Cottonmouth and assorted projects

Looking forwards to the Cottonmouth poetry gathering tomorrow night! Also pretty excited that one of my poems was accepted for Cottonmouth's zine. I'm feeling really happy with the way that my poetry has changed over this year, and hopefully will be able to produce more consistent pieces in the future.

Currently reading Marjorie Perloff's "unoriginal genius: poetry by other means in the new century," which is so far proving to be extremely interesting. Will post a more thorough review later, provided I don't forget.

In the meantime, still working on a layout for the second chapter of my thesis, as well as two t-shirt designs to be sold at Wai-Con 2011. The lineart isn't terribly clean, but I figure it's good to start somewhere. If it all goes badly, at least I'll have upwards of 50 Christmas presents to give to people for the next however many years!

T-shirt designs are coffee and castle orientated, the coffee t-shirt having a slogan and a few little designs around it, while the castle is a silhouette that takes up most of the body of a t-shirt. Very keen to see how these turn out when printed!

Page Seventeen

Turns out that I did manage to get a poem into page seventeen. I wasn't too sure, but it looks like everything worked out! Very happy about that since it's the first time on of my poems has been published in a book. I've had a few online or in magazines/newspapers, but this is something that I can actually put in a bookshelf, or alternatively use as a coaster, as I have just realised that that is what it is currently doing - my bad!

Currently reworking the plot of my fantasy series so that it has a more concrete ending and more credible conclusions. Politics are not my forte, so I'm expanding my awareness of factionalism while trying to come up with more believable character responses. Fun times. Also working through chapter two of thesis and looking for some more 'new' ideas to connect to readings of Sappho's fragment 31. Yay!

Heading off to tutoring in forty-five minutes. I suppose I should probably get back to work.

Traffic lights, poetry and procrastination

Still planning on writing a collection of poems orientated around Hong Kong. Since I will be going up there in a few weeks' time, I'm hoping to get some concrete ideas sorted out so that I can churn out some more polished pieces while I'm up there. I need to take some photos so that I've got a bit of colour to work with as well. Hopefully I can pick up a decent, cheap camera while I'm there. Should be a lot of fun, considering my spending money runs out pretty sharpish!

Also currently scrounging around for some new ideas to play around with. At the moment traffic lights are proving to be pretty entertaining, if a tad difficult to introduce to a poem. I think this is going to require some more editing, but so far this is what I have:


"Crossing"

Traffic laws, stencilled between pavements,
are lexical boundaries.
Bitumen and concrete mould seams and

borders are pulped, lost beneath
bamboo beams and flashing signs.

When it rains at night, the buildings (lime bleached
white lit) shiver like horses
left out over winter.

No transgression
signals advance or retreat.

The known spaces close ranks,
flanking traffic lights
with divisions not named.


Needs to be a bit less vague, but I'm aiming for stronger images and fewer abstractions (or at least, less clumsy combinations of the two). Either way, that's it for the chopping board at the moment.

Getting published in four, possibly five places now. Yay!

On Sappho, Colour-Coordinated Stationary, and Reviews

There's something endearingly frustrating about Sappho. There is such a vast collection of work on her, so much of it tantalisingly (terrifyingly?) close to my own topic, yet so many critics just don't take the most logical steps onwards from their conclusions. This is not a case of being over-critical, but something like confusion on my part. Is there something inherently wrong with my conclusions, or does everyone else take them as so achingly simple that they can't be bothered to articulate them?

Just a bit of paranoia I suppose...

My best efforts at not throwing all my money at books lasted under strain for exactly four minutes. I left Planet Books with 6 books and less $100 or so. Maybe I can claim it back as uni expenses, but I'm really not that bothered in all honesty. The pressing need for a new bookcase will just have to be put aside for a while longer. In the meantime, I'll continue to build my replica of the Great Wall of China across my bedroom carpet, separating the sleeping and studying sections nicely. I might end up attracting international (familial) aid relief. Alternatively, a declaration of future hostile engagement if I don't clean up my act.

Two new notebooks have been acquired and scribbled in as well. At the moment, it's all rubbish, but with any luck something decent will appear among the wreckage. Both books have desserts on the covers. This might start influencing what kinds of nonsense I write inside them. In fact, that idea might not be a bad one to pursue.

Currently working on a review of [eds.] John Kinsella and Alvin Pang's "Over There" poetry anthology. Very interesting collection. Only problem is that every time I sit down and try to write anything about it, I just end up re-reading it. Fun, but not very productive. Story of life as I know it right now.

Zombies and poetry

A wonderful combination... really wonderful... Cordite certainly picked a great theme to work with!

I'm not too sure if what I submitted for consideration is exactly up to standard. I tend to look at my poetry and be horribly self-conscious about it, especially when I've never written in that particular style before... hopefully they weren't too tragic this time around though. I decided to try a couple of different ideas - namely with or without a plot. Current pieces that were offered:

(Sappho Risen)

When memory encased you

in the hot silence of a tomb,

still you would not sleep.

Alexandria loved you once:

Fond words, gentle songs

filled your summer island, and beyond.

When your temple crumbled

to ash, arthritic and bone-weary, you

were struck dumb, banished

to suffocating dark.

You lay –

under sand

under coffin

under linen

under skin –

For thousands of years.

Mouthpiece lost,

You moved in silent dismay

From the mouths and hearts of scholars, to

The desiccated chest of a kitchen hand, a gardener, a housecat.

Those lonely spaces drew you,

Pieces, fragments of

Love lost, love kindled.

You remained, the pulse beneath

A dry chest: impossible, relentless,

patient. Dreaming of the sun,

Until, finally, bloated with years, you were

expunged from the sands;

not living, but never dead.

A sorry sight, of course –

You wreck of ancient eloquence -

but though your

quiet hosts lay forgotten,

you were cradled in the most tender of hands:

wounded by graveworm hunger,

you limp among us again.

The other poem is more wandering in focus, rather than an homage to the focus of my thesis. I kind of like how it turned out, even if in terms of plot it's fairly pedestrian:

(Only the beginning)

You sad, wet thing. Knock-kneed disintegration.

Your animal-drive scramble for half-life

does not frighten me,

Death’s starving posterchild!

Thick chunks of putrid meat

– your rot and ruin –

hit the floor with fat splats:

sombre and somehow ridiculous.

Nothing excessive is carried.

Where fantastical epigrams have spoken

of morbid, eternal beauties, curtaining

Porcelain skin with

Hair and wings and tongue and teeth

Of a glorious, hulking beast:

Romantic carnivore, ethereal predator.

yours is the true shapeshift, all

smoke and blood and madness.

Humanity decanted, you are real in your

grotesque glory -

Life and death in one.

Meat turns to food turns to life turns to meat.

Rabid beast turns on its maker,

but I am not Frankenstein to shy from my child.

...

...next time I will look up when the library opens and save myself the hassle of driving all the way down to uni just to end up sitting on a bench, trying to use some of my parking money. In hindsight, it was probably a good thing that the meter wouldn't let me put in more than three hours' worth of coinage. I had the best of studious intentions today: I was going to get myself a proper study corral in the scholar's centre and slowly transport every single book on Sappho onto it until I had a worthy fort.

I was going to design turrets and everything. Maybe even a little flag for the top. It would have a coffee cup rampant over a crossed computer keyboard and pen, complete with the motto: 'Shut up! It's a library!' inscribed underneath.

Ah well. Maybe on Friday. I have economically unsound plans for the next few days.

Hyperflexion

I am yet to see a sincere, well-worded and biologically sound argument for the use of hyperflexion in training horses.

The name itself is cloying enough to turn the stomach. At what point does the word "hyper," accompanied by a reference to the horse's musculature, suggest anything other than stress and strain on the animal? By definition it is excessive and painful. In reality it is these things and more.

As far as I can see, the basic premise of stretching a horse to such a ridiculous extent is to open up the back muscles, hyperextend the neck and to also encourage the horse to work up and under the rider. There are also issues of submission and dominance coming into play. However, the basic anatomy of the horse reveals that all of the above ideas are complete nonsense.

If the horse's neck is bent to such a horrific degree, chin stuck on its chest, then this move is inherently counterproductive. The back is being blocked, not lengthened. Energy and impulsion that should be transferred through the back muscles and through the length of the horse's frame is trapped in the shoulders, rather than pushed out and lengthened through the neck. These horses are not being taught to power along: they are jacked-up, held in, and invariably, in excruciating pain. What is even more inexcusable is the fact that highly esteemed, world champion dressage riders regularly utilise this method of "flexing" their horses.

Phillipe Karl has much to say on this subject and I am inclined to agree with his classically-founded and scientifically evidenced approach. If a horse is critically bent in the fashion demanded by hyperflexion or rollkur, then the horse is not only in pain, partially blind and being forced into a frame that actually tears the muscles that it seeks to "flex," but the rider is demonstrating the worst kind of ignorance for their partner's welfare.