I am crack-bang in the absolute middle of penning a biggish poem for the Australian Book Review's 2009 Prize and I'm reveling in every movement of its sporadic creation. This work is unguarded, ridiculous, fanciful and hopefully, resonant and poignant. It's an Australian-centred piece incorporating drugs, abstraction, visions, crimes, celebrities, wildlife, oddities, kitsch stuff and burning history's pages whilst still celebrating our magnificent, perplexing continent.
My recent sojourn to Monga National Park (and seeing an upside down rotting wombat by the side of a road within), Allen Ginsberg's immortal HOWL and the poetics of Anthony Lawrence were the bright stimuli for the poem.
One of Australia's great poets, Robert Gray, once said to me, in a Country Road store in Sydney, that writing poetry is like dropping stones into a well.
Let's hope this stone causes a tsunami... or at least a wave big enough for a well rat to surf...
LJ, November 9 2009.
