Yoko Danno | Kyong Mi Park (trans. Lianna Kushi) | Paul Hoover
Philip Rowland | William Allegrezza | Jane Joritz-Nakagawa
7.1.09
I am reading Loiterature, happily not an obsessively-linear book, by the only Australian member of OuLiPo, Ross Chambers, who is currently the Marvin Felheim Distinguished University Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan and is a Visiting Professor at Louisiana State University.
The cover image of ‘Loiterature’ is a detail from a photograph by Montague Glover
Montague Glover’s photographLoiterature's Chapter I Divided Attentions (On Being Dilatory) begins:
I’ve been giving up caffeine for years now, but a caffé latte steams at my elbow. Midsummer:
Wet heat drifts through the afternoon
like a campus dog, a fraternity ghost
waiting to stay home from football games
The arches are empty clear to the sky
These verses might have been written (or composed, or generated) only a few yards from where I sit, at the intersection of N. University and S. State in Ann Arbor, the suture point (in my personal myth of the city) where the campus meets the town. No campus dogs in evidence (expensive animals on leashes don’t qualify). Times change. When Frank O’Hara came to Ann Arbor in 1950 he was amused by the Midwestern candor of the cafeteria signs that read, bluntly, FOOD; today they’re more likely to read cappuccino, and it’s hard to find a cafeteria:
(la forme d’une ville
Change plus vite, hélas! que le coeur d’un mortel).
Sitting lazily at this much frequented intersection, I think about intersections and I think about belatedness, my regret for an Ann Arbor I never knew (and wouldn’t have liked), the stab of Baudelaire’s midline exclamation point at “hélas!”, the image of abstention - better still, of anticipated abstention - in “waiting to stay home from football games.” Being belated, one foot in 1950, the other in the 1990s, is (like abstaining and anticipating) a form of divided attention, the “distracted” attention Benjamin thought characteristic of modernity (was it Benjamin? I must remember to look it up). One foot in campus, one in town; one in 1950, one in 1994.....
Loiterature's back cover notes give a pretty good summary of the contents :
The fabric of the western literary tradition is not always predictable. In one wayward strand, waywardness itself is at work, delay becomes almost predictable, triviality is auspicious, and failure is cheerfully admired. This is loiterature. Loiterature is the first book to identify this strand, to follow its path through major works and genres, and to evaluate its literary significance.
By offering subtle resistance to the laws of "good social order," loiterly literature blurs the distinctions between innocent pleasure and harmless relaxation on the one hand, and not-so-innocent intent on the other. The result is covert social criticism that casts doubt on the values good citizens hold dear—values like discipline, organization, productivity, and, above all, work. It levels this criticism, however, under the guise of innocent wit or harmless entertainment. Loiterature distracts attention the way a street conjurer diverts us with his sleight of hand.If the pleasurable has critical potential, may not one of the functions of the critical be to produce pleasure? The ability to digress, Ross Chambers suggests, is at the heart of both, and loiterature’s digressive waywardness offers something to ponder for critics of culture as well as lovers of literature.
Read Laurence Porter’s review and a ‘preview’ of the book here
Books by Ross Chambers include The Writing of Melancholy, Facing It : AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author, and Room for Maneuver.
30.12.08
no velvet on the word
I’ve been reading ‘Dementia Blog’ by the Hawai’i based poet, academic and editor of Tinfish Press, Susan M. Schultz. We published an extract from the blog in issue 35 of Jacket magazine. The complete ‘Dementia Blog’ was recently published by Singing Horse Press.
*
Susan writes -
Dementia Blog was written over the course of six months during the worst of my mother’s dementia. In August 2006 she was still in her home; by January 2007 she was settled into an Alzheimer’s home. The blog, like all blogs, moves backwards from the present into the past. Because it moves back, the reader has no sense of cause and effect and often does not recognize what has happened until reading further back. This form struck me as appropriate to a meditation on memory and self-loss.
*
Coincidentally, and perhaps with some unintentional sense of precognition, six years ago in 2002-03, Susan and I collaborated by email on a poem called Amnesiac Recoveries, written for the Department Of Dislocated Memory for the web project International Corporation of Lost Structures. The poem engaged with daily life in Sydney and in Kane`ohe in the face of the then imminent invasion of Iraq by the USA, UK and Australia. It was also concerned, more loosely, with the role of social memory in those countries.
As Susan says, her blog entries about her mother’s dementia were made over six months in 2006-07. It is profoundly moving to read this book but she also sustains a unique thoughtfulness, a complex poetic perspective and a connection with the world-at-large via her children and her own vigilant awareness of the parallel gradual disintegration of the United States government and its involvement at war in Iraq.
Susan relates how her children, Sangha and Radhika, experience the displacement and uncertain memory of the adopted child -
I show Sangha photos of his aunts in Cambodia. He says he remembers the smaller woman on the left in the pink shirt. The significance of photographs in adoption narratives.Their sister was your birth mother, I tell him. She died. Those who remain to be photographed do not smile. Their faces are tired, foreheads creased. Speedboat on a river in Takeo province. Field beside the water. The sisters appear again. “You could not remember her,” I say; “you were a tiny baby.” Then let go. If he says he remembers, he does.
*
Susan’s poetry has always connected the culture of personal life and its context, the political world. Her concern with memory is a significant thread through earlier books. In 1999 she published a series of single cards in various colours that were extracts from a work called ‘Memoir’ which developed, the year after that, into the chapbook ‘memory cards (the happiness project)’, and then the following year, that chapbook combined with another sequence to become the book ‘Memory Cards & Adoption Papers’ (published by Potes & Poets Press in 2001). The first section of ‘Memory Cards & Adoption Papers’ is called ‘Mother’ and the book is dedicated to Susan’s father. ‘Adoption Papers’ is dedicated to Susan’s adopted Cambodian son, Sangha. There are often intensely personal paragraphs throughout 'Dementia Blog' that are reminiscent of her writing in general and there is a consistent self-conscious analysis of writing’s context-
Poetry or poetic prose. Sequence or unraveling of. Prose or text message. Forward, then back. The writing dances, a child beside the canal, its green water not yet inviting. Failure to thrive. Two of them died right after they came. She did not. Failure to fail to thrive is life. Life is a happy place.
#
To write about others without making of them stick, stock figures. The one who learns language, the other whose teeth sprout, the third who shepherds them to school. She who writes about them loves them, but in the writing loses feeling. Words are not to be touched, not here on the screen. There is no velvet on the word. It is dark and hard and composes itself letter by letter, the kind chiseled into lead or pixellated for your reading comfort. He laughed that I did not know “Pilates” as exercise, rather than Roman King.
*
The layered writing in 'Dementia Blog' slips between dualities like the sometimes childlike behaviour of a demented person and the experiences of an actual childhood. There are also diegetic moments that mimic the states of confusion that can accompany both memory loss and the writing process -
I don’t know how this section relates to the one that precedes and follows it
*
When she is clearly not going to be able to live there any more there is the problem of putting Susan's mother’s house up for sale . These entries are tacit and, for me, utterly poignant. Here are some extracts from that section -
The house. Read it as her autobiography: dark wood, crumbling wallpaper (dark again, checked squares of brown and white), the paintings (representational, a mill in the woods, some storm-tossed ships), the 1970s style modified shag carpet, parquet floors (dark), fireplaces (three of them), front and back yards needing to be mown. How did she come to this?
#
The “home”. Read it as biography. A porch outside the Country Lane, picnic bench, umbrella, a brightness next to the window. Outside inside. Remember your corridor by the décor. The artifice must present nature, or a loving intervention in it. What you remember shall comfort you and what you do not is simply not here. This sanctuary is not only for the birds.
#
…This is about the problem of what is private and what is public, what ought to be shared and what must be. The process is not fiction, but enactment. Easement. When the property is sold, it can no longer be taken as the story of her life, or of mine. Interpolated, perhaps. But the quotes have gone missing.
Concluding with -
There is an offer on her house, for it “as is.” The closed house is yours. The open one will not be.
*
At times there is a kind of intense exhaustion that leads to an informed, acerbic cynicism-
Better the sins of empathy than its lack. Key words in this text include: “privilege”, “gender”, “race”, “institutions”, “narcissism”. “Empathy” must not elide any of these terms, for fear of their erasure. I must feel empathy for my own kind, lest I bend categories, ignore my privilege. If emotion is itself a privilege (what hungry person has time for it?), then interrogate it. Critique, intellect, idiolect, locution, execution. The seven Chinese brothers were a perfect Adam Smith machine. One did the seeing, another the hearing, a third the crying, and the others were strong. When in doubt, drown your enemies in tears.
*
Towards the end of the book (which, because the posts read backwards in time, is actually towards the beginning of the blog, and is also why I placed the back cover image at the top of this blog) Susan writes a kind of ‘definitive’ entry -
None of this is new. Dementia is bricolage, is collage, is mixed-up syntax. It is nothing new. To describe it is to say nothing new. it cannot be analyzed, because its origins, and its ends, cannot be located. The maps are hanging from the laundry lines in a humid country; the ink that is their roads has dripped off the dark paper that had enclosed them.
*
One of the reasons I find this book so powerful is that over the past year I’ve spent every Thursday (except on the occasions I've been out of town) working with a group of elderly demented men and women at Mondeval Day Centre in Leura in the Blue Mountains just west of Sydney. At first, I was apprehensive about participating, thinking that my inexperience would be a disadvantage and, also, that I could possibly become depressed or saddened by working with people with dementia. Gradually though I became familiar with everyone and I adjusted to their personalities and abilities and to the situation as a whole and I am continuing with the task. Of course, I have experienced reflective moments when I’ve wondered about the usefulness of communicating with people who, for a variety of reasons and to varying degrees, have lost their memories. When phrases, stories and responses are so often repeated from week to week and, sometimes, from hour to hour; when someone has ‘the wanders’ and continually gets up and walks off somewhere and needs to be followed, walked with and brought back to the group, the things we do can seem so habitual (although, interestingly, never perfunctory) and perhaps futile. The outcome is, after all, predictable.
What has struck me is that loss of memory, and its associated deteriorations, is a far more sorrowful experience for a relative or a friend than it is for people who work with the ‘lost one’ and quite often or, mostly, not such a crisis for the ‘lost one’ herself.
Aspects of the emotional upset or devastation that can happen to relatives coping with the onset of dementia in family members were portrayed in the recent films Away from Her and The Savages. The day centre I work in provides respite for the carers of elderly people with dementia. No one lives on the premises - the centre’s vehicle picks up the clients each morning and returns them to their homes each afternoon, so the situation is different from Susan Schultz’s mother’s and from the agendas in the films I’ve mentioned.
Early in 2008 someone I had known as a friend for over 25 years committed suicide after having been diagnosed with dementia at the relatively young age of 60. He had lived with the disease for a brief period of his once engaged and very active life as an academic, writer and political activist. He courageously decided that it was preferable to opt out before the condition worsened.
For further information, the Singing Horse Press link is here
You can read US poet and editor Eileen Tabios’ response to ‘Dementia Blog’ here
28.12.08
18.12.08
the ghosts of xmasses past
This time of year usually carries some nostalgia and too much sentimentality, so let's indulge in both. 1977 was a truly great year for anti-xmas festivity. The Tin Sheds on City Road was a-hopping and a-bopping. The Lean Sisters, from the precipice of simpleton theatre, performed a Workers-Control themed santamime, the Crunk Boonk Xmashow, where Santa was portrayed as a rapacious profiteer who had already sold the rights to easter to god's agent, Gabriel, before the previous year had ended, and his 'helpers' suffered mightily under his cruelly exploitative conditions of employment. After the fabulously didactic performance the audience danced on into the sweaty summer night to the music of the rockin' all-girl band, Sheila. And on Xmas Eve, a horde of happy counter-culturalists danced into another hot and steamy night to the music of Alias, Wasted Daze and Mental as Anything at the 'Christmas-is-False-Consciousness-Eve-Party'.
I don't mind saying it - those were the daze.
Silkscreen Poster by Jenny Coopes, Netta Perrett and Pam Brown 
If you can't read it, Che the shepherd is saying "And you think capitalism has
problems". Silkscreen Poster by Chips Mackinolty, Earthworks Poster Collective
Enjoy yourselves this year, pals of 'the deletions', and here's to a happy 2009
17.12.08
k a m a t e k a o r a # 6 : h o n e t u w h a r e
September/December 2008
The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) is pleased to announce the sixth Ka Mate Ka Ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics, a special issue on the work and influence of Hone Tuwhare (1922 – 2008), guest-edited by Robert Sullivan.
*Selwyn Muru,
*Hana O’Regan, He tītī me te waihoka pōhutukawa
*Robert Sullivan, Hone Tuwhare’s Aroha
*Janet Hunt, His own true voice
*Michelle Keown,: Hone Tuwhare’s socialist poetics
*Jon Battista, When grief inhabits the desolate house . . .
*Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Solar Metaphors: ‘No Ordinary Sun’
*Cassie Ringland-Stewart, Talking with Hone Tuwhare
*Hinemoana Baker, 'People leave I know’
*Peter H. Marsden, Er war ein Berliner!: Hone Tuwhare in Germany
*David Eggleton,Pūrorohū: Hone Tuwhare’s Rain Spells
*Photographs by William Farrimond, Jan Kemp and John Miller
Tributes by Barry Brickell, Tania Hinehou Butcher, Glenn Colquhoun, Murray Edmond, William Farrimond, Bernadette Hall, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Steve Lang, Michele Leggott, Jean McCormack, Cilla McQueen, Bill Manhire, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Michael O’Leary, Mark Pirie, Brian Potiki, John Pule, Gavin Reedy, Miriam Richardson, Dieter Riemenschneider, Alice Te Punga Somerville, Robert Sullivan, Apirana Taylor, Albert Wendt, Reina Whaitiri, Simon Williamson, Briar Wood
Hone Tuwharekmko is edited by Murray Edmond with assistance from Michele Leggott and Hilary Chung at the University of Auckland, and with the support of a team of consulting and contributing editors. It publishes research essays and readings of New Zealand-related material and welcomes contributions from poets, academics, essayists, teachers and students from within New Zealand and overseas.
Click here to read issue 6.
Click here for submission guidelines and further information.
15.12.08
Lean Sister Becomes High Court Judge
Virginia Bell (a.k.a. Ginger de Winter), a former member, along with myself, of the anarchic Lean Sisters Theatre Group has been appointed to the bench of Australia's High Court. Virginia was the highly entertaining mistress of ceremonies for the Leans Sisters' performance The Leans Lurch Left at the Tin Sheds, Sydney way back in 1977 and she participated in other of the troupe's energetic performances.
The Leans Lurch LeftFrom the ABC online news service :
Justice Michael Kirby will be replaced on the High Court bench by the New South Wales Court of Appeal judge, Justice Virginia Bell.
She is the fourth woman to be appointed to the High Court and her appointment will take effect from February 3 next year.
Justice Kirby will retire after reaching the mandatory retirement age.
Justice Bell began her career with the Redfern Legal centre in 1978 and served as counsel assisting the Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Services.
She has also sat on the bench of the New South Wales Supreme Court and as a Commissioner with that state's Law Reform Commission.
Virginia Bell in 2006
Onya Virginia ! (as we say in Oz)
(Virginia launched my book New & Selected Poems at the State Library of NSW in 1990)
13.12.08
Tourism
People think we’re
German tourists
or Norwegian
outside the fiscal
envelope hui
grimacing faces
Go Home Whitey
I don’t mind
I am going
home
__________________
The Buried Village
e hora noa mai ra
i te po uriuri
i te po tangotango
waiho nei te aroha
waiho nei te mamae
ka ki kino i taku kiri
i maringa awai to roimata
i aku kamo ki te iwi
ka wehe …
__________________
Northern Southland
Where the trucks
double declutch
& roar by
a black & yellow
AA sign
points a way down
Old Lake Road
I’ll never go
__________________
Poems from a road trip made in New Zealand in the 1990’s
by the writer and poet Martin Edmond
from his chapbook The Big O Revisited
recently published by and available from
Soapbox Press
36 Old Mill Rd
Grey Lynn, Auckland
New Zealand
One of Martin Edmond’s three blogs is Luca Antara
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
