First review! Plus stars!
September 30, 2011
That’s to say this is the first review on this site. Fear not dear discerning blog-lover, I have written quite a number previously. Indeed, my reviewing efforts were once rewarded with the prize of $200 worth of wine by the ACT Writers Centre, as part of their annual awards. That’s what a poet calls ‘Breakfast’. I have the pleasure of judging the same award for book reviewing, sponsored by Z4 wines, this year.
And actually, I’m lying. There is a link here to a review written by a Canberra writer who calls himself or herself Poetix. So the review is not really here at all. I assume Poetix is a Canberra writer as the review of Canberra and Beyond by well known Canberra identity Bill Tully appears on the RiotACT, a Canberra-based discussion site about all things Canberran.
Sometimes you can have just too much Canberra.
For those 99.999% of the world’s population who have no interest in Canberra (which is the capital of Australia, for those overseas who have never heard of it) please enjoy this little poem about the frustrations of astronomy. The night sky differs between the hemispheres, but there are always stars.
Kicking the telescope
All this antic fiddling
when I wanted wonder
injected from you
like a syringe of pure white.
Fingers work, and thumbs,
in order to make a handle
of space, my grip as dumb
as a paralytic’s knee.
Perspicillim, sounds like
a Martian’s green-snot cold.
Ugly tripod, alien crouching,
on those three ungainly legs.
I swing mine to make a fourth.
You bow your one-eyed head.
P.S. Cottier
10 words, 2 days and a flock
June 17, 2011
I recently competed in an interesting competition run by a Canadian journal, Contemporary Verse 2. They give a list of ten words, and punters (who must have pre-registered) have two days to create a poem which contains every word. I sometimes like doing this type of thing as it stops me from falling in a rut, and if the result is less than wonderful, it doesn’t really matter.
I was very pleased to receive an honourable mention, particularly as I found myself writing about cockatoos; hardly something that the average Canadian would see stripping the bark from maple trees on a daily basis, or resting on the antlers of moose. Actually I know that Canada, like Australia, is overwhelmingly urban, so please excuse my tired and narrow stereotypes. (Is there such a thing as a vibrant and broad stereotype?) Here in Canberra cockatoos are as common as sparrows. If not commoner, which is remarkable given how many foreign birds have been released in this country over the past 200 years.
I won’t put the poem up here, as I can’t remember if I granted exclusive e-rights for a time to CV2 (probably not) but here is a link to the poem about cockatoos, imaginatively entitled ‘Cockatoos‘.
Muse with beak
Reading the other poems is fascinating; they are so good that I forgot that they had to contain the magic ten words. And the other poems were mostly urban.
Really urban, not Canberra urban.
Muse-sick
May 6, 2011
I am about to embark on a fortnight’s total immersion in music. Sounds like acoustic water-boarding, but it’s a matter of choice. The Canberra International Music Festival runs between May 11th and 22nd, and I’ve splurged on a gold pass, which means I can attend all 34 concerts, should I so choose.
I find that the ‘jet-lag’ caused by embarking on the long-distance haul triggers connections in my brain that otherwise lie dormant. That’s once I get past the lurking feelings of inadequacy that great music always creates. Sometimes I feel that poetry is music’s poor relation, being tied too much to meaning. But then another vodka kicks me past this, and the synapses stimulated (or created) by the baptism in sound can be put to good use, emphasising the noise that words make, and twisting meanings into improvised forms.
Here’s a little poem about the feeling that others (or Others Unseen) are somehow more perfectly creative. (Interestingly, I searched Bigstock for an illustration combining music and snails to go with the poem, and found the image above. It’s comforting, in a way, to know that someone else’s mind has been where mine has!):
Even snails
Peg loves looseness, envies river of sheet,
flowing down from plastic clench of beak.
Milk would carve itself into solidity, escape
sloppy white seascape into certainties of cheese.
Poet would be musician, shed sad bad husks of words,
sprout into airier art, so eary and so letterless.
Sliming through house-heavy dirt,
even snails may dream of wings.
P.S. Cottier
Update 11th May
Just returned from sitting in an exposed position on concrete on a wet piece of rubber listening to William Barton and an organist play some interesting music. (Barton’s own composition and some Philip Glass.) But I really couldn’t concentrate or enjoy the experience, as it was just too cold. There’s no way that concerts should be staged in Canberra at 7am at the end of Autumn. There’s a real martyrdom for music attitude amongst some of the attendees at the Canberra International Music Festival. I simply had to leave early as I felt I might get hypothermia. I obviously don’t have the right attitude. And the event was very difficult to locate for those of us who got there early, which added to my general festive spirit.
Unbelievable comment from one fellow attendee when I commented that I hoped the performance was not cancelled due to possible rain damage to the instruments: ‘Oh no, it’s only a didjeridu’. 40,000 years of culture belittled. Hats off to you, dickhead. (Although there’s no way I would have removed my hat due to possible frost-bite.)
Previously I saw William Barton as one of the musicians in a concert at the Fitters’ Workshop featuring Sculthorpe’s Requiem, another requiem by Tomas Luis de Victoria and a setting of ee cumming’s ‘I thank you God for most this amazing day’ by Eric Whitacre. I wasn’t too keen on the last one, perhaps because that poem is so near perfect that the music seemed, for once, to detract from its beauty.
The event was co-sponsored by the Spanish Embassy. A Spaniard (I think she was, anyway) pointed out that there were several red-backs nestling at the edge of the concrete of this old industrial building, including one enormous one. I agreed that it was better to leave them alone, rather than stir them up into possible vengeance (a pun about red-backs and bulls was stifled on my tongue). I found myself explaining how the really big ones are female. I hadn’t expected to become a junior David Attenborough at the concert, I must admit. No doubt she’ll have a story to tell back in Spain: (‘..and they have horrible spiders, even at musical venues…’)
PS Cottier 