Helen Hagemann's Hike Up Blackwall Mountain, November 2010

Steep path up Blackwall Mountain I rested on occasions before the massive climb! This time, drinkies! I made it to the top, what a view! View over Ettalong to Broken Bay On the way down was cool These granite outcrops could kill you if they broke! Ah, Blackwall, the massive mountain I conquer...

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Amazing Bird Life on the Central Coast, NSW Holiday November 2010

Rainbow Lorikeet in the Grevilleas, Entrance shops Feeding Pelicans at The Entrance, 3.30pm All male pelicans - one female Cormorant drying wings at Tuggerah Lake Black & White Cormorant about to take flight! Pied Oystercatchers bedding down for the night, Tuggerah Lake Duck & Eleven Ducklings in Town! Ducks live in the streets of Ettalong Ducks...

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Happy, happy holidays!

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OOTA WRITERS take over Westerly's Pages of Volume 55: 2, 2010

Check out all the West Australian poets & writers in this latest Westerly Spring Issue Volume 55. No 2, 2010. Most of the poets, FOURTEEN!! all told, are from OOTA WRITERS! Westerly Magazine Why not join OOTA WRITERS? We rock! oota writ...

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Poetic Graphic of the Day - Cow Poem

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Poem for the Day - After John Ashbery

When you Pass Go, Collect $200                                     After John Ashbery How little we know of someone’s brain, and not that we want to! Too much static going on. Who was it who said, “We had macaroni each day, except Sunday. Wait! I know who wrote that!                ...

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Poem for the Day - a found poem "Picnic"

Picnic Live blue spray kicks against the mountain. There is a lesson here at the creek, boys & girls like handfuls of gladiolas arrange a camp fire, rummaging in the bush for flint, paper, kindling to smoke out Apache. Geronimo! The Lone Ranger, high-ho Silver, away! Roundup time. Cowboy suits flash, arrest the sun. White shoes hang in trees like cockatoos nibbling seed pods. Frogs serenade from the bank, their voices deeper than night. The...

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Cartoon for the Day - The Wrecking Ball

Acknowledgement: Eureka Street, 1st October 201...

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Poem for the Day - Marble Tornedo

Marble Tornedo My girlfriend Heather experienced a weather adventure. The havoc she caused upset the boys squatting at marbles. She had several hundred of her own, shoulder- slung in a string bag, betting everyone. As the storm bullied clouds off Barrenjoey, she joined their game with forty of their Tom Bowlers, Cat’s-eyes and Peewees in the rink. At the line, the wind lifted her skirt, her plaits like marionette strings. The Big Bonker she...

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Graphic for the Day: I'm Such a Feminist!

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John Ashbery on PBS News

John Ashbery on PBS News A Perfect Hat I forget what it is I would rather be doing. Floral and verbal, I am in the thick of what I would rather be doing, jumping off a cliff, rousing subordinates. There are just so many things one would rather be caught out doing, like measuring the tree, the swift shadow of which menaces us and bluebirds. ...

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Hagemann's Saturday Poetry now at "The Grove" Library

Saturday Poetry at The Grove Library, Peppermint GroveJoin Helen Hagemann's second Saturday Poetry class for Term 2 at The Grove, 28th August, 1.30pm-3.30pm. This class will look at the inclusion of “MOTIF” in poetry and ways of making your contemporary verse richer with wider references. Prior to writing exercises we will look at the work of Andrew Marvell, Nathan Curnow, Kate Llewellyn, Michael Ondaatje and Andrew Taylor. The Grove Library is situated...

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Poem for the Day - Claremont Showgrounds

Claremont Showgrounds When you enter this microcosm  country life meeting city  you're not thinking of Sideshow Alley. Your ear instructs you to the polo, wood-chopping, craft and produce show. You're not thinking of bunny hops, eagle drops on the Roller Coaster, your name called last for the Camel Ride, or the one-off number you couldn't collect for Big Bear or Panda. All winter your children saved for the whirligig of whoops and jolts,...

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Vale - Alec Choate 1915-2010

Vale by Helen Hagemann, 4th August, 2010I met this lovely man at his book launch of My Days Were Fauve, an Autobiography in Verse. I attended the launch with a friend, enjoyed Alec's reading, the wine and the company of many poets I knew. I bought Alec's book and was amazed at the creative, kinetic energy of his verse that was sustained throughout in imabic pentameter & rhyme. I later discovered that My Days Were Fauve was shortlisted for the...

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Poem for the Month - The Only of Only Being Woman

I want to write the language of my sex hear the crack of rope again a childish squeak of crosses into desk I want the oranges and apples of my chest to be those grown-up watermelons I want to feel the crack and split the burrowing erotic trip between two thighs I want the moment when a raspberry splits my teeth the naked juice cascading open lips I want the bulging sweet fecundity of birth again the unconditional taste of love that opened every pore of...

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Evangelyne & other poems - Poem of the Month

First Failed Boyfriend Fearless, he drove his Austin to Patonga. Steep mountains, rock-slides, wash-aways and slush. He travelled through these treacherous hills on winter mornings, on his way to work. Ambitious, he worked in Woolworths. I fell in love with his movie-blue eyes above the beets and sprouts. He had a cute radio-voice when he announced the specials. I got to know him, his face cocked in terror when I asked him out. ‘Elliot Ness eyes,’...

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Evangelyne Speaks! 'Play it One More Time' - on CD 22

“22” is a poetry resource that has been developed for use in secondary schools in Western Australia.The resource comprises an audio CD featuring 20 Western Australian poets reading selected works. Poets include Andrew Burke, Lucy Dougan, Kevin Gillam, Dennis Haskell, John Kinsella, Andrew Taylor, Morgan Yasbincek, Fay Zwicky and many more...The CD is supported with an accompanying...

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William Carlos Williams in 92nd Street in 1954

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Evangelyne & Other Poems - Read a Poem a Month

First Sex After we got into bed, and after he told me ‘I’m glad you’re not wearing lipstick,’ he lay across me like the map of Australia. I’d heard about ‘the battle of the sexes’ but knew little about naked bodies rolling, sweating like Sumo wrestlers on a mat. You could liken my first sex to martial art. His sword was searching the scabbard of my mother-of-pearl. Glaring – pushing my legs apart – he fingered the little slit between my legs. He...

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Read Carol Jenkins' review of Evangelyne & other poems

Carol Jenkins' Review of Evangelyne & other Poems You can read this review on my website, along with the Mary Gilmore report from judges, reviews from Roland Leach, Jean Kent and Andrew Burke. I've taken out the negative bits from Carol Jenkins' report of the book mainly because someone's ideas of what poetry should and shouldn't do can be very subjective. Click here for Reviews Helen Hagemann's Poetry & Pr...

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Evangelyne & Other Poems - Curious About Cormorants

Curious About Cormorants Tempted by the sea's lull to snorkel, I find their passage curious, the way these great divers descend to steal the frugal tips of waves. Our group jack-knifes from the hem of reef, paddles out. And something else sinks forward, a lone cormorant, roused from her fluid stare, follows the scuttle of sediment from swimmers' legs. Flippers sink into the eye of the blue, identical hunters at best, careful over rock and pool;...

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Southerly 69.3 2010 Launched

Southerly 69.2 - My poem Ferris Wheel - published in this issue!   Southerly invites you to the launch of 69.3, the Poetry Special Issue. This volume continues Southerly’s tradition of publishing and promoting the best in Australian literature, and with this launch, we wish to celebrate this issue's focus on poetry and poetics. Venue: University...

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Judging Panel ASAL, 2010 on Evangelyne & other poems

Helen Hagemann's book [Evangelyne] looks the size of a chapbook but is actually quite substantial. Every line is packed with content, in coastal poems of memory and nostalgia that are celebratory, sometimes elegiac, and often both simultaneously. The poems have a wide range of reference even while maintaining a consistency of subject matter. No words are wasted and this with rich imagery creates an emotional intensity, but an intensity that does...

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Poem for the Day - Christmas Pageant

Christmas Pageant On the train your children fog a sunlit window. They sway in silence to a landscape not yet filled with Fat Cat or Percy; your son dreaming of Star Wars men, Yoda to appear. We pass factories of ochre roofs, car yards like gods of steel. Shops & cafés string past in reminisce of tangy fish & garlic, movie days of Thai food, coffee & cake. Your son interrogates with blue eyes, his cool mouth almost pouting, 'Are we there...

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Allen Ginsberg & Friends

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Poem for the Day - Monster Fun at the Pier

Monster Fun at the Pier We came a distance for entertainment. Kids wanting action, dodgem cars, Leather Man above the ghost train, pythons twisting through skulls, jaws below the waterline invasive and mean. We left our parents’ smiles for a grinning clown, bolted through an arcade spitting silver as we talked. My brothers made a circular ‘o’ with their mouths pressed on scanty ladies stripping on cards. In their sweaty glow, your bothers spun...

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Poem for the Day - The Travelling Tent Show

The Travelling Tent Show The show had come to town. big-top, small caravans, a lion chasing its tail. It was an outing with hairy camels, no one familiar, only neighbour’s faces, some unknown. Except for Dracula out front, there were no zombies inside, no clattering chains to pattern a death. Only lipstick- clowns in toothless grins, twirling dogs in tutus. There was more excitement when tent pegs popped, when wall skirts collapsed in the...

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The Handsome Family in Perth

Thursday, 7th January 2010Woohoo! The Handsome Family has chosen to come to Perth in their Australian Tour. Great gothic/new country/blue-grass/Cormac McCarthyism style songs. Can't wait to see them this Sunday at the Rosemount Hotel, 6.00pm. THE HANDSOME FAMILY consists of Brett Sparks (music) and Rennie Sparks (lyrics/also a poet) who live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They...

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