{"id":446,"date":"2022-09-08T22:48:49","date_gmt":"2022-09-08T22:48:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/?p=446"},"modified":"2022-09-10T19:19:00","modified_gmt":"2022-09-10T19:19:00","slug":"anna-caddens-film-pacific-light-poems-of-renewal-by-david-mason","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/2022\/09\/08\/anna-caddens-film-pacific-light-poems-of-renewal-by-david-mason\/","title":{"rendered":"Anna Cadden’s film\u2014’Pacific Light: Poems of Renewal by David Mason’"},"content":{"rendered":"

‘Pacific Light: Poems of Renewal by David Mason’, a film by Anna Cadden with underwater photography by Cally Conan-Davies<\/a>, is a meditation on life, work, poetry and the soul. Poems are from David’s book Pacific Light<\/em> (Red Hen Press, 2022), available through <\/span>https:\/\/bookshop.org\/books\/pacific-li…<\/a><\/p>\n

David Mason was born in Washington State, forty-odd degrees north latitude, and now lives on the Australian island of Tasmania, forty-odd degrees south latitude. That Pacific crossing is the work of a lifetime of devotion and change. The rich new poems of Pacific Light<\/i> explore the implications of the light as well as peace and its opposing forces. What does it mean to be an immigrant and face the ultimate borders of our lives? How can we say the word home and mean it? These questions have obsessed Mason in his major narrative works, The Country I Remember<\/i> and Ludlow<\/i>, as well as his lyric and dramatic writing. Pacific Light<\/i> is a culmination and a deepening of that work, a book of transformations, history and love, endurance and unfathomable beauty, by a poet “at the height of his powers.”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The film\u201423 minutes in length\u2014is a very thoughtful, professionally-designed production, & I particularly enjoyed listening to David’s reminiscences of how he’s configured ways to live a life…. <\/span><\/p>\n

[DAVID MASON] \u2018I don\u2019t really have ideas so much as I have sensations. Keats said, \u201cOh for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts\u201d, and I suppose to a very great degree that\u2019s the way that I live as a poet. And what I try to do is define the words that are going to match those sensations and the rhythms I\u2019m feeling, the sounds\u2026.\u2019<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

[INTERVIEWER] \u2018So\u2014what is to you, the work of poetry? What is its purpose, in a way\u2014if work gives us purpose, what is the job that poetry does in this world?\u2019<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

[MASON]: \u2018There are several different things. One is what it does for the poet\u2019s life. I think it\u2019s DH Lawrence who said, \u201cI write so that I will not lose my life\u201d. So one feels as if one is trying to live more fully, or relive more fully\u2014you want more life. You want to live more\u2014by observing more, writing more, seeing more, and all that\u2026.\u2019<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018I don\u2019t write just for myself. I write to speak to other people, and to speak across time to people I\u2019ve never met about what it\u2019s like to be alive in the world. I want to make memorable speech out of this, maybe even memorable song out of this. Which means, that to some extent, we write to face our mortality. Or we are always facing our mortality when we write. We\u2019re always thinking about what it means to speak through that death and across that death, into another time, and to other people.\u2019<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

David will be appearing as a guest of the Tasmanian Poetry Festival<\/a> in Launceston at the end of the month.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘Pacific Light: Poems of Renewal by David Mason’, a film by Anna Cadden with underwater photography by Cally Conan-Davies, is a meditation on life, work, poetry and the soul. Poems …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[93,94,92],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cadden-anne","category-conan-davies-cally","category-mason-david","entry entry-center"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=446"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":492,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions\/492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}