Tim Upperton

Writer living in Palmerston North. Third poetry collection, A Riderless Horse (Auckland University Press), published 2022.

[Tim Upperton @TimUpperton]

New poems around town thanks to @0800Phantom

[Tim Upperton @TimUpperton]

@DobicoDan If they’re not from the fenêtre region of France, they’re just sparkling windows

[Tim Upperton @TimUpperton]

@CarolineHagood “Book one”!

[Tim Upperton @TimUpperton]

@frank_logged_on @ShakingStick “Francis, I have a preposition for you”

[Tim Upperton @TimUpperton]

@DobicoDan I once counted the steps up from the port at Whitby on the Yorkshire coast - the same steps Dracula bounds up when he comes ashore in England, and jumps into an open grave in the cemetery at the top. In Stoker’s novel there are 199 steps - and it’s true! 199.

[Tim Upperton @TimUpperton]

@secondzeit I remember coming home from work to see old cars lining Grange St, Opawa, and Melanie Lynskey or her stunt double cycling along whilst a truck moving slowly alongside drenched her with hoses. In the film, it really did look like rain

[Tim Upperton @TimUpperton]

@gtconway3d Let’s not forget the fate of Hungry Joe in Catch-22

[Tim Upperton @TimUpperton]

@zyxnix @benedictsred @mawkAnthony_ That’s why Tolstoy decided to learn English! But he ended up preferring Dickens

[Tim Upperton @TimUpperton]

@secondzeit It made me think of those Yeats lines, ‘The best lack all conviction, / while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’ Not that Biden is the best, but he fared badly because he faltered and wavered, whereas Trump was stupid and incoherent but also confident and quick.

[Tim Upperton @TimUpperton]

@secondzeit I liked the film but I thought Chris Hemsworth’s performance was off - the comedic touches were jarring and had a Captain Jack Sparrow vibe

[Tim Upperton @TimUpperton]

@gtconway3d The Quite Good Gatsby

[Tim Upperton @TimUpperton]

https://t.co/uvOmn6vGnB

[Tim Upperton @TimUpperton]

@secondzeit “Is it raining? I hadn’t noticed.”

[Tim Upperton @TimUpperton]

@secondzeit He’s slouching

[Tim Upperton @TimUpperton]

@thebooksdesk One for you, @thomasjuliusb

[Alycia Pirmohamed @a_pirmohamed]

‘Foxglove Country’ by @ZaffarKunial is literally a perfect poem. I gasped at the close.

Sounds, syntax, language, form, references, the little Englands of grief. This poem has truly unmoored me and I don’t know when I will recover.

[Tim Upperton @TimUpperton]

Amis's fiction is flashy, ostentatious in its style, and with a vein of cruelty that is absent from his nonfiction. His memoir, Experience, is much more humane, less cocky, questioning, even humble. It'll last, I think, whereas the fiction already seems of its time and place.

[Tim Upperton @TimUpperton]

Crikey, Martin Amis has died. Last week I was analysing first sentences of novels - Melville, Austen, Plath - with creative writing students. And Amis: "Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing."

[Tim Upperton @TimUpperton]

@pacificraft @ashleigh_young What a great Wellington poem

[Tim Upperton @TimUpperton]

@RonFilipkowski Is it actually fun to stay at the YMCA?