It’s a thing now!
May 16, 2014
I spotted this handsome thing having a glass of good Australian sparkling wine at Tilley’s.
This thing will be launched in Melbourne and Canberra soon, and then be sent out to all the contributors whose DNA formed the thing.
But on a lovely sunny Autumn afternoon in Canberra, this blogger will join Thing in having a drink or eight.
My fingers are feeling shky…vant spell,,or punktewat…
Tuesday poem: Old men’s ears
May 12, 2014
Old men’s ears
half lettuce and half slug
sprouting sound
P.S. Cottier
Hair growing from noses and ears is a peculiar phenomenon, and one that seems to have spawned a whole lot of gadgets, mostly invented in the United States. Advertisements for this desirable kit now grace television screens in Australia. Americans groom themselves with a missionary fervour, spouting platitudes from the same faces which recently sprouted hairs.
I think I prefer the hairs.
I am currently going mad awaiting the arrival of the anthology for which there are two launches in June, as detailed in my last post. Nightmare scenarios grow in my brain like cerebral hairs.
And no-one has invented a worry remover that will work on those unwanted growths.
Click this feather and see if there are any other poems about body parts posted by the Tuesday Poets. I suppose a feather is a body part. Or perhaps just a bird’s hair.
Launches….also Verity La
May 3, 2014
If you are reading this and live in the cities of Melbourne or Canberra, and don’t come to one of these launches, my drone will find you. It sprays honey and drops hungry wasps.
Just saying…
Click on the relevant poster to enlarge. Clever people manage to enlarge things before posting, but I am not at all geekish.
I have yet to receive any books, but I am sure that will happen soon.
I have my longest poem ever up at Verity La. It is a list poem called ‘100 holes in my bucket’. Enjoy! I like this one quite a lot.
Tuesday poem: Pod, cast
April 29, 2014
Pod, cast
Cradled in my pod, my body shut up like a bedside book, with a bookmark of drugs inserted to continue me some day, I had a nightmare. It was an old fear for the fourth millennium, that of being buried alive. And it came to whisper panic in my ear; you are forgotten. They have entombed you in speed. No-one will be there, at journey’s end, to dig you out, little podded pea. Fool, to accept this alien life, to dream in airless space, a ghost not dead, a man suspended beyond hope. Hanging in time, rope of frayed expectations slipped around your neck, tightening. And still you fly stupefied, dumb, trusting those not yet born to release you. Listen to your heart beat the retreat, a jerking jazz rhythm of fear.
The living dead, that shady cast of zombie, of vampire, flickered like ancient film shadows through my mind, a hazy cloud of horror where no cloud ever forms, out here between one star and the next. Feeble belief of resurrection somewhere, beyond the years.
Sleep left me. Gulping, choking, drowning in doubt, my eyes scanned the dark inside of the pod, looking for escape, for any feature to tell me that I was, in fact, awake. That I was, in fact, alive. But the pod was like a closed eye, and I was trapped inside its blindness. How could I know? Was this lulling pod a grave? I fought to feel the walls of the capsule, read their enclosing story in Braille, but my arms were pinioned, would not shift. I was wrapped in spider’s silk, a stupefied unbreakable embrace. My disquiet lead me further inside myself, with no twine of reason to bring me out. Knotted in a strait-jacket, tangled in progress, I sped on into darkness.
Machines detected, read the chemicals, adjusted. Put me back to sleep, rocked a thousand years. But now I dream only of death, and the heavy years and the speed of light smother me. I staked my life on stability, that there will be no upheaval in which I will be swept away, an insect unmourned, amongst the crumbs of swarming stars. I am the unborn, dreaming in the womb, this metal womb, quickening towards my second birth, but bracketed in iron ifs and buts. Icarus with untried wings of steel. Hiatus, hubris and hell here, inside me, inside the pod, cast away.
P.S. Cottier
I wrote that piece of prose/prose poem for a competition in the United States way back in 2008. I was lucky enough to win, and actually went to the convention which had organised the competition in Wisconsin. (The Odyssey Convention.) This was a turning point in my writing, and although I had been exploring the speculative in my work, it certainly helped to strengthen that element.
Since then, ‘Pod, cast’ was republished in the Indigo Book of Australian Prose Poems, edited by Michael Byrne.
Currently, I have a poem up at Eye to the Telescope, the online journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association based in the United States. This one is edited by Robert Dutcher, and is one the interesting topic of ‘mundane’ science fiction, that is, the idea that we are basically stuck in our solar system with no aliens and no journeys to other galaxies, as undertaken by a million travellers in a million science fiction novels and films. And by my nameless traveller in the prose poem above.
Speaking of speculative poetry, here are the launch details for The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry, which I have been editing with Tim Jones for several light years:
Melbourne, 6pm for a 6.30pm start, Friday 6th June, Collected Works Bookshop, 1/37 Swanston St, Melbourne. To be launched by renowned poet Philip Salom. This is to be a joint launch with Gemma White’s new collection, which is also being published by IP.
Canberra 6.30 for a 7pm start on Thursday 12th June at Manning Clark House, 11 Tasmania Circle, Forrest, ACT 2603. To be launched by the multi-award winning novelist Kaaron Warren.
There has been a wonderful response from poets to our request that they read poems from the anthology at the launches. I am looking forward to the two launches so much. Anyone reading this is most welcome to attend.
I’ll post the proper invitations here, and of course, sent them out (by email) to lotsa persons.
Click this feather for further poesie:
1. My song is love unknown,
My Savior’s love to me;
Love to the loveless shown,
That they might lovely be.
O who am I, that for my sake
My Lord should take, frail flesh and die?
2. Christ came from heaven’s throne
Salvation to bestow;
But people scorned, and none
The longed-for Christ would know:
But O! my Friend, my Friend indeed,
Who at my need His life did spend.
3. Sometimes they strew His way,
And His sweet praises sing;
Resounding all the way
Hosannas to their King:
Then “Crucify!” is all their breath,
And for His death they thirst and cry.
4. They rise, and needs will have
My dear Lord made away;
A murderer they saved,
The Prince of life they slay,
Yet cheerful He to suffering goes,
That He His foes from thence might free.
5. Here might I stay and sing,
No story so divine;
Never was love, dear King!
Never was grief like Thine.
This is my Friend, in Whose sweet praise
I all my days could gladly spend.
OK, it’s more a hymn than a poem as such (whatever that may be), but it is quite lovely, with an interesting use of rhyme. And what a perfect name for someone who wrote hymns! If that happened today we’d think it was an advertising slogan, but this work dates from 1664.
The image is rather strange, as Jesus looks a little like a football player who has just scored a goal, or a cricketer who is appealing for a wicket. A tad arrogant? Mary Magdalen looks totally inspired; as you would be, being the first person to see the resurrected Christ. Or in this case the elbow of the resurrected Christ.
The first apostle with eyewitness news about to run off and spread the word. Amazing that some churches still don’t have women priests. I think they’d rather that Jesus appeared to a man. Silly mistake for the Son of God, what?
I had a quiet Easter and a chocolate Easter. Hope all my readers, whether atheists or religious in some way, also ate their weight in chocolate.
I’d hate to be the only fatty.
The painting is by Johann Heinrich Tischbein the Elder: Resurrection, 1778. Snatched from the vaults of Wikimedia Commons.
Take a moment to read some other poetry. Simply use this feather:
My next post will have details of the Canberra and Melbourne launches of The Stars Like Sand.
PS Cottier 