Ian "Barra" Miller

Dear Tim Thorne,

I’ve just spent the night talking with Nils Lofgren. He told me about the Launceston Poetry Cup Upset.  The year the crew from the Schnapper Point Yacht Regatta turned up. Sam and William and the others. I think Vicki Viidikas was there too. Nils has given me a two hour long monologue about that disaster. Evidently it was then you decided to run with Scott Amon and edit an anthology of the language poetry of fishing! Also that you have given up meat and gone the way of vegans. I can’t believe it. I can’t think. I have to think though, as so much is counting on the fact that you have not betrayed us all. Everything depends on one thing: tell us it’s true about the wagga-meat in your freezer!

Ian ‘Barra’ Miller
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Dear Ian Miller

I bought one of your so-called hand-crafted rods last year. Paid $2,000 for it. I might as well have used a swamp gum branch and a strip of cotton torn from my shirt as line for all the good it's done me. I might as well have used a coke can and spiderweb. I went to the Riverina, to the banks of the Murrumbidgee, to fish for Waggas. I had a bucket full of bardi grubs and a couple of yabbies. I was going to camp for 3 days, and fish the Red Banks, a hole renowned for Waggfish, about ten miles south of Tocumwal, but on the first night, on the first hit from a Wagga (I estimate its weight to have been in excess of fiften kilos from the enormity of the strike) your rod snapped clean in half below the third guide. In disgust, I threw the two halves, as well as my Shimano Stradic, into the drink and went home. How can you mention Nils Lofgren and fishing in the same breath? One is a master songwriter & singer, and one is my favourite past-time which, thanks to you, has left me with a sour taste in my mouth. Your rods are a joke. I could make a better rod by whittling a fencpost down to a stick and leaping into the river to whack mullet with it. Last night I phoned A.A. Amons. I told him that you have been harassing me. He is going to write a series of short poems in the form of curses and burn them on his barbecue while saying your name. A.A. is a killer who runs vegans over with long, narrow, tight lines. The only red language poetry I know is the poetry the Red K writes: a rolling mass of words-as-grass seeds sewn into the pockets of the Red Academy. You might as well stop flying, driving, abandon trains, burn your computer, and return to the myth that is Pure Living. I'm sure Steve Starling would like to know of your involvement in all this. Come clean and oil your binding wheel. The time is now redder than your silken signature.

Tim "The Tin Horn" Thorne