Published 22 November 200930 November 2009 · Main Posts How poetry ruined my life, episode 1 Tara Mokhtari Welcome to my first blog for Overland. This poet will not be posting poetry here. I’ll let you know if I post something half worth looking at on my own page: taramokhtari.wordpress.com, if you seek toilet reading material (I know you all take your iPhones to the loo with you for Tweeting purposes these days). I’ve banned myself from distractions lately while I try to write up the final few chapters of the verse novel I’m working on. Mind you, last weekend I reverted to my groupie-former-self and drove up to Maitland, NSW for a reunion with my beloved Toohey’s Old which is oh so hard to find in Victoria and to see Pinky Beecroft play songs from his band’s new album (The White Russians – Pretty Black; if you like heart-on-sleeve rock’n’roll, stripped back to its most intimate skin, played by a tight Oz super-group: Get thee to an iTunesery)… Anyway, rock-adventures aside, I’ve been diligently writing like a maniac. Not just for the verse novel, either. I decided to start sending out poetry submissions to U.S journals – you know, to find out if their rejection letters are the same as the ones we get here. To reward myself for my effort this last few weeks, I walked fifty miles, or so, in the pouring rain up Bourke street last night to The Paperback Bookshop to peruse their fine poetry section. If you’ve ever been in there, you’ll know it’s the only part of the shop where the fiction shelves overlap a row of ceiling-to-floor poetry anthologies, and the only way to get into the nook is if you’re a mouse or a yoga proficient. Nonetheless, I found a new (2007) John Ashbery book, A Worldly Country, and a Faber Poetry collection of Robert Lowell’s poems. Perfect! I thought. These are two poets I like. A lot. I feel my own poetry swings a bit between confessional (Lowell) and the observational style of the New York schoolers (Ashbery). So my plan is to read the two books simultaneously and see what happens to my brain and to my work. This may seem like a harmless exercise in indulgent procrastination from Ph.D. Land, but I can be extremely psychologically altered by good poetry, potentially to the point of paralysis. What I’m reading so impacts my day to day life that I have to watch myself. Bukowski makes me drink, for instance. Sexton brings out my inner scarred feminist. Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate made me rhyme half my verse novel. It may happen that Ashbery will finally convince me I’m the fraud I always suspected I was. I may never write another word. If that happens, this first blog post will be my last, thus justifying how damn long it’s become. Thanks for reading. Tara Mokhtari Tara Mokhtari is a Persian-Australian poet and screenwriter based in New York. She is the author of The Bloomsbury Introduction to Creative Writing and Anxiety Soup. More by Tara Mokhtari Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays First published in Overland Issue 228 25 May 202326 May 2023 · settler racism The ‘Chinese question’ and colonial capitalism in New Gold Mountain Christy Tan SBS’s New Gold Mountain sets out to recover the history of the Gold Rush from the marginalised perspective of Chinese settlers but instead reinforces the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty. Although celebrated for its multilingual script and diverse representation, the mini-TV series ignores how the settlement of Chinese migrants and their recruitment into colonial capitalism consolidates the ongoing displacement of First Nations peoples. First published in Overland Issue 228 15 February 202322 February 2023 · Main Posts Self-translation and bilingual writing as a transnational writer in the age of machine translation Ouyang Yu To cut a long story short, it all boils down to the need to go as far away from oneself as possible before one realizes another need to come back to reclaim what has been lost in the process while tying the knot of the opposite ends and merging them into a new transformation.
