Hi Andy,
Thank you for an amazing first week, I feel stretched (in a good way) and
nourished from the readings, the variety of responses, and from the feedback.
Re. feedback / emails - I too was overwhelmed by the volume, and on a more
practical level, found it challenging to work out who / where / how to respond
and ended up worried I had skipped someone or responded to the wrong thread. So
my preference would be to combine feedback in one email - but of course happy
to go with majority.
All the best,
Jessi
On 21 Jan 2019, at 3:13 pm, Tru Dowling <purplepoet@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Andy, I like to respond to each poem after I’ve read it so my feedback is
fresh & immediate, like Emilie. It feels too forced when a combined email.
But I’m happy to concede to the majority. Btw, apologies I didn’t intro my
initial poem or say how much I’m looking forward to the varied poems we’ll
all write, people. We had five minutes to submit my poem before the library
closed, & had to wait for the sole pc in Apollo Bay library to be vacated; I
have had trouble picking up the internet signal on my laptop too. Anyway, am
enjoying the group immensely! Thanks everyone, esp Andy. Care, Tru
Sent from my iPhone
On 21 Jan 2019, at 12:57 pm, J V Birch (Redacted sender "jvbirch" for DMARC)
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
Hi Andy
Yes, what a fab group we have! The work has been amazing, love reading all
our different responses. And thank you to all those who fed back and of
course yourself Andy, plenty to think about.
As regards feeding back, I actually found the volume of emails a little
overwhelming to be honest (sorry!), so my preference would be to circulate
it in one email like Rach and Kirsten did, as I tend to collate the poems,
read and feedback all in one go. But happy to go with the majority.
With this weekend being a long one, we’re heading off into the Flinders
Ranges staying in a very remote place with no signal! But will circulate my
draft poem before we go and print off what’s been circulated so far to read
and feedback Monday evening, all in one email if that’s okay as will be
easier. That’s the plan anyway, let’s see how it pans out! ;)
Julie
On Mon, 21 Jan 2019 at 11:29, Emilie Collyer
<emiliecollyer@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:emiliecollyer@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
Hi Andy
Re the feedback question: I like doing it in response to each poem / email
so I can read and immediately respond. I also quite like the cascading
feedback that comes through the in-box as it informs and adds to my
thinking. BUT I can just as easily collate this into one document if others
prefer that.
Emilie
On Mon, 21 Jan 2019 at 09:23, Andy Jackson <andyjackson71@xxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:andyjackson71@xxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
First of all, I want to sincerely thank you all for your wholehearted and
generous feedback. It seemed to me that people looked carefully at others'
poems (without being overly analytical), and gave their opinions honestly,
based on their own intuitions. That's great, especially after just one week.
I also think all the poems submitted were original, thoughtful and
committed, and I expect I may well see a few of them published, once they're
honed and matured.
Second, I just need to let you know that Ian has bowed out of our group. He
thanks you all very much for the feedback, but has had a few things come up
in his life which have to take priority, so he'll be doing the Autumn
workshop.
Third, there have been a few issues with the group email system. A few
people reported being unable (or unsure how) to check if their emails
reached the group. I think most if not all of those issues should be
resolved, as we get used to how it works. I hope so, anyway. Please let me
know if you're having any trouble, still. If these things get in the way, we
can revert to just using group emails instead, from next week on.
On a related matter, do people have strong preferences for how to give
feedback? That is – replying to each individual poem within that email, or
collating your feedback on all poems in one email? If there's a consensus,
I'd like to go with that. Let me know.
That's admin out of the way. Now... where are we going this week? Well,
wherever you are. Or, wherever you have been. Or will be. Place. Places.
Your place. Other places. Displacement. Placing, as in the opposite of “I
just can't place that”. All those kinds of knowledge, which are bodily,
situational, environmental. Which includes that kind of knowledge that is
hard to articulate, perhaps because its unique to you and you're not sure if
you can communicate it to anyone else. Also, that kind of unknowing. I'm
thinking, too, of how we can know something without being conscious of it,
how something has to change – subtly or profoundly – before that knowledge
can be unearthed.
All that's quite abstract. I'd rather be concrete. I remember sitting in an
airplane as it taxi-ed into the terminal, after a long journey back from
Chennai, India, where I'd been for about two months. The airport staff on
the tarmac prepared to remove luggage from the hold, leaning against
trolleys and punching and slapping each other on the arm with a kind of
laconic, masculine warmth. Australians suddenly seemed huge, lumbering and
slow, physical with each other, yet somehow awkward in their bodies, wanting
to maximise the spaces between. Back in Melbourne, the trains and the
streets seemed empty and quiet, with hardly any rubbish tumbling through the
city. Of course, as soon as I moved to Castlemaine, when I visit Melbourne
it seems hectic and crowded, full of advertising and bustle. A change of
place made a place new, or strange.
Around a hundred years ago, Viktor Shklovsky coined the word
defamiliarisation, to explain (if it can be explained) what poetry does, or
could do. What is familiar – what we might see every day – through poetic
language and form, becomes strange, while remaining very close to us. This
includes home, work, cities, all kinds of environments. Place is unsettled.
I can't completely explain how poetry does this. What I do know is that
there are as many places as there are consciousnesses, and as many
consciousnesses as there are forms of poetry, which is to say perhaps
infinite. How I experience place – as a 40-something white man who is
visibly different – is not how others experience place. Some move through
the world with more anonymity, more vulnerability, more difficulty, more
ease, more confusion. Defamiliarisation is not just about how we use the
language, but about perspective, where the voice comes from and how it
sounds.
Anyway, so, yes, it wasn't easy to restrict myself to just six poems this
week. Here, we have poems of the moment, of public transport, the natural
world, of memorials, work and home. None of them are representative of any
particular school of poetics – ecopoetics, experimental, lyrical,
traditional, etc. In a way, each poem borrows from multiple approaches, and
is also utterly itself.
In the classic Tang dynasty (8th century CE) poem by Tu Fu (this translation
by Kenneth Rexroth), there is a measured evocation of place – the scents and
images that coalesce around the poet's mood, a mood which is both profoundly
still and subtly disturbed. Things resound more intensely at night, or
perhaps in the wake of this visit to an abbot. Things, also, simply are what
they are. The water. The bells. The iron phoenix. The prayers. Intruding
into the moment is tomorrow, that the poet knows he will walk in the fields
and weep. Where do these thoughts come from? How do they come out of this
place?
Scent, too, is a dominant presence in Gieve Patel's poem – “human manure /
Vague and sharp... [which] does not offend”, but also “station odour...
seeping into your clothing”. The poet cannot help but be penetrated by this
world – even if you haven't been to Mumbai, you can imagine how the place
might stick to you, climb inside you – but this is at the same time a kind
of detached portrait, curious and (somewhat) unjudgemental. The odour is
both “a divine cushion” and not at all “the beginning of a meditation / On
the nature of truth and beauty.” The poem carves out a personal space within
a public space, as we often do on crowded trains.
As a side note (though a crucial question, in a way), think about the form
of these two poems. Tu Fu's is one solid stanza. Patel's is two stanzas,
each line capitalised. Why? Is there a relationship between the shape of the
poems and the sense of their places? I'm not looking for a “right” answer,
just wondering how the way a poem looks on the page – open, drifting,
enclosed, formal, wild – might itself evoke, reinforce, complicate, how we
feel about place. These questions, of course, relate to the rest of our
poems, too. A poem is a place itself.
Anne Elvey's poem knows this well. It is about, among other things, place as
layers, as sedimental histories overlaid on each other. Colonial violence is
considered in the light of Christian remembrance. A map is sketched on an
oval, a sporting arena made into a place of memory. “Late evening we came …
while the stories were told until day”. The poem knows that the sheer weight
and depth of these stories is hard, perhaps impossible, to tell. The poem
knows, too, that invoking weather as sympathy or consolation might be “a
cliche”. Instead, mostly on the right hand page, we have a field of marks on
paper, as if the poem were another map, a visceral history of sorts.
There's a similar – though also quite distinct – kind of unsettlement in
Stuart Cooke's poem. Loosely speaking, this is a poem of landscape, of place
beyond the city – though such places cannot escape the human. Among acacia
and eagles, vineyards and groves, and a very human way of being within place
and not quite belonging. The lines slide and leap across the page, moving as
the eyes move, both meditative and overwhelmed. Words are broken in two or
mashed together – “mag / nificent”, “r / attling b / ack to the coast”,
“itdoeswhatitdoes”. You'll notice different aspects than I will, but I was
struck by “I'm joining / with the split”, and by the “snake coiling ( ( ”.
Punctuation and line-breaks here reinforce an unresolved and ambiguous sense
of place.
Another ecopoetics is in play with Jill Jones's poetry, but it's much more
about the human, urban world. It's not explicit where we are, but there is
“the building”, “a desk”, “data” and “ceremonies”, all of it spoken of by a
collective “we”. It gives me certain visuals, concrete and steel and human
bodies together, almost de-personalised. Again, you'll have your own take on
it. I'm interested, here, though, in how the “we” shapes our sense of place,
how even the blue sky seems strange, a kind of foundation.
Finally, Quinn Eades takes us home. Well, to his home, and in particular to
their kitchen table and what surrounds it, what it supports literally and
figuratively. In this place – the poem and the table – family and writing
come together. I've included this because writing about place is not always
exotic or ambitious or universal, but by attending to the intimate, it
somehow does touch something much bigger. It also reminds us that
associations and memories attach to objects in their place.
This week, I want you to write while dwelling in a particular place. It may
be a train carriage, your own workplace or office or bedroom, a park,
shopping centre, vacant lot, library, bushland, laneway, swimming pool,
creche, desert, waiting room, church, mosque, art gallery. It should be any
place you know well. You have two options – to write absorbantly or with
resistance. In other words, you could write as if taken over by the place,
absorbed, as if your words are channelling the heart of the place, like how
a dancer embodies the music. Aim for embodying it, rather than just
describing. Think sensory, but if ideas come, let them. The other option is
to write against the place, to resist it, pull the loose threads of it, see
what dwells underneath it. This could be a dark history, your own
ambivalence or aversion, even perhaps how hard it might feel to capture this
place in language. I think our six poems this week have elements of both
(yours might too), but you could say the Tu Fu, Quinn Eades and Gieve Patel
poems are absorbant, and the Anne Elvey, Stuart Cooke and Jill Jones poems
are resistant. Pick one approach, and see what happens.
I should also say I came up with this idea before reading your poems this
week – and some have already written place poems (eg Mike's), though most
are based in memory. The key to this exercise is – as I say – the present
experience, and how your langauge interacts with that, in the moment. You
might need to write a whole lot of rough draft while there, and later go
back and edit it into shape. Or it may all come in a flow while you're
there. Either way, see if you can somehow use the page, puncuation,
line-breaks, etc to reinforce your sense of that place. Hugely looking
forward to seeing what you come up with – I've no doubt it'll be really
diverse! Good luck!
Andy.
Andy Jackson
http://amongtheregulars.com/ ;<http://amongtheregulars.com/>
--
Emilie Collyer
0425 761 594
www.betweenthecracks.net <http://www.betweenthecracks.net/>
Twitter: @EmilieCollyer
I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which I live and work. I
pay my respects to their Elders, past and present. I acknowledge that
sovereignty was never ceded and that the complexities of living on this land
that remains stolen and occupied are many and are unresolved.
