all years are tough & tender, it depends on which direction one's looking at any moment - but I want to thank everyone for your support & encouragement thruout this year - it has been something of a wild ride - the great success of CODEX 2014 in Melbourne last March and the demise of Codex Australia soon after - the hours of personal questing & questioning about 'what on earth I'm here for' that followed - the publication of poems in Loom to wood engravings by Richard Wagener by David Pascoe's Nawakum Press in California; the immanent issue of Vestige, poems to accompany more engravings by Richard and issued by his own wonderfully-named Mixolydian Editions, also in California; invitations to participate in the Codex Foundation's Alchimie du Verbe, with 25 book artists 'from around the world', and The National Print Museum's Fine Press Book exhibition in Dublin, Ireland early in 2015; the acceptance of a book of poems, (a paperback, no less!), Crankhandle, by Cordite Poetry in Melbourne, coming out in 2015; the sad & unnecessary closure of The Holloway Press at the University of Auckland (which I helped to found in 1994); an exhibition of Holloway Press books in Auckland, which then travelled to Christchurch to the Christchurch Art Gallery; and a talk I gave at Steve Clay's home in New York City back in 2010 will now be published in Threads, a series of talks by book artists (all the talks were delivered at Steve's home), published jointly by Steve's Granary Books, New York, & Kyle Schlesinger's Cuneiform Press, Houston, Texas; I launched a splendid exhibition of the calligraphy of Deirdre Hassed, a gem of which now hangs on the wall at home; and I gave two talks, one at the State Library of Queensland titled Electio Editions - what is a printer to do? and the other was the Keynote at the Victorian Bookbinders Guild symposium, titled Shaking the pumpkin : the artisan and the book as a work of art -
for Electio in 2015, two books : one, the poems of my early (1960s) friend & mentor George South, and two, a book by Western Australian Robert Wood, who I met in Philadelphia in 2004 - he was in a class of Charles Bernstein's there - and he now lives in Melbourne - add to that four or five poetry broadsides, and writers already lined up for that are Marion May Campbell & Ruark Lewis, there may be one by the printer, and two others are under discussion -
I cannot comment on 'world news' it is so irremediably bad - the amount of killing that happens every day is beyond any individual's capacity to grieve for - no wonder a local death is capable of unleashing a large scale social grieving - it stands, it seems to me, as a trigger for the deep grief most of us feel at a world in which power & money does not care whether any of us lives or dies - yesterday, a neighbour gave Miriam roses from her garden and they now grace, and seriously, they do grace, our kitchen table - and we do know that acts like these are also commonplace and along with whatever work we are given to do, are sometimes the only defence we have against the killing tides - let 2015 be safe for all of us -
