One of the things about works in progress is they can turn out to be temporary or permanent dead-ends. An idea that might once have seemed promising goes nowhere and you lose your enthusiasm for whatever it was that drove you to write it down in the first place.

So, while some of the links below go to works that are actually progressing, others go to fragments, ideas that have gone nowhere since I first wrote them down, or that have yet to find the spark needed to give them life.

The Grand Object of not Travelling (WIP) To get the ball rolling, here’s a brand new poem I’ve submitted to The Black Light Engine Room for publication in the April 2011 issue (this link goes to their blog).

Mapmaking in the realm of dreams (WIP) I’ve always wanted to write about the topography of dreams but never quite knew how to describe it until, while struggling to express myself in drafting this poem, my eyes fell on a cheap inflatable plastic globe belonging to my son.

Opportunity? Not (WIP) This poem is based on a recent event. While you need an  imagination to write fiction, in my experience at least, real life makes for better poetry. With apologies to the great Billy Collins, whose poem ‘Consolation’ gave me the self-belief to think good poems can be written about everyday disappointments, just as they can about life-changing events. Needless to say, he does it better than I can.

The Last Poem (WIP)
15 April 2011; a diary entry.

Under the shade of the avocado tree (WIP)
Fragment of a poem in progress that seemed like a metaphor for something at the time (middle of the first decade of the 21st Century).

Woman with the wrongface (WIP)
A short prose piece written after a real experience in an Auckland bar, influenced no doubt by David Thomas’s reading of Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Faces’ from Jackie Leven’s album Shining Brother Shining Sister.

A Night in Tunisia (unfinished)
A poem (work in progress) inspired by McCoy’s version of the Dizzy Gillespie composition ‘A Night In Tunisia’.

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