A BRUSH WITH TREES AND OTHER POEMS

Special guest Sarah St Vincent Welch
Photo by Dylan Jones

It’s a vibrant weekend across the Yass Valley thanks to the Yass Valley Arts Trail, driven by Cayla Pothan of Yass. A highlight of Binalong’s weekend of Arts Trail activities is a tree-themed pop-up Brush with Poetry organized by Binalong Arts Group (BAG) on Sunday November 6 at 2 pm in The Hive, Café on Queen, 13/15 Queen Street, Binalong. 

Our featured poet is well-known Sarah St Vincent Welch who is instigator of the Kindred Trees website project, featuring trees loved by Canberra Region poets in the form of photographs and original poems. Sarah will talk a little about this project, read a tree poem or two and share other poems including from her two poetry titles. See Sarah’s bio below. 

This special Brush with Poetry will include its usual shared mike where everyone is welcome to share a poem — or more — depending on how time goes. On this occasion we encourage you to read or recite a tree-themed poem (but not essential — we’re open). Music and song also welcome. Or just come along and listen.

Sarah St Vincent Welch is a Canberra based writer and image maker who is known for chalking her poetry on footpaths at arts festivals. Her poetry can be read in ‘chalk borders’ (Flying Islands Books) and ‘Open’ (Rochford Press) and in anthologies and magazines. She has also published short stories. She is the founder of Kindred Trees, a project that asks Canberra poets to respond to a local tree, and which encourages a love of trees through poetry (kindredtrees.com.au). St Vincent Welch has worked in film preservation, (specialising in early film), and has facilitated creative writing in the community. 

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Please note that Café on Queen is not open on this occasion due to private functions but there will be a tea urn and nibbles (BYO if you like) and coffee is available nearby. Other Binalong events include the duo exhibitions A Piece of Place and Finding our Way Home by Lizz Murphy and Kate O’Connor and exhibitions at the Old Bakery Gallery and Peter Minson Art Glass, open all weekend, plus the Poetree poetry workshop 10.00-12.30 Sunday (bookings essential). The Binalong Public School fair is also on Sunday until 1.00 pm. 

For more information on the Yass Valley Arts Trail please visit their Facebook page, plus Cayla’s page for related activities at her Tootsie Gallery Café.

LOW-FLYING DUCKS & POETRY

There are always amusing or special moments from changing skies to kangaroos and foxes giving you a nod or low-flying ducks or hawks swiftly passing your windscreen.

So grateful to have an interview in The Monthly arts journal published online by Community Arts Partnership (CAP) in Belfast, Ireland. They’ve also provided links to five of my eight readings filmed at the James Joyce Library at University College Dublin (UCD). Worth visiting for the range of poetry interviews from Scottish-Australian poet Ali Whitelock, to Scottish poet Magi Gibson and Canadian poet Catherine Graham. There are videos of Seamus Heaney reading Digging and Sinéad Morrissey talking about her poem inspired by the painting Titian, and spoken word music, podcasts and links to International Page and Stage online events, just to mention some.

Great thanks to Ali Whitelock for connecting me with The Monthly and to Gordon Hewitt, editor, for the opportunity.

Photo: Oh aye — wandered past this plaque in Dublin 

for the UCD readings but we were too late for Seamus

POETRY AT THE STREET (NOW SHOWING)

Ben Drysdale, Adele Chynoweth, Sophie Pieloor

Under Sedation:Canberra Verse Remixed was a repast of poetry, song, drama and emotion. Lighting and sound effects helped create intriguing what’s-happening-next/whose-piece-next moments. The notion to bring poetry to the stage in a live anthology performance is the brainwave of Director, Adele Chynoweth.

Actors Ben Drysdale and Ruth Pieloor played out each piece dramatically but subtly, humorously but graciously, and with irony, grit and emotion yet often still with an appreciated naturalness. They are superb. Over forty Canberra Region authors are represented, from AD Hope (Under Sedation), Dorothy Auchterlonie (Green) and Kevin Gilbert, to Michael Byrne, Adrian Ceasar, Omar Musa, Victoria McGrath, Geoff Page, Sarah Rice, Sandra Renew, Melinda Smith and myself ($600). Full list here.

‘Poets have a very unique view and should be brought to the stage, and the everyday, and the *insurance companies ...’ Adele Chynoweth told us at her talk on Sunday. Her research was painstaking — she read hundreds of works. Adele was interested in what poets might have to say about civilization; what alternatives they were offering other than sedating ourselves.

Shenanigans with actors and poets: Lizz Murphy (left), Victoria McGrath, Ruth Pieloor, Jan Pieloor, Ben Drysdale, Anon (with apologies), PS Cottier (floored).

Experiencing poetry other than on the page can be a challenge for some of us. I thoroughly enjoy hearing poetry read, preferably by the poets themselves even if they are not great ‘performers,’ but I’m visual rather than aural and need to come back to the page to absorb and fully appreciate the words and images. For this reason some works washed over me especially in the earlier section where the actors moved from one piece to another quite quickly. I would’ve appreciated an extra breath or two between each, but this is a minor grizzle as so many others I caught well as the pace slowed a little. Still others caught me out, especially at the end where I could easily have been an emotional heap — on the floor, with the very actors who blew a new life into our words.

Under Sedation: Canberra Verse Remixed is playing at The Street in Canberra until October 14. Go ‘see’ some great Canberra Region poetry — and the world today — unfold in the round.

Reviews (interestingly conflicting) at City News and The Canberra Times.

*A reference to American poet Wallace Stevens who worked most of his life as an executive for an insurance company — as you probably know already.

ON THE GUILTY PURSUIT - POETRY & ART

Media: Oil pastel, collage, found text on paper. © Lizz Murphy

ON THE GUILTY PURSUIT

Back at the wharf,
on the guilty pursuit
I sallied forth
With the sun dipping low

Each time, the story deepens,
"Older thinkers had been wiser
Myth was no mere
stoush

Mystically I offer
years of human history
suspect of sins.
handle it.

In my life, I have had opportunities
"I am very grateful for that."

                         Several steps more


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This is not an ending, this is a beginning. Thank you Kit Kelen and all the Project 365+1 contributors. It's been wonderful - even the days that had me cursin. Happy new year. 
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Above is the last of my posts in Project 366. Some of the poets and artists are continuing on into 2017 such is their passion for daily making and posting, so the blog is still live and vibrant. I need to take stock. I know I gained so much from participating in the project not the least of which was being in that creative and supportive space with other poets for the whole year. Indebted to instigator/coordinator Christopher/Kit Kelen. 

See some previous posts for more about how I survived. There are also three pieces at the project's metablog: click here for In for the long haul; here for Bungee jumping: A response to Kit Kelen’s upside down meditation on daily practice; here for Get over yerself (my response to questions posed by Kit).

A number of the other participants have also posted about their experience and it's interesting reading indeed. Kit Kelen's Rather a long rant about it all is a terrific discourse which includes the background to Project 366, contemporary Australian poetry and publishing, the 'star system,' funding, community, Kit's own creative process and more ... Pour a glass of wine and settle in.