My local council, the City of Onkaparinga, is a very progressive municipality which fosters the Arts. I know I’m biased, having won their inaugural Best Single Poet’s Collection in 2006, but I think they do a tremendous job on the local level. Poetry Unleashed 2010, now underway, involves poetry competitions for kids through to adults and a smorgasbord of accessible poetry events for the public. I’m involved with Candles, Wine and Classics at Leconfield Winery, McLaren Vale this Saturday night Sept 4 along with Jill Gower, Julian Zytnik, Ray Tyndale and Mary Bradley.
On Sunday Sept 5 I’ll be performing in the open Spoken Word competition at the Singing Gallery, McLaren Vale. There’s also a Poets & Pizza night
with Geoff Goodfellow, Alice Sladdin, Jill Wherry and David Cookson.
Oh, and a Great Debate that Poetry Sux. Onya onka!
About the logo: Not sure why I’m the soft underbelly. Better than being a horse’s arse I guess.
It’s National Science Week in Australia. A few months ago The Poets’ Union & The Australian Poetry Centre invited submissions for poems on the wide theme of ‘poetry and science.’ I was very pleased that my poem slater was chosen for the anthology Earthly Matters and my audio work Earth’s Greatest Hits will be played at the Science Made Marvellous launches in Melbourne, Sydney and possibly Adelaide. slater originally appeared in micromacro, along with a number of other poems on the science/ eco theme which has always interested me. It’s great to see an entire book of poems on such subjects as bacteria, pollen and stromatolites! The other poets are Martin Langford, Faith de Savigné, Carol Jenkins, Saskia Hewitt, Mike Cooper, Meredi Ortega, Meg Mooney, Annamaria Weldon, John Bennett, Martin Langford, t.w.gee, Benjamin Dodds, Michael Sharkey, P S Cottier, P S Cottier, Liana Christensen and Emily Ballou.
Earth’s Greatest Hits grew from my interest in the Radio Bubble after reading a number of articles most particularly “Radio Bubble: alien couch potatoes? It’s possible, thanks to escaping TV & radio signals” by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson (which I accessed online but originally appeared in Natural History, Nov 2001.)
I’d read years ago that these signals, while continually weakening, theoretically continue forever. It’s incredible to consider that the electronic garbage we pump out every day may have an infinite life… I started to wonder what alien civilizations might think of us as seen through soaps and sit-coms.
The original piece I wrote was more an article for a magazine than a poem, but I wasn’t sure where to send it. It sat on my laptop for a time until I started to play around with spacey sounds on Garageband and matched the sound effects and music loops to the audio. I sent it off to a couple of poetry publishers who weren’t interested. Again it sat on my laptop unheard for a year until I read about the Poets’ Union’s Science Made Marvellous project. At last someone else liked it!
I’m in London right now visiting my daughter Amy. I read here that John Lennon’s original draft of his A day in the life recently went at auction for £810 000 & that took me back to the first time I heard that masterpiece when I was an innocent boy of 15. Years later it inspired this (less lucrative) poem:
A day in the life
You imagine the solidity of
bricks mortar suburbs.
The transience of music & memory.
rehearsing the school musical
in the community Hall in Camden
At the cast party the camaraderie
of shared experience.
When you could have a wild time
without booze or drugs wearing the new pinstriped flairs
And the whole night playing
that one new record over and over
called Sergeant Peppers.
Every track a fresh view of
the world.
Thirty five years on taking a shortcut
you find yourself in the same street.
Everywhere beige courtyard homes.
The music and memories more
concrete with time
The Hall, gone.
(© rob walker 2006 from micromacro)
Thanks to The Group literary arts magazine for putting up our (Ben & my) bibliophobia in the latest online edition. We join the esteemed company of Larry Buttrose, Sue Bond, Nike Bourke, Blazenka Brysha, BM Buttrose, Sam Cooney, Jack Feldstein, Matt Hetherington, Belinda Jeffrey, Kavita Jindal, Adair Jones, Mark Kovan, Angela Meyer, Mark Mordue and Billy Marshall Stoneking
(Image by OverTheMoon)
.
A poem of mine which had its genesis in a junior high in Himeji two years ago has been recognised in the Australian Poetry Centre’s national poetry competition: ‘Making sense of it’. The competition was looking for poems which “show life from a totally unique perspective, from an author’s own sensory experience, allowing others an insight into this distinctive view of the world - how the author felt, observed and encountered it.”
The top five poems selected were
Lines written in Himeji, 2008 by rob walker,
Night Fires by Mercia Morton,
Now Hear This by Lerys Byrnes,
Talking Behind my Back by Julienne Juschke, and
autistic child with acute auditory processing disorder by Melinda Smith.
I was particularly pleased that my work received glowing comments from Chris Wallace-Crabbe and was read publicly at a ceremony at the Wheeler Centre (Melbourne) on May 7.
My poem was written with a regular rhythm but little rhyme. It was a stressful time for me. The poem was written is an almost dissociated state after I had seen Picasso’s Guernica hanging in a corridor while thinking about plate tectonics and Japan’s amazingly disconnected culture and my tiny place in it…
All five poems will be recorded, performed and released on the APC’s 3RRR poetry podcast Nothing Rhymes with RRR, and published on the Australian Poetry Centre’s website.
Congratulations to winning poet, Melinda Smith.
Read all 5 short-listed poems HERE.
