the wealth of poetry
January 25, 2010
I don’t mean filthy lucre, or even clean lucre for that matter…
I was just thinking about where writing poetry and short stories has taken me over the last year, since I started this blog:
In Melbourne, I received a brass horse for a poem about Adam Lindsay Gordon (a famous Oz poet of the nineteenth century, buried at Westminster Abbey in London);
I went to Sydney for the Society of Women Writers biennial book awards, in which my book The Glass Violin was highly commended, AND I WON THE LUCKY DOOR PRIZE!!!;
Recently I was back in Victoria for the inaugural tango poetry prize and saw a beautiful dance based on the winning poem by Charles D’Anastasi;
I have read my work a few times in in Canberra (including an extra short story at the launch of A Quiet Day), and once in Cooma, and a poem by me was read in Wangaratta at the jazz festival as part of the launch of the latest extempore journal;
My electronic pixies have whizzed around the world like Ariel, taking my words to places I have never been and may well never go.
I hope this year sees me spinning rhymes and prose like Rumpelstiltskin on amphetamines, without any impatient Princes of reason knocking at the door.
The atheist at Christmas
December 1, 2009
First published in ‘The Mozzie’, Queensland, last December:
The atheist at Christmas
Yes, I wish for more, more than these tottering temples,
these building blocks of presents under this most
European plastic tree, dropping leaves unseasonably.
If only it were possible, to unwrap belief, to kiss it quick
like an unexpected guest under mistletoe’s sharply
convenient hangover marriage.
But God is an idea too far, too gaudy, too stuffed,
fills a void of longing with crumbs unreasonably.
The brain must talk turkey, (or mouth gobble on).
Faith desire shines each new born December,
but frail batteries barely make month’s end.
By then it will have broken down.
And then be gone.
P.S. Cottier
Seconds?
November 17, 2009
I’ve just had a second book published by Ginninderra Press (see blogroll), a collection of short stories called A Quiet Day. To be launched in December by Peter Frankis.
Launching books
atmosphere pulls
pages flutter
Really, perhaps I should leave haiku alone and stick to quirky free verse, which seems to be my forté. And super-short stories with twisty possum tails. Have you noticed that no-one says that anything is their piano, let alone pianissimo, as in something they’re hopeless at?
Novels were her pianissimo,
Crushing her in bulk,
smalling her to modesty.
She slams the covers on her fingers.
Enough. Blogging is the new nicotine.
Dear NASA
October 22, 2009
Ths poem recently won first prize in the C.J. Dennis Literary Awards (Auburn, South Australia) on the theme The Universe: Yours to Explore. Such an overwhelming topic seemed to call out for a little humour:
Dear NASA,
When we reach Mars, kicking up red dust,
walking against gusts like Marcel Marceau,
let’s not do what we did on the Moon,
forty leap and leap-less years ago.
Let us not plant any one nation’s flag,
like a toothpick through a lump of party cheese.
Might a woman set her feet first on the planet
so often connected with war? And please,
please, no one takes golf clubs, whether niblicks
putters, drivers or irons. Let Mars stay a place
untouched by sprees of futility, no heady sticks
to launch tiny white balls into circles of space.
Leave no junk; let the plains spread clearly.
Just a few thoughts from
yours, sincerely.
P.S. Cottier
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 