the deletions

14.3.17

farewell from 'the deletions'

After several technical issues with the blogger dashboard and considering the teensy audience for this old faithful blog I've decided to 'close' it - that is to stop posting blog-notes & images here. I've been doing it for over a decade & it's been an enjoyable & useful enterprise.

If you like you can find me on basefook
or check in on my poetry life here

The sidebar has disappeared so I'd like to re-post the stanza
I use as a kind of general approach to life & art -

Now I forgive the delicious lunacy
Which made me use up all my best years
Without my work bringing any advantage other
Than the pleasure of a long delinquency.
Joachim Du Bellay, The Regrets, 1558

bye bye

24.2.17

Lonnie's Lament
towards a history of the vanishing present
Poems by Ken Bolton

about Ken Bolton's earlier books -
'Writing that is buoyed by indeterminacy, in which a blithe surface both collapses and embodies intellectual enquiry ... the work is also a meditation on poetry.' - Gig Ryan, Australian Book Review

'[We find] the familiar use of floating lines, repetition, loose jaunty rhythms, tonal shifts, proper names and explicit references to other poets ... a rabbit warren of ideas and tangents grounded in the act of composition. In fact, no other Australian poet, with the possible exception of Pam Brown, pays quite so much attention to the physical and mental act of actually writing poetry.' - Liam Ferney, Rabbit magazine

Just published by Wakefield Press, Adelaide
info & ordering click here

4.2.17

A LIGHT IN THE MOON

A light in the moon the only light is on Sunday. What was the sensible decision. The sensible decision was that notwithstanding many declarations and more music, not even notwithstanding the choice and a torch and a collection, notwithstanding the celebrating hat and a vacation and even more noise than cutting, notwithstanding Europe and Asia and being overbearing, not even notwithstanding an elephant and a strict occasion, not even withstanding more cultivation and some seasoning, not even with drowning and with the ocean being encircling, not even with more likeness and any cloud, not even with terrific sacrifice of pedestrianism and a special resolution, not even more likely to be pleasing. The care with which the rain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong, the care with which there is a chair and plenty of breathing. The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain.

Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons, 1914

Gertrude Stein, Biscuit & Alice B. Toklas

27.1.17

      祝大家好运在2017年
  Zhù dàjiā hǎo yùn zài 2017 nián
    Good fortune for all in 2017

15.1.17

Luis Alberto Arellano, Querétaro, Mexico 1976-2016

Mexican poet, academic and critic Luis Alberto Arellano
died on 17th December 2016. He was 40.

Luis' poetry publications included Fotogramas del Ocio : Clase B (Coleccion Literatura Portátil - Letras de Querétaro). He was the co-ordinator of creative writing at Centro Estatal de Formación Artística y Cultural (CEFAQ) in Querétaro.

In 2007 Luis and his friend and colleague Román Luján (UCLA) compiled a collection of Mexican poetry, El país del ruido. ('The noisy country') translated into French by Francoise Roy as Le pays sonore.

I met Luis at a poetry convention in Trois Riviéres, Québec in 2008. He was generous, clever and funny. We became firm poetry friends.

Eduardo Padilla's translation of two of Luis' poems into English can be found in Mexico City Lit here.

Luis Alberto Arellano translated many English language poems into Spanish, including Bob Flanagan & David Trinidad's A Taste of Honey (Cold Calm Press, 1990) - read a sample here.

Luis & I knew each other in our mostly present-tense French & English - our second & third languages.

At his own instigation Luis was working on translating poems from my book Home by Dark into Spanish. He published one of the poems on his blog Santo Remedio (Holy Remedy) here.

One of Luis' collections of poems was translated into French by Françoise Roy and published by Écrits des Forges, Québec in 2006 :

I took both photos of Luis Alberto Arellano in Trois Riviéres, Québec, Canada

14.1.17

Leonard French 1928-2017

Leonard French, Seven Days of Creation: Seventh Day, 1962-65, 365.8cm diam, enamel on hessian covered hardboard, Australian National University ____________________________________________________________