Dinosaur Art

Me and Ben Rosamund are making a dinosaur poetry chapbook, to be released in June/July. We are looking for people to contribute dinosaur-related art. Could be fun right? No real restrictions, just has to be dinosaur related. Deadline in May 1.

Email me staceteague@gmail.com

day in review: march 29: my birthday

I wake at 6.45am. I think something like "fwwhafkjarrrrrrrrrrghhhgrkjnthfuuuckrgnkjngr, oh yeah it's my birthday". I have a shower and make my breakfast (cup of tea and toast (one peanut butter, one jam on vogels) - is bracket in bracket even allowed??). I check my internet for about 15 minutes before I have to walk to work. The walk to work is nice and I see lots of cats and stuff. It takes me 20 minutes to walk to work. I arrive at work and my colleague Mel is there. Hi Mel (I probably said). I work at a bird rescue so I do lots of bird stuff. Cleaning, yeah, a lot of that. Get bitten by some birds. It's not a big deal. At 10.30 we stop for morning tea. I mention it is my birthday and everybody tells me they wish they were 22 again. Cue nostalgia. I have an apple muffin and a really strong coffee. My boss has 4 dogs and I like playing with them on my break. I do more bird stuff. Work is really busy today. I leave at about 1.45, even though I am supposed to finish at 1. This pretty much always happens. Just too nice. Man. I walk back to my house and heat up leftover curry for lunch. I have another shower. My sister comes over, and she gives me her old ps1, sweet, I thought, I can play Crash Bandicoot and Spyro. Then she drops me at my bus stop and I catch the bus into the city. On the bus I txt Susie: "Listening to Moon Pix version of Metal Heart. Nearly crying of happiness." I honestly nearly was. So emoshunal. I go into town and treated myself to one of my favourite pass times, book shopping. I didn't buy anything though, because I had to go meet my flat mate, Hannah. We walked around a bit and went into some op shops. Then we went to Grey Lynn Foodtown: the epicenter of babes, or, where Auckland hipsters go to get various food items. We bought red red wine and stuff to make quasadillas. We made ours with beans, tofu and courgettes. Probably the best thing ever cooked ever. We listened to music and talked and drank wine. It was nice (photo evidence below). Then I skyped with Susie. I serenaded her with a Dido song. Then I did various things on the internet. You know how it is. Now I am writing this. I will probably go to sleep in about 15 minutes. Yeah. I am 22 today. Good night.

RELATED MEDIA

this reminds me of opening pages of 'person' by sam pink

Sometimes I wonder about what happens if you witness a decently troubling crime. Nothing overly traumatic. Possibly not death. Maybe death. Like, this.

One of those douchebags who whistles at you from his truck/car instead of looking at the [motherfucking] road runs his vehicle into this bus stop, bench and a bin on the corner of the street and he breaks his arm due to it hanging over the side of the door. He is also impaled through the head by a sharp pole type object that wasn't tied down properly in the back. [lecherous males lack work safety scruples]. But this happened 20 seconds after the leering incident. You come over the hill on the road just in time to see it happening, a little ways ahead.

Are you a witness? Do you feature at all in the investigation of the police? Or are you just the passerby that the news interviews for a brief shocking eyewitness account of the "tragedy" - 'it happened so quickly' etc. Obviously, it is bad, this guy had family, but your only memory of him is that he was a salivating moron.

I often envision such freak accidents. It seems like things are just as likely to go wrong as they are to go right. Do people do this? Think of the worst possible thing that could happen and - when it doesn't happen - try to detach your reality from the scariness of tragedy, strengthen your fast-cementing sense of [though rationally nonexistent] invincibility.

50

i want a boy to keep me warm for winter
i get so cold
otherwise i would have to sleep
with two hot water bottles
one by my feet and one by my stomach
and instead of having to boil the jug
and fill up the water bottles every night
i would just have a real live person
which would be easier in the short term

although i want a boy to keep me warm for winter
i do not need a boy to keep me warm for winter
this is important

now
lay with me

i want your whole body to learn
my whole body

long love poem with descriptive title by matthew savoca

My review of a poetry chapbook by Matthew Sovoca. Well, not really a review, but I say some stuff about how I related to it and I read an excerpt from it. Excerpt is a weird word to say out loud.

49

i woke up
and in my mind i thought
"mutha fuuucka"
in that exact spelling
i had a shower
then i ate some vogels toast with marmite

on the bus to the city
there was a cute boy sitting opposite me
he was wearing nice pants
i imagine him at home
putting on his pants thinking
"man, these are nice"
and then feeling really good about himself

at the downtown warehouse
i bought a new red backpack
for $5
and it had an extreme effect on my self-esteem
as i walked up queen street

i even talked to one of those guys with the clipboards
who try to make you become a member of something
and make you feel like a really bad person for saying no
he was this hippie dude and we talked for a while
then i went into farmers
and bought some socks

during my walk home it was raining so i put up my umbrella
i twirled it above my head
and when i looked up
the blue bits looked like the blades of a blender
or something
it was buzzy

in the evening
i got home and made
tofu and risotto
i burnt the rice a little
but it was all good
on skype i said to susie
that loneliness felt like a tightness in my chest
kind of like heartburn
but maybe it's just heartburn

i realised i hadn't seen or heard any current events in the past week
i thought, “what is going on in the world”
i checked stuff.co.nz
how 'bout that royal wedding

looked at the clock and it said '10:59'
one minute later i looked at the clock and it said '11:01'
i thought, "what,
this cannot be"

i am tired
i am taking off my socks

top 10 reasons to take acid +1

wrote this before I took acid (2009)

1 - your friends said it was Real Fun
2 - you're curious
3 - you think maybe nothing could be weirder than real life anyway
4 - it's only temporary hallucinations/not a big deal
5 - kneecaps
6 - people will think you're cool
7 - maybe it'll make life into some sort of cartoon thing
8 - or the muppets
9 - fraser looked like christ last Saturday at Flinders with his arms out, expecting a hug
10 - there's nothing else going on tonight
11 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjY_uSSncQw

current influences

- the album 'what would the community think' by cat power
- chips and dip (bluebird ready salted and onion dip)
- the movie 'mighty ducks'
- facebook chat
- the simpsons
- susie anderson
- steve roggenbuck
- wood bay
- twitter
- my flatmate
- auckland cbd
- my new red backpack
- dinosaurs
- curry
- thought catalog
- the mountain goats (always always always)
- the song 'it's time to rest' by transcription of organ music
- my pets
- bus trips
- vogels toast
- tea
- self-publishing
- chillwave
- let people poems
- google reader
- gilmore girls

the last 5 jobs i applied for

typist/audio monitor at parliament of Victoria
This job seemed to entail basically transcribing audio as recorded at parliament sessions. Seemed legit, mostly due to the fact that it was $28 an hour. Potential drawbacks would be sitting around for a whole day of boring political talk and not being able to go anywhere for hours on end due to longevity of parliamentary sittings. Felt like my experience in radio and crazy awesome typing skills would make me 'an ideal candidate' for this job. Have kinda envisioned my life if I get this job, imagine myself riding my bike through empty streets late on a Wednesday night or something.


junior (trainee) publicist at music PR firm
I have never worked in PR and generally feel that PR students are annoying/intimidating, but I figured this would be a pretty sweet gig and applied for this job. Maybe because I have always wanted to work with music. Maybe this is my ideal field? I don't know. For whatever reason, there was no closing date on the application, which is a cause of anxiety for even the coolest of cucumbers. Spent a lot of time working on a cover letter for this one. I feel like I am super qualified for this position, because all the selection criteria was basically media related. But due to the ambiguity on the application form, my success doesn't seem likely.

customer service role at Melbourne Museum Tutankhamen exhibition
I am impressed that apparently I spelt Tutankhamen right. Sweet. This job seemed like it could be legit, but it was one of those 'form' applications where you don't get the chance to use words to speak highly of yourself, just actually say what work you've done. I find these types of jobs hard to apply for. In fact, writing any job application is strenuous. I figured it could be cool working at the museum. Not too far from my place; I started to imagine what my coworkers would be like and hoped they would be cute science nerds or something.

gallery assistant at Centre of Contemporary Photography
this job I was really excited about. The CCP is in my locale, seems like a legit type of organisation, and the position only required work on weekends from like 11-5 which would be totally enough to pay rent and still give me time to do uni stuff. I have a feeling I probably undersold myself in the application, I lack self confidence or something. As mentioned before, job application writing can be strenuous, but only because it is hard to talk yourself up. It's counter intuitive. Guess I had to pretend that I had an interest in photography. This application had to be sent in by post and I was going to take it in in person; ended up putting it through the mail slot on the door because the centre was closed for the holidays.

administration assistant at Melbourne Food & Wine Festival
again, an exciting prospect. I always flaunt my administration & arts volunteering experience when I apply for jobs because apparently a combination of these two things is somewhat unique. I dunno, it hasn't helped me get anywhere yet. When I write job applications I think my indecisiveness about what I actually want to do with my life sometimes comes through. What I mean is that for this application I attempted to write something about my passion for food, focusing on this radio show I had last year which was about food, but despite this being the theme of the show I couldn't actually write about it as if food was my passion. Sometimes I don't know about anything at all, which is an inconvenient/undesirable thing to communicate via a job application.

48

i am so tired all the time
so tired that
i think this is how life has always been

always reaching for black coffee

always saying 'man i'm tired'

people saying 'you look tired'

yawning a lot

this is how life is now

waking up in the morning
with a small scream

with a small scream
i put soy milk in my cereal

i think 'fuuuuck' in my mind

i drink a lot of coffee
and start to feel strange

today on the bus i thought i was holding my ipod
in my hand
i actually felt that sensation of it on my fingers
but there was nothing there
i thought holy shit

i thought oh my god
shit is getting real

i want to go on the internet
i want to go to sleep

zzzzzzzzzzz

why do we post poetry on our blog?

When Stacey and I started writing this blog together we would pick topics and write (anything, in any form) about them. From writing about different topics, we have progressed to the stage where we probably each post anywhere from 1-3 poems per week. Before, when only our friends read our blog, I think the idea behind this was so we could give each other feedback and feel like we had a reason to write. Stacey has always been a seeker of poetry online, and through this somehow we cottoned on to this scene of poetry - I don't know whether you would call it the 'Pop Serial' scene or if you could generalise enough to say that the poets basically just publish their own writing on their blogs and a lot of them live in America (though there are a few bros in the UK - sup Liam & Crispin).

Probably around this time we started getting a lot of people reading our blog in NZ. This was probably due, in part, to Joseph Ernest Harper and David Klein putting a link to our blog on their blogs. These relationships were fostered by a series of commenting and, arguably, interest in what the other parties were posting. We started to really like this attention on our blog, and began to expand our commenting spectrum.

One of the most important characteristics of the American poetry scene I referred to before is that it is a really strong and supportive community. Through both Steve Roggenbuck's chapbook 'I am like October When I am Dead', available online and in print, and Poncho Peligroso's 'the Romantic', we were introduced to this really enthusiastic, exciting bunch of poets who, most comfortingly, are real people who reply to comments. Another noteable characteristic is their zeal for tweeting. I have noticed that (even Australian) writers seem to be the biggest users of twitter. @ing people, I feel, is similar to commenting on blogs - enables engagement with writers, breaks down typical hierarchies between author/reader etc. Twitter is great for cross promotion and conversing with people relevant to your practice. By following poets/writers whose work we read, we are able to implant ourselves into the community by consistently retweeting and @ing. Probably pertinent to mention at this stage that consistency or reliability (with both tweeting and blogging) is key.

I realise if you don't know anything about this scene I refer to it might seem a little bit vague. A bunch of them are mentioned in a post Stacey wrote earlier this year called 'Enormous Boon' and more can be found by perusing Pop Serial's website and also the online literary journal New Wave Vomit. The moment I was really excited by this bunch of writers was when I listened to  Ear Eater Audio where people read out their own poetry and other people's poetry in an apartment, with attendees reading via skype or in person. Other similarly exciting things I have witnessed have been live poetry readings by Stephen Tully Dierks, Steve R and Brett Gallagher on ustream where you can totally chat with them as they read cool poetry and be really awesome. There is another one of when Poncho went to Chicago to visit them. At the particular reading I watched, the boys read poetry written by their contemporaries and other poets who have inspired them. Both the Ear Eater Audio series and the ustream readings show the strength of this community and their eagerness to support one another - probably they wouldn't put it that way themselves, but I guess that's what it is really. I don't think any of this could have begun without blogging.

Anyway seeing this as an opportunity to make people aware of us down in the southern hemisphere, me and Stacey last week recorded a poetry podcast via skype with a similar idea in mind. We wanted to show how much we dig the poetry we read online and in doing so, increase our blog's readership. And, hypothetically, after all this, more people are reading our poetry.

Stacey has been submitting to online literary journals/publications far and wide, both of us (I believe) starting with New Wave Vomit. For me, this was a most validating experience. Felt like I could submit my poetry elsewhere. Recently, I was solicited, through the blog, to write a piece for a Mexican zine called me gusta, no me gusta. From where we began, posting our thoughts about different topics, to Mexico? It's so crazy. I have been searching for something like this scene I badly outlined above in Melbourne and I cannot find it. I know that it is not just native to America, because of the large number of kiwi writers who read our blog. We get a lot of hits from Melbourne, which confuses me, because I don't feel I have convinced many of my friends to read my blog regularly, and there's only so many times I can hit refresh.

I have attempted to research a similar scene (as outlined above) in Australia, but have come up with nothing. For now, I can only conclude that the literary scene here is about traditional pathways to publishing, and more concerned with poetry as a commodity than sharing it with the world or people who might actually feel something after reading it. Incidentally, poetry that I read online is for me more emotionally valid than poetry I read published in some local publications - which isn't usually the case when I read stuff on a screen**. This is one of the reasons that we (or at least something I want to get out of it) are making our poetry anthology/zine/whatever - to try and give poetry bloggers in Australia/NZ some 'credibility', or kinda as a fuck you to the literary heirarchies going round.

We haven't actually discussed whether we want to 'make a living' from this or what we really want to do with our writing. We get excited about projects or things we can do via our blog, things that we could only do with the help of people who we know through the poetry/lit scene that we have become a part of. I reckon part of the reason we started posting poetry here was because we wanted to share our 'feelings' and basically get some sort of catharsis and potentially connect with people who read and who feel the same. Ultimately I am trying to say that I think sharing poetry online isn't thankless, it opens you up to a new bunch of readers and real sweet ass community of bros.

*I realise, though, that there probably aren't enough literary journals to accommodate all the writing going on - an email from Going Down Swinging said they got close to 3000 submissions from around 1000 individuals.

47

in my new shoes i feel powerful
i get off the bus and walk to whitcoulls so i can buy a pen
so that i can write in my notebook
about how my new shoes make me feel powerful

i want a black uniball ink pen
but i couldn't justify spending $5 on a pen
so i bought a $1 pen instead
the same thing happened to me last week
and now i have two of these $1 pens
where all my pens at yo

walking down city streets
i feel determined to make eye contact
with cute boys
sometimes they smile at me
and it makes me feel extremely nervous

crossing queen st diagonally
can be dangerous but
i am wearing my new black hi-tops
and in them i exude something which must be like
"stay the fuck out of my way, various peoples of auckland city"

in the food court i eat vege samosas
and write in my notebook
with my new $1 pen

i write things like:

"my arms are covered in cat scratches"
"my bag contains tampons and bus tickets"
"in my hands are a million little poems"

i fill up the pages of my notebook with words
and i think about how everything is so full of something

yeah, think about it

writing gives me this feeling
that is something like a river flowing

i go swooooosh
i am a river flowing

tasmanian tiger

my flat mate bought me home a muffin

how 'bout that reggae music

want to be eating vegan sausage rolls wit chu

i tried to go onto facebook on my phone but it was weird

no matter what, there is this notebook and me

the last two things i searched were 'full house' and 'how do whirlpools form?'

my shoulders are carrying the weight of my backpack and other things too

i feel a community of hurt

sometimes i think that the ocean air transforms me

may our collective sadness be remedied by pictures of cats on the internet

Poetry podcast

Poetry Podcast by staceteague

Susie and I just recorded this podcast via skype. It features poetry by Spencer Madsen, Poncho Peligroso, Ana. C, Blake West, Ben Rosamund, Matthew Savoca, Steve Roggenbuck, Walt Whitman, Richard Brautigan and Adam Carr. Plus some of our own poems.

On our next (monthly) podcast, we will be reading poems by female poets.

how often do most girls masturbate

cracking nuts
this is a double entendre
my wrist is not cut out for this

or playing wii sports
these acts seem sexual maybe
we laughed because it was like giving handjobs right

oh handjobs,
amusing conversation at a 'party'

i don't remember what that's like

can't let myself write don't without an apostrophe
even though I like the look aesthetically

feel really nervous or just hungry
would drinking gin help

drink if you think it'd help

FRIDAY

me and stacey are recording a cover of rebecca whatserface's 'friday'

2 4 U

fatwa

I have been passive-aggressively hating you this week
and loving it because
you are my inspiration




reading poetry @ 12am

need a pencil
need a pencil

I am not sleeping with a textbook

46

if i listen to the album 'tallahassee' on repeat forever
will the world seem bigger or smaller

i get so scared

but susie says that i am brave in ways that i don't realise
she says we all are

the very last string in 'alpha rats nest' is played
'tallahassee' starts up again

and again
there is a beginning

everybody is busy or having sex

in a tower
in a nunnery, you are
watched by centipedes
that crawl over her face,
kept just above eye level by gravity,
they seem to look down on you.
they prevent her from
conveying an emotion
about your gnomish features
but she can't remove them -
she has no hands.
give her your hands.
you crumple after the exchange,
wish you could have given claws.

45

there are two rats that live under my house
they dig up the potatoes in our garden
i do not mind though
i want them to have my potatoes
i want them to live and be happy
even though i'm not sure if rats experience complex emotions

is happiness a complex emotion

i imagine that the rats living under my house
are in a long term monogamous relationship

i imagine that they feel a sense of love
and attachment to one another
and also have the same taste
in movies and literature

i hope they have a warm nest
and plan to have lots of rat babies
in the near future

as long as they don't come in to my house
because
that would scare the shit out of me
one day
when i am cooking dinner
or in bed on my laptop
or something

i googled rats and it said they are a threat
to new zealand's many native birds

i hope they are not killing our many native birds
if they are then maybe
i would not feel so blase
about letting them eat my potatoes

i don't think people really care
about rats
and that makes me feel kind of sad

many things make me feel kind of sad

but mostly it's rat apathy

mostly