I'm the old guy! Sebastian is my daughter's son. He is 3 and 3/4s.

Eyelight - poems poetics random thoughts chess daily life politics art etc etc

This is an introduction - I hadn't intended to start a Blog - I was trying to contact Nick Piombino - poet in NY - I mean make a comment on his Blog. My interests are centred in literature but I also make a small income from selling books - used quality and second hand - I have been a technician (in fact I have had about 50 or more jobs in my 57 years) - more of all that later - I
am a keen chess player - and I may mix my posts with some of my ideas on or about Chess - I dont know why I am writing all this - but I do things as they happen - don't plan much - I am in New Zealand - I am a fairly open person - Eyelight is from a line of a poem I wrote which goes "Black veins on eyelight scrawled" and is the title of a large work I am in the process of doing – well...I am hoping at I will actually get to do some thing on it if I have a Blog - I need an audience even if it is only a potential or a possible audience. Also have been commenting on Ron Silliman’s Blog - very informative –some great stuff on there. But here I need to talk about NZ poets.

I might put it straight onto here [I was talking about Eyelight – a project] - or at least in draft form so to speak...that just occurred to me. I'm interested in the idea of things continuing -no beginning or end and what I say now is the truth: for me there is no perfection - so all the forms a of thing to be completed are the thing "completed" but such a postulated completion can be anything in any order - there are no certainties – probably nothing completed or there are things - all things are processes - we merely snap moments and maybe moments in our mind - so a poem – in this concept of what a poem might be - is not the form traditionally 'there' after 20 drafts - it is also all the drafts - all the crossings outs - the decisions and indecisions and so on... The above probably sounds muddled - it probably is - in fact it could well be total nonsense - I don’t really know what I am talking about - I kind of know - but there you go... and does it matter? Does anything matter "What's the matter with the matter?" ( by me, sadly - sadly?) Just now I am working through Louis Zukofsky's "A" -more on that -but first I am using a dictionary and some knowledge of the book via Barry Ahearn and Mark Scroggins -both of whom wrote books about him - and also my reading of various other books including Michelle Leggott's book about his book "80 Flowers".

-But now I am reading Ronald Johnson’s “Ark” –anyone out there know much about his work? Also I am looking through Kenneth Goldsmith’s huge book 111 - that starts with the single word unit A and progresses…

-She (Michelle Leggott) also is a New Zealander and a poet and critic – runs or is prominent in organising the NZEPC – (Google new Zealand and poetry). I am a published poet but not extensively - I have published in Poetry NZ and a (fairly outre) mag called Brief - this is a intro only so it wont be very interesting - I will write a more extensive one another time...

-I have just discovered how to edit so this is still “tentative” – I’m not sure if I will get the Blog ‘bug’ – but thousands have so I might also. The above is mixed as it is combined with earlier comments – thus I am adding to my own stuff – I am having a dialogue with myself.

But I don't want to talk about myself only - I want to look at NZ poets and - of course - others.

So this is a beginning. Cheers.