What writing poetry requires

It requires regular (preferably weekly) practice. Facing the blank page regularly. What to leave behind? Negative or excusing inner voices saying, repeating “I can’t write today”, “I’ve no ideas”, I’ve got a backlog of other things to do”.

The poet is threatened by time, the telephone, the internet inbox, the lure of sunshine and walking outside away from bullring of the blank page.

The blank page is daunting but not writing induces guilt, despondency, erosion of our compass and rudder.

Facing the blank page is where we learn…and what is knowledge? –an attempt to pierce fog, murk, swamp, darkness, to reveal, to illuminate and by doing so we set an example.

The poets we admire, they have written their poems. Look at their poems, the choice and order of their words, but the narrator in your poems should be you, or one of your selves that has key, amusing or thought-provoking things to show or convey.

Writing a poem involves focus and calm simultaneously, even if the subject matter may be difficult and costly.

Writing poetry involves control and sometimes letting go of the steering wheel .

Writing poetry involves gathering what people say, how they look, what they do or refrain from doing.

Writing poetry involves noticing the shape and veins on a leaf, what the sea, night-time, and waking today, holds and means.

Writing poetry involves sifting, selecting, deciding which paints and brushstrokes to try,

which to retain.

Writing poetry involves thinking about people and life, thinking about important questions.

Reading and writing go together. Reading contemporary poetry, history, crime fiction and biographies, have given and continue to give me nourishment. Images, facts, pictures, characters, personalities from this pleasurable reading have given me many seeds for poems.

Much writing is a mix of personal/historical fact and the imagination. Both careful and vigorous mixing of fact and imagination has given and continues to give us engaging pieces of writing.

Literature survives due to our writers utilizing image and story. To ignore image and story is to have a hulk of words without windows, an engine or a colourful driver.

Tell the reader, the listener, the truth of your life, how you have perceived yourself, those around you, your neighbourhood and country, this spinning and phenomenal earth.

Writing involves courage, crossing the tundra of the blank page, but you can turn that blank page into a dancehall, a boudoir, the Amazon river, a mirror.

Writing is about the reality of putting words on paper or on a computer screen. I’ve written this today. Now I can move on to the next piece of writing, my next appointment with putting one word foot in front of the other, something that toddlers, pilgrims, explorers and sages do.

October in the railroad earth of Melbourne 2009

Reading Jack Kerouac at the age of eighteen, made me want to hit the road. In the early 1980's I hit the road for seven years. October in the northern hemisphere remains a cherished month. October 15 is my birthdate and also my mother's birthdate.

As a poet I remain enthralled by the duality of the world - between work focus and the equally necessary times when we take a nap, sit on a park bench or "goof off".

Time is part of that duality - when time is a prison guard and we cower under his truncheon or on the other side of the day's mirror when we sit in a green field and are made quiet in watching the wind chess move the clouds.

The way we spend time can not always be called wise. Offering our love to someone who can't reciprocate it is a "waste" of time but only if we don't learn, move out of the dust and our begging clothes.

Earlier this month I sold a copy of my latest volume of poems, "Beneath Our Armour" to Elvis Costello. Have found myself re-listening to his recording "Painted From Memory" and also re-hearing in my head his song "Alison" I think the heightened knockout singing performances are when the singer isn't acting, singing from a persona. Two examples of the singer revealing himself are Bob Dylan's "I Threw It All Away" and his "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go." Please note that Elvis Costello has been known to sing "I Threw It All Away" live.

Let's go for the song and the poem that we have to write because our heart has had a match lit underneath it.

Why I haven't suicided

To me being suicidal is when a person cannot see any ladder up/a life preserver they can grasp. I didn't suicide when extremely lonely in London in the 1980's because I considered to do so would be a slap in the face to surgeons that saved my life via heart surgery. To a degree I feel that suicide is "unnatural" - to the best of my knowledge animals don't suicide. To a degree I consider suicide a middle class "indulgence" - most people who suicide aren't without food, shelter, warm clothing. Continuing, striving, having "hope" is certainly a hard and thorny road. The extremely difficult parts of our lives, in surviving them, we learn and knowledge is an anchor. My poem, "Self-portrait with beliefs, 19 October 1997" contains the lines "In fact, I'd say/that curiosity/is my best friend..." Falling in love with the map of the world at the age of six has given me a reason to continue. Reading books in rooms throughout the world saved my life. A suicide is a warning, an event to stop you in your tracks to grieve and think. Sometimes we must stop our rushing and see and absorb again how miraculous is a bird poised on roof guttering beyond our kitchen window.

Writing a parent poem

There is the immediate moment and there is the past, which in literature has been compared to an ocean, a hall of mirrors, another country. Whatever it is, it is worthy of exploration. In remembering, let’s remember the heightened moment – our first reading of a certain book, a reoccurring childhood nightmare, seeing a parent cry, the trouncing of a bully.

To write a poem about a parent or both parents is a vital challenge. It requires honesty, that the writer remembers correctly, that the writer rigorously refrains from diluting/defusing events and words spoken. A parent poem requires exposure, to put family members on the stage.

The parent poem is invaluable to both the writer and the reader. By revealing the personal, frankly and vividly, the writer holds high a lantern, illuminates human lives, be they exemplary, imperfect or scarred. The best autobiographical writing finds the riveted reader saying out loud “Yes, yes, I’ve felt exactly like that!”

The parent poem is needed. Whether it’s a homage or a leap through fire you’ll only learn through writing it.

When your parents are divorcing

At parties in the Eastern surburbs of Melbourne in the late 1960's/early 1970's my Polish father, flirted compulsively, fueled by Polish and Russian vodka. At these parties, my mother sat on a sofa studying the hem of a lampshade. In the family car on the way home my mother's valid accusations would start. My Dad claimed/shouted that he should be allowed to be himself, that he was gregarious by nature, loved friends, drinking and dancing. 

My father felt tethered, that Mum was a less than warm-blooded German anchored to the three "C"s - children, cooking and church. At these parties my mother felt humiliated, ashamed, by her husband's close dancing and laughter with the wives and girlfriends of others. She felt neglected, unnoticed, unconsidered, wringing her hands on that sofa.

Back at the family home, often at 1 or 2 a.m. the fighting continued in the kitchen to the sounds of Dad throwing a bowl or plate against the wall. Mum shouted at Dad to "go to hell, go to the devil" in German. Sometimes he hit/slapped Mum and then, slamming the front door of the house, drove off in the family car, returning at dawn or later.

I was 17/18 at the time and the known universe had a huge crack in it. There was no-one for my younger brother or I to turn to for counsel. Both parents were stunned and exhausted combatants in the tawdry boxing ring of their marriage.

Their temperaments were different and ultimately a ruinous match. My Dad's flirting which he rationalized as "harmless flirting" further eroded my mother's self-esteem, which has never been high or healthy. I see them now as victims. My father, not having a proper role model, because his father died young, beaten to death in a WWII concentration camp. My mother, immediately after WWII, urged by her parents to leave Poland, escaped to the West, which she did at the immeasurable cost of never of seeing either of them again.

I've written two poems about my parents' divorce - The Children of Divorce which appears in my third collection Days That We Couldn't Rehearse and At 10 Rosebank Terrace, Lower Templestowe which appears in my fourth collection, Beneath Our Armour.

Besides victims there are survivors, some who may learn/glean something from trauma - poems andautobiographies in print and film.  

 

Beneath Our Armour

Beneath Our Armour is comprised entirely of portrait poems of real and imagined people. Poems are set in Macau, Hong Kong, Suzhou, London, Ireland, Siberia, rural Australia. Includes portraits of prisoners of war, criminals, visual artists, teenagers and children. $21 a copy, includes postage within Australia 

Crime fiction poetry 1

I've been writing crime fiction poems off and on for more than a decade. It's part of my ongoing investigation in portrait poems of what's destructive in an individual. I've read several hundred crime fiction novels. What fascinates me in them is the difficult history of an individual, the circumstances, forces and pressures which have made them wounded, warped, murderous.

The past decade has seen the rise of Scandinavian crime fiction. In the 1970's many non-Scandinavians saw Scandinavia as the liberal dream, a benevolent society taking care of its populace.

Anyone reading contemporary Scandinavian crime fiction will quickly be made aware that things are rotten in Denmark and further north. Those long winters, bored teenagers gathering in the mall or downtown shopping precinct, loners living in run-down apartment blocks, car and drug-smuggling between Eastern Europe and Scandinavia have shown us that Scandinavian crime fiction writers are asking hard questions about their society.

This is to be applauded. Also to be applauded are the driven, obsessive detectives and police officers who go without sleep, drink bad coffee, are poets of the clue, not resting until the nagging, niggling thought leads to a revelation/a case breakthrough. These are the knights, overdue for retirement, who cannot rest until the monster criminal is ambushed, handcuffed, tried and sentenced. Allow these detectives and police officers their pleasures - a generous nightcap, some musing time in an armchair listening to Coltrane or Callas, their fantasy of a long holiday in far warmer Spain. 

The crime fiction torch has been passed from the Californian likes of Chandler, Hammett and Macdonald to the Scandinavians. Go figure.