Busy-ness unbefitting a poet
December 1, 2012
What a lovely present for a launch speech! Yesterday it was about 36 degrees in Canberra and unusually steamy, and I gave my first launch speech for the pamphlet In Response to Magpies. This was organised by Hazel Hall, Australian Poetry’s café poet at Biginelli’s café.
Hazel Hall
It went quite well, and the readings by the poets included in the collection were enjoyable. Here I am looking up in the air, as if there is an invisible magpie swooping:
Fortunately I am wearing my special invisible helmet
I am hoping to write up the speech for publication. The wine remains intact, as it is gin weather.
Last night I went to a poetry slam, co-organised by fellow Triptych poet J.C. Inman at The Front, and it was so steamy and hot we were all like pieces of tofu floating in a laksa. Here is a piece of poetic tofu, also known as J.C. Inman:
J.C. Inman
(my phone was fainting from the heat)
I realised how exhausted I was when I read a poem before the slam and my hands were literally shaking. People must have thought I was a very sensitive flower, but that was not it at all. It was: half heat, half gin, half gym. So what? A mathematican I ain’t.
Canberra: freezing one day and Brisbane the next. If only I could afford a pankawallah. Or another gin.
Now I’m off to be languid. After the gym.
Sydney twice in two different ways
September 13, 2012
The first was on the Poets Train from Canberra. Four leisurely hours to take in the scenery, to read, to compose a poem (we read out our efforts every hour). Arrival at the beautiful Central Station where we read to ourselves again, and a couple of punters.
The next day we read at The State Library. Here I am doing just that, in a photograph taken by K.A. Rees. (Note the staring into the middle distance):
And that night we read at the Friend in Hand pub in Glebe, where a cockatoo, George, chats to the customers. I chatted to Martin Langford, whose vocabulary is much greater than George’s. (No offence George!)
And in between, I enjoyed all Glebe has to offer. Interesting food, cheaper than in Canberra. The big vegan breakfast at Badde Manors, for example. Lying on a chaise longue that was used as a prop in the film Moulin Rouge, writing a review. Drinking wine. Longing for the ability to stay in that fair city. Sigh. As usual, I found myself looking at real estate agents’ windows, doing very unpoetic calculations.
Then four hours back, dozing and composing on the Sunday.
And today? (That’ll be yesterday by the time I post this.) Up to Sydney again in 23 minutes by plane. Barely up before you’re down; the landscape something to get over rather than through. State Library again, where I was lucky enough to pick up a third prize in the Society of Women Writers poetry competition, judged by Judith Beveridge, for my poem ‘A brief history of fun’. Judith gave a wonderful seminar focussing on sound in poetry, and although her ideas are quite different from mine, I left feeling inspired. There was a haiku/ haibun/tanka reading. There was Mark Tredinnick, although I had to leave his PowerPoint talk early to catch the flight home. A fire siren test provided the ideal moment for slipping out.
Twenty-three minutes
Throwing steel through air
We scorch the sky
Now I’m in pre book-launch mode! Radio interview on Friday on local station ArtSound. But I am haunted by a most beautiful spirit at the moment.
A ghost called Sydney
Lithe warm and lively
Winding me back home
Home that is, to a city I have never lived in. And against whose inducements I must block my ears, and tie myself to the cold mast of common sense.
Also known as Canberra.
I’ll love it again in a few days, but I have to learn to do so again.
Tuesday poem: From a Railway Carriage by Robert Louis Stevenson
August 20, 2012
From a Railway Carriage
Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.
Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And there is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart run away in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill, and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone for ever!
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
From A Child’s Garden of Verses
On 7th September, the Poets Train (aka Poetry in Motion) will be leaving Canberra, bound for Sydney. Now this is not a plan by the burghers of the ACT to rid themselves of the tiresome pox of poetry, but an initiative of Australian Poetry, the relatively new national poetry organisation.
Vers libre: No-one is keeping it on the rails. Hence the lack of rails.
We will be composing poetry on the train. A chapbook of poems will result. Countrylink, the NSW train people, will be donating a return fare to anywhere on their network for the best poem. (How that will be judged is something I do not know. But throwing the other poets off the train seems like a wise precaution.)
In Sydney we will read and/or slam, given our preferences. I think it sounds like fun!
I will give an update on the Poetry Train later on. If you’re interested in joining the train, here is the Countrylink page with the details. (Scroll down). It may already be too late, but possibly not. You will have to book accommodation in Sydney (Fiona McIlroy, the organiser, whose email appears on the Countrylink page, may be able to help with suggestions for reasonably priced places and don’t forget a return fare! Unless you decide to stay in that beautiful, comparatively WARM city.)
In the meantime, the feather below may be pressed in an emergency. Such as if you feel the need for more poems.
Tuesday poem: Mango
July 30, 2012
Mango
Skinned sun bleeds thickest honey,
flesh cubed into soft armadillos.
You whisper of summer, twin ears,
lure us like that other yellow,
the smiling curve of beach.
Lie in a hammock —
canvas forming cocoon —
and eat a mango;
where fruit ends and we start
is hard to say. Peel away
accretions of words and worries —
be stroked by gold to dream.
P.S. Cottier
Hard to believe that a couple of weeks ago I was warm. Now I’m in Canberra and freezing. It’ll be a balmy -2 overnight, and -4 is predicted for later in the week. This usually brings on questions of Why? Why here? Why not on the coast? (I know the answer was State politics and fear of invasion, but the mind still boggles like a most boggly thing.)
At the moment, Kazakhstan leads Australia in the Olympics medal tally. Though, to look on the bright side, there is no history of Australians mumbling ‘Bloody Kazakhs’, nor any great sporting traditions linking the two countries…And didn’t New Zealand do well in the hockey last night against Australia? I believe the Russian umpire was called Kakapovic, or something like that.
Amazing how idiotic sporting badinage cheers one up! Although the total fixation of local media coverage on Australians and only Australians at the Olympics is already beginning to pall. I’ve absolutely no hope of seeing the Kazakhs, for example, unless they’re up against a ‘plucky’ Aussie.
I am in a world of discomfort as I adjust to the gym, but I can’t stand people who whinge about voluntarily inflicted pain. So I decided to post a poem about my favourite fruit instead.
I wonder if there are poems about vegetable or fruity love published by anyone else? Click this feather and you will be transported to New Zealand, and will most surely find out.
One third of a new book!
April 29, 2012
There will be contents...
The Canberra based publishers Blemish Books have just announced the line-up for the third edition of their Triptych Poets series. The poets to be published are Joan Kerr, Joshua Inman, and myself. This is terrific news, and I am so pleased to be published by a relatively new Canberra publisher.
I am not very familiar with the work of the other two poets, and intend to do a bit of Googling. One of the strengths of this series is how an unintended conversation between the different poets making up each triptych can sometimes be detected, murmuring away just below the surface. Such strange resonance is a good thing, as is the chance for the reader to explore three poets in some depth.
My suite within the triptych is called Selection Criteria for Death. The book should be out in September.
PS Cottier 