So, for a hot Saturday night date with myself. I just closed down a blog I’ve been writing in since late 2005. And migrated all of Now You Are a Poem and Project Look Up. Times were good folks, but now those times have passed. You can’t hang on to everything, sometimes you have to let go. Consolidate. Recalibrate. Rewind. Be kind.
Somehow – despite the final advertising (sorry folks), I just feel a bit like this.
Via hot bread rollls.
Ten new poets are coming on board for the Melbourne Poetry Map – all of them great, strong, young voices, and I’m chipping away at learning my lines for the Queensland Poetry Festival. Things are taking shape folkettes. I’m hoping to file my tax one of these days, well, I just feel like a whole new Energiser Bunny.
Yet, oddly, this seems an appropriate farewell to Hell and Awe. You were my voice for a long time, but I feel like now – for a while – I want only to tell stories that can be told sweet and plain. I started writing that blog because there was a someone I was in love with that I couldn’t express myself to. I wanted to tell them things and for those things to be understood but – eventually – things got misunderstood anyways.
Here’s where it started:
December 1, 2005
My father
Used to cite a Paxton Hood quote, about minding the books you read as much as the company you keep, because your habits and character would be as much influenced by the former as by the latter.
It was not until much later that I realised that company you keep might indeed be just like the books you read. Not only would some company enrich and enlarge you, in your heart and in your mind, but some company would need to be left unread, their stories half-finished and unresolved. People with bookmarks slicing their middles and separating their time known from their time unknown, their time of friendships from their stranger-hood.
I have a whole range of books sitting on my shelf right now, and the chance that I’ll ship the rest of them up here soon from Melbourne. I keep wondering why I can’t read them all. Why looking for something new and something better displaces the joy of what I have right now, the enjoyment of peaceful Saturday afternoons in the reading nook, finally opening a book I should have read about five years ago.
Oh well, it’s open now. No sense in weeping for what was lost, only for the wistful farewell and the loving remembrance that you never really lose the ones you love, they are under your skin, singing in your blood, flying on your breath.
eleanor j jackson 