Poem for the Day - Camping WA

Camping WA

When the days seemed longer,
the road wider, we headed south,
panel van & surfcat hitched.

You knew where the road led, through acres
of Tuarts, valleys that searched the sky.

Ahead were thick forests in sleepy canvas,
first pee at Margaret River, before a coast road
to Walpole, smell of dieback as thick as the
leafy glare that fluttered through windows.

The kids' heads doing a backward pounding
into upholstery. Their hands scattering toys,
knuckles clenched for last punch.

White markers beside the road, large green
signs smuggling you in; to a right gravel turn,
Caravan & Camping five more ks,
- beware trucks crossing.

The language then: of leaving a city for solid
mountains, echoed laughter across the bay,
pelicans collapsed on a jetty,
fertile song encircling campsite.

The boss quickly chopping malley roots,
for billy tea, chops on a steel plate,
the peaceful coil of smoke.

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Poem for the Day - Kewpie Doll

Kewpie Doll

Little doll, good luck charm, fairy wings,
rustles her blue taffeta skirt in the wind.
She is part of carnivalé, as old as Ray Lawler's
play, Summer of the 17th Doll.
Flocks of morning light glaze her pink head
with only one dent, having been held too many times.
Her faded lipstick pouts an "O" as the mouths of girls,
words forming seduction in their heads.
She has lost her wand, her diamond ring,
but not her kiss-curl, her good luck heart.
At the windowpane she raises her suppliant wings
& reaching for the stars, taps
her tiny blue shoes against glass.
Fairy wings dispersing dust, as if she is back there
above the gaze of girls, lolling in the wind,
taking in the glitter of carnivalé,
the rustle of lemon & pink Kewpie dolls
luminous & young.

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Robert Adamson & Mark Tredinnick at PIWF

Perth Writers Festival - Sunday 1st March 2009: 5.00 - 6.00pm @ the Dolphin Theatre UWA.
Poetica

Robert Adamson and Mark Tredinnick will consider themes that shape their poetry and share some of their recent writing. Chair: Johanna Featherstone.
Robert Adamson's books, including Inside Out grace the shelves of my poetry library. I have all but two, however, his latest collection The Golden Bird includes poetry from those collections. I am yet to discover Tredinnick's work, but Adamson, I believe, along with Anthony Lawrence, are the best poets writing today. Both poets write of a life lived. This gives me the reader insight into their personal world, relaying an immediacy of experience, knowledge, and a poeticism (form & feeling) that convey a sense of "place/lifestyle" deep into one's consciousness. I know Adamson's world. I grew up on the Central Coast in Ettalong, Broken Bay, and therefore my interest in his work is not only associative, nostalgic & also inspirational, but allows me once again to enter the Hawkesbury - to enter into its dark recesses, as well as its unique beauty. I thoroughly recommend his large & beautiful book -poetry & photography Juno Gemmes- The Language of Oysters.

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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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Poem for the Day

The Last Tree Standing

Earthbound, the last tree stands.
You look up, a fleeting shadow crosses your path.
This tree is one of life's tragedies, quietly
tempering itself to be alone. What else can it do,
but drip leaves, wait for shattering rain,
watch its forebears roll past? A rumbling sound
disturbing root and twig. Double lorries
trussed with logs, a girth as wide as a stone
Hercules might roll. Relocation, destruction.
The space will bear out: untidy hills, poor drainage, salt.
'They don't tell us everything,' a contractor says,
painting a house in the street. A new house
spacious, alum roof, cream brick, concrete.
What have we become "cutting timber",
to mound wood chips, to hone tabletops
for the rich to panic birds?
Still, the one tree stands, mocks us with its
artistry, noble shade; its boiled sap
hearing the woodcutter's saw. Thinking
of an old land of wallaby, bilby, bandicoot,
a cooler time with every bird singing.

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Poem for the Day

The Paradox of Green

On the Destruction of Old Growth Trees, Dwellingup

When the day is twice as hot as the last day of winter, when a visit
to the country opens its secrets, 'doubt' like a downward curve touches
your shoulder. Suddenly you realise they're still raping the land.
Trucks criss-crossing the forest you used to know.
They bend to the task of filling up trays;
lorries hauling away a history of shade. And in the forests:
empty pathways, divided lots of tearaway soil,
bulldozer and saw ragging edges of old Jarrahs -
old growth without sanctuary, without song.
Seeing through it all, seeing the waft of endless
butterflies, you know the birds have fled.
Near the Murray, there's nothing so forlorn
as the empty soundless call of wind
through pines. Small pines, neat pines, no nothing
conifers that hold no wallaby nor owl.
You wonder if that one tree by the roadside,
graceful in its largesse of leaves,
still shares a sentiment with these foreign -
re-assignments filling up the hills.
On the road, the camera is the only thing that
regards this scene. And as you enter picnic
grounds, a gatekeeper informs you the road is rough
at the 2 mile-peg, and mutely anticipates
you will enjoy what is left
of a valley green.

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Robert Adamson

The Hawkesbury River


One of my favourite rivers is the Hawkesbury.
This pic was taken from the punt that crosses over the river at Wiseman's Ferry.

 

Robert Adamson
Australia - International Poetry Web

A Visitation

All night, wild fire burned in the tree tops
on the other side of the river. Now it's morning.
Smoking embers from the angophoras
are landing on the near shore
as a yellow-footed rock wallaby limps, dazed,
from the scrub, its fur matted.
Its tail barely able to support its weight.
Although wounded, it seems miraculous:
the soft yellow of its feet, the hard, sharp black
of its claws. It's the first yellow footer
I've seen for more than forty years...

Extracted from The Golden Bird - Robert Adamson, published by Black Inc.

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From a Feminist Perspective

This cartoon is totally irreverent, but nevertheless from a feminist perspective (& not just the woman in the pic), it's such a hilarious, subversive juxtaposition re "woman as sexual object".

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Poem for the Day

South-West Woods
                                    Tea Tree Cottage, Dwellingup

i
This year, like an inkling for shade
we head to Dwellingup: its wrinkled forest of leaves,
tree walks, birds writing songs of reminisce.
You have memories of the south, the holiday un/packing,
radio songs and kids in the back seat; camping
on the Blackwood river, loaded up with a promised
movement of bathers, scoop nets, rubber dinghy.
To this day, you do not know how 'holiday' - ever,
became a change of pace, a dialectics
of investment, rural containment,
erratic dreamlife, upheaval.

ii
Now these ghosts are long gone and this cottage,
as gift, coaxes us to its tenure of rest,
its pink myrtle, lilac borders,
timber verandah with an open sky
slithering down its starlight.

iii
Relaxed & seeking the flurry of bird & bush,
we trek the green valley dizzy with splendour.
We catch the season, evergreen: kangaroo paw
spider orchids, morning iris. Butterflies
twisting fugues of light; the Murray river rising
each time to meet rope and swimmer. We take in
the beauty of grass and ridge, a little summer heat
- wanting to be singed by this aroma of wilderness;
as if in its namesake Tea Tree Cottage
will promise us composure,
an early morning rise of watercolours,
of summer, a forest rolling past.
Six days of cabin life - we deserve it!
No high-tech, technivision, telephone.
Only a quintessential archway of cool air
infiltrating.

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Graham Mort - A British Poet's Site

Poets on the Internet
If the truth be known, not all poetry on the internet is a challenge to the reader. On occasions, however, one does come across great poetry and so this post highlights my discovering the British poet, Graham Mort.
His latest collection is called Visibility and he has won the Bridport Prize for short fiction in 2007. He is a humanitarian (helping in Africa) and lectures at Lancaster University. View some of his work at these sites.

Graham Mort
Poetry Society UK

The Sunday Poem: The Alchemist Next Door
by Graham Mort

What he does, you wonder, hearing
him clatter quietly to his wheelie bin
on dark mornings, fumbling with black bags
when the sky is pure frozen sleep.
All night his house lights burn and you
picture him at a table etching crystals
from dull stone, their brilliance ringing
his eyes with amethyst.
Or when the bags squelch see him
butchering body parts, hands bloody,
his bedroom an abattoir, his fridge a
skull-house, backlit and grinning.
On cold days his starter-motor rasps
abraded splines, starts at the third try
when he drives off to some kind of work,
wiping the windscreen with a rag.
Or never works, but parks to watch
the windows of a certain house where
a woman drowns her face in silvered glass
and hums the cadence in his head.
You couldn't draw his face from memory
yet at weekends greet him, amiably
scooping the sundae of a frozen rose bed,
astonished by the paleness of his hands.
He watches you watching him alone,
the way your eyes absent themselves,
searching his soil for sharp serifs,
its sanskrit of fallen petals or of bone.

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Poem for the Day

Ghosts of Christmas
 
There are ghosts in this house,
a factory turkey, paper stockings,
a machine gun, boiled fruit cake,
an old Santa without raiment,
sculling back a skinful.

If you unearthed these boards
you'd find presents from a wishlist;
a Christmas tree; my son climbing
with a star, the wild scent of pine
filling every room.

And on Christmas morning,
the crush of paper underfoot;
trucks working the berber from the rug,
the throaty roar of crackers,
machines and gadgets spilling their noise
into a five am quiet.

Our children moved on small bicycles
that fitted in the backyard shed.
They circled their energy on paths,
fought, played, snuck back under
sheets, to rise like eerie ku-klux men.

These little things keep returning,
an unopened chemistry set,
gifts for the Salvos
ghosts of the big picture
haunting me again.

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DOROTHY PORTER

Resource for DOROTHY PORTER writings
Plenty to read and marvel at from Dorothy Porter at
http://www.austlit.com/a/porter-d/index.html

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John Kinsella & Tracy Ryan - Poets' sites

John Kinsella & Tracy Ryan

Three new sites for these two West Australian Poets

Mutually Said: http://poetsvegananarchistpacifist.blogspot.com/

Tracy Ryan: http://www.geocities.com/tracy_ryan

John Kinsella: www.johnkinsella.org/

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Dorothy Porter Dies (10th Dec) - Such a Sad Day

Vale
Dorothy Porter died in Melbourne this morning of 10th December from complications due to cancer. She was 54. A writer at the height of her powers, Dorothy's most recent publication was EL DORADO, her fifth verse novel. It was shortlisted for the Dinny O'Hearn Poetry Prize (Age Book of the Year Award), the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, the Prime Minister's Literary Award for fiction, and Best Fiction in the Ned Kelly Awards and the Australian Book Review described it thus: …this mature and accomplished work…puts her at the top of the distinguished class of contemporary Australian poets when it comes to livres composés.Four months ago Dot was diagnosed with metastasized breast cancer. She has been in treatment since. She was very positive - and wanted to keep this to herself as she was sure she would defeat it. Unfortunately there have been complications and she was admitted to hospital 2 weeks ago and ICU 10 days ago.Dorothy was the most passionate of people who gave her all to everything she engaged with. We cannot imagine the world without her.

I was fortunate to meet Dorothy when I invited her to the 2007 Perth Spring Poetry Festival. She gave a wonderful talk about her work & was so generous with her time. There was no hint of her being unwell. Three of us had a great conversation with her in the Art Gallery coffee shop. She was off to Africa after the festival and enthusiastic about her libretto being published as a movie. She talked about our own work, giving us tips, such as never give up!

Dorothy we will miss you!

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Poem for the Day

Ode to the Post(wom)an
It is always the postman delivering news,
outstretching arms to that most noticeable
point - letterbox at land's edge. Friend and
lifelong reminder of correspondences. And although
those dreaded bills equate to the missing zero at the bank,
there's harmony in a house with gas, light globes glowing dust.
Little envelopes and packages move forward
like gifts: birthday parcels, a postcard from Turkey,
stamps to re-cycle if they've missed the mark.
Most days the postie steers his heart like a looping
Evel Knievel on a wobbly ten-stroke. There's grit & sand,
grass without splendour, cars on-the-verge, savage dogs,
tom cats hypnotised by scent. We hardly praise the postie
in this current road rage, a visitor to our home we never
invite for tea. We don't call out his or her name,
We don't know our postman, do we?

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Helen Hagemann's Poetics - The Female Voice

Problems for Women

When it comes to our writing tradition, it has relatively only been, (& referring to Virginia Woolf 's A Room of One's Own), a matter of eighty years since women have been allowed a sense of equality as writers. We are allowed into university libraries, we no longer hold back in relation to our female psyche. We have established the objectivism of the female through political correctness, and no subject matter is diminished by its inclusion (i.e the domestic). We no longer hide in attics (like the Bronte sisters), are taken seriously beyond the word "scribbler", and no longer experience the undermining of subjectivity re women's health issues/"hysterical" labelling - as with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper. Authors of fiction and non-fiction find success with publishers, embrace all genres, are brilliant at crime writing, literary works, historical romance, to name only a few. However, these are established genres and are formulaic. And why would a female author want to change this tradition.

When it comes to the tradition of poetry for women, there are problems. Firstly, their is no tradition of women's poetry per se. If we look back in time to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron & Shelley we find an overarching predominence of male poets, published with collections tucked neatly under their smoking jackets. One could argue, yes, women were writing poetry at that time, but 19thC poets such as Emily Dickenson, Christina Rosetti, & Elizabeth Browning, were not published in their lifetime.

Therefore, when we discuss/argue/critique traditional poetry (& its various forms handed down), we are looking at a page where poetry is male orientated. In other words, heavily influenced by their psyche, gender, perspective, views, beliefs, attitudes, esp. attitudes towards women. Consider here the male poet's muse, that inspirational female spirit as similar as Shakespeare's Ariel to Prospero. Where does this leave the woman poet? Certainly not part of the 19thC tradition of poetry, certainly marginalised and certainly negated under the label of "woman" historically as lack, deficient, and subordinate in the position of mastery. (Luce Irigaray, - The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine).

Therefore, when the modern woman comes to poetry, what she finds is the traditional "poetry of men". Not that that is such a bad thing. How we love the imagery of Edgar Allan Poe's Raven "knock, knock, knocking at the door" or the Falcon in Gerald Manly Hopkins' The Windhover. But this doesn't alter the fact that there has been a minority voice gone unheard.

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