Women: More Dead than Men. (And less so.)
August 8, 2014
Poems read at the Dead Poets’ Dinner in Canberra, July 22, 2014
Colin Campbell / Thomas Blackburn ‘A Smell of Burning’ and ‘Hospital for Defectives’
Marion Halligan / Yeats ‘Sailing to Byzantium’
Joyce Freedman / Siegfriend Sassoon ‘Everyone Sang’
Hazel Hall / Hilaire Belloc ‘Tarantella’
Chris Dorman / William Baine ‘The Archery of William Tell’
Kathy Kituai / Muso Susaki ‘Sun in Midnight’
Nicola Bowery / Sarah Broom ‘About Me’ and ‘That Moon’
Wendy McMahon Bell / Seamus Heaney ‘Digging’
P.S. Cottier / Catherine Martin ‘The Mouse Tower’
Geoff Page / Seamus Heaney ‘From the Republic of Conscience’
Laurie McDonald / David Meyers ‘Fencing in the Dark’
Carmel Summers / Janice Bostok ‘Amongst the Graffiti’
Moya Pacey / Elizabeth Bishop ‘One Art’ and Louis MacNeice ‘Wolves’
Rosa O’Kae / Seamus Heaney ‘Skunk’
Sue Edgar / J.L. Borges ‘Mirror’ and Sylvia Plath ‘Mirror’
Adrienne Johns / Hugh McDiarmid ‘Vanitas’ and ‘Balmorality’
John Stokes / R.F. Brissenden ‘The Whale in Darkness’
Mary Besemeres / Wizlawa Szymborska ‘View With a Grain of Sand’
Sarah Rice / T.S. Eliot excerpts from ‘Little Gidding’
Emily Rice / Ted Hughes ‘Tractor’
Annie Didcott / Keats ‘Ode to a Nightingale’
Tony Williams / Neruda ‘The Dead Woman’
Arlene Williams / J.J. Bray ‘Address to Pigeons in Hurtle Square’ and William Carlos Williams ‘This is just to say’
John Van de Graaff / Seamus Heaney ‘Follower’ and D.H. Lawrence ‘Piano’
Adrian Caesar / R.S. Thomas ‘The Owl’
Michael Thorley / Thomas Hardy ‘Channel Firing’ and ‘They’
Andrew McDonald / poems by two Scottish poets (Norman McCaig?)
Lesley Lebkowicz / poems by Soseki
Alan Gould / a song by Hamish Henderson
Alinta Leaver / Kenneth Koch ‘Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams’
Richard Scutter / Auden ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ and Hopkins ‘Inversnaid’
Martin Dolan / Dylan Thomas ‘Prologue’
Marlene Hall / Thomas Wyatt ‘Whoso list upon the slipper top’
Melinda Smith / Francis Webb ‘Cap and Bells’ and ‘The Bells of St Peter Mancroft’
Ruth Pieloor / C.J. Dennis ‘The Austra—laise’
Janette Pieloor /Gwen Harwood ‘The Secret Life of Frogs’
37 readers chose poems to read by dead poets. 7 women’s poems were chosen. Please check and see if I got that right, as numbers and I rarely speak. I can’t work out the percentage, not being at all like the remarkable Ada Lovelace pictured below.
We continue to shape the world with the words of men only.
Poetry is an art form where many women work, and have done so for centuries. There are lots of works by ‘dead women poets’.
Are our aesthetic judgements so very narrow? Does thought spoil poetry?
I did get a giggle out of ‘The Dead Woman’ by Pablo Neruda. In one sense women are more dead than men, in that their/our poetry seems more easily buried. In another, it seems that they are not dead enough to qualify as Dead Poets, that is, those who are part of the pantheon.
I just don’t understand.
Apart from the retrospective silencing of women, it was a very enjoyable night.
Bias in the sciences and bias in the arts
Sydney Launch of The Stars Like Sand
July 6, 2014
…it’s on Wednesday the 23rd July, 7.30pm at Don Bank House, 6 Napier St, North Sydney.
Hopefully my health will have improved by then, as I am currently sounding like a moth-eaten walrus with a two packets a day habit. Here I am looking a little dumpy:
I will try and haul myself together over the next little while, and magically transform myself into a cultured creature who can read. North Sydney is not my usual part of Sydney; so it will be interesting geographically as well as offering an opportunity to meet more poets. I tend to stay in Glebe when I go to Sydney. Or Newtown.
The launch is being held alongside poetry readings organised by Danny Gardner, so there is a small cover charge for non-contributors.
Do come along, dear Sydney persons. Unfortunately, Tim Jones is poetically ensconced in New Zealand and will not be able to make it, but I’ll be there, as will David Reiter, the publisher.
Here is a link to the Facebook page with lovely photos of the previous launches, and you can navigate from there to a dedicated Sydney launch page, should you so desire.
Or better still, just come along.
Canberra: Centre of Poetry Excellence (and nice meals)
January 22, 2014
The indefatigable Geoff Page (was there ever a better surname for a poet?) has just released his schedule for readings at The Gods this year. Here it is:
Poetry at The Gods 2014
Tues Feb 11 & possibly Wed Feb 12 Les Murray (Bunyah)
Tues Mar 11 Omar Musa (Cbr)
John Stokes (Cbr)
Lizz Murphy (Binalong)
Tues Apr 8 Tricia Dearborn (Syd)
Barbara Fisher (Syd)
Tues May 13 Catherine Bateson (Dandenong Ranges)
Dennis Haskell (Perth)
Tues Jun 10 Moya Pacey (Cbr)
Harry Laing (Braidwood)
Geoff Page (Cbr)
Tues Jul 8 Ron Pretty (Wollongong)
Lynn Hard (Syd)
Tues Jul 22 Dead Poets’ Dinner
Tues Aug 12 David McCooey (Geelong)
Maria Takolander (Geelong)
Tues Sep 9 Alan Gould (Cbr)
Michael Thorley (Queanbeyan)
Penelope Layland (Cbr)
Tues Oct 14 Samuel Wagan Watson (Bris)
Judy Johnson (Newcastle)
Tues Nov 11 Jennifer Harrison (Melbourne)
Jordie Albiston (Melbourne)
Tues Dec 9 Stephen Edgar (Syd)
Judith Beveridge (Syd)
You can see that there is a melange of local and interstate poets, starting with Les Murray. Les always attracts a huge crowd, and there will most likely be two readings.
The venue (a café and restaurant) gets its name from the fact that it is next to a small theatre on the Australian National University campus. My alma mater, at least for my PhD. I thought I’d put up a theatrical image because of that. And poetry reading is theatre; the darkened room, the sweat on the brow, the audience response. The critics!
In other poetry news, we are hard at work on The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry. The cover is being designed by David Reiter, and I should be able to post it here very soon. All being well, the book will be appearing around the end of April, although no date has been set yet. Very exciting. There is quite a cross-over between that list of poets at The Gods and the anthology, to segue like a mad thing.
Tuesday poems: At one remove
December 31, 2013
Zireaux has analysed several of my poems about Canberra in a very thoughtful entry at his blog.
Not everyone turns into a sun-worshipping lizard over Christmas and New Year, swinging in a hammock and watching England snatch defeat from the jaws of a possible draw, as happened at the MCG recently. Or Zireaux hasn’t, anyway.
May I suggest you pop over to his blog? He has certainly thought more about my poetry than I ever have!
Rodrigo will tango, not tap
That is actually a photograph of me at the moment, not another walrus by the name of Rodrigo. You should see the size of the hammock…
Click this feather to see which of the Tuesday poets are lizards or walruses, and which are active at this time of year:
A nice reminder
November 18, 2013
…that I am a poet, not just an editing slave-droid.
Judith Beveridge and a madwoman
My collection of poetry, The Cancellation of Clouds (Ginninderra Press) was awarded Second Prize in the Society of Women Writers NSW biennial book awards in Sydney last week. More to the point, one of Australia’s leading poets, Judith Beveridge was the judge. I look forward to reading her thoughtful comments properly, as I was a little too flustered to take in much more than the words ‘quirky’ and ‘muscular’, and there was a lot there that I wanted to consider. Those two words did bring to mind a combined weightlifter and clown with wacky inflatable biceps that squirt people. Multi-skilling, I think they call it. This is really what is wrong with my mind, I suppose; it does go off on trampolines.
I actually read some of my poems at the airport, and I thought, hm, these are not too bad. Then I lifted up another passenger waiting in the bar, while wearing a purple nose. (Red is so yesterday, dahlings.) The book is still available from Ginninderra Press, by the way, if you go here. Scroll to ‘C’ for Cottier. (Or Clown (Multiskilled).)
And now, back to the wacky world of editing, which is a bit like juggling diamonds, and a bit like cholera.
PS Cottier 