secret cities



Seven Secret Cities

A city had never the dimensions of a page; or, if it did, there was no need for the writing of it. Writing is a way in which a city of instances becomes an event. Instances disclose themselves patiently; the intention to account for these translates them into events. The inhabitant, who may or who may not be transitory, writes, and the page opens onto a secret space where instances arrange themselves into constellations: something here can at last and literally take place

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Hidden Signs of a City

How does one read a city? More specifically, how does a poet decode, and in turn re/present, the language of a man-made space? In Australia (and other 'New World' constructs) much poetry has been devoted to the natural world; but …

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Chains (Poems, Nagoya)

When I ate out with someone Japanese, in this case the poet and translator Keiji Minato, I asked them to translate the menu rather than the usual point-at-the-picture option. Rather than have them translate every dish I'd find out what categories there were first. 'fried things' was one.

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Constant Haze (Notes From Chengdu)

Five weeks and I have still not visited Mao's statue, which stands at the heart of Chengdu's First Ring Road. On the map in one of the city's English language magazines his presence has been reduced to a vector-based outline, …

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Dispatches

First: remember it's a foreign country, Your words spun to remind me it's a foreign English fulfilling the promise of years watching white picket fences on TV.

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