Tuesday poem: Wetlands haiku
August 25, 2014
perched on a log
damp bark transfers water —
my pink frog bum
P.S. Cottier
I do not fully understand this image…
Now that damp croak of a poem was written at a great event which was held in O’Connor, just up the road from where your poetic blogger lives. (That’s me, if you were wondering.) A group of people met, heard about the wetlands and haiku, and wrote a brimming bucket of the tadpole poems.
The event was organised by Sarah St Vincent Welch (writer) and Edwina Robinson (Urban Waterways Coordinator). There are lovely photos and more poems at the following link, including some more serious ones. But I am particularly chuffed by the photo that follows on from the poem, in which I am indeed perched on a log.
http://www.canberra.edu.au/faculties/arts-design/research/research-centres/cccr/publications/haiku
Canberra is a very lucky city, with features such as the urban waterways in the inner city. (If you are imagining a city such as Paris, or Sydney, please don’t. Canberra is not that type of place at all.) The waterways return some of the creek that flowed through this area to a more natural state after it was concreted at some stage. Philosophically, it is an interesting question whether these recreated ponds are ‘natural’, but I am pleased that they exist.
Similarly, is haiku in English actually haiku? Is a haiku that contains a rhyme a proper haiku? Should we worry about such notions of form and purity?
Or should we just play?
Press this feather, fly to New Zealand, and read even more poetry:
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Women: More Dead than Men. (And less so.)
August 8, 2014
Poems read at the Dead Poets’ Dinner in Canberra, July 22, 2014
Colin Campbell / Thomas Blackburn ‘A Smell of Burning’ and ‘Hospital for Defectives’
Marion Halligan / Yeats ‘Sailing to Byzantium’
Joyce Freedman / Siegfriend Sassoon ‘Everyone Sang’
Hazel Hall / Hilaire Belloc ‘Tarantella’
Chris Dorman / William Baine ‘The Archery of William Tell’
Kathy Kituai / Muso Susaki ‘Sun in Midnight’
Nicola Bowery / Sarah Broom ‘About Me’ and ‘That Moon’
Wendy McMahon Bell / Seamus Heaney ‘Digging’
P.S. Cottier / Catherine Martin ‘The Mouse Tower’
Geoff Page / Seamus Heaney ‘From the Republic of Conscience’
Laurie McDonald / David Meyers ‘Fencing in the Dark’
Carmel Summers / Janice Bostok ‘Amongst the Graffiti’
Moya Pacey / Elizabeth Bishop ‘One Art’ and Louis MacNeice ‘Wolves’
Rosa O’Kae / Seamus Heaney ‘Skunk’
Sue Edgar / J.L. Borges ‘Mirror’ and Sylvia Plath ‘Mirror’
Adrienne Johns / Hugh McDiarmid ‘Vanitas’ and ‘Balmorality’
John Stokes / R.F. Brissenden ‘The Whale in Darkness’
Mary Besemeres / Wizlawa Szymborska ‘View With a Grain of Sand’
Sarah Rice / T.S. Eliot excerpts from ‘Little Gidding’
Emily Rice / Ted Hughes ‘Tractor’
Annie Didcott / Keats ‘Ode to a Nightingale’
Tony Williams / Neruda ‘The Dead Woman’
Arlene Williams / J.J. Bray ‘Address to Pigeons in Hurtle Square’ and William Carlos Williams ‘This is just to say’
John Van de Graaff / Seamus Heaney ‘Follower’ and D.H. Lawrence ‘Piano’
Adrian Caesar / R.S. Thomas ‘The Owl’
Michael Thorley / Thomas Hardy ‘Channel Firing’ and ‘They’
Andrew McDonald / poems by two Scottish poets (Norman McCaig?)
Lesley Lebkowicz / poems by Soseki
Alan Gould / a song by Hamish Henderson
Alinta Leaver / Kenneth Koch ‘Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams’
Richard Scutter / Auden ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ and Hopkins ‘Inversnaid’
Martin Dolan / Dylan Thomas ‘Prologue’
Marlene Hall / Thomas Wyatt ‘Whoso list upon the slipper top’
Melinda Smith / Francis Webb ‘Cap and Bells’ and ‘The Bells of St Peter Mancroft’
Ruth Pieloor / C.J. Dennis ‘The Austra—laise’
Janette Pieloor /Gwen Harwood ‘The Secret Life of Frogs’
37 readers chose poems to read by dead poets. 7 women’s poems were chosen. Please check and see if I got that right, as numbers and I rarely speak. I can’t work out the percentage, not being at all like the remarkable Ada Lovelace pictured below.
We continue to shape the world with the words of men only.
Poetry is an art form where many women work, and have done so for centuries. There are lots of works by ‘dead women poets’.
Are our aesthetic judgements so very narrow? Does thought spoil poetry?
I did get a giggle out of ‘The Dead Woman’ by Pablo Neruda. In one sense women are more dead than men, in that their/our poetry seems more easily buried. In another, it seems that they are not dead enough to qualify as Dead Poets, that is, those who are part of the pantheon.
I just don’t understand.
Apart from the retrospective silencing of women, it was a very enjoyable night.
Bias in the sciences and bias in the arts
Lizz Murphy at the Hub
July 28, 2014
That sounds like an ad for a jazz singer, at a club drenched in twilight like cheap cologne, where the sax wails like a lonely cat.
But it is not. It is purely informative, telling you, dear reader, that I edited the hub post for Tuesday Poem this week, and that it features the said Ms Murphy with a most beguiling poem. Press this feather and read:
Here is a photo of Lizz Murphy and myself in front of some wool, which bears absolutely no relation to the poem. She is the one who looks intelligent.
Tuesday poem: iPsalm
July 24, 2014
Sweet god of Twitter
keep me succinct
but not too avid.
Deliver your goat
from all foul trolls’
machinations.
May the words of
my blogs,
the firstworldproblems
of my speech
be acceptable
to your on-line policies.
O great moderator
#amen
P.S. Cottier
So here’s a poem partly about Twitter and Facebook by a person who resolutely refuses to do either. Twitter seems to bring out the inner thug in too many people, and Facebook, with its voluntary marketing of each person by each person as a commodity, is just sad. Although one of the books I have been involved in has its own Facebook page, admittedly. But that is a commodity, albeit a poetic one.
Blogs, of course, are inevitably saintly…
The following feather, dropped by a visiting angel, will take you to New Zealand and you can contemplate the wonders of technology as you fly there. Or not. That is entirely up to you.
This poem is appearing on Thursday, rather than Tuesday. Sorry for that.
By rights I should be in Sydney, recovering from the launch of The Stars Like Sand, but I was too sick to go. Rest is what I need right now.
I hope those who attended enjoyed the launch.
PS Cottier 
