Sunday, January 31, 2016

POETRY — GETTING ON WITH IT
























One month down, 335 days/poems to go. Project 365 + 1 is doing it’s job so far. As Kit Kelen says in his intro which you can find here, it’s about getting on with it.  I am getting on with it in different ways.

Of course I am quite mad in my thinking. I haven’t had enough uninterrupted time to write much for a couple of years so I suddenly think I can produce something on 366 consecutive days!

So far it’s the same scatter-smatter approach. A prose poem here, a haiku or a micropoem there, a place poem, a rage poem, a café poem, a bird in the sky. The pressure to post something means I can’t afford to pick and choose. (It doesn’t have to be complete or polished and often it’s not!)

No room here for wondering how many shop or café poems one person can write in a lifetime, if that childhood experience is too sentimental or for procrastination on issues in the media (social or otherwise). Memories or old thoughts that resurface get snared – their own fault for still floating around.

Getting on with it includes shaking out old drafts on some days — sometimes a rewrite, sometimes a fresh twist — but at last it’s a passable piece. The most difficult thing is the new work that won’t get on the page — no lines. It makes me wait.

In the meantime you can see how much time I’m on the road (kind of living between two places), my rural vs Canberra environment, what I might be reading or what pisses me off. I do feel a might exposed.

At the same time I am enjoying the generous unfolding of the other poets’ lives through their poetry. There is the passion for haiku, the love of visual art as much as words, a commitment to translation, a wedding, inlanders getting away to the sea, a trip to India, visitors and pets, 3 am creations, ekphrastics and landscapes. It’s a wonderful ‘conversation’ of ideas, poems and images by a group of published Australian and international poets. You’re welcome to visit. The blog is here. The Facebook page is here. See you there.

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