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.
Tuesday Poem: (haiku) by P.S. Cottier
June 25, 2013
Gloves house hunger
moths make gaping mouths
finger tongues speak
Now that’s me, begloved in gloves which never had fingers, at the launch of Poetry in ACTION yesterday, in front of my poem, ‘April mornings’. ACTION stands for ACT Internal Omnibus Network, by the way. I bet you didn’t know that! (And it just occurred to me that some readers won’t know that ACT stands for Australian Capital Territory, which was set up so that Canberra wasn’t in either New South Wales or Victoria. Most of the ACT is national park.)
If you would like to read this poem properly, along with the other nine poems selected to appear on Canberra buses, please press this link, which will take you to a page within the Arts ACT site.
You can also see the short-listed poems, and children’s poems, if you navigate from that page.
It was beyond freezing in Canberra yesterday. Note the loverly weather outside the bus window in the photograph above. It may snow at the weekend, which is positively un-Australian. Next month, though, I am having a handful of days in sunny Wellington…
Click this feather for further poetry frisson from the tropical climes of New Zealand:
Tuesday poem ‘In a London Drawingroom’ by George Eliot
June 18, 2013
In a London Drawingroom
The sky is cloudy, yellowed by the smoke.
For view there are the houses opposite
Cutting the sky with one long line of wall
Like solid fog: far as the eye can stretch
Monotony of surface & of form
Without a break to hang a guess upon.
No bird can make a shadow as it flies,
For all is shadow, as in ways o’erhung
By thickest canvass, where the golden rays
Are clothed in hemp. No figure lingering
Pauses to feed the hunger of the eye
Or rest a little on the lap of life.
All hurry on & look upon the ground,
Or glance unmarking at the passers by
The wheels are hurrying too, cabs, carriages
All closed, in multiplied identity.
The world seems one huge prison-house & court
Where men are punished at the slightest cost,
With lowest rate of colour, warmth & joy.
George Eliot
Such a modernist sounding work; even a tad of the other Eliot (T.S.) about it, but this was written in the 1870s. It was not published during Eliot’s lifetime.
For further poetry, please press this feather, and you may find more Victorian poetry. Or you may not. I’m not promising, you know.
Don’t forget, if you’re in Canberra, to come to the reading at Smiths, Alinga Street, Thursday 20th at 6pm, with Nigel Featherstone, JC Inman and myself. Unfortunately George Eliot can’t make it.
A Very Blemished Evening
June 11, 2013
Canberrans!
Now is (almost) the time to come and hear novella-ist Nigel Featherstone, and poets JC Inman and P.S. Cottier. We’re all published by Blemish Books. Band Jason Recliner will open proceedings at Smiths Alternative on Thursday, 20th June at 6pm.
Smiths has a bar.
Smiths has a bar.
Smiths has a bar.
Tuesday poem: Innumerate
June 3, 2013
Innumerate
Adding up was one thing, boring as thick porridge,
each sum a trial rather than a triumph, but I could
do it, just, stir that numbered pot, when teacher-cook
required us to follow her bland, lumpy recipe.
Once spicy symbols joined the foul stew, however,
I was forever lost. Mathematics was a language
alien to my brain, slipping off unformed synapses
like bald car tyres on slick roads. I crashed out.
I comforted myself with the appearance
of her pimpled acolytes; thick glasses flashing
as they squealed their joy at piggy feasts of number.
I was vegetarian amongst eaters of formulaic flesh.
I still am. My brain is one-sided, and it walks like a sailor
who has lost his wooden leg, but can’t read the compass
to save his limp, to save his salty soul. But so what?
My mathy albatross still stinks — and I’ve sailed different seas.
P.S. Cottier
This poem appeared recently in The Canberra Times. Unfortunately, the first word was inadvertently removed, which made the whole poem a little difficult to understand. I thought I’d post it here in its uncropped form.
For more poetry, press this feather, and read the work of other Tuesday Poets:
PS Cottier 