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An Excerpt from Our Year of New Zealand Letters

I'm reading the new Sally Rooney book
the characters all talk to each other by email
making gestures of intelligence to each other: 'maybe
I'm undialectical'
In the real world everything is surfaces: empty rooms
but I don't know
if Eileen's is the real one or mine. You know this is
a very embarrassing start to the sequence we agreed to write
(if we had agreed to write something like this
we would probably never have started it
I'm not really interested in this kind of work
and I don't think you are either)
which I suppose means that I do find the Rooney embarrassing,
or that this poem will be the start of a bestseller.
You said you had Claudia Jardine's AUP New Poets on the side of your bed
and I work with Claudia and Claudia seems nice
and just bought the new Isabel Allende book.
I don't like Isabel Allende. When I read The House of the Spirits
I couldn't get past all the violence. But I guess that's realism for you.
The problem with all this
prose
is that it's not very poetic.
***
Music. Please play gentle instrumental. Lady in white passes under white tree. Richard Powers’
The Overstory. Please charge speakers overnight. It's not writing to just write down everything
you see. But it is a start. Woman facing right toward abstract yellow and green squares. Selling
blunted knives (protective layer against the outside, the rest of the world). Protected against
nothing.
***

J

That’s funny. My sister lent me that book.
I got through the first two chapters
then gave it back to her, and when
one of the women in my writing class used the word ‘dialectically’
in a poem last week, we collectively decided
that it was attention-grabbing but definitely
not the right word. The last thing I read was a legal case
about words. Specifically, it was about NZ politician Bob Jones
who was publicly denounced by NZ politician Hugh Templeman
for hating women, civil servants, and jews.
Bob sued for defamation
but only about the jews part. I think my boss might hate women too, and
technically, me telling you that could be defamation
because in legal terms, communication
is publication. It’s very unpoetic that you can actually sue people
for messing with reality. In any case, the truth
is surprisingly (or unsurprisingly)
a hard thing to prove. My flatmate Gracie and I talk a lot
about dissociation
but I don’t have the money to go see anyone about it.
It’s probably just that Gracie's a second-year psych student
and likes diagnosing me with things.
Once she convinced me I had diabetes.
I don't understand the line between
poetry and prose. If there is one, I suppose it's about
gaps
(I think this is not very good and
I’m talking past you)
I’m not reading anything
at the moment.

**
[I’ve attached a one minute recording of my speakers playing the HAIM
song ‘Up from a Dream’. You can probably hear wind or cars or people
on the street. I don’t know, I haven’t listened to it. I listen to the
song a lot on the bus.]
**
Sarah

There is something wrong inside me
physically. Each day my spine spins itself
into a morbid equestrian frenzy.
For a twenty year old I am aging fast.
I think the inside of me doesn’t match the outside
(and the outside is much older than the inside
which is instead so interested in ice cream and
mud).
the .m4a HAIM song you sent is kinda dissociative
I’m lying in Christchurch and for a brief moment I’m there
beyond myself
on the street with a guy yelling HEY and a tap running in the other room
(maybe the room where you threw up in the sink)
but I shouldn’t pretend recordings are more than they are
and we shouldn’t pretend words are more than
amphetamines that revolt against our brains;

conspire against us