Listen To That

The most surprising thing about the editing process is that it is fun. And Fun, as Mr Geisel's cat tells us, is Good. The least surprising is that I am extraordinarily distracted by everything that is not editing, including this blog.

I've been on fire since I wrote the Long Important Poem About Shipwrecks* seventeen days ago. Am simultaneously working on at least three other things and feeling very high on all of it. It's awesome. If I could bottle this energy I'd be writing a book every six months. I am learning so much about how to write, I feel like I've been injected with a degree in the astrophysics of language. Writing will never be the same again.

I've also made a new zine**, and talked a lot, and made friends with the world and its people, and probably babbled a lot of hogwash about the universe. Getting high from work is what it's all about. The stuff I was blogging about last post about poetry-as-reality-revolution is holding water. Creation creation! Bipolar Mood Order strikes again.

At the Alice reading last Friday I was the only writer who didn't speak in an Indigenous language. I read a story about being silenced instead (I'm told it turned the air into soup). Listening to languages I didn't know, and thinking about language, and thinking about how listening-to-what-you-don't-understand is what it means to live here. The honour of that listening is rebuilding the Tower inside my head out of old glass bottles and sticks of dynamite and somehow making a magical sense about the struggle to make sense.

It's good to be in a mystical state of grace/mania while I try to make this book mean what it is attempting to say about love and the curious shape of belonging. I might be a bit distracted now in the sun of a perfect winter's day in Alice, but tonight on the train to Darwin I will sit up and work like a mad monk in a small steel cage doing ninety through the desert with coffee and focus and every last god on my side.

I'm very much looking forward to getting into the road trance without having to drive.

The road trance is intensifying again already. I started this blog as a kind of lame-arse travel diary, and it's changed the way I write - and actually helps me figure out why. I am taking off for another long adventure in June, and already there is a remarkable symmetry between now and 2004-5. Pilgrimage, a sense of necessary quest. A counterweight of finding some astonishing things at home. But it is possible to leave with no doubt at all; I can simply pack up the astonishing and take it with me.

See You There.

*it has a name and I am going to publish it somewhere soon.
**available from direct mail order jenjen over here.