Only Shirley Hazzard could end a novel by writing explicitly of a virgin woman’s clitoris – which she describes with a kind of cheerful poetic simplicity as ‘the final fleshly inch where he could wake her and touch her, and say her name’ – using it to literally embody survival, and art, and all of […]
I’ve joined a Facebook group which posts pictures of people’s dogs. The rules are long and repetitive: only dog pics and pics of dogs being doggish and cute: no lost dog posts, no questions about dog food… just hounds. In the last week this group has taught me all kinds of new vocabulary. Boop is […]
Saturday night, home with the one I love. We cycled over to the Korean grocers’ in the freezing cold mist to get ingredients and I made soto ayam, my favourite Javanese chicken soup from childhood. He is nutting something out for himself on the guitar. I read him something I had written earlier, while he […]
Walking through the park in the unexpected sunshine yesterday I realised suddenly: strolling through summer in Berlin is like strolling through an off-duty circus. People are riding bicycles with no hands, they are taking turns practising walking slack rope, one man is playing the tuba and another is set up with his slap box between […]
I have no depth and everything within me is shallow and small. I waste this only thing time. I spend it as a charity on stultifying trivialities all pettifogging at the window’s pain like untrue love. I show off and on again. I’ve nothing. Not even that nothing. Only what is left by boiling too […]
I’ve been using the exact same folded square of toilet paper to blot my fountain pen every time I refill it for about three or four months now. It resembles the nosebleed of some terribly well-educated, landed, gentle person. Gentle in the old sense, I am gentle in the new. My blue blooded blotter and […]
I was so tired. I rang my mum. We rarely speak. I said, it’s me, I just wondered, are you out tonight? Only I’m feeling so worn through, and I want to have a bath, I thought maybe I could use yours but I’m feeling antisocial, I just want to be in the water. Mum […]
I had a pen name, once, after I wrote two excruciatingly awful romance novels thinking this would for sure be my road to steady income. Submitted them with great condescension to Mills & Boon and they wrote back, saying (and I paraphrase) “We wouldn’t publish this shite even if you paid us.” I was so […]
Sat for half an hour watching this bouncer refusing entry to a drunken girl who had evidently no ID. She tried to show him all her tattoos, including one on the base of her ankle, talking earnestly, presumably explaining how could I possibly have so many tatts, and not new tatts, if I was underage? […]
Something annoying I remember from the endless days of smoking and working is how ganja made me very prone to toppling off the painstaking and yet somehow effortless vertical tower of rope bridge that is composition and new invention. I so easily got sidetracked into nitty-gritty nothingry. Looking back it was as if my mind, […]
When a poet walks into a printer’s and says, I have written a book, I want to publish it, their eyes light up like neon stars. “It has to be on sumptuous papers and beautifully bound,” says the poet, and the printer’s salesman purrs, “Right this way, madam,” and leads her into an impressively empty […]
I have this really long poem which I have rewritten decisively – indecisively – thoroughly over about four or five years. It’s five pages long and it’s called Reaching for the Remote – about our longing despite celibacy for gods. Did I say celibacy? I mean atheism. This poem is one of three reasons the […]
Had to write a blurb about myself – a bio – for Queensland Poetry Festival. Oh, the horror. Describing oneself & talking about one’s work… is there anything yukkier. I hammered out a couple hundred words, only to discover I had been too verbose (who whuddha thunk?) and they needed a brief 100 words for […]
Visited my twitter account & brushed all the cobwebs away. I could write a book: Twitter, I’m Doing It Wrong. See I set up umpteen channels, so as not to bore people who don’t want straight poetry, no chaser (@cathoeljorss), or neologisms (@inventedword) or neologisms by other people (@inventedwords). I made @exmalcolmfraser to share wisdoms […]
Whenever people ask, So do you make a living from your writing, I feel obscurely coal-hauled, if not outright keel-hauled. Does anyone ask this question of an architect, a dentist? It’s so personal and somehow lip-smackingly censorious. I hear behind it two subtext questions: 2: “So. Is your writing any good?” and 3: “And am […]
