Malingering
July 2, 2012
That’s what I’ll be doing for the next two weeks. So no poem this week or next.
But I may feature a most poetic tattoo next time. Cheers.
Canberra has improved recently
For non-malingering poets, click this feather:
Tuesday poem: Thirteen reasons for burning her
December 19, 2011
Thirteen reasons for burning her
One irrevocable stutter from left-handed mouth,
forever failing to birth ovate words.
Seven skin tags, crooked nipples of flesh,
sprouting from her sordid shoulders.
(For the Devil to suck from behind
for his greater convenience. Many teated sow.)
Three companions inside her cottage:
wrinkly goat, grey cat (black in smoked disguise), inexplicable toad.
Fluency with rare herbs, no flustered stutter there.
And a bovate of best land, just beside the river.
P.S. Cottier
From The Glass Violin
Other (hopefully more bewitching and seasonally appropriate) poems can be found at the Tuesday poem hub.
Little Nell’s death scene from The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens, ‘improved’ into a happy ending by an alien’s tool.
November 14, 2011
It’s been a good week for my fiction writing, which I generally see as a secondary function to poetry. I sometimes sneak prose poems into story competitions, and hope that the judges will accept the lack of plot and character development! My first small collection of ‘real’ stories, A Quiet Day, was published in 2009 by Ginninderra Press, and was just highly commended in the 2011 Society of Women Writers Awards in Sydney. The judge was Susanne Gervay, who is an established and prolific young adult and children’s fiction writer. (Here’s a link to her blog.) This was very gratifying for me. Susanne told me that there was a poetic element to my stories; I didn’t mention that this element is always threatening to eat the plot!
This week I am going down to Melbourne because my flash fiction ‘A Writing Unexpected’ won the Big West Festival Competition and I’ll be reading it at one of the events. That’s if the airport is open, as a certain President Obama is visiting Canberra this week. The only other problem with the awards being in Melbourne is that I come back to Canberra missing that city too much. I am still having withdrawal symptoms from Sydney last week.
My very silly story ‘Little Nell’s death scene from The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens, ‘improved’ into a happy ending by an alien’s tool’ was recently highly commended in a humorous story competition. You can read it here if you feel like something quite ridiculous, along with the other prize-winners. There was a special prize for the funniest title, and I thought I would win that!
I am such a pessimist that I focus on one typo I left in the story when I read it. Perhaps you will find it if you go there. There is no prize, dear reader, if you are a pedant too!
Speaking of US Presidents, I just read Stephen King’s new novel about the Kennedy assassination. There’s a real storyteller, like Mr Dickens was before him. I have spent many night with these writers over the years, running through the hours in a readerly marathon, totally absorbed. I just don’t have that narrative urge, but prefer the sound of words. They left plot off my mental Swiss Army knife, and put on extra tools for wordplay.
Which is why I’m mostly a poet, who dabbles, however seriously, in fiction. Here’s the link to my skimpy story again.
must adjust trope...
Death and the missus
May 19, 2011
mass grave
Death and the missus
Death is a doughnut; we lick his sprinkles every day.
We feel their shadows on our lips after they have buried
into our own grave of stomach. Burps are their ghosts,
rattling sonic chains. Perhaps we are the doughnuts,
dunked in Death’s ever morning coffee, as he chats
with Mrs Death. Mrs Death is a knitter, has been working
on the same cardigan these twice two million years,
needles clicking like clocks before there ever were clocks.
It’s a domestic thing, after all. One minute you’re watching
The Bill (you poor sad sod) and the next, you’re gardening
from below, totally rooted, rooted as. And Death sighs,
and has a little break at Donuts R Us, hands trembling
as he cups that endless drink. He gloves himself in sugar.
And then he gets back to it; the icing and the holes.
P.S. Cottier
First published in The Mozzie, Queensland.
Voices, internal and external
August 17, 2009
I have been doing a few poetry readings lately, at a number of different venues. In some ways, the reading of poetry aloud strikes me as a strange practice. No doubt rhymes evolved to make things easier to remember where the written word did not exist, or was jealously guarded by a chosen few. But those days are long past, and rhyme has often been abandoned, or, if used, is no longer a substitute for literacy.
The performance poet or slammer lives and writes for the spoken (or shouted) word. This is not, in general, my favourite type of poetry. Many crude faults are hidden behind the energetic or frenetic delivery. I saw one particularly bad example a couple of years ago which inspired this piece:
Waste of a good microphone
A decade since I saw him, this performance poet,
and the act is still the same, ten years in the faking.
World’s oldest adolescent, wings flailing, flirty windmill
hoping to attract stray Quixotes of attention.
Under that boil of a hat (one small step from beret)
his chin now quivers in time to his shout, as he revs
through a thick tarmac of prose. He calls it a poem.
(It is poetry in the sense that Bathurst is ballet.)
Fascinated, I watch the skin wattle sway,
muscle-less metronome catching winds
of his own indignation; a crashing fleshy kite.
A one miss wonder, he raises his frantic voice
and chops the air with blunt inadequacy.
The words skim like fatty stones, drowning.
Such dumb slabs to whet a frolicsome pen.
P.S. Cottier
But the reading out loud of poems that were written to be read from the page is the phenomenon I am dealing with here. When I write, I tend to read the poetry back to myself in my head, rather than out loud. It is a delight to me to hear others appreciating the word-play and musical aspects of my poetry when I read it out loud to an audience. But my ‘ideal reader’ is definitely an individual, reading from the book at his or her own home (or library).
Nevertheless, I like to think I am quite a good reader, with a decent appreciation of the needs of the audience. Some poets, contra the performance poet, see, to think that a mangled, quiet delivery adds a certain piquancy to the words. IT DOESN”T. Or that reading twenty pages of angst-filled obscurely referenced screed to a non-academic audience is appropriate. IT ISN’T. This shows a lack of respect, and does poetry no good at all, cementing into place the brickheaded equation of poetry = boredom. At least most slam poetry keeps the audience awake.
Between Shout Mountain and the Slough of Mumble lies the pleasant Valley of Appropriateness. Let’s all set our compasses and go in search of that verdant realm.
PS Cottier 