March Wrap Up

NaPoWriMo has begun and while I embark on that, I look back to the month that was. The highlight was my reading at the Madras Street Cafe on 31 March. I stuck to time, I stuck to the script and the feed back was good.

I forgot how much I miss performance, used to sing a lot and haven't done so in many years. From hearing others read, I've learned what works and what doesn't. There is an immediacy to a public reading. As a listener I don't have time to decode hefty scholarly works. Or am I just shallow? Anyway, I chose poems that have performance value and imagery I could bring to life with nuanced tone and interpretation, much as I would a song. I also thought about the structure of the set. Take the reader on a journey, balance long and short, emotionally challenging with levity and at the end set them down gently and leave them wanting more.

In March I also evaluated my work based on the critical framework I've developed with Kerrin P Sharpe and more recently, Joanna Preston. Two very important influences on my writing. I've slowed down a little, set things aside to view with fresh eyes at a later date. It means I wrote fewer poems, with more consideration.

Having said that, NaPoWriMo is in full swing and I'll blog as many as I can. These are not finished poems and I look forward to the comments and critque of others. Even better than writing is reading the work of others, following the trail of crumbs left in the comments from one blog to another, discovering some great writers out there.

That's quite enough from me, back to writing everyone.

April 2 2010

on hearing Rodney Jones read

his voice reading rain crumbles like good sugar cookies
I think of petrichor and how a dry acid whitish-blue sky
turns blue-blue after the drought

I'd like a lover to write
down pour and hallowing on my skin
in his consonants I hear tin tin, tin tin
and think of the mud bricks we made covered
with sheets of corrugated iron

the house was never built so
we removed the iron and the bricks
dissolved back into the earth

I can't think of a city like I'm supposed to
rain on dry bitumen smells like oil
and bricks don't dissolve

sunrise might be promising but
the same sun at midday reveals shop girls
smoking in dirty allies and I retreat to the farm

the farmer was glad to have his top soil back
love does that too it retreats back into the earth

April 1 2010

The Road to Katrine

you got stoned and drove me fast to your farm
I recall it now as though through a monocle
of transparent golden toffee

your nose and mouth pressed into my hair
one arm hooked around my chest you inhaled me
my hair the heat the ripening wheat the

Patterson's Curse raped us staked us both out
in the tyre tracks of the combine harvester and
filled our mouths with purple blossom and broke
paddy melons on our bodies

although you died crushed in the teeth of the
winding road to Katrine you kept your pact
and five years later I woke panting in my bed
with melon seeds pressed into the sides of my head

NaPoWriMo

NaPoWriMo is here. 30 poems in thirty days. When I tweeted this on my Twitter channel, one chap said it was a worse idea than NaNoWriMo. Since I can do without the negativity, I blocked his arse. I do love that feature on Twitter. It says something for the digital age that we can create our own personal wonderlands that prop up our egos, is that not so?

So here it goes, I'm having a crack at it. Feel free to leave your comments. I doubt I will block anyone, but I am not making any promises. Goggles down...

In poetry news today...

February was a big month for me, in terms of publishing. Another poem appeared in The Press. Thank you to James Norcliffe who has kindly published 4 of my pieces in the last year.
In February Siobhan Harvey, poetry editor of Tahkahe Magazine accepted two poems. The date was also set for my reading for the Christchurch Poet's Collective: 31 March, Madras Street Cafe.

Perhaps the most important thing about February was the workshop by Joanna Preston I attended. Joanna was kind to all the writers, novice and more experienced, but I was itching to get some notes from her. I must have looked a bit wild eyed and over-eager (one of the reasons I tend to fail at interviews, ah well) because she invited anyone wanting feed back to stay after class. I rushed her and elbowed everyone out of the way, informed her I had all the ego pummeled out of me in 4 years of art school and asked her to go for it. In the follow up notes I have since received by email, Joanna has been incredibly generous with her time. Her feedback has been invaluable to me.

Kerrin P Sharpe is also a mentor and very good friend. In 2009 alone she was published by Snorkel, Turbine, and was selected for Best New Zealand Poems to name a few.

Time to return to scribbling.

on the death of a lover

my crucible
you are gone

you left me the alloy
ingot forged in your
bowl the colour

of apricots
with a lustrous nacre
deep as subterranean
caves

The Little Goat

I graze too close to the ravine

my distracted goatherd
you forget my clumsy cloven
lips lead me astray

and I tumble