Tuesday poem: Winter in Canberra
June 29, 2015
Winter in Canberra
Wet paper mushrooms
thick crop on nature strips
Chronicles sprouting
P.S. Cottier
The Chronicle is a free newspaper distributed to, I believe, every house in Canberra. They are thrown onto nature strips (the Australian name for the grassy area between footpath and road) and there many of them stay. In winter, the plastic wrapping your Chronicle cannot keep out all the water from frost, so they end up as delightful parcels of yellowed, soggy paper. The one above has not yet reached full mushroom.
Some people end up with months of Chronicles covering the grass outside their home. Talk about first world unsightliness! I saw one man, driven mad by the abundant crop his lazy neighbour had grown, throwing them from their nature strip into their driveway, so they would not be able to ignore them any more. He was genuinely angry.
Meanwhile, in the real world…I hear there are places where free newspapers are not distributed! But surely that is just a rumour.
Here I am listening to Judith Crispin say nice things before my reading at Manning Clark House. Despite the photo, the space was packed. There were as many people as the average Canberra nature strip has Chronicles, but they were a lot less soggy. In most cases.
The reading went well; I tried out a lot of new material and I am becoming more confident. Mark Tredinnick was also seemed happy after his reading.
Now I am off to throw around a few newspapers.
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Tuesday poem: Carrying an injury
June 8, 2015
This is a link to a poem I just had published at Verity La, called ‘Carrying an Injury’. I an settling down for a few weeks watching the World Cup in Canada, so it seems appropriate, although the players in the poem are male. And this is an image of a far less pretty sport than that being played in Canada:
Last week I bought the latest Stephen King novel, Finders Keepers, and read it in the usual feast, all in one sitting. Each new book by Mr King leaves me actually trembling until I hold it, and obsessional until I have finished it. It’s a weird sort of bliss!
I can’t stand the idea that eventually, there will be no more new novels by Stephen King; his Carrie and Cujo and Pennywise will haunt his study like Dickens’s characters, looking for their creator.
Hopefully not for another thirty years! (Though I suppose that might be up to the writer himself…But can anyone believe that Stephen King would voluntarily stop writing?)
Read the works of the other Tuesday Poets around the world by pressing here.
Wednesday 24th June, I am reading poems old and new at Manning Clark House in Canberra at 7.30pm. I think that Mark Tredinnick will be the other reader. More on that later.
A special afternoon
April 19, 2015
David Stavanger works on a line between music and poetry…No.
David Stavanger erases the line between music and poetry….That’s better. Though overly simplistic.
Here he is setting up before his gig in Canberra at Hotel Hotel in New Acton.
Richard Grantham played actual music, including electronic delay with a viola, and keyboards. David played his throat, and the audience, in a devilish performance.
Ellie Malbon also performed her poetry, and at one stage she was joined with Aaron Kirby in a piece with eucalyptus forests, and drowning, which made me think of Birnam Wood coming towards Macbeth in his castle (in the soon to be released play of the same name). Also there were surfing images, and a challenging of the division between elements, and a questioning of myths of improvement. There was a bath, too, in another poem. Here are Ellie’s feet, displayed on the interesting floor which could hardly be described as minimalist:
CJ Bowerbird emceed and performed, and I regret not having captured either his suit or his performance. Andrew Galan read works from his forthcoming second collection, which had a decidedly canine feel to it. This is the sort of maniac that he had in the audience:
Thanks to Annie Te Whiu for the photo.
All in all, this was a wonderful afternoon of poetry and music at Hotel Hotel, in which a lot of poems about water were transformed into magic. The wine was good too…
David’s collection, The Special, is one I should have read by now, but it’s always great to buy it from the poet direct.
Happy birthday Banjo!
February 18, 2015
For yesterday, that is.
I just drove back from Orange, about three and a half hours from Canberra. Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson was born here, and the 17th February is his birthday. I went courtesy of a competition offered through Australian Poetry Ltd and attended a poetry competition, a birthday breakfast, a dinner, and undertook my own Banjo-related activities.
Soon I’ll write something about the Banjo Paterson Australian Poetry Festival for Australian Poetry’s website. (There are too many similar words in that sentence, but that can’t be helped!) I’ll talk about how much I enjoyed this experience in Orange, but for now I must rest, having eaten about as much as I eat in a week over three days. Here is a photo of a bust of the poet, erected just near his birthplace. It can be found in a park dedicated to him:
And what other Australian poet gets jokes made about his or her birthday by coffee shops? (Yes, that is rhetorical…)
In Transit
December 8, 2014
When December comes, a not-so-young woman’s mind turns to a heady mix of wine, politics, religion and poetry…
At least three of these were present at the Transit Bar on Sunday, where Kaveh the Unlikely Poet, Anthony Anaxagorou and a number of other poets performed their work.
I was the judge of a women’s poetry slam, and six women performed their poetry, some of which were composed, or reworked, at an earlier workshop run by Anthony. How he was still standing, or even lounging, is beyond me, as he had finished another gig in Sydney at 3am the previous morning, driven to Canberra, and then done the seminar.
Like an idiot, I was so busy concentrating on judging the poems that I didn’t take a photograph of the participants of that part of the night. I caused unintended difficulties for the organisers by awarding first prize to two women for their poems: Sarah Rice and Jacqui Malins. Both poems were about where the poets live in a sense: Sarah’s a direct and nuanced description of he physical home, and Jacqui’s about the need for a genuine acknowledgement of the first inhabitants of Australia. Both were excellent.
Anthony and Kaveh are both poets who refuse to draw an easy line between political awareness and the poetic. These two realms are inseparable; truly borderless. Neither has much in his too-hard basket, either!
Many thanks to Kira and Jessica, the organisers, for allowing me to participate in the evening through judging.
The photo I took of Kaveh was too appalling for me to post, but a somewhat more competent person took that one of Anthony and myself at the top of the post.
PS Cottier 