Thanks to Jill Gower and Hills Poets for inviting me to the Stirling Hotel as Guest Poet yesterday. I was able to do a bit of a retrospective of my first six books of poetry and enjoy the poetry of this very talented and welcoming group!
SAETA has invited me to help launch an anthology of South Australian high school students’ poems this Saturday. I’ve written an introduction to the excellent collection. As guest poet on the day I’ll also be talking on the subject of “Why write poetry anyway?” I’ve previously been asked to judge the competition as well. It should be a good day!
I’ve been mixing audio versions of some of my poems from Original Clichés and Policies & Procedures recently. This one began its life at Land’s End, Cornwall a few years ago.
LISTEN to tethered
It seems I overlooked to mention that my prose poem lines written on the train between Himeji and Shirahama was published in Transnational Literature (Vol 8 No 2) back in May. Some poems take a long time to happen. This one was begun in 2008 as a very short story, rejected several times, and rewritten as a prose-poem before being accepted. Transnational Literature is published by Flinders University in South Australia. It’s a great journal (not least because they’ve accepted quite a few of my poems and short stories over the past few years!)
Read the poem HERE.
Many thanks to The City of Unley Libraries and Friendly Street Poets for the invitation to the regional reading and open mic as Featured Poet on Saturday September 17 at the Unley Town Hall. I performed poems from my publications sparrow in an airport, micromacro, phobiaphobia, tropeland, Policies & Procedures and Original Clichés – a bit of a taste of my work from 2005 to 2016. Other guest poets were Kerry Harte, Lindsay McLeod and Judy Dally, with Kalicharan Nigel Dey as MC – always hugely entertaining – followed by work from a range of locals.
Thanks to Jules Leigh Koch for organizing a wonderful afternoon of poetry!