And I was calm as the plane went down

Sometimes I wake up with a line of a poem stuck in my head.

I've been thinking these days about that space above the things on which we focus. Sometimes, it's the sky:


Sometimes it's the walls and ceiling of a natural history diorama:


Last night I dreamed that the plane I was in clipped the Sydney Opera House before it went down. We were hovering above that eminently photographable skyline identifier.

I've never been the kind of poet that writes from dreams. I write from research. I read. I visit archives. I look through photographs. Frankly, I don't know how to write a poem from a dream; I don't know how to make that relevant to a wider audience than myself.

But I like waking up with a series of words in my head that I trust to be a line of poetry.

"another, and truer, way"

It's raining again this morning and I stayed in bed far too long, luxuriating in the sound of it and then luxuriating in some poetry. [Times like these I wish for everyone that they have some time in a quiet bed on a June morning to read poems.]

I had picked up John Ashbery's Three Poems for no particular reason but that it was by my bed. It occurs to me that the technique of leaving out - actually composing and then removing text, negative space left behind in the poem - is one that would be particularly well-suited to the personal history and poetic prosthesis series.

I'm off now, to dia:beacon to fight valiantly the urge to wrap my body around and into some Richard Serras.

Later, I'll meet Salman Rushdie. [Right now, you can imagine me swooning all over my office...]

Still later, I'll surround myself with roller derby girls. [Still more swooning...]

There's a part of me that longs for some modern form of Stendhal Syndrome.