Launches….also Verity La
May 3, 2014
If you are reading this and live in the cities of Melbourne or Canberra, and don’t come to one of these launches, my drone will find you. It sprays honey and drops hungry wasps.
Just saying…
Click on the relevant poster to enlarge. Clever people manage to enlarge things before posting, but I am not at all geekish.
I have yet to receive any books, but I am sure that will happen soon.
I have my longest poem ever up at Verity La. It is a list poem called ‘100 holes in my bucket’. Enjoy! I like this one quite a lot.
Tuesday poem: Pod, cast
April 29, 2014
Pod, cast
Cradled in my pod, my body shut up like a bedside book, with a bookmark of drugs inserted to continue me some day, I had a nightmare. It was an old fear for the fourth millennium, that of being buried alive. And it came to whisper panic in my ear; you are forgotten. They have entombed you in speed. No-one will be there, at journey’s end, to dig you out, little podded pea. Fool, to accept this alien life, to dream in airless space, a ghost not dead, a man suspended beyond hope. Hanging in time, rope of frayed expectations slipped around your neck, tightening. And still you fly stupefied, dumb, trusting those not yet born to release you. Listen to your heart beat the retreat, a jerking jazz rhythm of fear.
The living dead, that shady cast of zombie, of vampire, flickered like ancient film shadows through my mind, a hazy cloud of horror where no cloud ever forms, out here between one star and the next. Feeble belief of resurrection somewhere, beyond the years.
Sleep left me. Gulping, choking, drowning in doubt, my eyes scanned the dark inside of the pod, looking for escape, for any feature to tell me that I was, in fact, awake. That I was, in fact, alive. But the pod was like a closed eye, and I was trapped inside its blindness. How could I know? Was this lulling pod a grave? I fought to feel the walls of the capsule, read their enclosing story in Braille, but my arms were pinioned, would not shift. I was wrapped in spider’s silk, a stupefied unbreakable embrace. My disquiet lead me further inside myself, with no twine of reason to bring me out. Knotted in a strait-jacket, tangled in progress, I sped on into darkness.
Machines detected, read the chemicals, adjusted. Put me back to sleep, rocked a thousand years. But now I dream only of death, and the heavy years and the speed of light smother me. I staked my life on stability, that there will be no upheaval in which I will be swept away, an insect unmourned, amongst the crumbs of swarming stars. I am the unborn, dreaming in the womb, this metal womb, quickening towards my second birth, but bracketed in iron ifs and buts. Icarus with untried wings of steel. Hiatus, hubris and hell here, inside me, inside the pod, cast away.
P.S. Cottier
I wrote that piece of prose/prose poem for a competition in the United States way back in 2008. I was lucky enough to win, and actually went to the convention which had organised the competition in Wisconsin. (The Odyssey Convention.) This was a turning point in my writing, and although I had been exploring the speculative in my work, it certainly helped to strengthen that element.
Since then, ‘Pod, cast’ was republished in the Indigo Book of Australian Prose Poems, edited by Michael Byrne.
Currently, I have a poem up at Eye to the Telescope, the online journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association based in the United States. This one is edited by Robert Dutcher, and is one the interesting topic of ‘mundane’ science fiction, that is, the idea that we are basically stuck in our solar system with no aliens and no journeys to other galaxies, as undertaken by a million travellers in a million science fiction novels and films. And by my nameless traveller in the prose poem above.
Speaking of speculative poetry, here are the launch details for The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry, which I have been editing with Tim Jones for several light years:
Melbourne, 6pm for a 6.30pm start, Friday 6th June, Collected Works Bookshop, 1/37 Swanston St, Melbourne. To be launched by renowned poet Philip Salom. This is to be a joint launch with Gemma White’s new collection, which is also being published by IP.
Canberra 6.30 for a 7pm start on Thursday 12th June at Manning Clark House, 11 Tasmania Circle, Forrest, ACT 2603. To be launched by the multi-award winning novelist Kaaron Warren.
There has been a wonderful response from poets to our request that they read poems from the anthology at the launches. I am looking forward to the two launches so much. Anyone reading this is most welcome to attend.
I’ll post the proper invitations here, and of course, sent them out (by email) to lotsa persons.
Click this feather for further poesie:
Belated Tuesday haiku: [Off to the printers]
April 9, 2014
Off to the printers –
the most beautiful four words
proofing is ended
Well, they are the most beautiful four words to an editor, anyway.
We’re finalising launch details for The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry, edited by Tim Jones and me. There will be a launch in Melbourne, and one in Canberra, both in June. Poets will read poems from their own copies of the book! One editor will probably drink too much! Details to follow. Of the time and venue, not of the drunk editor’s proclivities.
For more sensible entries, I suggest you tap the following feather. Feather-tapping is a thing now.
Look what I found at the beach…
February 6, 2014
This is a small version of the cover for The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry (Interactive Publications), which should be out in late April. Click for a better look.
Not a bad piece of flotsam. Or is that jetsam? No, they were the cartoon characters who lived in a perfect American future, weren’t they? With nifty jetpacks?
When all this egregious specpo is over, I am going to read a novel of such staunch realism that you wouldn’t read about it. With a plot so heavy it would drown you, if you read it on a lilo floating on a pool.
Unless, of course, it was a hover-lilo. Now there’s the ultimate personal transport device. I sneer at your pathetic jet-packs, American cartoon people.
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.
PS Cottier 