Tuesday Poem: Australian junk
January 28, 2014
Australian junk
Perfect beyond compare, the composition
glimpsed behind the sand dune, visitation
of a nation, expressed in three fork prongs:
a cricket stump, a tinnie, and a single thong.
Was there an arranger, of design intelligent,
or was it just luck, dumb evolution, that bent
time and space to make this eloquent trio?
Leprechauns fix just one shoe, but there’s no
Irishman likes cricket, it’s just not their game.
Should I search for walkers gone lame,
one side leaning? Or a patriotic drunk
who made tribute, through placing this junk,
into a precise summation of our Antipodes:
weird sport, sour booze, and feet liking breeze?
P.S. Cottier
A very light poem indeed today. Ye gads, it’s not even a proper sonnet! Yesterday was the public holiday for Australia Day (which was Sunday the 26th, for all you benighted foreigners), and the flags hopped out like feral rabbits. I find the yobbo aspects of patriotism very hard to take.
But the rhyming thing above celebrates a moment when I saw a thong (a flip-flop for all you benighted foreigners), a tinnie (an aluminium drink can that once contained beer – oh, do keep up!), and a cricket stump (surely you know what that is?) discarded at the beach.
Meanwhile, of course, morons are killing sharks in Western Australia as they occasionally bite people who are in the water. Meanwhile, our navy is reportedly pushing boats of asylum seekers back to Indonesia. Meanwhile, we still don’t recognise Indigenous Australians in the Constitution.
But at least we beat the Poms in cricket. (Men’s cricket, that is.)
Now, after this dubiously un-Australian rant, with all the affection hidden in the poem, I suggest you cleanse yourself by flying to New Zealand. Click this feather, and It Shall Be:
A nice reminder
November 18, 2013
…that I am a poet, not just an editing slave-droid.
Judith Beveridge and a madwoman
My collection of poetry, The Cancellation of Clouds (Ginninderra Press) was awarded Second Prize in the Society of Women Writers NSW biennial book awards in Sydney last week. More to the point, one of Australia’s leading poets, Judith Beveridge was the judge. I look forward to reading her thoughtful comments properly, as I was a little too flustered to take in much more than the words ‘quirky’ and ‘muscular’, and there was a lot there that I wanted to consider. Those two words did bring to mind a combined weightlifter and clown with wacky inflatable biceps that squirt people. Multi-skilling, I think they call it. This is really what is wrong with my mind, I suppose; it does go off on trampolines.
I actually read some of my poems at the airport, and I thought, hm, these are not too bad. Then I lifted up another passenger waiting in the bar, while wearing a purple nose. (Red is so yesterday, dahlings.) The book is still available from Ginninderra Press, by the way, if you go here. Scroll to ‘C’ for Cottier. (Or Clown (Multiskilled).)
And now, back to the wacky world of editing, which is a bit like juggling diamonds, and a bit like cholera.
Endgame: The anthology
November 12, 2013
We are finalising The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry. Here is a recent photograph of me as I enjoy the process of fine-tuning things:
I am both the one in the hole and the one with the weapon.
My only consolation is that Tim Jones, co-editor, probably looks worse…
It will be a wonderful day when I hold the book in my hands, and all this egregious checking is out of the way. Then I’ll no doubt find a typo, and hit myself over the head with that.
My last post!
September 26, 2013
No, not on this blog, dear reader. Still those sobs.
http://www.australianpoetry.org/2013/09/25/pucks-girdle-or-the-web-and-poetry/
If you dare, click that link and read my final post for Australian Poetry on the Wonders of the Web or How I Learnt to Love the Difference Engine.
This blog tends towards the short and sarcastic, so it was fun to be able to write some long pieces elsewhere.
World tour of one part of New Zealand…
July 3, 2013
…one part of the North Island of New Zealand, in fact.
Yes, next week I’ll be popping over to our comparatively near neighbours and meeting other Tuesday Poets, and particularly Tim Jones, with whom I am editing The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry.
We will be making final selections for the anthology, from the approximately nine million on our two lists of ‘must haves’. I’m also one of four poets reading at Au Contraire, a science fiction convention in Wellington.
And I hope to sneak off from poetry duties long enough to see a dead Colossal Squid on display, and also to see some live, medium-sized birds.
I really can’t wait. (That is not sarcastic, for once, by the way.)
I have visited New Zealand once before when I was a teenager on a school trip, and have vague memories of an extremely racist bus driver, a wool museum (like Australians really don’t have enough wool and need to visit other people’s wool museums), and the smell of Rotorua.
I look forward to contrasting Canberra with Wellington. The populations of the two cities are about the same. That fact says a little more about Canberra, I think, than Wellington.
So busy have I been preparing Vast Lists of speculative poetry that I have no poem to post this week, and next week may be dodgy too, as I’ll be buying things for Wellington.
Wool things, mostly.
PS Cottier 