Good morning everyone, and welcome. Specifically, welcome to Emilie
Collyer, Ian Gostelow, Jessica Cohen, Julie Birch, Kirsten Krauth, Mary
Stone, Maureen Sexton, Rachael Mead, Tru Dowling and Wahibe Moussa. If
you've received this message, and you're not on that list, email me and
we'll work out what's happened.
WEEK 1 - SUMMER
“Poetry Season” has been a title wandering around in the back of my mind
for a while now, a name in search of a home. So, when I decided to run a
workshop, straight away the name stuck. Which made sense. Writing poetry
to me has always been very much about time and change. To some degree,
like rain or heat or wind, it happens of its own accord, when the
conditions are right. Too often, when we want it to arrive, it doesn't;
yet when we least expect it, it plunges down into us, and we have to
pull over, stop what we're doing, and write.
Of course, that's not to say that poetry can't be encouraged, lured to
draw near. Cats, it's often said, approach the people who ignore them,
who are looking elsewhere. What we're going to do – if you don't mind me
stretching the metaphor – is thinking of cats while looking elsewhere.
We'll pray for rain and get snow. Or we'll write about X and suddenly
find ourselves in Y.
This week, I'm thinking of summer. Here in Castlemaine – and I'm sure
wherever you are – it has well and truly arrived. Already, there have
been a few days-long heat-waves, everywhere the hum of air-conditioners,
plants and trees under stress, open-beaked birds seeking water, the wind
an oven's open door. I think of summer and think of fluids. Sweat. How
your thighs would slither on vinyl couches. As a child, dripping wet
from the swimming pool, lying down on concrete to make a kind of damp
silhouette. But fluid is also the sense of time. Often, summer requires
you to be prone, immobile, the hours creeping by with torpor, or passing
in a half-asleep blur. Nights, the windows open in the hope of a cool
breeze. Stillness. Crickets.
From my teenage years until my early thirties, I hardly wore shorts,
even in the peak of summer. I was embarassed by a bend in my leg at the
knee, a kink towards the left that I felt made me stand out (pun half-
intended). And “the left” makes me think of politics. Anyway, I
certainly almost never swam. That would have meant being even more
visible. For an introvert with scoliosis, that's not an ideal formula.
Summer is a time of bodies on display. With all the awkwardness, shame
and desire you can imagine. Beaches – treeless, gritty, exposed places.
Jellyfish. Sharks. UV. Jetskis.
Hard to think of beaches and to not also think of Cronulla in December
2005, young aggressive white men draped in the Australian flag, ready to
beat people perceived as other, to “reclaim” a place that is,
ironically, still unceded Aboriginal land.
In summer, I think (increasingly now) of bushfire. The threat and menace
of it, how fire can destroy the homes of humans and other animals. I
remember the dust-storm in Victoria in February 1983, my first year of
secondary school, the sky a wall of pale brown, like a cloud had merged
with the earth and was rolling in from the horizon, a drought-fed
eclipse. A week later, Ash Wednesday.
I think, too, of the year after that, the summer after my first spinal
operation, a twelve-year-old boy in a back-brace and sweltering. My mum
bought me a sheer, sleevless t-shirt, the only thing she could find in
the local Target store that breathed. From the womenswear department.
She didn't think I'd mind, she said. And I didn't.
But now I'm starting to write a poem. One thing flows into another.
Poetry, like summer, is fluid, permeable, leaky. I begin to write one
thing, and another presses its way in. I enter some kind of intense
state of attention or reverie – which could be either wildly associative
or calmly meditative – and things seem to coalesce, attract each other.
A smell triggers a memory. A photo recalls a peculiar pain or pleasure.
A word sounds like another word and suddenly two disparate worlds have
become intertwined.
To me, this is not only exciting but encouraging. Right in the middle of
writing something, I often find a miniature critic in me saying “oh,
that's been written about before”. As if a poem could be reduced to its
topic. Rather than think in terms of identity and things, if we thought
ecologically, relationally, it might remind us that what makes a poem
unique is not its “topic” – eg summer – but its connections – the
utterly unique associations that happen within and through you as a
writer and a person.
I've attached four poems of summer. But of course they are about so much
more. They're all Australian, and recent(ish), this time, though in
later weeks we'll go international. Summer felt like a time to be local.
You'll notice things I won't, of course – they'll conjure memories,
thoughts and ideas that won't have occurred to me. I've chosen them for
how differently each poem works, how oepn they each are to different
responses, but also on what they have in common – the way they
incorporate other ideas and experiences, how fluidly they move.
Pam Brown gives us three summers in uncapitalised prose, memories of
childhood in the country among farms, fruit, disability, flies, alcohol,
and much more. The language is direct, seemingly unadorned, yet
punctuated with associations that are existential and spiritual – “the
auctioneer speaks in tongues”, the goods train “always” moving on “to
somewhere we've never been”.
Martin Harrison's poem is located on the roof of a hotel in Thailand,
deeply attentive to the details of the moment, but also profoundly
vulnerable to questions of what it means to be human. Bracketed comments
complicate and question. A family in another building could be “rich or
poor”. A plastic chair speaks of the absence of bodies, of death. The
poem is as philosophical as it is visual, shuttling between the two,
combining them.
Gig Ryan remembers a summer working in London, as many Australians have
done. The language is laconic, vernacular, smart, with no need of
punctuation. It's a hard poem to sum up without doing it an injustice.
The disillusionment of New Years Eve, of hospitality, the club scene,
drugs and the sensuality of others.
Robert Adamson's poem, by contrast, is more internal, the thoughts that
come unbidden on a stifling summer night. Here, the poem is immersed in
place, in very particular smells and sights, but the hands of ghosts
keep reaching in – not only poets, but an unnamed “you” who has “left
the land of the living”. It's a poem of painful, rhetorical questions.
I'd suggest reading each poem twice. Some things will hit you
immediately. Others will creep up, or emerge subtly out of the
background.
Then, I want you to write your own poem of summer. Think of one
particular scene, experience, moment, or even an entire season. It
could be recent or ancient memory. Something vivid. Write towards that
– the smells, sounds, images, sensations, the phrases and language of
that time. But since poetry is always about something else, I want you
to include something else – which could be philosophical, existential,
linguistic, political, spiritual, environmental, anything beyond the
scene itself, but somehow intuitively related. One way to do that is to
include it as you write, just let your mind wander. You could also
write your entire poem, take a break, then go back and insert something
else into it.
I have only one one limitation – keep that “something else” to one or
two lines only. Each of the poems I've included, I know, are much more
permeated with other things and people, saturated, you could say. But
it's an interesting thing I want you to explore – how to evoke something
subtly, with a hint, a flash, so that in its aftermath, the whole poem
is shadowed by that quick mention (of course, if your poem demands to
include more than one or two lines of this “something else”, so be it –
but try to keep it to a line or two, see how that feels).
You might want to take one of these four poems as a model for your
approach. It's not a requirement, because your memory or scene might
call for an entirely different kind of set-up or language. Think about
what kind of lines, energy of language, tone, etc that might be
appropriate for the world you're conjuring. But choosing one of these
poems can certainly help get you started. Three Summers? Observations
while elsewhere? Summer work? A solitary summer night's thoughts? Where
do you go?
WHAT HAPPENS NOW?
Once you've written your poem – or, quite possibly, a rough draft of
your poem – send it as an attachment (word or PDF) to this email
address – _poetryseason2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx[1]_.
1. Send it by midnight on Friday, at the latest, if possible. That
will give us all time to read the poems and provide feedback.
2. If you can, over the weekend, or as soon as you can, provide some
brief constructive feedback to each person (or as many as you feel
you can – there's ten in each group, so that adds up!). It only
needs to be a sentence, a quick sense of how the poem affects you,
what you feel it does well, and where it might be faltering. Bear
in mind that people's poems may well come from a deeply personal
place, and because it's online you won't necessarily be able to
tell that – so, be sensitive, respectful and supportive. Also,
feedback is best when it's specific – especially when it's
critique. Usually, the only general feedback that's useful is when
you're saying what you think the poem does overall. You can do this
before I give feedback, or after – it's up to you.
3. I'll endeavour to provide feedback to everybody before next Monday.
My feedback will be a little more substantial. I'll try to identify
the highlights of your poem, and what might need some work, but
also provide some suggestions as to how you might radically
transform, shorten or extend your poem.
4. On Monday the 21st January, we start again!
PS This email list system is a trial run. If you have any questions or
feedback (I've already had one really good question), let me know,
and I'll find out and get back to you.
Andy Jackson
http://amongtheregulars.com/
Links:
1. mailto:poetryseason@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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