Changes

Back in the middle of last year I started making a list of things to do before my next birthday. Unfortunately it didn't include experiencing two major earthquakes! With just two to three months left to go, I find that much of the list remains undone.

What I did include on the list was two things to stop doing. Strangely, stopping something seems almost as difficult as doing something. But I am nearly there. One was to leave one of my two jobs, and I was hoping for extra hours at my other job to partially bridge the gap in earnings. This has worked out perfectly - an extra day at the second job was offered and accepted without my even asking for it. And yesterday, for the first time in a long time, I found myself with a free Friday. Which I spent running round catching up on all sorts of errands, and wondering how I ever found the time to work five days a week.

Among the tasks - most of the copies of Takahe issue 72 are now in the mail (the other task I am planning to give up. The AGM is in a few weeks time, then I will be done). Getting a long overdue haircut. Picking up a book that I had put on hold from the library.

I started walking to the hairdresser, got as far as the footbridge (see photo) and realised that I couldn't go that way any more. I wasn't able to capture it in a photo, but the bridge has completely broken away from the supporting pillar underneath. Only gravity is keeping it in place. It was too late to take the longer route by the road bridge so I went back home and got the car.

On the counter at the hairdresser, a petition to save our local Post Shop. Apparently NZ Post intend not to renew the franchise when the shopping centre is rebuilt. Given the distances I had to drive to get all the magazines in the post, I was very quick to sign. I really miss being able to do quick errands on the way home at 5.15 pm.

At the library, I thought I would check on the poetry books shortlisted for the NZ Book Awards. And there they were in the catalogue, listed as "available - first floor Central Library". So I went to the counter. "Books that are listed as available at the Central Library - can you actually retrieve those?" "Well, no", was the answer, "we're not allowed in at the moment". So, I can place a hold but I might have to wait six months, or who knows how long, before the Central Library is accessible again.

I've asked my daughter, who works at the University Library, if she can get them for me. She is going to try, but much of the University Library is also inaccessible, apparently. Sigh. I could buy them, but I've already spent quite a bit on books in the last couple of weeks.

Instead, I will console myself with The Best of the Best New Zealand Poems, which is one of the books I did buy. And with the fact that it is a long weekend here (happy birthday to the Queen, even if it is not her real birthday!), so I still have two more days of weekend to look forward to.

A Few Poetry Things

Performance poet Charlie Dark in New Zealand - video clip here. (It's about seven and a half minutes and comes with an energy efficiency ad before and after, only brief though)

Best New Zealand Poems 2009 here. This has been up for a few weeks, but the NaPoWriMo madness meant I didn't get round to posting until now.

Another new New Zealand poetry site - The Tuesday Poem.

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I've started looking over my April poems and editing them. I'm pleasantly surprised - I haven't counted, but the number I want to tune up and keep is definitely more than last year's tally. In a few days, I will probably delete some or all of them from the blog in case of future submissions, so if you haven't read them yet and want to, be warned! (Though I can always e-mail them to you, if you are too late).

This evening I read at the final of the Canterbury Poets' Collective's autumn poetry series. The guests - ten of us - for the second half were the poets who had been voted first or second by the audience in one or more of the preceding seven weeks. I read three of my NaPoWriMo poems, suitably tweaked, and they went down well. With no "big name" guests, I was impressed by the quality of the reading - my favourite of the evening being Joanna Preston's five poem sequence, Lucifer in Las Vegas, which I very much hope makes it into her second book. (I very much hope there will be a second book!)

Ten Thousand Hours

If you want to get to the top of your game, natural talent won’t be enough. You’ve got to put in the hours – 10,000 of them.

Reading the article linked to above really made me think. I tend to dabble. In fact I think dabbling and procrastinating are two of my big talents. I was heavily into patchwork, then I started writing poetry, then I got side-tracked from both by genealogy (though I still think of myself as a poet) and there have been plenty of other interests along the way.

But I get to the point where I'm not satisfied with the level I'm at, and I think I tend to attribute that more to lack of a major talent than to lack of effort. Ten thousand hours? It's a lot. Especially for someone with a day job, and household responsibilities as well. Ten thousand hours of a forty hour a week job is about two thousand hours a year, or five years. For an hour a day pastime, or an hour a week, it's a lot longer - let's see - an hour a day five days a week would be forty years.

Of course the ten thousand hours figure is for the very top level - Nobel prize winning novelist, Olympic gold medal sportsperson, world renowned concert pianist. It probably takes a lot less than that to get to a fairly decent level of competence, but still a lot more than we allow for in our culture where, too often, we expect to be multi-talented and well-rounded.

Some of us would no doubt be bored if we stuck to one thing. I believe it's a valid choice to diversify, but we have to be realistic about what we might be giving up.

So, I am soberly considering how much I want to be a really competent poet and how much time I might need to put in to achieve it.

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Links for today:

Great to see New Zealand poet Emma Neale (who won last year's Takahe poetry competition) featured in Poetry Daily (The last link there is the one to Emma's actual poem)

Following links from other writerly blogs, I came across expat New Zealander Martin Edmond's blog, Luca Antara, and this post on the 99 most frequently used words in An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English. An intriguing list, which one of his commenters promptly rearranged into a sort of a poem. (The words are arranged alphabetically on the blog post, it would be interesting to see them in order of frequency)