Essays

I started reading The Trial after my apartment building’s last Owners Corporation meeting, because I wanted to directly understand the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’, and its applicability to our situation with combustible cladding.

It turns out the answer to the problem of poetry’s secrecy is community. In a poetry community we talk about writing and share our work with each other. We collaborate on chapbooks, read poems out loud to each other occasionally. The secret is that it doesn’t need to be secret.

‘A novel is a simulacrum of life that, unlike the real world, has a distinct beginning, ending and meaning.’

What some might call selling out may actually be art listening, responding, and adapting to dynamic changes in the environment in which it is produced.

I then attempt to unblock the blocked emails which, it turns out, come with attached sets of proofs marked HIGH PRIORITY as, due to outsourced publishing deadlines, the expected turnaround is prohibitively tight…

All this inventiveness reveals to us Farrell’s true love, his pedagogic feel for aesthetics. It is what can keep his humour deadpan and philosophical even as he serves up disintegrated language in novel, variously formed ways

My faith and culture were still paramount to my identity – but so was my femininity. I grappled with my desire for equality and my quest to assert myself.

But when I’m hungover in the office it feels like every second is being seared into my skin, a line I used many years ago, in a short story about a woman who had suffered a great bereavement.

We’d never met in the flesh before, but we knew each other from articles and photos and from reading each other’s work, and, most importantly, from years of exchanging handwritten letters.

I write in my journal the list of jobs for the week. Then I read from Mary Oliver’s Poetry Handbook: ‘The most important point in the line is the end of the line. The second most important point is the beginning of it.’I make a note.