Too Many Forks in the Road

Just to make life interesting, I've just had yet another idea for a PhD I'd like to do, and it's in yet another discipline.

I have a slight problem in that I want to do a PhD, but I've got half a dozen different ideas of what I'd like to tackle at that level, and they all have slightly different disciplines. I've got an idea for something I'd like to do that looks at serious games and applied linguistics, something I'd like to do that looks at librarianship and applied linguistics, something that I'd like to do that's educational design and applied linguistics, something I'd like to do that's comparative religion (no linguistics in this one, just to shake things up)...

And now I've just noticed I could do a PhD in Creative Writing and use it as an excuse to deep-dive into two "young" genres of poetry that I've been enjoying playing with lately (Estonian Haiku and American Cinquain), which have both evolved from Japanese Haikai and write a book of poetry as part of the project.

The only flaw with that plan is I need to have "a substantial record of publication appropriate to the proposed project", and so far I don't have anything published at all.

Would it be too weird if I just said "stuff it, I'm going to see how many of these I can do?"

Kettle and Toaster (or Still Life)

One of my friends at work was an artist in her former life. She went to art school and everything. I suspect there was a point in her life when, if you asked her, she would say she hoped to make art for a living when she "grew up". 

Similarly, there was a point in my life when, if you asked me, I would say I wanted to write poetry for a living when I grew up. I didn't exactly go to "poetry school" (largely because such a thing doesn't exist - certainly not in regional Australia), but I did study literature and once submitted a poem for an assignment on Literary Criticism (something that didn't go down as badly as I had expected).

My friend did, at least, produce art that ended up on walls in galleries at some point. Apart from a couple of competitions (and the odd assignment), I've only ever "published" my poetry in blog posts. I still dream that one day I'll put together a tome of verse and have it published - even if I have to resort to vanity publishing.

My artist friend and I both have trouble sleeping, and I joked recently that we should spend our extra waking hours producing still-life works (one of my favourite artistic genres) - she in pen and ink, me in verse and short prose. We could put together a multi-format show from our midnight sketches.

Of course, having said that, I had an overwhelming urge to sketch some household objects with poetry, didn't I? Well what's the point of having a blog if you can't use it to self-publish your own two-bit verse?

So, for your reading pleasure (or otherwise), I present a verse still life:

Kettle and Toaster

The kettle and the toaster

do not match.

It's not just that they are

different brands

different colours

different materials - 

But that they are so clearly

bought at different times

from different shops

with different budgets.

The kettle

metal

sturdy in silver and black

Is upper middle class

and meant to last.

The toaster

plastic

flimsy and white

Would look at home

in a make-shift kitchenette

in the bedroom of

an impoverished uni student

in a share house in Kirwan.

They do not match

Right down to their cables

Side by side 

Black and white

in the electrical plug in the wall

- "Karuke"

Don't teach students to write poetry

I love poetry.

I love reading it, and I write it occasionally. I've never published anything (unless you count my out of office messages, which are usually either in poetry or short story form, and the occasional blog post), but one day I might - you never know.

I sometimes write poetry in a free-form diary-type stream-of-consciousness crap, and I sometimes write "proper" poetry - sonnets (Shakespearean, Italian and Spencerian), ballads, terza rima, trochaic tetrameter... The whole nine yards. I do it because I can, and I just love the game of it.

However, most importantly, I do read it. I borrow and buy collections and anthologies. In the past two months I've re-read Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, read Chris Riddell's anthology Poems to Live Your Life By (which I found flummoxing - something I'll explain at another point) and Henry Treece's The Haunted Garden, and I've started on a collection of animal-themed haiku.

My love of poetry was formed in school - but not in English classes. Oh, no. English classes always had either exceptionally dire poems designed to teach poetry or decent poems that were dissected until they made your head hurt and you grew to hate them. And then they would make us write poetry.

Now, I wrote poems all through my schooling years. If you had asked me, in school, what I was going to be when I grew up, I would say "astronaut", because I was an idealist with little grasp of reality. But I would have also have sworn that I would make a living from writing poetry somehow. Note the comment made about being an astronaut.

Heck, I even won a poetry competition in high school (it was just one of the minor categories, but it counts).

And yet, I still say you shouldn't teach kids to write poetry in English class. No good comes of it. It just so happens that I was a poetry nut, which is why English classes didn't put me off poetry for life - otherwise there's every chance they would have.

I love poetry because I took private Speech lessons (what used to be called "Elocution" in the old days), and we read poetry.

We didn't study it. We didn't dissect it. We didn't get a steady dose of poems chosen specifically for school students. We read real poetry - the kind that used to be popular back in the days when poetry was the equivalent of rock music. Shakespeare, Coleridge, Tennyson, Poe. And we read it to read it.

That may sound strange, "we read it to read it", but that's what we did. We would read through dozens of the poems, pick the ones we love best, and read them out loud with all the nuance and passion that we could muster. Along the way we also picked up things like symbolism, rhyme scheme, major literary movements, history and the lives of the poets - but it was real and it was raw and we read poetry for the pure thrill of reading it.

All of that good stuff soaked into my brain and spilled out of my fingers. I write poetry because I read so much of it that it's in my blood. It comes out, if it's in you.

And really, that's what you need. The average poetry lesson in English class seems to be designed to tick a box and get something horrible out of the way, but poetry is like an infusion - you have to steep in it, get it to soak into you. Read the good stuff for the sake of reading it and for no other reason than that. Let people find what they love and what they hate. Let them read it out loud and read it quietly to themselves.

Then, if it seeps in deep enough, it will pour out of them. It's the only way it can be any good (even if it's terrible).

And I Fancy Myself a Poet

The call to write
Hits me now and then
And I fancy myself a poet.
A dozen notebooks
Or more
Filled over the years
(Well, partially filled)
With jottings that never see the light of day -
And probably never will -
Because I fancy myself a poet,
But I never assume
Anyone else will.
Is poetry a career or a vocation
In this day and age?
Or just an affectation?
Does anyone really read poetry now,
Apart from posers like me
Who fancy themselves poets?
And is a poet one who writes
Or one who is read - who publishes?
And yet, for many years now,
I've fancied myself a poet.

- "Karuke"

On Magical Tidying, Or: Molly Vickers Wets Her Nickers

I'm currently reading Marie Kondo's book (which you may have heard of) about tidying up, largely because I recently bought a Kindle and I was looking for a few different things to load up before going on holidays.

Momentary digression to talk about ebook readers: 

I bought a Kindle partly to try this whole ebook reader thingy, and partly because I noticed a few books I was interested in reading were way cheaper and easier to obtain by Kindle than by traditional means (i.e., ordering it from the other side of the planet). However, I just remembered one of the reasons why I hadn't bought an ebook reader ages ago is the fact that I can't lend the books or give them away after reading them, and that sucks.

Back to rambling on about Kondo's book: 

So, this woman clearly has deep seated issues and probably should have had some sort of intervention when she was a child. She talks about how much "freedom" she had as a middle child, whose parents were busy looking after the youngest and whose brother completely ignored her to play video games, and how she used that freedom to develop an obsession for housewife magazines and form a life-long passion for tidying up - and yet spent most of her childhood and youth feeling that no matter how much she tidied, her room never seemed tidy enough.

Essentially, she's a person who was raised by Home Beautiful magazines and has developed a tidying mania as a way to exert some control over her life. And yet she's made a bucket load of money from her *ahem* "passion", so while she might be insane, she's certainly not crazy.

And that's how I'd sum up her book really – insane, but not completely crazy. Reading her book is an interesting rollercoaster that goes a little something like this:

"This woman is nuts! Oh, actually, that's a really interesting idea. Nope, this is just loony. Oh, I can see how that would work. I should give that ago... aaand it just went seriously weird again."

For example, she suggests storing things vertically rather than in piles, because you can easily see what you have and how much you are accumulating. Interesting idea, and I could see how it would work. She suggests storing your laptop like it's an actual book – I hadn't thought of that before but I like it. And then she tells us she loves carrots to pieces and she stores them vertically in her fridge, keeping them in cup holders so they can stay upright.

Why? Why would you go out of your way to store carrots vertically? Why would you tell thousands of people that you store your carrots vertically? Surely this sort of thing is between you and your carrots?

I'm also concerned that there doesn't appear to be any kind of charity shop in Japan, because she spends a lot of time telling you to throw out clothes and books that don't "spark joy", but never once suggests donating items that are still in good condition to charity. It's straight into the bin bag, if you please. This seems strange, because surely it would be easier to let go of something that's "still good" if you knew someone else might appreciate it more than you?

Speaking of books, she clearly doesn't have the soul of a librarian or archivist. That's okay, not everyone does, but some people do and that's going to play havoc with her "if it doesn't spark joy, toss it out" approach to weeding your book collection or paperwork.

I used to be the kind of person who had to keep every book I've ever owned. When I moved to Tasmania, I took boxes and boxes of books with me – and left more at my family home because I couldn't part with them. And then I lumped them all back when I moved back to Queensland.

I'm getting better at this, and over the years I've weeded a lot of my collection. I'm planning another big cull shortly, where I'll be saying goodbye to quite a number of books that used to mean something to me, but don't belong to the person I am today.

We change a lot over the years, but we keep hold of things for older versions of ourselves because they meant something to us, once. But the truth is, we need to let go of what once mattered to us in order to have space in our lives for new things – or for nothing. Sometimes we need to simply take a break from having things and have a bit of free space for a while.

And yet I know there is one book I'll probably be keeping even though it doesn't "spark joy" and doesn't mean anything to me any more. I've tried to get rid of that book through several successive culls, but I keep fishing it out of the pile and putting it back in my bookcase.

It's called Voices: An Anthology of Poetry and Pictures, edited by Geoffrey Summerfield, and every time I look at it I wonder why I've kept it all these years. And then I remember. I've kept it because there's a poem in that book called "Child's Bouncing Song" written by Tony Connor.

This poem starts with the line "Molly Vickers wets her nickers" and the poem is burned into my brain for reasons I can't explain (we all have our childhood obsessions, mine was poetry – sadly I haven't worked out how to make a fortune out of that, yet). However, I keep stuffing up the two stanzas before the last one. I don't know why. All I know is, every few years or so I'll start reciting that poem in a moment of absent mindedness, and then I'll get to the point where I can't remember if the next line is "High and low and/ to and fro and/ down the street and up the hill" or "Mister, mister,/ Shirley's sister/ won a prize at Blackpool prom."

It will drive me nuts, until I find that blasted book and remind myself how the last half of that poem goes. So while the book doesn't "spark joy", and I'd happily part with it otherwise, I can't get rid of it.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "just photocopy that poem and keep it somewhere". Nice idea, but unfortunately my brain is now broken. Once upon a time I could "accidentally" memorise sections of poetry, and deliberately memorise passages the length of entire chapters. I can't do that any more – my brain elasticity has gone and lost its rebound. I can't remember where I move things to. I try to move them to a more logical place, but I may as well move them directly into a black hole.

So, maybe Konmari's method might actually work for that. A) have next to nothing in the first place, b) put everything in the same category together, so that you just need to go to the place where everything is and look for the scant few things that you still have.

Or, maybe I just need to leave Molly Vickers to dry off somewhere, and decide that I'm okay with never remembering the order of those two stanzas.

Poetry in OoOMs

My travel agent's out of office message has a really interesting use of spaces and returns. I'd like to believe it's on purpose - that she's created a form poem to give some visual beauty to the mundane. For your reading pleasure, I present (exactly as written in her email), "Thank you for your email", by R. Pegoraro:

For any new 

​inquiries or booking requests,​ 

please email 

me

 the details of your trip

​​

​​

and 

I

 will prepare your booking upon my return

​. Alternatively, I am happy to chat by phone when convenient for you, or make an appointment time with you to come into the store.​

Thank

 you​

 for choosing me as 

​your

 travel agent

He said: "She has a lovely face..."

Tennyson rocks my world a little bit. He's a great poet, and he likes writing about the same things I like reading about, so it all works out quite well, really. The fact that I haven't read more of his poems than I have always befuddles me - I know I will enjoy them, but I just haven't gotten around to it. I must fix that one of these days.

I have always loved his version of the Lady of Shalott. Mallory's version is just depressing (and part of the reason behind my undying hatred for Launcelot), but Tennyson's is incredibly beautiful... and depressing.

Well, they both end with the main character both a) dying and b) experiencing unrequited love that directly lead to the dying, so you can't really get away from the depressing aspect of it. But where Mallory's version of the tale is all about Launcelot being a jerk, Tennyson's is this sweet, lyrical character study in which Launcelot is an innocent bystander - the tale is more tragic and less obnoxious the way he tells it.

And then Loreena McKennitt put it to music.

By all that's bright and colourful, McKennitt's setting of the poem is one of the most gloriously beautiful pieces of music I have ever heard. It doesn't matter how often I've heard it, I still get shivers down my spine when she sings the lyric:

She left the web, she left the loom
She made three paces through the room

It's hard to explain if you've never read the poem (or heard the song), but that's the moment where a young girl's yearning to see something real for the first time in her life seals her doom. McKennitt's vocals ever so subtly draw attention to that - three paces were all that had separated the girl from her window. Three paces that she had never walked before for fear of some nebulous curse (that turned out to be true).

It's just the perfect complement - a brilliant match between an excellent poet and a fine musician. Maybe you won't quite find it as inspiring as I do, but I feel I should share it anyway:



God, in his mercy, lend her grace...

Slessor

Two chronometers the captain had,
One by Arnold that ran like mad,
One by Kendal in a walnut case,
Poor devoted creature with a hangdog face.

I was going to write a "spoof" of this stanza for a post comparing two cookbooks I had bought recently, when it occurred to me that the number of people who knew Kenneth Slessor's poem well enough to recognise a spoof could probably be numbered on one hand... and they probably don't read this blog.

Which suddenly made me feel very sad, and prompted me to put off the post concerning cookbooks in favour of a post concerning Kenneth Slessor. For anyone who would like to read the whole poem, you can find it here.

It's actually an excerpt from a longer poem called Five Visions of Captain Cook, but invariably these five stanzas on the chronometers end up being published in anthologies, while the rest of the poem is left out. I don't believe I have ever read the whole poem myself, only various excerpts like "Two Chronometers".

Kenneth Slessor was an Australian poet who wrote in the first half of the 20th century. Yes, believe it or not, Australia does have more than one poet on the books.

I know about him because I took Speech and Drama classes as a child (and as a teenager, and as an adult), and had to cover Australian poetry on more than one occasion. Most people, though, have probably never heard of him. Just like they've never heard of Charles Harpur, Henry Kendall or Mary Gilmore.

I'd like to point out that Mary Gilmore is quite a noteworthy poet - literally. She's on the current Australian $10 note, on the opposite side to Andrew Barton (Banjo) Patterson.

Ah, you've heard of that one, have you? Waltzing Matilda, The Man from Snowy Mountain and Clancy of the Overflow are Australian poems you may actually know about?

Hmm.

Meanwhile, how many $10 notes have you seen in the last ten years? Did it ever occur to you to ask who the chick on the other side was?

Anyway, I mentioned those poets in particular because they are, believe it or not, quite "famous", as far as Australian poets go. Pick up any book on Australian poetry and you'll find a number of poems by these writers.

Slessor's "Two Chronometers" excerpt is the first poem in the most ubiquitous book of Australian poetry in existence - This Land, an anthology selected by another famous Australian poet, Judith Wright. You can pick up Wright's anthology in any second-hand book store or charity op-shop in the country, I expect. I think I saw six copies of it at the last book fair.

Oh, come on. Of course you've heard of Judith Wright. Why, she and Bruce Dawe are considered to be among the most important poets in Australian literature, and are practically responsible for every anthology of Australian anything that you've ever read...

What? Oh, sorry. I hadn't realised you've never read an anthology of Australian poetry. No, no, it makes perfect sense. Quite frankly, if it wasn't written by 'Banjo' Paterson or Henry Lawson, there's no reason why an Australian would even dream of reading Australian poetry on purpose.

What? You've never read any of their poems either? What about Waltzing Matilda? Surely you've read that one? No? You've just sung the chorus on occasion. Okay. That makes sense, too. No one would actually think a song about a homeless bum who steals a sheep and commits suicide would make a good national anthem if they knew the lyrics.

Look, it's not like Australian poetry is particularly bad. I think quite a bit of it is really good. That Slessor poem, for example, does lovely things with rhythm and pace and is a brilliant poem to recite. I mean, if you've read any British or American poetry, you wouldn't think the Australian poetry was in any way inferior...

Oh. You don't read poetry as a general rule. Okay. No, no. Don't worry about it. That's perfectly normal behaviour for an Australian. Poetry is, after all, for wusses and toffy-nosed gits who can't get a real job. I think it's pretty normal behaviour for most people in the Western World, isn't it?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go somewhere and cry.