My apprenticeship

It's easy to sit around in a cafe and say 'I'd love to be a published writer' but Ian Thorpe didn't sit around in a cafe saying 'I'd love to be Australia's fastest swimmer', he went ahead and spent many hundreds of hours practicing the craft of swimming. There is no way around serving an apprenticeship in writing. You have to spend many hundreds of hours facing the blank page. I started writing poems in 1983 and served an eleven year self-imposed apprenticeship in writing them. I took what I felt were the best poems from that eleven year apprenticeship and submitted them as a manuscript to Penguin. They rejected it. I revised the manuscript and then submitted it to Hale & Iremonger. The manuscript was accepted, published under the title "In The Human Night" and won the 1996 Victorian Premier's Award for Poetry. Practice and persistence remain integral to my creative and professional focus as a poet.

War zone

Here are the key words in this diminished world—

weapon,

target,

victor,

victim.

Take your next breath,

take your last breath.

Roll the dice over the edge of a cliff

into tomorrow’s headlines.

The war turns children into orphans,

the war turns children into corpses,

the war turns children into statistics.

Children, it’s not a good time to play outside.

Not everyone is listening,

not everyone is learning,

not every human is humane.

This is an angry poem.

Anger is a shovel blade

striking buried skull and rib,

slowly unearthing

another mass grave.

Regarding telepathy

I’m in more than two minds about it.

The weather inside

Sometimes your thinking can make you cry,

sometimes your crying can make you think.

The next time you've got writer's block

Go back to your childhood and adolescence,

whether meadow or minefield.

Consider

the distance you’ve come,

what you’ve discarded or continue to carry

and why.

Take a running scrawl at

what’s in the room

or cornered in your heart.

Be alert to the world. Note

the veins of a leaf, the bank teller’s fingernails,

what the people seated at the next café table

are saying to each other.

Remember that you’ve got a vocabulary.

So have dictionaries, billboards, headlines and traffic policemen.

Words are everywhere.

Let a few wander onto a black page.

See whether they react to each other.

If not audition some more.

Words are building blocks

which can be toppled, rearranged, reassembled.

Throw some over your shoulder,

see how they land.

Return to the circus arena

of being playful and precise,

balancing words on the tip of your nose

as you jump through flaming hoops

in rehearsal

for opening night in a new town,

far from where you’ve written before.

Consider this

You can rest

in the shade of a tree,

but not

in the shade of an axe.

My zen answer

You get a grip

when you

let go.