Tag: Japan

The Ham Actor

SoutherlyBlog

by Corey Wakeling 1. A secret to admit. I’ve been writing novels lately, but only as a bellows to an unlit fire. The tinder of poetry hasn’t taken for almost a year, shooting a few sparks in the last week, but otherwise perfectly unlit since February 2015 when I moved from my home of six years, Melbourne, to Western Japan. Initially when I arrived here last year I wrote poetry kind of desperately. Because of a month’s window of free time but also due to unexplainable bodily malaise, I was feeling mortally determined to preserve what thinking was immediately at…

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Walter’s live blogging – Thomas Keneally

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by Walter Mason It seems only fitting that, being a guest for the day at the Tom Keneally Centre at the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts, I should have the opportunity to speak to the great man himself. I had spent most of the day sitting in front of an immense portrait of him, so when he loomed into the doorway of the office I felt surrounded. Keneally is, of course, famous for his garrulous good humour, affability and approachability. I saw it all at work today as he spoke to a gathering of about 50 people who had come…

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To The Invisible

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Peter Minter 4. Leave-taking, Sydney 1987   The garden blooms no more, my egotist. Day’s butterflies have fled to other flowers, And now the only visitors will be The butterflies of night. Apollinaire “Flower Picking”  (205)   … it is impossible to return to the subjectivity of the experience because it is no longer possible to access the geography in which the language event occurred …   If forgetting is some kind of beautiful annihilation, how is that together with frailty and contingency and indeterminacy it is also so creatively vital? Alongside various others, this question or something like it is at the heart…

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To The Invisible

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Peter Minter 3. Cranes, Hiroshima 1986   Cranes      Hiroshima, 1986.   When the rice farmer trances over the fields his paper room is waiting. Even the blades of grass beside the road are the colour of polishing oil. Autumn is the perfect season for walking home. Overhead, during the day, did you see the cranes swirling in the fickle wind, spiraling round in leaves, in clouds that left no shadows ? “I keep the deities to one side of this life you lead me into. They smile like framed portraits of people in old clothes.”   Madeleines for the survivors.…

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To The Invisible

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Peter Minter 2. Hiroshige’s Journey, Yokohama 1986   Hiroshige’s  Journey Yamashita Park, Yokohama, Winter 1986.   an old man who walked past here cloaked against the blue sky and wind now seems a mile away the white birds there are so many white birds beside the sea.   Why is it that so much of our thinking and writing about poetry is monopolised by a rhetorics of dramatic visibility, clarity and focus? The vivid image, the intense phrase, the memorable line, lucid brilliance and the glow of authenticity are primary objectives in many a poetry workshop and poetry “how too.”…

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To The Invisible

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Peter Minter 1. Gimen no soko no byōki no kao, Yokohama 1986 Gimen no soko no byōki no kao: Sick Face of the Earth Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886-1942) In the earth I see my face, a lonely sick person’s face. From the ground’s darkness grow my eyes like stems of grass, like a fieldmouse from its house of confusion into a field of trembling hair, from the sick and lonely ground of the winter solstice where the roots of the thin new bamboo spread and spread; this pathetic blunder I see today and am forced even more today, today, to see…

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