Don't join the inflexible

If you’re rigid in your thinking,
you’re not really thinking.

Remote

When you channel surf

take care that your mind

doesn’t drown.

Inertia

When all the things you need to do
remain
all the things you need to do.

Thoughts from a writing desk. No.1

I think a poem should work first on the page. If it works on the page it should work read out loud.

I think it's not on to whinge or complain in a poem or write a easy target rant poem along the lines of:

war is bad,

politicians are bad etc.

As a poet I'm focused on writing clearly. A poem needs a beginning, a middle, and an end, with preamble and blathering digression cut out/sculpted out of drafts of the poem, but with an engine in the poem, moving the poem forward. In regards to writing poems, Charles Bukowski said, "Get in, get out, don't linger."

A cardinal self-imposed regime I have with reading live is not to over-read. If a poet or writer reads for too long they end up murdering the audience, the audience which was initially on their side, groans inwardly, sneak glances at their wristwatch, ends up resenting the over-reading poet.

I read five or six poems maximum when I'm a featured reader.

I've never gone for self-publishing. I've wanted to secure a publisher who'll give proper editorial scrutiny of the proposed book and also has national distribution.

I served a self-imposed eleven year apprenticeship in writing poems before I submitted a manuscript to a publisher. I always cull poems from a manuscript. I don't want any poems that are passengers in a manuscript, that let the team down. Be ruthless with your poems. Write more poems, write many poems and pick out the best. Better a thin, strong book of poems than a weaker, thicker one.

To progress

Chip away

at a wall

until it becomes

a stepping stone.

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.