Hi Andy, Everyone,
Here’s my belated offering in rough draft form. No more to be said for now, no
swearing or excuses (though it’s bloody hot!!).
Care, Tru
PS: Hope you’re feeling better, Maureen, and Happy Birthday Wahibe! (My poem
this week is also influenced by my sisters, who were both born on ‘Australia’
Day 10 years apart, and the sadness that surrounds the nationalism of 26.1.) I
recommend this doco too: it’s a beauty, full of sensitivity and puppets in the
desert, literally.
From: poetryseason2-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:poetryseason2-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Andy Jackson
Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2019 4:49 PM
To: poetryseason2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [poetryseason2] Re: week 2 - place
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 <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.
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.
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