Full text of David Eggleton's Tapa Notebook [PDF: 9MB]
David Eggleton grew up in Fiji and South Auckland and now lives in Dunedin, in New Zealand/Aotearoa. He is a poet, critic and writer who won the NZBPA Reviewer of the Year Award six times at the Montana-New Zealand Book Awards. He has had six books of poems and a book of short fiction published, as well as a number of works of non-fiction. He has also released a number of poetry recordings featuring his collaborations with musicians. His poetry and short stories appear in a variety of recent anthologies. He is currently the editor of Landfall.
After videoing David reading at Port Chalmers and in and out of doors in central Dunedin in April 2013, nzepc presented him with a Tapa Notebook.
David writes:
I decided to use the Tapa Notebook as a creative springboard, filling it with 'notes' towards poems, mostly first drafts plus random jottings from things I was reading or came across during the month 13 May to 13 June. I used a rotring black ink pen to make each page visually interesting. I think there are maybe four or five first drafts that I can take onto work and rework into poems I would be happy to send anywhere for publication. So the notebook is raw, a kind of quarry or perhaps collection of reflex musings on matters drifting into my consciousness or being brought to my attention as part of the atmosphere of that four weeks.
Part of the philosophy here was Allen Ginsberg's proposal for notebook poetry of "First thought, best thought" — only occasionally true, of course, but the white heat of clanging red-hot horseshoe on the blacksmith's anvil before plunge into cold water of hardened form is interesting.
Links
Photo: David Eggleton in and around Dunedin 19 April 2013
Photo credit: Still from video by Tim Page
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