PS Cottier

I recently competed in an interesting competition run by a Canadian journal, Contemporary Verse 2.  They give a list of ten words, and punters (who must have pre-registered) have two days to create a poem which contains every word.  I sometimes like doing this type of thing as it stops me from falling in a rut, and if the result is less than wonderful, it doesn’t really matter.

I was very pleased to receive an honourable mention, particularly as I found myself writing about cockatoos; hardly something that the average Canadian would see stripping the bark from maple trees on a daily basis, or resting on the antlers of moose.  Actually I know that Canada, like Australia, is overwhelmingly urban, so please excuse my tired and narrow stereotypes. (Is there such a thing as a vibrant and broad stereotype?) Here in Canberra cockatoos are as common as sparrows.  If not commoner, which is remarkable given how many foreign birds have been released in this country over the past 200 years.

I won’t put the poem up here, as I can’t remember if I granted exclusive e-rights for a time to CV2 (probably not) but here is a link to the poem about cockatoos, imaginatively entitled ‘Cockatoos‘.

Muse with beak

Reading the other poems is fascinating; they are so good that I forgot that they had to contain the magic ten words.  And the other poems were mostly urban.

Really urban, not Canberra urban.