The Wrong Advice
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- The Wrong Advice
Nachman Goldwasser, kibbutznik,
with a flair for drama, a loud voice,and a habit of misplacing his Uzi submachine gun,
and whose father was a character in The Pledge,
a book about the creation of the State of Israel,told me to write only what I knew,
and so, for decades, I left the pages blank,
until it dawned on methat the truer venture was
to write only what I didn't know,
to unleash the many-pronged probes of imagination,digging into that deep mine of the unknown
for whatever bronze or gold coins I might find,
whatever archaeological fragments,dirtying my hands at least, with labour,
whether or not they remained empty. [End Page 160]
David Adès is the author of Mapping the World, Afloat in Light, and the chapbook Only the Questions Are Eternal. He won the Wirra Wirra Vineyards Short Story Prize in 2005 and the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's International Poetry Prize in 2014. He also hosts the WestWords podcast series.
