The poem is from a triptych[1] in my 2015-16 AUT Master of Creative Writing, the broad theme of which was retrieving my creative and writing life. The piece is a retrieval from scrawled lines in notebooks written in Matapouri Bay moonlight, from journals, paper scraps, over the 2000s, the decade of my professional peak in academia: travel, income, part of a team building an internationally successful English language school. However, my writing was these scribbled fragments.

For the MA I typed them as written — incomplete/crossed out /indecipherable/ alternative words, phrases — with each separated by dotted lines in 30 or so chronologically sequenced pages. A sense of hesitancy, of privacy seemed to emerge from the displayed mass. I found this very moving.

I channeled the William Burroughs cut-up, but with my selection and arrangement around that pervading perception, and wanted to acknowledge this affective core along with the retrieval process. An imaginative and practical construct formed from discussions with my MA mentor Mike Johnson and of what I knew of the palimpsestic effect: the poem (and poet?) emerges from grey scale. Around this time, in a meeting with AUT Professor of Art and Design, Welby Ings, our talk ranged serendipitously to palimpsest and disjecta membra — the bones of the poet, retrieval, remaking. Very exciting, still. I’ve continued to use grey scale as memory, a chorus, for visual texture, for reflection.

notes

[1] Another of the trio, Night Light, was selected by Olivia Macassey for brief56.

michael giacon