Hi all,
And thanks Wahibe - it's been just as stimulating for me! Hope your
birthday was full of refreshment and love, and that that continues for
the year ahead.
And, hmm, it looks like the "vote" is a little bit divided between
people sending one feedback email vs people responding individually to
each poem. I appreciate how willing you all are to be flexible, that's
fantastic. I wonder if the best option is to just do what you most lean
towards. Perhaps if you don't care either way, send one feedback email.
If a good portion of us respond with just one email, then the amount of
mail people get will still be reduced. But, for those who prefer to let
the moment take them, respond individually, that's fine, too. I'm sure
we can all handle what happens.
Others who haven't let me know what they'd prefer, feel free to do so -
otherwise, we'll go with the flexible approach.
Thanks for putting thought, heart and patience into this. It's the
first workshop, so it's a little bit "guinea pig".
Best,
Andy Jackson
http://amongtheregulars.com/
On Mon, Jan 21, 2019, at 10:16 PM, Wahibe Moussa wrote:
Hi Everyone. Andy thanks for another thrilling provocation. Place has
definitely been on my mind in the past week as I feel myself pulled
toward Lebanon’s snowy winter (my cousins sending me pictures has
really not helped) and I can’t put into words yet my sense of a life
stretched across the world, because I was born in Beirut and yesterday
I was really aware that my birthday couldn’t happen until it was 11am
on 20th of Jan in Lebanon… Oh! yes, it was my birthday yesterday.>
Sorry to hear Ian’s had to drop out. I really enjoyed his Fireflight
and was looking forward to reading more of his poetry. I wish him luck
with everything.>
In terms of how we give feed back, I like replying separately to each
person. Especially as some poems give me an immediate buzz, and I feel
I really have to respond now, because right now everything is fresh
and I can respond without questioning myself.> But if the majority feeling is
for one email responding to all the
poems, then I’m happy to meet a new challenge. I mean it did get a tad
confusing with emails criss-crossing over the weekend.>
I’m really sorry I haven’t responded to everyone’s poems yet. Some
poems I need to think about because they are dense with imagery and my
responses are deep or layered and need to be deciphered, the
appropriate words aren’t easy to find. Also, Between house hunting, a
funding acquittal and the heat making me so ill, its been difficult to
focus on words.> I’ll try to pull my sox up from here though.
Wxx
On 21 Jan 2019, at 4:07 pm, Rachael Mead <meadipus@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:>>
Hi Andy,
Thank you so much - what a brilliant first week! The next exercise
and the example poems are incredibly inspiring so I’m very keen to
get my teeth stuck into ‘place’ this week.>>
Because I’d made the decision to do all the reading and commenting in
a single session at the close of the week, I ended up being a little
overwhelmed by the email volume. I think condensing all the comments
into one email is my preference just because it fits with the way I’m
trying to manage my time at the moment. But, that said, I’m also
happy to go with the group and tackle each poem as they come in this
week. Now that I know what to expect, it will definitely be easier to
manage!>>
Thanks again,
Rachael
On 21 Jan 2019, at 3:22 pm, Jessica C <j.cohen2031@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:>>>
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> 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> 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> 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/
--
Emilie Collyer
0425 761 594
*www.betweenthecracks.net[1]*
*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. **>>>>>>
Wahibe Moussa.
Navigating
Words
Action
Direction
☎️
+61 405 604 465
📥
wtmoussa@xxxxxxxxx
yawahiba@xxxxxxxxxx
I ACKNOWLEDGE THE AUSTRALIAN AND ABORIGINAL AND TORRES STRAIT
ISLANDERS AS THE FIRST INHABITANTS OF AUSTRALIA AND ACKNOWLEDGE THE
TRADITIONAL CUSTODIANS OF THE LAND WHERE I LIVE, WORK AND LEARN.>
