This rock poems!
February 15, 2012
For all those occasionally frustrated by the financial aspects of poetry (that is, working your guts out for love alone, just hoping that your poem may reach another person, somewhere) please check out the poetic contribution from mining magnate Gina Rinehart, ‘Australia’s richest woman’, and be consoled that money and art do not walk hand in hand. She donated the rock that the poem is attached to. The rock is a little less shiny than the poem. And a little less clunky. This link is to an often wonderful (and sometimes scurrilous) site called The Worst of Perth, where you can read the poem ‘Our Future’ in all its iron awe, as it appears in situ. Go ahead and enjoy!
But it rhymes, so it must be real poetry…The fact that this was put up in a public place confirms to me that Western Australia and the Australian Capital Territory are Very Different Places. But as Ms Rinehart points out in her poem:
‘Our nation needs special economic zones and wiser government before it is too late.’
Stirring stuff.
prospecting for pentameter
Tuesday poem: Modern Jesus watches Roger Federer
February 13, 2012
Modern Jesus watches Roger Federer
[The LORD] taketh not pleasure in the legs of a man.
Psalm 147
Now that’s perfection. He never emits
a single groan, moves just enough,
seems to have a sixth sense about
those lines. That’s a subject worthy
of worship. His legs are thin, I see,
a little like mine. After match speeches
all listened to with bated breath.
Catches minds like fish. Mild and fair.
I wish Someone would sent lightning,
make that thick black hair echidna itself.
Just a bit. I was crucified, never got half
this much adulation. He looks a lot
better in shorts though, that’s true.
Though not like that other Rafael.
Everyone delights in his angel-legs.
Oh well, who cares?
Pass the strawberries.
P.S. Cottier
Part of a series in which a character called Modern Jesus is just as world-weary and cynical as the rest of us. Started out from that weird line in Psalm 147 about God not delighting in legs. Ended in fruit.
Some may be serious, some playful. However, if you click on this quill, I can guarantee you a blog experience with added Poesie:
Tuesday poem: Happy birthday Charles!
February 7, 2012
200 today...
Happy birthday Charles!
Always, somewhere, a Scrooge
is saying something sour,
and a Spirit is coming, to slap
him into rebirth; over chimney tops
or skyscrapers, foul rookeries
or slums, and so he finds himself,
like Marley’s door-face, stirring,
and startling, and breaking
his self-forged solid chains.
***
Charles John Huffam Dickens
February 7th, 1812 – June 9th, 1870
I wonder if there’ll be any further birthday tributes to Dickens apart from my little poem at the Tuesday Poem site today? Click this quill to see!
Poets in the corner
February 2, 2012
not everyone is such a publicist...
No, this is not a post about naughty poets (I told you to stop playing with Augusta, George*!) but about three sculptures that were just unveiled in Canberra’s Garema Place, in an area now known as Poets’ Corner. Judith Wright, David Campbell and A.D. Hope make up the triptych.
I attended the launch, and forgot to take photographs, but anyone interested can follow this link to a Canberra site called The RiotACT see what the sculptures look like. (Not everyone is as forgetful as I am.)
There were excellent poems read at the launch, and an appearance was made by Jon Stanhope, a former Chief Minister of the ACT (sort of a cross between Mayor and School Principal and Premier) who was also Arts Minister. He was supportive of this project.
While many poets pushed for something like this, I left feeling somewhat underwhelmed. Do poets need any memorial outside their words? I don’t think so. And the sculptures (while competent) show the poets at once staring into the middle distance and totally wrapped up in an internal world, with little awareness of the actual world around them. I’m afraid that’s probably how most people see poets, anyway. The idea that the real poets of the world are the dead ones is somehow supported by this type of project, in my opinion.
Byron’s memorial plaque in Westminster Abbey (a somewhat more salubrious location than Garema Place, Canberra) was not installed until the 1969, due to his most naughty reputation. Yet did the reputation of his poetry suffer in the meantime? I don’t think so. The real memorial to these three fine poets can be found in their work. A.D. Hope and David Campbell are represented at the Australian Poetry Library. Judith Wright doesn’t seem to be (copyright?) but examples of her work can be found on the net.
*Byron’s Christian name, as you all undoubtedly knew. And Augusta was his half-sister.
Tuesday poem: Depression is not
January 30, 2012
Depression is not
It is not a dark Baskervillean hound.
For me a black dog is a plump,
peaceful stealer of sandwiches.
Hardly an entrée to self-murder.
It is not a boiling cloud, conjuring
a thunderous storm, energetic
Frankenstein forks spearing brain.
That has a bright explosive tang.
The thoughts lie aborted, disjointed.
Synapses refuse to pass on interest.
Joy, love and pleasure ring no bells;
Esmeralda vanished, cathedral burned.
Taste dulled into pap, gagged by lack
of living buds; music rhythmless noise.
And touch a kind of necrophilia with
the living body corpsed. Visitation
of a mute frigid deafness. No dog’s wet
questing nose implicated, no sharp bite.
But every day a dullard rock to roll uphill,
and Penelope weaving holes, every night.
P.S. Cottier
This is from my first poetry collection, The Glass Violin. One of the worst things about having been depressed is that is deprives you of the simple, snarly joy of being in a really bad mood. You begin to think you’re sliding back into depression, which is, in itself, quite depressing. If, however you start checking that you have enough pills to knock yourself off if you do slide back into depression, then you probably are going that way. If pain persists, please see your doctor.
If, on the other hand (and don’t we all have more hands than Kali?) people being ‘nice’ to you because they know you have had depression makes you want to say really, really inappropriate things to them, then you’re probably just in a foul mood. Enjoy it! Even normal people have moods. And they end, usually within a couple of days. Before you know it you’ll be finding things (such as the Indian cricket team’s recent performances, for example) amusing again.
For more Tuesday poems, some sadly bereft of helpful medical tips, click on the quill above the poem.
I realise for the past month or so, I’ve only been posting on Tuesdays, for the Tuesday poem. Must break out of summer slackness, and enter into an orgy of posting, now that the cricket and tennis are over. If only I could find something worth saying…
PS Cottier 