a clarity of smog – another poem which has been very good to me – partly remixed with Grand City Break by BOCrew of France.

READ

LISTEN

My poet-mate Mike Hopkins has been incrementally posting a sequence of fantastic haiku-style poems on his blog ‘mistakenforarealpoet’ under the title ‘The President’s Mirror.’ I love them! What do you think?

(I suggest you start on this page  and scroll down so you can begin at day 1 to read them in order. But why should you listen to me?)

Great suite of poems Mike – and thanks for reminding us all once more that we can deal with serious subject-matter while having a laugh.

I should also mention that Mike Hopkins (as ‘mistakenforarealpoet’) is one of poets who can be found under “links” in the banner above.

I’ve also added Kathryn Hummel and Joshua Ip recently. Please check out their fine work.

STOP PRESS! As if to reinforce Mike’s talent, only today he’s been notified that his beautiful poem My father’s blood will be published in Award Winning Australian Writing 2007

I was pretty chuffed that my Norfolk Island Pine (ft. airtone) was selected for ccmixter’s Earth Day Eco-music Playlist

The poem – originally published in Cordite Poetry Review – also formed part of the Araucarias of Gondwana (Tree Dinosaurs) sequence in my tropeland collection. The other poems were Bunya, Monkey Puzzle, Hoop Pine and Captain Cook’s Pine.

airtone is Martyn Bloor from the UK. I’ve remixed his beautiful ambient electronica quite a few times.

LISTEN

Thanks to the NLA in Canberra, virtually all of my work has been saved and catalogued.

This poetry blog (which I began in 2004) has been archived annually by Pandora, the National Library’s digital archive “dedicated to the preservation of and long term access to Australian online electronic publications of national significance” so that our digital culture is preserved in perpetuity.

Just about every poem and piece of short fiction or memoir I’ve written is catalogued in AustLit, the encyclopedia of Australian writers and writing. (For full free access to the service you need to visit a library or apply for a National Library card which is also free.)

See:

THE ELECTRONIC COLLECTION

COMPLETE WORKS

BLOG SNAPSHOTS SINCE 2007

That morning I dozed off in an overcrowded, over-heated bus on the way to work in Himeji dreaming I was watching a 1957 live MJQ concert in Amsterdam. That series of paradigm shifts as I returned to sentience… The baboushka metaphor again – or a series of concentric bubbles. A roughed-out poem eventually written as a ruba’i sequence.

It was eventually published in Original Clichés in 2016 and submitted to ccmixter as an audio poem where it was picked up and remixed by Grand City Break / BOCrew.

Everything is a series of unlikely coincidences…

LISTEN

Bubbles of reality

So here I am, a front-row seat

in Amsterdam, a cool-jazz beat

Modern Jazz Quartet they’re called

It’s ’57. Urbane. Sweet.

Chamber music’s Modern Age,

John Lewis piano-playing sage.

Lost in music’s interplay

my seat jerks roughly towards the stage.

My earplugs and my iPod fall

I realise I’m not there at all

but on a bus with windows fogged

and in Japan I now recall.

It’s hot in here but not outside

Commuters sleep all through the ride

We pass Himeji Castle, snow,

My reverie’s abruptly died.

I wonder if I’m really here

an Alien Resident for a year

or back at Home still sound asleep

alarm about to ring out clear…

And so it goes, banality,

the bubbles of reality

like Russian dolls each bubble pops

I doubt my person-ality.

And when I die will I be less

than all a bubble can compress?

And will the final burst reveal

a mere sphere   of nothingness?

The ruba’i is a Persian form of the quatrain. (Multiple stanzas in the ruba’i form are a rubaiyat, like The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.) Basically, a ruba’i is a four-line stanza, with a rhyme scheme of AABA and has been often used in English such as Robert Frost’s famous poem Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.