This website has gone dark for a few months. No I’m not back in China. At the end of last year we left our home of thirty years in Cherry Gardens in the Adelaide Hills and moved to suburban Adelaide. Since then we’ve been renovating my wife’s childhood home for an average of 60 hours a week. There’s still been time at night to write and publish but the blog has been allowed to slide…
Over the next few weeks I’ll give a summary of what I’ve been up to each month…
The poem.
I wrote process poetry 2 while I was a resident artist at Adelaide City Library. The theme of the 4 week residency was ‘Lost & Found’ so I began by composing a found poem exploring the idea of lost and found and defining what a poem is. I often begin a poem by writing notes or a stream-of-consciousness, then remove unnecessary words. It occurred to me that the logical conclusion – and the perfect poem – might be the blank page you started with.
I guess it’s also a bit of a dig at the whole fad of ‘found poetry.’ There’s an awful lot of pretty bad poetry which consists of the random assemblage of lists and lines stolen from text books, newspapers and other people’s poems.
process poetry 2
start with a fragment.
or bruise.
words and phrases piled
like lost property
POEM (Peroral Endoscopic Myotomy)
is an endoscopic procedure used
to treat swallowing disorders.
writing poetry is no easy task.
Eran Hadas built a tool
that can read your brainwaves
and generate poetry
that reflects your thoughts.*
Remove unnecessary words
until you are left
with a blank page.
Marvel at its whiteness.
[* the stanza in italics is a quote from Wired Magazine. http://www.wired.co.uk/arti…
First published in malevolent soap Vol. 1 (ed. Felix Garner Davis)
ISBN 978-0-646-97882-6
October, 2017
https://www.facebook.com/MalevolentSoap/
the music.
I remixed 3 works by Bluemillenium and merged it with my poem on ccmixter.org
I’ve gone dark for a few weeks. We are taking 6 weeks in China & Japan. I didn’t realise that Facebook, Gmail and Google would all be blocked in China… Meanwhile I’ve decided to set myself the challenge of writing a poem every day. There’s plenty to reflect on…
Cycling the city walls, Xi’an
Squirrel, Temple of Heaven, Beijing
Archaeologist inspecting his terracotta troops
Terracotta Army, Lintong via Xi’ an.
Tower fortress, Great Wall, Badaling
Buddha’s Angels, Great Wild Goose Pagoda, 7th C.
Giant Panda Research Base, Chengdu
The other Fringe event I was involved with last month was Defying Gravity, a free afternoon of comedy, poetry and music organised by Margaret Clark and sponsored by Salisbury Council.I sang ‘If I were a subjunctive clause’ on guitar, ‘Livin’ in the Sunlight’ on uke and ‘Whispering Grass’ with John Brydon and performed the poems Ode to the Penis, speech of parts, an accident waiting to happen, bucket list and Tommy Ruff. Thanks to all the other performers: Margaret Clark, Fred Willet, Bruce Greenhalg, Leanne, Jill Wherry, Gordon McPherson, Nigel Ford, Joanne Baker and the musical group Creation!
I was part of two Festival Fringe events in February. The first was the launch of Amelia’s Dreamday collection, a project done in collaboration with Campbelltown ArtHouse. It was a fun and unique day which combined the opening of an art exhibition with the book launch. You can see more photos and read my launch speech on the Rochford Street Review website HERE. (Photos courtesy of Asbjorn Kanck.)
