Defect/ Perfection

Rumours of Defect Perfection's demise have been greatly exaggerated.

2008-10-03T15:27:00.000-07:00

A new editor has taken hold and is meddling industriously behind the scenes, making minor Faustian bargains to bring Defect Perfection back from beyond the veil.The journal website is the first aspect being revamped and will open at www.defectperfection.org.nz by year's end. From there we aim to retake the original form of annually published anthology, starting with a 2008 edition in early 2009.

Stukas

2007-07-12T04:25:00.000-07:00

The day we fall in lovewith the Stukas of experiencedawns fine: out of a refugeerun sky, the crosses fall.You bear yourself alongthe road with all youown at noon. The sun seemssomehow German, as the moonwas French last night.The hour we meet in personthe fascists of convictioncan’t be told: they’ll trialtheir new-made weapons onyour ground (they sense a holeyour Fuhrer wants to hide).In the

Making a Mark

2007-06-21T01:12:00.000-07:00

We all want to make our mark, and make it forever. We build squares in aworld naturally made of curves. Even the straightest line - the horizon- has an inevitable bend.This is a sand sculpture. Or drawing, depending on how you want to lookat it.I am exploring notions of perspective, our environment and the quixoticquest for permanence.The two images are of the same thing - sky, sea, sand,

2007-04-21T22:39:00.000-07:00

I'm not your typical teenager.No, it's not because my name is Kitty Wilde. What were my parents thinking? Iguess they could have given me Panther or Tiger as a middle name or somethingequally bad and tease-worthy. But, they didn't give me a middle name so I'mstuck with Kitty Wilde. Oh yeah, Kitty isn’t short for Katherine either.I don't see my parents that often – they reside mostly in the

Frank Sargeson's "More Than Enough": A Review

2007-03-06T03:52:00.000-08:00

Frank Sargeson’s prose style is efficient, direct and self-effacing, and it is well-suited to the man. I have gleaned this from the second book in his autobiographical writings, which is called “More Then Enough”, was written between 1971 and 1973, and chronicles his life and work from the early 30s to the 1970s (or thereabouts), during which time he worked and lived primarily at his borrowed

Rocks, Tongariro Crossing, Rocks

2007-03-06T03:51:00.000-08:00

The other day I did the Tongariro Crossing, and because of the fine blue weather I could well see that it is a rock-filled place up there, a crumbling Stonehenge of a place. There are rocks like teeth, all kinds of teeth. There are bared teeth, dull white with gums of moss and black lines marking the gaps between the long white slabs. There are broken teeth, chipped and rotted with moss and

Story About a Cow

2007-03-06T03:43:00.000-08:00

Once on the edge of somewhere there was a large field. It was filled with grass and it was very large indeed. It was so large that the sky was not big enough to cover it, and at the far ends of the field, just above the horizon, you could see the stars and planets poking through, even during the day time. It was so big, in fact, that noone had ever found the middle – no one was sure whether or

Stupidity: A Sonnet

2007-03-06T03:38:00.000-08:00

Stupidity, the least poetic vice,Is grey, heavy grey. Golden lust, black hate,Crimson rage: all excite, if not entice.(Consider, too, the incompletely chaste.)But simple lack of sense? Dull, dull. No sheen,No blazing devil’s hue, no tempting shade.Before, no wicked stratagem; and then,No passion or despair, just dumb dismay.He who, having looked a fool, belabours grief,Betrays a spirit absent

The Moral Legalities of Dancing

2006-12-06T23:30:00.000-08:00

1 ======================================== This legal dance step collects memoirs from Egyptian milk baths to colonising spilt knowledge. Meditating her next leap a United Glider passes. ======================================== Love life is a private signpost of change, public and unassuming, a planet for all children, Jupiter has a dusts feather lying on a beach star gazing back

Disappearing Act

2006-12-06T23:17:00.000-08:00

If I had a balloon, I would paint it red, all red, and let it carry me through the sky A drop of blood on a ceiling of blueI would float and the air would whisper ‘don’t look down’ There is no ground; no green or brown;no black or clay Just me and the day and a balloon painted red I would loose myselfin light and the music of the flight A lonesome polka dot,a splash of jam, a pin-prick in

The Shape of a Key

2006-11-21T19:32:00.000-08:00

She has made love with strangersin rooms she didn't know.She makes love to strangersin rooms she doesn't knowThe light fittings differ,so do the cracks in the plasterand the tune in the background,but they are all a shade of whiteand the cobweb pendulumfloats on the same breath of air.There are kissesmingled with her hair,skin slides and risesin peaks and troughsHer eyes are closed,her heart lies

Southern Alps at Midnight

2006-11-21T19:26:00.000-08:00

The soldier on manoeuvresstands in the howling dark,on rock crystallized to whiteThe night strips away camouflage,opens his ribs and creeps around lungs,to germinate a small seed,the dream that is his life,whenever he thinks of home.Rae Pater

Adventuring Up North

2006-11-21T19:24:00.000-08:00

My silent broodings hang over the head of the Hokianga,where charcoal waters claim the tyreless rusten hulk of an old augustan logger;the kereru sing to the kauri and sup greedily the cardinal fruit;and ponytails flick sandflies, adrift in distant fields.While in the settlement, as such; the pier sinks empty to the bay,horse-shoes and hammer hang idly from iron pegsand tidal swells quench the

Alphabetical

2006-11-21T19:21:00.000-08:00

The extent to which the book extendsis bound within its cover and stretchesthrough the vaunted halls of mind cathedralsin signs and codesThe book whose spinefollows the circle of library wallsis God - according to Borges-and spins circles through space.The space between books on shelvesin the library,any library at any time,remains a universal constantover which a librarian has no control.This

A Piece of Power

2006-11-21T18:58:00.000-08:00

A piece of power,A peace of paua.A country of noupheaval, war ortransgressionThese elemental factsare fiction to your3rd eye, I nevermarried the girl whoAsked me, regret has to beReality, denial isreally faith, yetI married herin reality and divorcedmyself from faith…Josh Manene Kahu-Noho

Contributors to 2005 Anthology

2006-11-20T19:16:00.002-08:00

Nick Colville lives in Christchurch and studies at Canterbury University. Other than that, the editors are in the dark about Nick Colville, but they are sure that he is a very interesting person, and they hope he contributes something next time.David Eggleton is a Dunedin poet and writer. His most recent book of poems, called “Rhyming Planet”, came out in 2001. His new collection of poems – “

Pewter Rabbit

2006-11-20T19:16:00.001-08:00

This tiny rabbit on my desk holdsaloft a smaller racquet. A tennisjoke from summers ago. Unfunnybunny now. We have been too long infamiliar circumstances: avoid eyecontact, maintain a bare civility.Rabbit has seen daylight throughmy promises, observed petty vanityand displays of subterfuge. Alsohe remonstrates. Bad habit Brerrabbit, and I’ve grown tired ofyour false silver, buck toothedsmile, and

'Sit down, Angelica'

2006-11-20T19:14:00.000-08:00

Angelica came from El Salvador. She was large, square and appeared to be deep-fried. She couldn't speak English well, but she spoke bad English very loudly. 'Honey, honey, honey,' to her husband, 'eating for me now, ha ha ha!' which meant, 'I'm hungry'. She laughed constantly and in a series of pigmy squeals. She laughed at many things; her recycling bin, Easter, some beans. And when she

Snow at 2am

2006-11-20T19:13:00.000-08:00

Hazard leads the way, blossoming ahead,to the moment grace tilts towards sublimesnow's slow dance on night-time's stage.Three Japanese students run out in theirwhite underwear from the backpacker lodge,brocades of ice sifting through their giggles.Quantum sky-burial, abstract and brightmystery practising the art of concealment,snow's ghost ships, shrouded, sailing into dark.Then an empty,

Tetragrammartron: Review

2006-11-20T19:12:00.000-08:00

Abortion town. Dormant cranes, sine prole in dioramas of detritus petrified. OUR ferule streets, inanimate chasms of Moloch. Contorted steel limbs and tangled lapidary erasures. Sisyphean scree of shamble. Extant retail space as domains filled with effluvium sequacious. Mouldy bagel arcades, polymath debonairz of the cabals of exclusions of the caconyms of pauperised ligature and the quack

Tetragrammartron: Introduction

2006-11-20T19:10:00.000-08:00

About forty odd people were at Peter Trevelyan's "Tetragrammartron" opening on January 17th at the High Street Project. Trevelyan's piece was only on display for one night, so you had to be at the opening to see what it was about, and being there is precisely what the work was about: "Tetragrammartron", on display for only three hours, made room for an interaction between viewer and machine which

2006-11-20T19:09:00.000-08:00

Paku paku, wakka wakka. Pacman activate player one. Tick tock. Tick tock. Whe’re you going? What you got? Wakka wakka. The Daily Grind. BP Edgewere. Tick tock. Medium latte, fill’er up. Paku paku. Wakka wakka. Coffee Culture. Tick tock. Paku wakka. Tick tock, what time you got? Beep Beep. Time for the news. Terrorists terrorise, petrol prices rise. Paku paku, need more wakka wakka.

Skies Versus Mountains

2006-11-20T19:08:00.000-08:00

You can feel the thin air crossing a swing-bridge,you can see it in the toi toi.Of course there’s sheep on a snowy hillbut I don’t hear the national anthem playing.Church of the Good Shepard like a brown monopoly piece.Floodlights shine over a dying horizon,Crusader’s flag dissolving in sunlight.Antenna on the Beehive for the radio controlled colony.You ease the bowls on like a baby’s head onto a

Ada Wells Essay: The Moral of the Story

2006-11-20T18:59:00.000-08:00

“If art does not extend the sympathies, it does nothing morally.” In saying this, the nineteenth century writer George Eliot made two assumptions: that morality is essential to art, and that sympathy is the key to morality. How valid are these assumptions when applied to the work of modern writers?The key to moral life is that nobody is quite sure what it is, but art profits from morality’s

Little Things

2006-11-20T18:58:00.001-08:00

Little things,Moments caught in the webWoven from threadOf words,Tangled in colours,Free to flyAcross the wallsIn our minds, fall.WordsIn our hands, lastRemnants of seasons past,Leaves on Autumn ground,Left to gather,Not to let fallFrom the linesHeld between time.Andrea Quinlan

No More Added Extras

2006-11-20T18:57:00.001-08:00

You’ve got the clipboard, the notes for the presentation and the Super-Pump bottle. Pausing in the hall, you re-collect your thoughts for the day. The dog tries to sneak out with you for a sojourn; knowing this trick well, you knee him lightly back into the hallway and close the door. His ears remain pricked for a couple of moments in case you return. You don’t. On the pavement, you achingly

A Leave Message

2006-11-20T18:51:00.000-08:00

My property manager sleeps at night.I wonder howto sleep when the scump, thurry and squeakabove my bedroomabove my bedabove my beQuiet for fucks sake!There’s a number on the fridge, buthe never answers when we call –Please leave a message. for fucks sakeRupert woke up screaming, hystericalclutching his neck, clawing his“I thought there was a rat on my face!”“Be for

Let Me Tell You a Secrete.

2006-11-20T18:50:00.000-08:00

Let me tell you a secrete.We smelt the smoke for blocks—Is Highpara on fire?I want to tell you that I’ll protect youbut I know it’s not my (historic) place(s trust)Asthmatic gutter children. They sniff.A bag of paint and glue.The city council strictly denies applications for open air fires.Regulations prohibit open air fires.Chch has a smog problem, don’t you know.Hey kids, is that spray paint

Lichfield Locals Development

2006-11-20T18:48:00.000-08:00

We call the streetlight Lucy Fir;below, a shoe-boxof pine needles.Pot not pop popularat Poplar Alley.Not official CCCdollar-a-bag rubbish;Felicity’s whores,car battery,place, paint and peel:a gruff confetti.We live here.We thrive here.Vivid poised, strike with precision!Don’t make me scribblethis ain’t no ribbonIt’s time to get some unrestin lease, picture piece piece,Each each pause, at

New to the Scene: Sacha Bradford

2006-11-20T18:46:00.000-08:00

Sacha Bradford is in love with the city, with every dirty inch of it, every scrap of rubble, every graffitied letter. “I love how the urban throws up beauty in unexpected ways,” she explains, and I think that’s how her poems work as well. They never fail to surprise me. Both playful and dark, juxtaposing inflated language with incorrect grammar, slang and hiphop rhythms with allusions to

Acrobats

2006-11-20T18:43:00.000-08:00

So, balance here upon the high wirenot daring to look down. So, arcupon trapeze, let ourselves go intothe void, arms outstretched towardsthe ones we love, while capturedbeasts are forced to tricks in ringsof spangled sawdust far beneath. Owen Marshall

Owen Marshall Interview: On Writing

2006-11-20T18:34:00.000-08:00

Owen Marshall is the writer in residence at the University of Canterbury. He has published ten books and a number of short stories. He has received numerous awards including the University of Canterbury writing fellowship, the PEN Lillian Ida Smith Award for writing, and the Katherine Mansfield memorial fellowship. His last novel Harlequin Rex won the Deutz medal at the Montana Book Awards. He

2005 Anthology: Editor’s Note

2006-11-15T16:21:00.000-08:00

“Defect Perfection” is an odd sort of name. It sounds good, with its jaunty snap and the stuttering double rhyme, but it is hard to know just what it means: does it mean that no one here can write, and our only hope is to quote Shakespeare in our title; or that all our contributors are hopelessly defective, and that our editors, bless their perfect souls, will turn their work into art; that

Contributors to 2004 Anthology

2006-11-15T16:12:00.000-08:00

Littlejohn Douglas was born in a little town in a little country (NZ) a little under half a century ago. He left school at first opportunity (aged fifteen) having learned a smattering of French and Latin and spent the next thirty years living throughout New Zealand and Australia working bum jobs and living in squats. Having collected the information, now he's going to write about it.Anna Jackson

New Zealand’s Indigeneity Problem

2006-11-15T16:10:00.000-08:00

I write a lot of the time for The Package which is a weekly gig guide has leaning pretensions as a pulse and market place of youth culture. Which is telling enough in numerous ways, but the biggest problem I’ve ever really encountered is their tendency to swap the word New Zealand for Aotearoa. The surprising thing here though is that this tendency comes from a different source than the

Nut

2006-11-15T16:08:00.000-08:00

If inside that shell A universe could fit, And all of stuff, all stories, songs and stars, All weight and store, all ways, signs, lightness, waste and wars, Could in there dwell, While we two sit Outside, with only you and I And breath, to wait and wonder why We were not lost Inside that nut-bound ever-widening sphere. Yet even then, despite its host, Eternity that could not boast.But if instead

Santa III – V

2006-11-15T16:06:00.000-08:00

IIIThe walk back is long and hot but I make it. I find the door that says manager. Duty is written with black marker on a card in front. I knock and go in. His name’s McMasters.“Where the hell you been,” he says. “It’s 9:30 already. I run a tight ship an’ this ain’t a good start.”“I missed my stop,” I say.“The hell ya did,” he says. “ya can’t miss it. Biggest bloody stop for miles. What, ya

Out of Season

2006-11-15T16:02:00.000-08:00

There's a bunch of plump Green strawberries In my garden. They'll never ripen. Not in May. They'll go the way of the last tomatoes Fall, slushy, to the damp earth.But the tiny green buds I noticed on my banksia When I hefted My new backpack Heavy with new textbooks And set off for my first lectures, They have survived the early frost.A few days ago I saw A lone young mother mallard Head bravely

Correspondence

2006-11-15T16:00:00.000-08:00

hey ben, hows the shop going? Do you still want thoseshoes? My skills drawing on ms word are sufficient togive you an impression,-----------I \ -\-\--\--\I \\I----------------------------\------------------------------Is there any way to draw a better picture?Ben Shaol

A False Life

2006-11-15T15:56:00.000-08:00

The woman stared deep into the man’s eyes and realised how much she loved him. The man held her close and whispered in her ear, making her giggle a little. He briefly kissed her cheek and neck, then apologised to her because he had to leave. She longed for him to stay, but understood that he had lots to do. He pulled the door shut behind him and left her counting down the hours before he would

Badminton

2006-11-15T15:54:00.000-08:00

It’s not a dumb game, you’re dumbat it. Though it doesn’t helpto say that, and you’re gettingbetter. This is probablythe only day we’ll ever get to play like this, you realise,this is Wellington. Wedon’t have a net, we’re just counting volleys, pretty good to hit three, then we hit five, then our worldrecord of seven. We’re going for

Watercress Jumper

2006-11-15T15:51:00.000-08:00

Tree by submerged tree you travela flooded provinceand this jersey you are knittingwill retain something of the swaying bus, the barns adrift in twilight, and the speed at which this vehicle takes you both towards these things and away fromthem. Each bump and detourand unsealed stretch knitted in episodesof wool. Every tree and drownedtree. Contentmentwill impress

And the Point of the Exercise Was. . .

2006-11-15T15:48:00.000-08:00

Harold grinned with pride. Not with the kind of pretentious, comparative, my-life-is-better-than-yours-because-of-what-I-just-did kind of pride – the variety normally associated with small children and politicians however; – this was a far more self-satisfied form of pride, the kind that makes you happy, even if nobody else ever finds out what it was that you’re proud of. Harold was grinning –

Rules of Poetry Safety

2006-11-15T15:35:00.000-08:00

Treat every poem as if it were loadedI tried to tell youI to youI ---- youbut the words were emptyIdentify your targetand missedby inchesanywayOnly use a poem if you intend to kill andeach timeI found themand aimed themand sent themto you you’d move anyway‘Never point a poem at someone you love.’The words were I, ---- and youS.C.Williamson

Processor

2006-11-15T14:16:00.000-08:00

This is the preface.There was a girl ten years ago in a coffee shop who was lonely. This was Carin. She pulled out a huge array of papers and fanned œthem out. She pretended to work.Carin found a husband who was in the Marines and had homophobic dreams, and they were married. That was Jeff. Later, she left him, and a dented gray word processor, and moved to another town where she finished school

Interview: Graham Lindsay II

2006-11-15T14:14:00.000-08:00

What kind of audience do you write for?An audience that's interested in the sorts of things I'm interested in, I suppose. I got interested in Zen Buddhism because I saw in it a description of the world that suited my sense of how it should be described. I got interested in George Oppen for the same reason. Ditto Baxter. Everyone has their enthusiasms and looks to bat them back and forth with

Interview: Graham Lindsay I

2006-11-15T13:40:00.000-08:00

Graham Lindsay is the Writer in Residence at Canterbury University, having taken up the 2004 Ursula Bethell Residence in Creative Writing. Mr. Lindsay has published seven volumes of poetry (his latest the 2003 Lazy Wind Poems) and he is currently working on a novel. He was interviewed by Michael Bycroft.What exactly do you do as a Writer in Residence?It's pretty

2004 Anthology: Editor's Note

2006-11-15T13:23:00.000-08:00

This edition marks the end of our first year in creating a creative writing journal for the University of Canterbury. Our aim to provide a creative forum for student artists was well received and we hope this will set a pattern for future years. The journal has brought together a range of writers, including the work of students from such diverse backgrounds as Engineering to English. In this

Introduction: Defect Perfection Goes Electric

2006-11-07T20:35:00.001-08:00

Hello and welcome to Defection Perfection, the blog connected to the literary anthology of the same name. The anthology is published annually by the English department at Canterbury University, and is meant primarily to give students of Canterbury University a chance to publish work of a literary nature. We mean "student of Canterbury University" in a generous sense, and we are equally generous