Possibly app/licable?

(Sorry, couldn’t resist the pun.)

I came across an interesting review on Stuff the other day – it’s for an app called Write Or Die. The basic idea is simple: it nags you to write. You get to choose the target (number of words or elapsed time), and the punishment (ranging from gentle nudges to the altogether more alarming extreme of words you’ve already written deleting themselves if you stop or pause for too long). You can either have it as a downloaded desktop (or iPad/iPhone/etc app) for a fee, or use the free web-based version (although you then have to remember to copy it from the browser and paste it into a document of your own before you quite the browser … I can almost hear the screams of anguish).

I am very, very tempted by it. Being the world-class procrastinator that I am. Of course you have to actually fire the programme up in the first place, so it doesn’t entirely replace the need for some sort of self-generated impetus. (Do I mean impetus? Quick check … yep, I do. Hooray!) (And did anyone else spot the nifty bit of self-distraction there?) And it wouldn’t work for the way I write poetry, which is almost completely longhand, and with a very large amount of the time spent staring off into the middle distance, tapping syllables on my knee (which can recognise iambic tetrameter all by itself now), and muttering all manner of ungodly things. All of which would fail to register as “writing in progress” as far as the programme was concerned.

BUT … I do write articles directly onto the computer. And haibun. And blog posts. And quite often my reviews. And I do have a real habit of just not quite managing to make myself sit down and start writing them. Yes, the revision takes quite a long time too. But it’s that initial hurdle of sitting down and writing something – anything! – that I can shape into the appropriate form later. (Admission – I usually have to print the thing out, and then scribble on the paper. Paperless Office? Only when I run out.) Even on the computer, I do still seem to be able to get that magical link between words unspooling themselves in front of me and some sort of insight that I certainly didn’t have before the words started flowing. So it can and does happen. So maybe Write Or Die will be something that can help me get some sort of writing routine re-established, even if only for the peripheral stuff. And maybe it could be something to get me off my backside and back into trying to write my PHdDFNisoP, or at least some sort of fiction. Maybe even NaNoWriMo? (Hah! This from the woman who still hasn’t finished 75% of the poems she started in NaPoWriMo three years ago!)

Anyone else tried anything of this sort?

Winter workshop 2012 – Dead Poets

I’ve managed to wangle some money from Creative Communities (thank you CCC!) to help defray the costs, so as long as I can get eight of you to confirm, I will be offering a winter Reading for Writing course based on (drumroll please) …

Yep, that’s right, Dead Poets. Or, to misquote Monty Python, poems by poets who have expired, ceased to be, quit this mortal coil, rung down the curtain and shuffled off to join the anthology eternal. I haven’t finalised the selections yet, but I’m planning to include some Paul Celan, maybe some Garcia Lorca, Akhmatova, Larkin, some Baxter or Curnow, heck, maybe even some Paterson. Not to mention Donaghy, Malloy, Porter (Dorothy as well as – or even instead of – Peter), and almost certainly some more of the immortal William Topaz McGonagall. (Unless I go to his feminine counterpart, the sweet singer of Michigan …)

Anyhow, the details:

Reading for Writing: Dead Poets
Saturdays, 10.30 am – 1.30 pm
June 2nd, 16th, 30th, and July 14th and 21st, 2012
(five weeks)
Sydenham Room
South Christchurch Library Learning Centre
Fee: $40
Limited to 18 places.
Closing date for enrolments: 1st June, 2012

I know the dates seem a bit erratic, but it was when I could get the room. It works out as four sessions a fortnight apart, and one final session one week later.

As usual, email me to enroll or if you have any questions. And if you’d like to download a copy of the flier for yourself (either to hand out to other people who might be interested, or to use to make a collage expressing your deep ambivalence towards the commodification of the arts in these dark and post-postmodern days …), click here.

Wellington, on a good day night

Back home again after a quick trip to Wellington, where I was the guest poet at the April NZPS meeting.

The whole thing takes place upstairs at the Thistle Inn, which is a gorgeous old building on Mulgrave St. All timber floors and branching corridors and rooms tucked around corners and down passageways. Apparently it’s the oldest pub in New Zealand, and was the favoured local watering hole of a gentleman by the name of Te Rauparaha …

Anyhow, the whole night was great fun. A good mix of styles at the open mic, including a couple of people who were popping their poetry performance cherry. And my reading seemed to go down quite well, although as usual I had prepared roughly three times as much material as I ended up using (what can I say? I waffle spontaneously. I know, I know – such things have bitten me on the bum more than once before. But I don’t think I managed to offend anyone this time …). The press of bodies meant that the room got quite warm (umm … from there being quite a few people present, and the windows being closed), so I didn’t even need my famous Red Coat. But it did mean that at the end of the whole thing I was feeling pretty knackered, and only had time to touch down on my seat before Laurice got me back up front for a Q & A session. Which took a few moments to happen (the questions, not me hauling myself back upright and up front again), as they always seem to do, but then became Quite Interesting indeed. I think I managed to answer them reasonably coherently.

So a huge thank you to the seemingly unstoppable Laurice Gilbert for organising, and to all you Wellingtonians (and others!) who came along – it was great catching up with old friends, and meeting new ones. And if the receptiveness of the audience is any indication of such things, it looks like the Wellington poetry scene is in good heart. Not to mention spirit, voice, and hands.

Adrienne Rich dies

I’m a bit late with the news, but none the less – one of the heroes of contemporary women’s poetry, the marvellous, incomparable, irreplaceable Adrienne Rich, has died.  She was 82.

For those writers of my generation or younger, it’s easy to forget just how damn hard poets like Rich worked to make a space where women poets could write and publish, without the “poetess” tag being used as something to gag us with. She was one of the people who blazed the path – and blazed is exactly the right verb here. A flame that tore through everything in her own life, and left a path that all of us can follow. Light. Certainly heat. And a reminder that something gentle can also be ferocious.

I can’t say anything that won’t be said better elsewhere by other poets (like here, here and here), so I’ll just say this: Go read her poetry. The old, as well as the recent. See how thoroughly she remade herself, and imagine the skill and sheer determination it took to do so. Then go read some of her critical writings – you don’t need to be a feminist (although if you aren’t, what the hell is wrong with you?!) to appreciate her politics, or even a poet to appreciate her poetics. She was amazing. And now she’s dead.

And it feels bleaker and colder to know that.

Click the link to read her most famous poem, Diving into the Wreck.