Janet Frame – 1965

Janet Frame (1924-2004) was invited to be the Burns Fellow in 1965, and she took the opportunity it gave of the 'freedom to write' with gusto. It was an extremely productive year. She finalised the manuscript of The Adaptable Man (1965) and sent it off to her agent, finished A State of Siege (1966), which she had begun in June 1964, wrote 100,000 words of a first draft of The Rainbirds (1968), completing it at the end of the year, wrote a number of short stories, and wrote 60 poems that were to go into The Pocket Mirror (1968). Some poems escaped. This untitled, unfinished, unpublished poem was written about 1965, evoking a memory 'shivering with the cold of my threadbare language I was once a Burns Fellow.'

Janet Frame, A State of Siege. New York: George Braziller, 1966. Brasch PR 9641 F7 S8; ___, The Pocket Mirror. Poems. Christchurch: Pegasus, 1968. Brasch PR 9641 F7 P6; ___, 'although you have asked me to send'. Untitled poem. Typescript. c.1965. Private Collection.