Trisha Pender: Dove Cottage

3 December 2008
Wm turned in the night again
digging his heels into my hasty pudding.
(Dove Cottage Maxim 13:
You can never have too much oatmeal.)
Our first weeks here we made maxims - late into the night.
I use 'we' loosely, of course,
Although I did proffer some choice morsels
Dove Cottage Maxim 14 [rejected]:
You can never have too much laudanum.
Wm's recall of M Wollstonecraft selective, as usual.
Dove Cottage Maxim 7:
Never confuse theory and practice.
DCM 8:
Never confuse poetry with reality.
Earlier in the evening we had braved a brisk wind
To go lie in a ditch covered with twigs.
I thought it was pretty lame at first
But after the first couple of hours I got into the swing of it.
There are many ways to induce hallucinations
But lying in a ditch covered in twigs was a new one for me.
I'm still pissed, though, that we never get to play the games
I want to play.
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Trisha Pender

About Trisha Pender


Trisha Pender studied Arts at the University of Sydney and completed her Ph.D. in English at Stanford University in 2004. A past recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Fellowship, and the J. G. Lieberman Award, she is currently a Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Newcastle. Her research interests include early modern English literature, women’s literary history, and Australian popular culture. She is a past winner of the Sydney Morning Herald Young Writer of the Year Award (1987) and won the Local Award in the 2011 Newcastle Poetry Prize. Her poetry and short fiction have been published in Cordite, Overland, The Bulletin, SMH, the Newcastle Poetry Prize 2011, and various literary anthologies. Her monograph, Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty, will be published by Palgrave in 2012.



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2 Responses to Trisha Pender: Dove Cottage

  1. Karen de Montfort says:
    December 16, 2008 at 2:03 am

    Now I want to hear the games you wanted to play

  2. Paul Squires says:
    December 18, 2008 at 12:35 am

    A kind of self-portrait poem using a distinctive tone or voice to reveal the poet/narrator through their interaction with their environment. The open ending, a kind of implied question, as Karen has pointed out, allows the poem to linger, the effect continues in the mind after the poem has been read. A very cool self-portrait with almost-manifesto poem.