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“Sociability’s a drag”
That’s Allen Ginsberg quoted in Gordon Ball’s memoir, East Hill Farm. Ginsberg must rank as one of the most generous, sociable poets ever, so his complaint about togetherness makes me feel better: my vague guilt this time is that I’m just not sorry to have missed the fifties and sixties. I do envy the cultural…
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Occasional poems
“Who Wants to Be a Scholar Anyway,” “The Academic Strategic Planning Blues,” “Ballad of the Executive Director of Alumni Affairs”: the titles in my poetry folders suggest that I write a lot of doggerel when I’m all steamed up. Most jobs present occasions for indignation, even when you like the work and feel fortunate to…
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How to read a literary magazine (print)
Either immediately, because you’re procrastinating about some other task, or after a long period of dusty avoidance, as if reading poetry were a chore. Bad poet. This summer, after nearly six months in New Zealand, the pile is high and dust rules. Primed for irritation, because so many poems will be dull and yet the…
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Poetic neighborhoods
When you introduce multiple characters and tag dialogue in a short poem, you make all kinds of trouble for yourself. Part of it is just fitting it in: most contemporary poetry in print is going for economy, resonance, surprise, evocation in fragments. You can toss out some of the names and the “he said”s by…
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Living with a writer
“Page two is a verb tense tour de force,” he says, and I puff right up. I’m pretty new at creative nonfiction as a genre, but prose storytelling is his mastery zone. Who knew the personal essay was all about verb tenses? Transitions, yeah, understood they were trouble. And bending accuracy for elegance (we sometimes…
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Lunch Poem
It is 10:21 in Wellington a Thursday last day on Fulbright’s payroll, ticket to fly out on Saturday the 8:30 to Auckland that is if Air New Zealand will bully past the ash plume, volcanoes the only smokers in my poems. In Moore Wilson’s I buy horopito for Atin and Tinni and spend my last…
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Order, disorder
“I love coming to a marae because everything is orderly.” That was Albert Wendt yesterday at Te Herenga Waka, the marae at Victoria University and the site of a conference I’ve been attending, “Reading and Writing in the Pacific.” A first for me: attending an academic meeting in stocking feet, wearing a blue lei, and…
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Coffee with poets in New Zealand
The Katherine Mansfield Birthplace was very, very cold on Friday morning. It’s small, furnished in dark woods with all the Victorian trappings, and of course unheated. Quotes from Mansfield typed up on the visitor’s guide call it “a little dark piggy house,” or something similar. Chris and I toured it on a sort of birthday…
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Travel dictionaries
That’s how it goes some days, don’t you reckon. You wander the streets of a city that’s no longer your own. You look at a map and all the words are in German. You ask a stranger where the hills have gone and he bursts out…
LESLEY WHEELER 