there were no seats on the bus           everybody had to stand                    !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Today the
postman brought
me the de-
nominator I
needed to
traverse the
Great Divide.

geographies: The Missouri River floodplain

The outbound envelope
serves as an effective
billboard. Mystery uses
magic tricks      a lot. A
certain condor remains
especially in my memory.

How to create a significant literary community

Tom Veal, who lists one of his interests as Shakespeare Authorship, summarizes the thesis behind Shakespeare's Fingerprints,by Michael Brame & Galina Popova, in a several years old post at Stromata.

"The leaders of Queen Elizabeth’s government wanted to promote the use of English as a literary language in order to secure their country’s position as a Protestant, mercantilist power. To accomplish this end, they called upon Edward de Vere, 17^th Earl of Oxford (whom I shall refer to as “Oxenford”, since that was his own preference), a genius scarcely paralleled in human history. Between 1558 and 1604, the prolific peer wrote most of what is memorable in English Renaissance literature, including the works now attributed to William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Philip Sidney, John Lyly, George Peele, George Gascoigne, Raphael Holinshed, Robert Greene and a host of lesser lights. An appendix to Shakespeare’s Fingerprints lists 38 Oxenford pseudonyms, more are mentioned in the text, and the authors do not claim to have made a complete search of Elizabethan literature. Applying their methods yields, as we shall see, further suspects for the role of Oxenfordian fronts (or “name lenders”, as Brame/Popova call them).

"The motive for this multitude of noms de plume, almost all names of real people who consented to play the auctorial role, was to create the illusion that England possessed a flourishing community of letters. Oxenford shored up this facade by such tactics as having his personae exchange flatteries and dedicate books to one another."

& turns

to bow to
the audience

then heads
back up the
coast, losing
i n t e n s i t y
all the way.

& then

moves further out to sea, & everyone


breathes easier.

Maybe I'm being ageist

but it seems that, as you age or, perhaps more particularly, get beyond a certain age, your ability to deal with a variety of issues at the same time lessens or leaves altogether. You become focused on one thing to the detriment of everything else. Multi-skilling is having a cup of coffee in your hand when you walk into the lounge & that's the extent of it. Turning the light on as you do so is a task too many.

It's why I'm concentrating on the cyclone to the exclusion of everything else. I haven't put other things on the back-burner; I've taken them totally off the stove. I excuse myself partially because it's our first up-close-&-personal cyclone, so time is naturally taken up gathering up & putting away anything that might go flying in the wind, checking that there are torches handy & enough batteries to support them & the transistor radio if the power goes down, that there's enough bottled water, & a firstaid kit, &&&. But instead of resting secure in the knowledge that everything has been done that can be done & moving on to something else, I find myself checking the tv news channels, the weather channel, Google news, the BoM radar maps.

Balls in the air. Singular. In the past, I have accused myself of procrastination, of putting things off because I'm too lazy to do them. But I'm starting to realize that it's not laziness, just an inability to handle more than one thing at a time. It's not the enthusiasm thing where you're so caught up in something that you let other things slide. Rather it's as if whatever task you take up has accompanying barriers that slide into place & do not allow room for anything else to slip in. I do not ring up & make a hairdressing appointment because I'm busy putting together the print edition of Otoliths. I don't do the print edition because I'm busy putting together the next electronic issue. I don't do the electronic issue because I'm busy posting to this blog. I don't post because I'm working on a poem. I don't work on a poem because it's my time for ringing the hairdresser & making an appointment. Which will then exclude.....

The first fingers of rain have reached out & touched us, the wind is gradually increasing in speed. I check the current radar images. The curve of the cyclone can be clearly seen, & we're now affected by the bottom edges of it; but its last projected track still has it staying a distance off the coast &, if that continues, it'll mean more & heavier rain for us, greater wind strength, but minimal impact.

the morning maps

4 a.m.


7 a.m.
Still Category 5, with the projected track slightly further out to sea. We're no longer within the red circles, but not by much, & so the waiting goes on.

& the national picture

The combined radar & satellite image from the Bureau of Meteorology, whose webpages are often referred to as the BoMsite.

Slowly, inexorably—

I've always wanted to use that word—Hamish tracks its way down the coastline. The 7 p.m. bulletin had the wind gusts near the center at 275 kilometers an hour, nearly 200 mph. & at 275 kmh, it's getting very close to the >280kph that defines a Category 5 cyclone.


4 p.m.
Cyclones, hurricanes & typhoons are all the same thing; it's just that they're named differently in different parts of the world. &, of course, each place has a different scale of measuring them though they tend to overlap.

Although Hurricane Katrina reached Category 5 in the Gulf of Mexico, it had been downgraded to Category 3—& would be the same here—in the U.S. by the time it hit the Louisiana coast. The destruction it caused was through the accompanying storm surge, where the sea overran the land. In Australia, most damage is caused by the wind & rain on land, as the cyclone passes across inhabited areas, which means that it's the East Coast that suffers most, even though the coast of Western Australia tends to have more cyclones & of higher intensity.


7 p.m.
No word yet of where this cyclone will cross the coast or if, in fact, it will. I note, however, that we're now on the latest cyclone tracking map which tends to worry me a little. So I've been reading up on the last cyclone—though there's not much information—that made landfall around here, sixty years & a few days ago, destroying about 500 houses & damaging 1000 more. A few lives lost from the cyclone, a few more from the flooding that accompanied it. Lasted somewhere between two & six days, depending on the account.

The 11 p.m. bulletin has just been released & the Bureau of Meteorology has upgraded Cyclone Hamish to category 5, with wind gusts now 295 kph near the center & the central pressure has dropped to 930 hectoPascals.


11 p.m.
Will keep you posted.

p.s. All images come from the Bureau of Meteorology site for Queensland weather.

preparing / to batten / down the hatches

Just as the monsoon trough has, over the past year & a half, reached further south, so too, it now appears, are the cyclones. Cyclone Hamish—a good Scottish name; & even though the Scots are popularly supposed to be miserly, this is predicted to be the strongest cyclone of the season—is tracking steadily down the coastline in our direction.

Cyclones are ranked, depending on the speed of the accompanying winds, on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 the strongest. Hamish has just been upgraded to category 3—winds <225 kilometres per hour— & is expected to be a 4—>225 kph—by the time it is off Yeppoon, that part of the coast closest to us, if it keeps on its current course.


What we can expect—this distance from the sea & with a couple of ranges of lowish hills between here & there; we're on the outer red circle of the lowest dartboard in the tracking map—are strong winds & heavy rains ahead of & during it. Say Sunday through to Tuesday. But cyclones that parallel the coastline have the unhappy knack of suddenly taking a right angle & veering in to cross the coast. The Weather Bureau are picking sometime on Sunday & somewhere round Mackay as being the likely place where that will happen, & if it does, & the cyclone continues on its southerly direction, then "strong winds & heavy rains" will probably be understating the situation.


The latest tracking map has the cyclone likely to lose some intensity in the next 24 hours, but it also has its path closer to the coast hereabouts. We're now sitting almost on that middle red ring.

The morning slightly smoke-hazy, but the sky behind it blue. & the humidity low so a certain amount of coolness in the air. Comfortable. But the song that rises unbidden from the spontaneous jukebox in the mind is contradictory, the Stones' Gimme Shelter...

The floods is threatning
My very life today
Gimme, gimme shelter
Or Im gonna fade away

(pro)Found Poem

    Constellation Cup, cartoons Cup, Couples Cup…… compared to the past a single color, style convergence of glass, enamel cups, now put on all kinds of Keren pattern of jewelry Cup attracted a lot of young consumers of view, sleepy market for some time the cup This is also the bright colors in the brewing of a new selling point.

    Casually walked into the street which jewelry stores, all kinds of ornaments Cup is absolutely essential goods within Diantang. Abstract color lines, the young people like the cartoon character with a logo or a combination of various types of modeling, coupled with moderate prices, five yuan, 10 yuan, will not be the highest in more than 100 yuan, the hearts of the young consumers Was captured.

    Shop staff in the new century shift in the Asia-Jun impression, jewelry Cup is the rise in 2003, Tupperware, Lok deduction, and so many world-renowned home of the brand gradually into the public eye. The initial jewelry Cup is actually very simple, ordinary glass or plastic cups printed on one pair of implied meaning of the logo has become a veritable lovers Cup, than the ordinary price of your glasses to 12 yuan. However, this cup of wearing beautiful clothes is not the same, many young people just to recognize this. Thus, the market slowly warming, in addition to steel, the magnetization, all other quality wood to reach almost all of this area.

    Beautiful indeed difficult to resist the charm. Just a work of the Miss told reporters in her home, large and small, all kinds of ornaments Cup least have more than 10. However, whenever walked into the store, although that know that they have many, but to see Huahualvlv wanted to buy the cup home. According to the salesperson shopping malls, past the cup, people value the sealing, insulation, the main business is also an issue around this area, therefore, up to up to, then it several selling points. But now is different, selling jewelry Cup is the beautiful, a special form, a creative design, etc., can bring the cup to the good sales.

The beginnings of a poem for Gary Snyder

I find
I can't write      poems
abt the
earth, the Earth, Mother
Gaia. There is
too much of
a                             disconnect.

The contributors to Otoliths

are a multi-talented bunch. Regular contributor of visual/ concrete poetry Joe Balaz performs his poem Eastside/Westside in this music video shot by his long-time collaborator, photographer Mary Ellen Derwis, also a regular contributor to the big O.

trance end

plaint

I have the time, but I no longer have the discipline to make the most of it.

Lunch Poems

Mais où
sont les hum-
colored cabs
d'antan?

It's been ten years since I've had a book of poems published in New Zealand, & that was the last time I had a book published in the "traditional" manner—commercial run, copies held by the publisher—rather than via the e-book or print on demand routes.

Lunch Poems is a numbered & signed chapbook from Soapbox Press, made up of poems written in 2007, my last year of "gainful employment", during or just after my lunch breaks. It's the product of the sidewalk café table & a double espresso as transition point, dreaming of Paris & New York in the mundane surrounds of midtown Rockhampton.

Yesterday it was almost
Autumn in New York
&, putting a logical
footprint on a flight
of fancy, I suppose
today is also. Here it’s
coming into spring
but there’s not a
flower to be seen.... (from 7/26/07)

If anyone is interested in obtaining a copy, email the publisher Michael Steven. There weren't that many copies printed, so it's likely to become a collector's item. I'd mention in passing, however, that, if N.Z. is anything like Australia, the cost of cashing a check in an overseas currency is probably greater than the cost of the book, so be prepared to engage in some alternative method of payment.

&, of course, the book is dedicated to Frank O'Hara.

how could I resist?

I am familiar

with the bumble—or humble—bee from my days in New Zealand but didn't think there were any in Australia. So was surprised to see what looked like, but not quite, a bumble bee flying from flower to flower in the backyard.

Went to Google—what did we do in the old days?— & typed in "bumble bees australia". Discovered there are bumble bees here, but only in Tasmania, where they were introduced, as in New Zealand, because of their excellent pollen transfer skills. Mainland Australia, however, is on a bumble bee watch, Hiveland Security at work, because those aforementioned abilities do not discrimate between commercial crops & noxious weeds.

But Google had photos of similar bees; & the bee—I've only ever seen one at a time & I've no way of knowing if they are the same individual—doing the rounds of the garden is called a Teddy Bear bee. Groan, but I have to do it—what a buzz!

So, if you go down in the woods today......


The Teddy Bear bee
(photo from the Australian Native Bee Research Centre website)