DAVID BEACH
Te Aro 12
The road hadn’t been closed off, nor even
the pavement, so probably the film shoot
outside Bowen Galleries wasn’t James
Cameron ventured forth from Weta Studios
for location work on Avatar. Two
19th-century time travellers presumably,
who equally might have been bystanders
sporting cutting edge retro fashion, were
conversing admidst a scene where the
difficulty was telling the mêlée
of creative endeavour from the mêlée
of people taking an interest in
proceedings if not rather turning the
proceedings themselves into a backdrop.
David Beach lives in the Wellington inner city suburb of Te Aro. Two books of his prose sonnets have been published by Victoria University Press.
Beach comments: ‘ “Te Aro 12” is from a twenty-four poem sequence. Te Aro has a busy arts scene and I was keen to emphasise this aspect, while at the same time treating the suburb itself as a kind of fiction. Poems were observed or invented as came to hand. James Cameron was in town but the gathering described in “Te Aro 12” is a figment, my attempt at CGI trickery.
Links