VARUNA NEW POETS 2008-2009

2008 VARUNA New Poets to launch their first collections during the 2009 Sydney Writers Festival
As part of SWF 2009, Varuna Writers Centre has invited the Varuna Longlines Poets to their regional festival 17-19 May. The four poets, Helen Hagemann, Andrew Slattery, Ali Cobby Eckermann & Kimberley Mann will have their books launched in the newly renovated Gearins Hotel in Katoomba. Readings and book signing, plus sales of books & panel discussions will take place in the first part of the Festival week. Helen will be launching Evangelyne & Other Poems, Andrew: Canyon, Ali: Little Bit Long Time & Kimberley: Awake During Anaesthetic. Varuna Writers House

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Poem for the Day - Oysters

Oysters

Oysters are the barnacles at land's edge.
Tangled together, we prise them from rock,
gather their gritty caves, as if leaving the reef
wrecked with tiny-white burrs of empty skulls.
Now the sea is touching our tongues,
our minds not listening to each other
as we slide the muscle between teeth;
taste the oyster, if only in one gulp.
We work all morning, the tide inching its high
watermark, renewing a chipped & mottled look.
We bend & stiffen in the gathering,
amble back to the quadrangle for ice.
Olive trees shading our walk, to our own
private view of a café island;
the wind gathering in our hair,
pushing us forward to cutlery & tablecloth,
cane chair, eyes swallowing an ocean.

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Creative Writing at the Fremantle Arts Centre

Writing at the Centre – Fremantle Arts Centre

Poetry classes are run by Shane McCauley alternative Fridays to the Prose class. The class concentrates on the form, enabling new, emerging, or published poets to enhance their poetic writing skills, knowledge and technique.

Prose classes are run by Helen Hagemann who guides writers through a broad range of literary techniques and forms, including prose poetry, creative non-fiction, memoir and life writing. The class generally looks at the short story form which enables writers to learn the basics of style, narrative structure, characterization, plot, dialogue, exploring life experience, editing, etc. and how to employ these through writing exercises.

Why not come along, join in the fun, each Friday from 10.00am to noon. We encourage writers of all ages, $20.00 OOTA member; $15 Conc OOTA, $25 non-member. Have lunch under the trees with the Out of The Asylum writers in the gothic atmosphere of the Fremantle Arts Centre, where even Edgar Allan Poe would feel comfortable. For a .pdf class brochure contact Helen -hagemannDOThelenATgmailDOTcom or to join the class as an OOTA writer contact Jo Clarke ootawritersATgmailDOTcom.

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Poem for the Day - Christmas Parade

Christmas Parade

On the train my children are held
toward the sunlit window. They sway in
silence to a landscape not yet filled with
Fat Cat or Humphrey B-Bear; my son wishing
for Star Wars men & Yoda to appear.
We pass factories of ochre roofs, car yards
like gods of steel. Shops and cafés string
past in reminisce of tangy fish & garlic,
movie days of Thai food, coffee & cake.
My son interrogates me with blue eyes, his cool mouth
almost pouting, 'Are we there yet?'
At the parade, we are comfortable in second row
when a clown in red nose, striped suit, paces a single wheel
back & forth like children do in order to pee. My daughter
studies the end of the street, talks up her dancing school,
the sequin castle, Santa & Rudolph without the team.
My children love all this mayhem & noise,
even if the sun burns, even if the wind meddles.
As a family you cannot share their shade as it
threads its coolness over mums & babies in prams,
toddlers shy of motorcycles & whistlestops.
You must admit, you love the sun on the tambourines,
the beat of colour, bagpipe & sporran, a big pipe band.
It's infectious fun when the marching girls come;
a unity of spangles, each lightly twirling a baton
like ropes of hair. We let go of each other,
fantails & bon-bons caught mid-air like awkward balls
from cricketers in the score of one.
'Where is Santa?' my children need to know. No sooner
Cadillacs appear, residents waving amoré. There's a netted
boudoi, courtiers, princesses in gold lamé,
a crowned Christmas Queen holding her sceptre.
In the final car, high in his sleigh, acrobats in front,
the jolly man in red works his hands into canvas,
digs deep for the thrust of toys.
Parcels & balloons float down,
the crowd & my two children
ecstatic in the sweet rain of applause.

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Helen Hagemann's Poetics - The Female Voice

Identity and the Female Poet

Like the old catchphrase, 'what comes first the chicken or the egg?' - poetry also has this dilemma for the female poet. To establish her identity in her work it is a case of what comes first, language or voice? In terms of language she must work within the confines of a male-loaded language, e.g. chairman, mankind, brotherhood, freshman, etc. These distinctive features are predominately sexist. Dwight Bolinger explains that if you compare 'bachelor' with the terms spinster & old maid, 'bachelor' has positive connotations. Old maid has the metaphorical meaning of shriveled and unwanted. Thorne & Henley write: 'Language helps enact and transmit every type of inequality, including that between the sexes: it is part of the "micropolitical structure"...that helps maintain the larger political economic structure. At its most "trivial" level, the vocabulary provided by our culture limits severely the kinds of experience we can express for ourselves.' Lyn Hejinian states, 'There is no such word as "nipplelike", yet mastoid attracts nipplelike, temporal, bone, ear and behind. The definition for "nipple" brings, protuberance, breast, udder, the female, milk, discharge, mouthpiece and nursing bottle - and not mastoid, not temporal, nor time, bone, ear, space, or world, etc. It is relevant that the exchanges are incompletely reciprocal.'

These incompletely reciprocal features of language, therefore, are embedded in the subconscious mind. Jung wrote on the collective unconscious aka a priori: 'It is a storehouse of memory traces inherited from all previous generations...these memories...represent universal inherited tendencies to think and to perceive in certain ways.'

What comes then for the female poet when she writes? What comes from the wellspring of her collective unconscious? TRADITION comes. A form that requires erudition comes. Poetic sensibility and technique come. The stricture of grammar comes. CONFORMITY comes.
The poet writes from silence, and the female poet conjures language/ speech from a consciousness of the past. The search for identity and her female voice, that is to be so recognisably female in her poetry amongst power-loaded male language, is to go against tradition - UNCENSORED. The search for this female voice vis-à-vis identity is to privilege a type of language that is uniquely a poetic, female voice. For the female to find her own unique voice it is necessary to subvert the androcentric language in her work; in other words, to work the imagination against all known traditions of the centre - "god", "man" and "patriarchy" - those self-appointed keepers of the gate. The struggle for the female artist is to decide which path she will take, and in there she will find her identity and voice.

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