Category: Blog

Readers block

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Kate Holden Ironically it was tonight, a hot, smothering, still Melbourne summer’s night when it’s all I can do to keep my dull eyes fixed on the telly, never mind think about great literature, that I had one of those moments when something true about my life with books hit me. I was trapped on the couch under the warm, soft weight of my little cat Boo, who was giving me a very rare and precious honour by taking her siesta on my hot lap, and thinking idly of how great it would be to get into bed later, and…

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Holding yourself by the throat…

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Kate Holden I just heard Richard Ford tell Margaret Throsby on ABC-FM that, in writing, what writers do is make themselves smarter than they really are. He likened the creative process to a crucible, one which was hot and focused, and which made him seem smarter than he is. And this fits in perfectly with what I was thinking last night: that writing is very much about vanity, and embarrassment. It’s always astonishing to me how little we talk, in essays, interviews, in teaching students, about the psychology and emotions of writing. Those things are what brim in us every…

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Moving books

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Kate Holden This post is a little late: the dilatoriness due not to lack of enthusiasm but the fact that I am in the middle of one of life’s cataclysms – moving house. And by ‘moving house’ you know that I, as a writer, primarily mean standing, hands on hips in the middle of my living room, gazing with an abruptly urgent sense of incredulity at the dozen or so tightly packed shelves that form the main decoration of my home. Moving house, in other words, means moving books. I am a forty year old writer and arts graduate from…

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February blogger – Kate Holden!

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Many thanks to Judith Beveridge for her excellent posts to start the year. This month, out guest blogger is Kate Holden: Kate Holden is the author of In My Skin: A memoir and The Romantic: Italian Nights and Days, both published by Text. For six years she wrote a regular column for The Age and has published essays, short stories, and reviews in Griffith Review, The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, Meanjin, The Monthly, The Big Issue and others.

The Power and the Passion

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Judith Beveridge I’ve always been drawn to this statement by the Irish poet Michael Longley: “The poet makes the most complex and concentrated response that can be made with words to the total experience of living. For these reasons I would go on trying to write poems even if no one wanted to read them.” I find this a very enabling comment and one that cuts through the frustrations that beset any poet who begins to dwell on the vast absence of poetry readers. It also harks back to the statement Keats made about poetry, that it is essentially about…

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“Poetry, I too dislike it”

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Judith Beveridge While I have been convalescing from a flu virus, I’ve spent the last week reading. I finished Louise Glűck’s “Poems 1962-2012” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2012) – a most rewarding and deeply moving book. I’ve been a fan of her work for years. Her spare, honed style, her precision with language, the ever-present, needling emotional trouble with which she imbues her poems have always won me over. Her poems are clean and swift, except for the longer form she uses in her 2006 volume, Averno, which is my least favourite of her books because it seems…

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Maximum Heat

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Judith Beveridge I’m writing this on the day when catastrophic fire conditions are expected and a maximum of 43 degrees in Sydney. I also have a fever, so it seems heat is absolutely inescapable today as it ravages over the landscape and pushes well above the normal level on my oral thermometer. The fires in Tasmania and Victoria are still burning as well. I feel a strong sense of nervousness about the day. At the moment there’s a small amount of cloud cover and the wind is just starting up. I can hear some insects outside doing their high-pitched, electronic…

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Beginnings and endings

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Judith Beveridge As it’s the beginning of the new year and the ending of the old year, I have been prompted to think about the beginnings and endings of poems. I always find beginning and ending a poem the hardest aspect of writing. I very rarely have quick flashes of thought and feeling that lead me into a poem, it’s more a matter of trying various lines and phrases until something starts to sound promising. But even more difficult for me is ending a poem, so I recently purchased Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s highly regarded book Poetic Closure: A Study of…

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Our first guest for 2013 – Judith Beveridge.

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Thanks to Lisa Gorton for your wonderful posts to round out 2012. Next, and our first for 2013 is Judith Beveridge. Judith Beveridge is the author of The Domesticity of Giraffes, Accidental Grace, Wolf Notes and Storm and Honey. Her prizes include the NSW, Victorian and Queensland Prizes for Poetry, the Grace Levin Prize, the Wesley Michel Wright Award and the Josephine Ulrick Prize. She is the poetry editor for Meanjin and teaches poetry writing at post graduate level at the University of Sydney. Her new volume of poems will be published in 2013.

The Future Freeze

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Lisa Gorton Cryogenics is probably the weirdest version of ambition. It proves how hard it is to think about the future: its images have no intimacy. This difficulty is probably identical to the difficulty of imagining the past not as it appears in retrospect, but as it was when its future was undecided, alive with possibilities. Nothing shows how habit has consumed strangeness so much as reading an out-of-date book of prophecies. Take Archibald Williams’ book, The Romance of Modern Invention. You can read it here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/41160. It covers the telephone, ‘mechanical flight’ and ‘horseless carriages’.  Here is its prediction…

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Non-fiction poetry

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Lisa Gorton Today I moved all my books. Here was further proof that I am not Walter Benjamin. I did not develop a single insight into the nature of collecting. I did think of Ivor Indyk’s essay, ‘The Book and Its Time’, in which he describes a scene from Arnold Bennett’s book, Riceyman Steps: ‘In the dining room there are more books, settled on the dining table, the sideboard, the mantelpiece, the chairs, the floor; in the bedroom the wardrobe is stuffed with books; in the bathroom the bath is full to the brim and overflowing with them…’. There were…

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Authority and Flood

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Lisa Gorton From time to time, these days, I wonder why I have spent so much of my life reading – what I have gained by that, and what I have lost. When I was seven years old, I was reading in the bath with the taps running. All at once, my mother was standing over me, her pale look changing to frustration. The bathwater had run over the walls of the bath, flooded the bathroom, run into the hall. She thought that I had drowned but I was only reading. I remember seeing the water and thinking, first, that…

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