I have begun a YouTube channel, The Burning Archive, where I will feature short videos of my writing and interests in culture, history and literature. To begin the channel I am releasing a set of five poems that I have read from each of the fascicles of Gathering the Flowers of the Mind: Collected Poems, … Continue reading Watch my poetry readings on YouTube
Personal story
My collected poems published and on sale now
I am very pleased to announced that I am publishing my collected poems, Gathering Flowers of the Mind: Collected Poems, 1996-2020 in both a print and e-book edition. You can purchase through online retailers such as Amazon and Booktopia. You can buy the print edition from Amazon here and the e-book edition from Amazon here. … Continue reading My collected poems published and on sale now
Reflections on starting a podcast
Over the last month I have started a new venture, my podcast, The Burning Archive. I have posted links to my episodes here on the blog, and you can listen on all the main platforms - Apple, Spotify, Google etc. I have some brief reflections on the process, and the meaning of the podcast for … Continue reading Reflections on starting a podcast
Announcing my podcast, The Burning Archive
Dear readers - you may now become dear listeners. Yes, I have started a podcast - The Burning Archive podcast. You can listen at Spotify, and all the other podcast platforms, Apple, Google et etc. The show is about all things history and culture. It takes to heart William Faulkner's statement from Requiem for a … Continue reading Announcing my podcast, The Burning Archive
Sponges, metamorphoses and psyche
In April 2017 I wrote the following post in an experiment, a form of improvised association and regathering of the fragments of my mind. I will write some more of these kinds of posts soon. Please enjoy. Sponges, metamorphoses and psyche (originally posted 23 April 2017) After a morning during which I searched my ravaged … Continue reading Sponges, metamorphoses and psyche
13 ways of looking at a bureaucrat
In early 2017 I wrote a series of posts - or let us call them essays - on Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat. I wrote it still aiming to revive a career in the bureaucracy, but perhaps gripped by the fates to know, as I know with high resolution tonight, that poetry and … Continue reading 13 ways of looking at a bureaucrat
On living not by lies
2020 has taught us through bitter experience that our societies are not vaccinated against totalitarianism, and certainly not the mutant strain of "soft totalitarianism" described in Rod Dreher's Live Not by Lies: a Manual for Christian Dissidents (2020). The last year has seen lockdowns, curfews and bans on the most fundamental human relationships (attendance at … Continue reading On living not by lies
Dream. Life. Recovery.
For several years in my early thirties, I attended a dream group with the Jungian psychotherapist, Peter O'Connor. Peter, who is now retired, was a gifted therapist who for many years from the late 1970s held the torch in Melbourne for a humanistic and mythopoeic psychology against the rat-observers and statistical behaviouralists who were dominant … Continue reading Dream. Life. Recovery.
This grey spirit seeking a sinking star
But more so than the moulted carapace of governing that lies at my feet, I connected to the adventurer of the spirit, weakened by age and misfortune, that Tennyson saw in Ulysses. It was this grey spirit that I turned to this morning for the courage to continue.
Taking time with Szymborska
I have established several practices for the New Year to make it a more mindful, culturally enriched and satisfying year than the plague year of 2020, now buried in an urn of oblivion. I have begun a bullet journal to record habits, moods, and experiences, and in which to write the plans and dreams of … Continue reading Taking time with Szymborska
Fragments from the Burning Archive: Mikhail Bakhtin
I plunged again into my white box of old handwritten index cards today, and pulled from the archive, laid down in my twenties and thirties, a fragment from Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), the Russian literary critic and philosopher. The text comes from a late work of Bakhtin, Speech Genres, although I took the text from Clark … Continue reading Fragments from the Burning Archive: Mikhail Bakhtin
The freedom of internal exile: 2020 in review
The freedom of internal exile So much of this year I have struggled with the moral crisis of how to endure and to live well through a corrupt, decaying, failing and abusive regime. I do not mean just the errant minor provincial government that I serve as lowly under-castellan. I mean the wider institutional regime … Continue reading The freedom of internal exile: 2020 in review
The Burning Archive 