Hear ISSA on Poetica

If you missed the initial broadcast of Poetica today November 21st you can still hear it at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/poetica/

My dog listened to every word I said with a quizzical ear ... and yet ... and yet ...

It will also be repeated on Thursday afternoon 26 November 3pm on Radio National in most States of Australia but 4pm in Western Australia. A beautiful programme put together with haunting music and sensitive readings by Ron Sims.

THE MELBOURNE SHAKESPEARE SOCIETY: Sonnet 155 Competititon

The Society is Celebrating 125 years

155TH SONNET COMPETITION

Winner: $300. Runner-up: $100.

OK, so it’s four hundred years since Thomas Thorpe published Shakespeare’s sonnets along with “A Lover’s Complaint”, and people are still finding their own emotions in them, still questioning the situations which inspired them, still transforming their creative energy into theses, fictions, scripts, paintings, and music.

To celebrate this anniversary, the Melbourne Shakespeare Society invites entries to a competition for the 155th SONNET.

Competitors are free to interpret the need for a 155TH SONNET, for instance, to include sonnets “in Shakespeare’s voice”, comments on love, the sonnet, us and the times of Shakespeare – and so on. The judges acknowledge the creative variation of the sonnet form as practised in Shakespeare’s time and since. The judges’ decision is final.

Entries: A previously unpublished sonnet, titled or sub-titled “The 155th Sonnet”.
Format: Each sonnet in typescript on one side of an A4 sheet of paper. The poet’s name must not be on this sheet, but supplied with address and contact details (email/phone) on a separate sheet of paper, with title and opening line of the poem.

Closing date: Entries must be posted December 1 or earlier (date extended).
Entry fee: Four x 55c unused Australian postage stamps with each sonnet.
Send to: Melbourne Shakespeare Society 155th Sonnet Competition, P.O.Box 231, Mont Albert VIC 3127

The judges are Kevin Brophy and Judith Rodriguez. The winner and runner-up will be announced at the end of the 1pm, December 12 reading of “The Rape of Lucrece” by the Melbourne Shakespeare Society, at the English-Speaking Union, 146 West Toorak Road, South Yarra 3181.

At the Society’s 2pm December 19 meeting at St Francis’ Pastoral Centre, Lonsdale St, the prize-winning poems will be read, if possible by the poets, and released in print in The Melbourne Shakespearean; writers of other entries may be invited to read or be published. Publication at ASA rates; copyright remains with the poets.

Poetica 21 November 2009 - Issa

In the gentle and incisive world of Haiku poetry, the 18th century, Japanese poet ISSA is still regarded as a giant talent in these 'little, one-breath poems'.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/poetica/stories/2009/2694426.htm - 3pm on ABC National Radio 21 November 2009. Repeated on Thursday 26 November 2009 at 3pm most States, 4pm in Western Australia.

I tell you this because I do make comments in it. The programme was compiled and produced by Ron Sims, recording engineer, photographer, sculptor and who knows what else.

the lazy dog
barks lying down...
plum trees in bloom

ISSA

Can you write Sonnet 155? It would be worth $300!

Sonneteers! 400 years after Shakespeare’s Sonnets were published, the Melbourne Shakespeare Society is holding a competition for THE 155TH SONNET. Winner $300, runner-up $100. Fee, each poem: 4 x 55c postage stamps.

Post by December 1 (extended) to
P.O.Box 231, Mont Albert VIC 3127.

Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets

Less than a month to enter the $3000 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets http://web.overland.org.au/?page_id=1549

Big High Song for Somebody by Philip Whalen, read at Perth Poetry Club @ The Moon

As I said in relation to the poem Tides which I posted recently, I am keyboarding in the full text of an old book of mine, 'Mother Waits For Father Late', the purpose of which (this activity) will become apparent in time.

The actual close reading of each word and each line, the punctuation and setting out on the page, is very interesting to me. Poem by poem, I can see the influences in my life at the time of composition, and can feel the memory of some of my editing decisions. It is like walking through and meeting again ghosts of those creative moments passed in a completely different frame of mind, a completely different frame of physical reference.

Yesterday I went to a reading at The Moon Cafe by Amanda Joy for the Perth Poetry Club. The audience was a lot smaller than such an interesting and talented poet deserved, so I am glad I attended. When they asked me if I'd like to read, I at first said no because I had not brought any books or typescripts with me, but then I thought of the poems I know by heart from those early days of discovery of modern American poetry, changed my mind, and said yes. So, with a pseudo-American accent which wouldn't have fooled an intern customs officer, I performed Big High Song for Somebody by Philip Whalen, one of my all time favourite poets. I had real fun performing like that, so I have resolved to work on my own work in a more performative way, to express the rhythm and pace of the poems with more vitality than simply reading them.

But it did bring back to my mind, again like the keyboarding instance, the poetic influences and passions of decades gone by, all of which stream into my creative practice today, for good or bad.

The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen is edited by Michael Rothenberg, and published by Wesleyan University Press, Connecticut, in 2007.

Go to http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=7347 for more about Whalen.

Thanks to Amanda Joy for the photo above, clicked with an iPhone - the wonders of today's technology. In times gone by, just decades ago, we would have been waiting for the chemist to open tomorrow morning to place our roll of film in for developing, and then waiting for some days before the prints returned. As for showing them to all of you in the many countries where you reside, I would have been - pleasantly - travelling for weeks.

TIDES (1992) by Andrew Burke

It is possible I have written too much sadness
to leave it at that who begat what
time has swallowed women swelling through
seasons O my luck to be the broken boy
of mother’s blind womb born in open urbanity
so certified in birth my paperlife begins
I have writhen through my first cry in songs
swelling in women and swallowed in whispers
each summer beached in the white belly of years
tears and laughter torn as begat and forgotten
women in season swelling to waves of touch
the sharp skin ache in the weathers of night
chilling the transient dunes in dissolution
a moonlit dome in her shadow play. It is
possible I have not sung enough of love
to reach the swelling of ill reason
my rising tide beached between thighs
begotten in listless waves of two-lip
speakers singing the ocean to shore
between the rolling reefs gone now in
the frightened fish-dash of time shadows
swelling like flesh a woman remembers so
rolls down a dune her swollen ache

*

This poem closed the collection titled Mother Waits For Father Late, published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press (now Fremantle Press) in 1992. Jeanette and I are typing the book up again for another purpose, so I thought I'd just share this poem with you. I think it was influenced by my reading of WS Merwin at that time, although I'm not certain. It certainly is different to a lot of my writing, which is why it is interesting to me still.

Dylan Photo Gallery

If you're interested in Dylan, go to http://dylanstubs.com/pictures/welcome.htm

Rethinking Readings

There is an interesting article on Poetry Readings at http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2009/11/13/poetry-poem-poems-reading/

Check it out before this afternoon when Amanada Joy and others will be reading 2-4pm at Perth Poetry Club which is now performed at The Moon Cafe, 323 William Street, Northbridge (near the corner of Newcastle Street).

JUDGE’S REPORT SPILT INK 2009 OOTA POETRY COMPETITION

Photos: Mags Webster, 3rd; Kevin Gillam, 2nd; Flora Smith, 1st; Bruce Russell, tutor and Gala Night compere @ X-Wray Cafe, Fremantle, 12 November 2009


Judge's Report:

Thank you for allowing me the privilege of reading these five dozen or so entries. It sounds glib and clichéd to tell you they were all of a high standard, but it is true.

When Josephine Clarke handed me the entries, she said, “I don’t envy you your task.”
I replied, “Well, I’ve judged a couple of dozen such competitions so I can do it easily.”

I tell you this as a joke at my own expense. It was anything but easy. The high standard of entries made even the first cull difficult. I normally start by reading all competition entries quickly and putting those aside which simply don’t measure up as poetry. Clichéd language, clichéd thought, ponderous rhythms and obvious anvil rhymes are normally the weaknesses which first show up. No such troubles here.

I did puzzle over how this high standard was achieved, and came to this conclusion: because of the closeness of the OOTA group, you have all learnt to edit your poems vigorously. It proves that old dictum which I quote frequently: All good writing is rewriting. I am certain your workshop leaders have had a very positive influence on you all and for this they too should be applauded.

The main problems which knocked out the early casualties were not craft problems, per se, but art weaknesses. Many of these poems were well written descriptions, with nothing else to them. Some started with lively promise and lapsed into unimaginative writing; some said it well, once, and then repeated it again, in different words, to create a longer poem. All good writing is rewriting, as I quoted before, but rewriting the same idea in the same text is tautology!

The number of poems which where still in the race after my first and second reading remained at 22. Far too many. I went away asking myself what is a better poem than a good poem?! These were good poems and I had to exorcise a dozen of them. So, I reverted to a list of objective questions, a list I have found effective in my teaching practice over many years:

* Are the images effective?
* Is the diction fresh?
* Are there sound devices?
* Does the poem make use of rhythm?
* Does the poem contain some type of tension?
* What is the essential unity of the poem?

Passing the poems through this list of questions, I whittled it down to twelve. And there I stuck.

By this stage I had read each of these poems many times. Those that grew in statue with repeated readings rose to the top of the list, but I must say that any one of the top three could have been the over all winner. When it came to that decision, it was my personal gut feeling that ruled the day.

So, here are the Commended Poems:
A Fat, Lying Thief – Janice Withers
Dinner after the Synagogue – Rose van Son
Snake – Jo Clarke
Light and Dark – Annamaria Weldon
Old Spoon – Dick Alderson
Gliss – Kevin Gillam

Highly Commended went to:
Orange – Molly Hall
Laboratory Class – Cecily Scutt
Midnight House – Flora Smith

Third place goes to – Prognosis – Mags Webster

Second Place to – What the living do – Kevin Gillam

And the overall Winner is – Fifth Generation – Flora Smith

Congratulations to the winners and to the place getters, and ALL who entered. If you didn’t crack a mention in the winners’ circle, it doesn’t mean your poem is of no value. It simply means that this judge’s criteria put others before it. Another judge, or another editor, may have a different opinion.

Thank you to all involved in Spilt Ink. Judging this competition has been a challenging but a satisfying experience for me.


Dr Andrew Burke
(MA, PhD in Writing)