Kwoorabup Writers Festival

I'm looking forward to forty minutes on the open road and then three days in beautiful Kwoorabup/Denmark WA in the company of a great line up of writers from the Great Southern Region and other literary folk, including the team from Westerly magazine. A full program and bionotes are available here on the Denmark Arts website. Artist Director Vivienne Robertson talks about Denmark Arts and Westerly Magazine's collaboration in Westerly's Online Special Issue featuring writers of the Great Southern here Link to the Online Special Issue coming soon. Watch this space!

Just two more sleeps and we'll be pointing our car in the direction of Denmark WA and the

2021 Denmark Festival of Voice!

Maree Dawes, Yann Toussaint, Kim Scott, Reneé Pettitt-Schipp, Graham Kershaw, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Maria Zajkowski, Tim Dunn and myself have been working with musicians Marianthe Loucataris and Jen Lush on the Music of Poetry project for the Denmark Festival of Voice. Due to the impact of Covid-19, Ali Cobby Eckermann and Maria Zajkowski are not able to join us in person, but they will have a virtual presence.

Saturday will see the premiere of Aqueous - Water : Longing : Memory, "an installation and web based collaborative media arts work: poetry, music, field recordings, sound design, and images". Aqueous features the work of Kim Scott, Maree Dawes, Barbara Temperton, Yann Toussaint, Tim Dunn and Marianthe Loucataris. There is a taster here. Aqueous will be playing in the Artsbar's Studio Listening Lounge in Strickland Street from 10am to 4pm all weekend.

I'll be officially appearing at the Festival three times, but you'll also find me in audiences listening to some the fantastic artists on the program. My three events are:

- Saturday 11.30am to 12.30pm at the Artsbar for a panel discussion with the poets and composer/musicians from the Music of Poetry project and Chair Andrea Gaynor.

- Saturday 3.30pm to 5.30pm reading at Teahouse Books, 8 Hollings Road, with the Aqueous poets Maree Dawes, Kim Scott, and Yann Toussaint.

- Sunday 6.30pm to 7.30pm I'll read with Reneé​ Pettitt-Schipp and Graham Kershaw for Poetry and Wine at the Artsbar.

Come and join us all in beautiful Denmark!

The complete Denmark Festival of Voice programme, including all the poetry events and the venue map is available here.

More information about The Music of Poetry project and Aqueous can be found here.

Thank you to Denmark Arts and Denmark Festival of Voice for producing this project, and the WA Departments of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries & Culture and the Arts for your support!

Coming soon: Denmark Festival of Voice - June 2021

You know you're working on a great project when you get to run away from home for the day on a field trip with some of the creative team, and you end up in the forest by the Styx River in Walpole-Nornalup National Park.

What were we doing there? You can find out soon when Music of Poetry premieres at the Denmark Festival of Voice on Saturday 5 June 2021.

Our team includes musician Marianthe Loucataris, driver and photographer Tim Dunn, with poets: Maree Dawes, Kim Scott, Yann Toussaint and myself. The Poetry of Music also features musician Jen Lush working with poets Ali Cobby-Eckermann, Graham Kershaw, Maria Zajkowski, and Reneé Pettitt-Schipp

More to come...

Further information can be found at https://www.denmarkfestivalofvoice.com.au/music-of-poetry

Styx https://www.denmarkfestivalofvoice.com.au/music-of-poetry

Watch this space

Walking around the block tonight, I was delighted to observe that we've been living here long enough now to have seeds from trees - felled when building the subdivision - sprouting vigorously in neighbours' yards. Peppermints, acacias, and various feral plant species once covered these former cow paddocks. Now they're back ... including some plants that look like the notorious acacia longifolia, aka Sydney wattle, and Taylorina/tallerina.

To the developer's credit, post-bulldozer, a variety of native peppermints were planted as street trees. Last year, in a big blow, a lovely weeping specimen across the road from us was snapped off near the ground. The sawn wood made its way into our woodpile after our son-in-law, helping with our flattened fence, put his chainsaw to good use and tidied things up. I’d hoped that the estate gardening contractors would leave the stump to see if it would sprout, but they ground the stump down to below ground level and that seemed to be the end of it.

The space across the road where the peppermint tree used to be.

We've been watching for a while, since we saw the first sprouts emerging with this winter's rains, keeping a proprietary guard over them. Then, last week, we dug up six and replanted them onto one of our verges where struggling grass has gone the way of our dodgy reticulation system. 

We didn't want to call attention to them, concerned some of the locals might think stakes and twine an invitation to exhume the seedlings. However, a neighbour's visitor parked their 4WD on top of number six the other night (it miraculously survived) and we're thinking some protection might be warranted. 

Our peppermint trees are about six inches high. Watch this space.

Susan Hawthorne's Limen

In case you missed Sotto, September 2013, my review of Susan Hawthorne's Limen (Spinifex Press, 2013) can be read here.

brb: be right back - A verse novel

 

Earlier this year I was honoured to be invited to launch Maree Dawes's second book, a digital verse novel, in Albany as part of the Perth Writers Festival in the Great Southern.

 

Monday 24 February 2014 was a warm, sunny day. A perfect time to escape from my usual routine and join the enthusiastic crowd enjoying the program at the Vancouver Arts Centre.

 

The launch was a lively one, and included music from A Mixed Bag (Sandy Bishop, Sue Tevaki and Barbara Watson) and  a dramatisation of excerpts from the book by Nic Spanbrock, Tarquin Smart and Sylvia Leymann.
 

Congratulations, Maree and Spineless Wonders, for delivering such a great read!

My launch speech:

I‘m delighted to be here today to launch this new title BRB: be right back written by Maree Dawes and published by Spineless Wonders.

 

BRB: Be Right Back ­is a verse novel, and an exciting blend of lyric and narrative poetry and cyber-discourse.

 

It’s the 1990s. Dawes’ protagonist, known as Boadicea, finds in online chat rooms an anonymity and freedom that liberates her from everyday life: her loneliness in a new town, responsibilities for children, her often absent partner and their unravelling relationship. In chat rooms she learns to be herself … or anyone else she chooses.

 

The first obstacles Boadicea encounters in chat rooms are culture and language. In order to even begin to communicate with the others there, she must undergo a kind of enculturation: become familiar with chat room etiquette, think and write faster, and be an adept of chatspeak – word strings of acronyms, abbreviations, pictograms, emoticons, etc. – which we now know as textese or sms, but brb is based in the 1990s when personal access to the Internet was still a novelty for many.

 

From the moment she gets naked online, Boadicea enters a world of discovery, eroticism and obsession.

 

This is known as delaying gratification ­– which must be terribly like cybersex, I think – I’m going to digress, because I want to talk for a moment about the verse novel and free verse.

 

Story has been conveyed in poetic form since the early days of spoken language, leading to the development of oral narrative poems such as the epic and the ballad. Gilgamesh, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey – along with Beowulf - provide us with some of the earliest written examples available to us of the ancient epic tradition. From that tradition evolved a range of narrative and poetic devices, and techniques of composition that remain in common usage to this day. brb is an excellent example of how these continue to evolve.

 

The poet and critic Leonard Nathan, writing in The New Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics (1993) (one of my bibles), traced the peaks and lows of narrative practice in poetry from the time of Homer to the present day. Rather than locating a continuity of a particular mode (or modes) of narrative poetry, Nathan found instead a continuous tradition of narrative in poetry. This tradition is peppered with works in forms that were perceived as being avant-garde at the time of their emergence and have since become classic (blank verse and free verse, for example). In recent times, this process has included not only a blending of some poetic forms with other poetic forms, but also a blending of poetry with other genres – such as the verse novel. Such hybridisation seems almost inevitable when one considers that for the last three centuries the novel has dominated narrative literature.

 

Free verse is a popular choice for the authors of verse novels. Poets can then concentrate more on narrative structure, as opposed to a strict-form poetic grid on which a narrative is to be suspended. Free verse, coupled with lyric poetry, can and does enhance sustained narratives, being dense with imagery, simile, and metaphor reinforced by the use of sound patterning techniques such as rhythm, alliteration, repetition, etc. In brb, Maree has put equal amounts of energy into both her poetry and her narrative.

I read an example of this: “The music teacher takes the stage” from brb. 

 

Free verse also lends itself to writing in the vernacular, i.e. the language of a particular place, in this case cyber-space. The use of textese, colloquialisms and unusual syntax is a point of commonality shared by many of the pieces in brb, especially in dialogue. Narrative will often employ dialogue to service the plot, in the guise of establishing character, exposition, and conflict. The choice of a chat room for the central location in brb provides the perfect opportunity for Maree to employ all these techniques, and to also play with language in unconventional, entertaining and sometimes humorous ways. For example: In Welcome to Yahoo! Chat you are chatting as Boadicea voices overlay each other: “huggles”, book discussions, and cyber-relationship building are punctuated by requests from a teenager for help with his English homework.

 

End of digression.

 

In contrast to Boadicea’s domestic arrangements, life in the chat room is un-constrained. Her wholehearted engagement with the cyber-world threatens to unravel her real life, but in terms of the writing it creates new opportunities for verisimilitude, i.e. likeness to the truth.  Indeed, the cybersex encounter in “Thistlehead PMs Boadicea” proved to be most educational ... But I’m not here to provide plot spoilers!

 

In summary: Narrative is easy to identify because the elements of story – beginning, middle, end, character, conflict, resolution, moral, and so on – are introduced to us at a very early age. Poetic language, however, is a consciously learned, figurative language that comes to us from an ancient tradition and is constantly evolving.

 

I quote from the words of the Australia poet Jan Harry, who said:

“Poets thrive on thinking of writerly ways to subvert or undermine conventions; by hitching verse to novel […] there are opportunities for poets to work in new ways …” (“Narrative And Poetry: What Happened Next” Cordite, 1 February 2001)

brb; be right back is Maree Dawes working in a new way, a way that is extremely relevant to our world today. The outcome is a work which wears the robe of the novel, but speaks the language of poetry.

* * * * *

 

Purchase brb: be right back online at Spineless Wonders/Tomely

 

More details, reviews, and information about the poet Maree Dawes can be found on Facebook at brb: be right back by Maree Dawes

 

 

Christening the kitchen

A friend dropped in a bag of home grown vegetables today, and – as a result – tonight’s dinner was made much more interesting.

In the bag were: cherry tomatoes, beetroot, turnips, leeks, one yellow chili (banana-chili?), silverbeet and kale.

We gave the beetroot a good wash – trying to rescue all the beetles we inherited along with the beetroot, which by now were rushing to the surface of the water in search of oxygen, and then dispatching them  elsewhere – and put them on the stove to simmer away while I attended to dinner.

It's a tad challenging, cooking in the new (very old) house. We are not really unpacked/organised yet, and space is limited. I tend to spend most of my energy flogging from the stove to two different countertops, two fridges, to sink, to walk-in-pantry (ancient). Cooking can be quite exhausting, but is always rewarding.

I’d planned my favourite, tried and true, stir-fry recipe for tea, and decided to substitute fresh leeks for onion. I trawled the Internet for tips on how to cook kale and discovered some simple cooking instructions here and jazzed them up with some garlic, throwing it all into the frypan as the stir fry was reaching completion. Well … what a triumph! Dinner was delicious. The leek added a different flavour to an old favourite for sure, but topped with the kale (and stirred in after serving) we had a whole new dimension added to our dinner.

While we were appreciating the stir-fry, the beetroot was cooling in its cooking water.

After dinner, I discovered that my bloke had never had the pleasure of peeling freshly cooked beetroot. He was the only boy in the house, almost the youngest and – with three sisters and an old fashioned mother – missed out on a lot in the learning to cook department. (He’s caught up, though, he’s in charge of cooking steak and fish in our house.)

Whilst initiating the bloke into the purple-hand society, I shared with him my memories of my own mother cooking and pickling beetroot. How I loved the moment when freshly cooked beetroot had cooled down enough to pick up and peel. Encouraging the beetroots’ rough skin away from their smooth, bulbous fruit was bare-handed treasure hunting.

Now I am off to trawl for a recipe for beetroot pickling emulsion. All I can remember is deep-red vinegar suffused with aromatic spices warming on the stove. Then again … maybe I should just ring my mother?