– before the advent of facebook

. . .  I’d write my travel adventures, as especially seen on lizardrinking, if you can wade through all the political posts.

More time now is spent writing snippets of bits of political conversation and comments, photos, posts – looking at how things are going, sharing aspects of myself, needing to follow this story, and that, and this one, and that one, and that. On Facebook, that is.

To get anything done, don’t look too closely at the world from a political perspective – or do – but the morass and myriad of unbelievable, and often unthinking (though as often enough deliberate) atrocities committed, of lives not protected, is enough to do your head in.

It also takes up swathes of time. Committing atrocities and being concerned about it. I am being glib. And I am concerned. Being vigilant, and I’m nowhere near as vigilant as some, is time consuming.

So, my explained absence. It’s all Facebook’s fault. Lately I’ve been using this as a post for publications, not perambulations, and that’s not a bad thing either.

That’s what I’m doing right now, though I promise pictures to make it easier to scan. My posts have been graphic in their imagelessness of late. There are so many articles I find I think I should read, that scanning is basically all I do anyway, thereby taking in only the surface of the content. However, it’d be cool if the contents of this heart beats oftly post appealed to you all.

Most recently, Rat’s Ass Review, an online poetry magazine, published twice yearly, included my poem
Hot Peanut Paste Night  in their summer edition. There are some really great poems featured, so do yourself a favour, and check ’em out.

I don’t think I’ve featured that poem on any of my blogs before, and it’s definitely a favourite. It was either commended or highly commended for the Bobbie Cullen Award when it was a poetry prize in 1996 or 97. So this one has been around for some time, so much so that I thought I’d lost it at a point. The picture below has a loose affiliation with one of the images.

Loose because the poem is set on the outskirts of urban Matsuyama, Shikoku, though not too much the outskirts, as  Tsubaki Jinja is the specific locale. The picture above was taken at Akiha Park in Niigata prefecture.

The above was also winter, as I recall, though it looks like autumn (photo data tells me it was March. That’s winter for Niigata!). The poem, as the title suggests, is set smack bang in the middle of the heat and humidity of summer. My first year in any country that wasn’t Australia, and that country was Japan.

Denman Island, NOT Japan

Three of my poems, comfort, poem to a lover, and untitled i (my man said), were all published in Hillel Wright’s Denman Island old school Literary Zine, MiNUS TiDES. It doesn’t have an online presence, but can be purchased at Abraxas Books, Denman Island, British Columbia, Canada.

You can’t search for it on that site, but there are contact details if you wanted to shoot off an email. comfort, in a slightly different form, was Highly Commended for the University of Southern Queensland Library Competition Awards in 2007. USQ runs the Bruce Dawe poetry prize, though I don’t know if the library has a connection with it.

Those poems all belong together too. People who read this blog regularly (quarterly at present!), would have seen those poems either on this blog or at the lizardrinking blog.

comfort came to me as I was winding around the turns of the pink-hued mountains leading into Muscat, almost 300km from Sur, Oman. Maybe the curves reminded me of the clack of rosary and worry beads between the fingers of the faithful. 2004, I think. Possibly 2005.

The picture below is leading away from Muscat, I think, and not in the direction of Sur? I can’t recall, but it gives you some idea of the topography. Coming into the capital, it wasn’t a dual-carriageway in those days, and considering the mountains, it still might not be. I think the Sur to Muscat coastal road is probably nowhere near as hair-raising a drive.

This picture was downloaded from here.

poem to a lover and untitled i (my man said) were both written in Japan, and not until 2008, or at least that’s when I uploaded them to lizardrinking. I might have written them earlier. They also have an Oman connection.

The links above are to this blog, as some of the links to lizardrinking are a bit glitchy. That explains date discrepancies, okay?

Finally, on the academic side of things, the great people at the Literature in Language Teaching SIG (special interest group) worked with me to publish my article, Student Autonomy Through Creativity. I enjoyed writing it, though it was hard work.

It expands upon (and condenses) some of the information featured in a prior paper of mine, the one with the unwieldily title, Surrealists in the Classroom: Developing CALP in the classroom through Plurilingualism and English as a Lingua Franca. That means I get an excuse to post a Dadaist picture, though maybe I’ll opt for a Gutai one.

Shozo Shimamoto. I don’t know where I downloaded this picture from. I’ll credit the creator with a link or caption (and can hopefully still use it) if they leave a comment.

You’ll have to read the articles to find the connection, though Shimamoto and his mail art are not the main, but are an important, focus.

The paper with the very long title is also available here if you don’t have an account with academia edu, or you don’t want to sign up.

I can’t help you out with Student Autonomy Through Creativity, however, because the LiLT journal hasn’t uploaded it yet. Once it’s available, I’ll let you know, and in the meantime, academia.edu can service all your needs. (August 8, this is the online article). The cover, which is pretty groovy, is below.

However, I can also see it says 2014, which is wrong. Elsewhere the journal states 2015. When the graphic is corrected I will upload the right one.

Also newly uploaded to the Aichi University is my paper Speculative Views on Non-Lived Memory in Creative Writing. This paper is a bit shaky, hence the “speculative” part, but it does mention Flannery O’Connor, so it’s got something going for it! And again, if you don’t want to sign up for academia edu (did I mention it was free?), you can download the people (where did that come from?) paper here.

Flannery O’Connor.

Okay, that’s the longest post I’ve made for a while, and it does have pictures! I hope life is treating you most excellently.

Explore posts in the same categories: images, photography, poetry, published, writing

Tags: LiLT, Literature in Language Teaching Journal, MiNUS TiDES, poem, poems, poetry, publications, Rat's Ass Review

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