Hello. It’s been a minute, hasn’t it?
This newsletter got off to a relatively decent start in the tail end of 2019, and then came a long period of world events in which I thought the last thing anyone needed, really, was me throwing my voice on things into the zeitgeist. Obviously, the great continued Happening of it all still hasn’t come to an end—but I thought I might give things another go in spite of that. [Chen Chen tweet voice] despite despite despite:
At the beginning of December, I made the kind of impulsive decision I will always insist I’m not given to, but which has, in fact, emerged as a pattern throughout my life: in a small scale development from the return to New Zealand (15-going-on-16) and the year spent in Ireland (nigh-on-19), I’ve left my early-twenties-dream apartment in Tāmaki Makaurau, and am writing to you now from a very tranquil, plant-populated bedroom at my grandparents’ house—in another city. This is the kind of personal detail I’m often averse to giving, but the second half of the impulsive-move pattern is the fact I don’t really tell anyone it’s happening until after it’s happened, and so here we are, and I am doing the telling. (I had a line here about ‘swimming amidst the warm salt sea’ of the telling, but it felt truly insufferable, and I couldn’t commit to that.)
At any rate—
I have a bunch of independently-laid plans and aims for the year ahead, and resurrecting this newsletter is one of them. There may be some changes to format, and I plan for things to be more frequent than the monthly roundups I did back in the day, but the content [unfortunate ick of a term] should be relatively similar. Expect everything from melancholic meditations on a theme (though not longing; that’s been done) to straw-clutching pop cultural conspiracy theories. I’ll try not to bare my soul too much.
In the meantime, I’m wishing you well. (I’m also pointing out that there is only one 2022 Compound Press poetry calendar still available from their second print run. I got in for the first one, and I don’t know if there’ll be another, but the calendar is literally hanging over my computer as I type and there’s no finer option if you’re on the lookout for one. So there you go! One more shot! Go, go, go! Absolutely not spon!)
— T
P.S. In true Florilegium form, this week’s bouquet: iris, valerian, rosemary.