Paths Into Inner Canberra: my next publication
March 6, 2015
I am having an essay published. Yes, in prose, with two bonus poems. This is happening in a wee pocketbook to be called Paths Into Inner Canberra. The publisher is Ginninderra Press, based in South Australia. It is part of a new series they are publishing, called Pocket Places.
In the book, I describe riding a bike through Canberra along the bikepaths, and the wildlife that one can see, such as cockatoos and turtles. It is part memoir, part philosophical reflection (that’s a very little part) and part evocation of aspects of this city that I love.
The lovely photos have been taken by the very clever and cool Geoffrey Dunn. Here is one that the publisher chose not to use, which I quite like.
How do I obtain this wonderful book, I hear you cry? And is it true that it costs only $4?
In answer to your first question, I will post a link when it is available. Or if you see me in Canberra, enquire direct, buy me a coffee (or a beer or wine, if your accountancy skills are delightfully bad) and one will be your own to keep. To quote Willy Loman ‘That is a one million dollar idea.’
In answer to the second: Yes. Plus postage.
I am very happy that this essay is being published, although I should probably call it creative non-fiction, or extended haibun, or something clever. Does anyone write essays anymore?
Tuesday poem: Falling through
February 23, 2015
Falling through
Suddenly enough, all the computers yawned, quick gape of electric jaws, and we fell inside their crocodile bytes. Gusting through googles of guts, airy programmatic colons, we were curtly expelled onto other users’ chairs. I am now John le Carré, and he has swapped Cornwall for my Canberra. He pecks up the slim crumbs of poetry, that elegant confetti of wordy Gretels, tracing back the route to nowhere known at all. He likes the sun-dipped cockatoos, the nestling hills, and the pungent gums; their leaves such shy apostrophes, punctuation in all four seasons’ sentences.
You’d think I’d favour it, being famous. Heaving shelves of unborn books with my name on them groan out to a midwife agent, so patient and alert. But anonymity has its charms of liberation, and cover stories (as John would know) can thin and fade, and sometimes even fray. For England, Cornwall almost has a Summer, or at least a Summer’s spritely maiden Aunt, out for a jaunt, recalling dead youth spent in War. I have felt something approaching happiness, writing of Berlin or terror on the cliff edge of this little island, staring out to frown of dark, deep grey sea.
I want to go home now, to space and lancet light, but this white dumb screen stays obdurate; locked square surface, on which so many best-sellers have been keyed. Teases of postcards beckon in front of portal mouth; I tempt it with treats to open up, chew, and spit me back. It likes this latest tray of toffees so tightly wrapped in silver. Now it quivers; a glassy jellyfish on firm dry sand of desk. Now
P.S. Cottier
Prose poem? Flash fiction? Unclassifiable weirdness? You be the judge.
I read somewhere that John le Carré does not write on a computer, but we’ll call that detail poetic licence, hm?
I hear that there has been a dead drop of poems here. Press this link and find out.
Not so egregiously slack
October 30, 2014
I really have been absent from my blog for about two weeks now, which is virtually unprecedented. ‘Virtually unprecedented’ is a pretentious way of saying I am usually not lazy like that. But I have been busy, judging other people’s poetry. 
That image is very dignified, whereas the process is somewhat more fraught. ‘Fraught’ is a slightly pretentious way of saying difficult. The whole issue of judging poetry throws one back to basics: Why me? What makes a poem good? It is easy to spot the bad poems in a Big Pile. They may use obvious rhyme to the extent that a rhyme seems to be the only point of each line. (A bit like that sentence, but even rhymier.) They may dwell too obviously on the poet him or herself (all the poems to be judged are anonymous, of course, so one does not know the gender of the entrant). I actually like some poems in which the process of writing itself is dealt with, if they are amusing or surprising; not if they are turgid or caught up in an unreflective notion of genius. A good poem should surprise and take risks. It should not use the occasional ‘poetic’ word as seasoning for a balefully plain meal. Somewhere between pinch, stroke and slap we find the Good Poem, strutting herself like a green flamingo, all swerve and flap and tingle. 
There you have it; a Good Poem describes an unusually feathered tall bird that tastes like sherbet. Having cleared that up, and finished judging a contest in which there were just too many lovely flamingos, I can move on to something different.
***
A very interesting anthology is currently being prepared for publication in 2015. Here are the details: http://www.abhayk.com/p/global-poetry-project.html Abhay K., Indian poet and diplomat, is editing a collection of poems on capital cities. One for each capital city, I think. I just found out that my poem has been accepted for Canberra. This will be the most international publication that I have been lucky enough to be part of, with poets from Tehran to Jakarta to Paris to Lima included, with 196 or so more. Very exciting indeed!
***
I am struggling to find the time to work on assembling a new manuscript of poems. So please, dear reader, forgive the absence of an actual poem here this time. I will remedy that in the near future. Which is a pretentious way of saying keep reading.
Tuesday poem: Wetlands haiku
August 25, 2014
perched on a log
damp bark transfers water —
my pink frog bum
P.S. Cottier
I do not fully understand this image…
Now that damp croak of a poem was written at a great event which was held in O’Connor, just up the road from where your poetic blogger lives. (That’s me, if you were wondering.) A group of people met, heard about the wetlands and haiku, and wrote a brimming bucket of the tadpole poems.
The event was organised by Sarah St Vincent Welch (writer) and Edwina Robinson (Urban Waterways Coordinator). There are lovely photos and more poems at the following link, including some more serious ones. But I am particularly chuffed by the photo that follows on from the poem, in which I am indeed perched on a log.
http://www.canberra.edu.au/faculties/arts-design/research/research-centres/cccr/publications/haiku
Canberra is a very lucky city, with features such as the urban waterways in the inner city. (If you are imagining a city such as Paris, or Sydney, please don’t. Canberra is not that type of place at all.) The waterways return some of the creek that flowed through this area to a more natural state after it was concreted at some stage. Philosophically, it is an interesting question whether these recreated ponds are ‘natural’, but I am pleased that they exist.
Similarly, is haiku in English actually haiku? Is a haiku that contains a rhyme a proper haiku? Should we worry about such notions of form and purity?
Or should we just play?
Press this feather, fly to New Zealand, and read even more poetry:
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It’s a thing now!
May 16, 2014
I spotted this handsome thing having a glass of good Australian sparkling wine at Tilley’s.
This thing will be launched in Melbourne and Canberra soon, and then be sent out to all the contributors whose DNA formed the thing.
But on a lovely sunny Autumn afternoon in Canberra, this blogger will join Thing in having a drink or eight.
My fingers are feeling shky…vant spell,,or punktewat…
PS Cottier 