Brand Fixing

For World Refugee Day, I posted a few poems by myself and others on Twitter and Facebook with the hashtags #worldrefugeeday and #poetry but here’s a new one I just wrote…

In the battle of the brands
brand Labor
brand Liberal
compete for niche markets
sell their wares to a demographic
they claim they have to appease
but cultivated themselves

paid Murdoch and Fairfax
to invent new customer demands

they now expect a certain type of product
fit with the latest in racist features
anti-boat rhetoric comes standard
with bogus security extras
for threats that don’t exist

and they’ve fixed the market
agreed to both leave out costly features
such as health and education
to go for the cheap sell
price brand Green out of the market
force them to play dirty too

more than sawdust in the engine
or bolts not screwed on right
the product is tainted to begin with
selling the same rotting wares
the biggest con job you’ve ever seen

under the hood
people pay with their lives
so the brands can cut costs
and make it Canberra on top

but
brand Labor is doing it tough
brand Liberal have a reputation
the tried and trusted racist brand
Labor’s just a cheap rip off
who fired the advisor that said
perhaps human rights
would be a definitive selling point
a one of a kind feature
that brand Liberal couldn’t match

Poem: When the end of the world comes…

When the end of
the world comes
there will be bastards
selling merchandise
desperate hawkers
on the side of the road
to oblivion
reaching out
in crashedcrushed suits
selling us the nooses
they make us
want to hang ourselves with

Nero would have been so proud
Not just a mad man
fiddling whilst a city burns
but a whole orchestra
a bank of mad-hatters
stock brokers smashing cymbals
generals blowing horns
politicians fiddling on giant basses
and executives twiddling with flutes
a symphony whilst they sell us off
to the highest bidder
before we’re cooked to a cinder
and when the end of the world comes
they’ll sell us the box set of DVDs
with extra features
and tell us the soundtrack is to die for

Athenian hangover

3am
reduced to clear
pikelets with jam
Greek elections
on the tele

I’d take a shot of ouzo
everytime a journo tells me
I’m going to go bankrupt
but I can’t afford any

In the morning,
Greeks wake up late,
a seedy film on their skin

Don’t need to drink
ouzo, to know what
an Athenian hangover
feels like

Bankers bloated from binging
on unnecessary midnight snacks
the rest peer into fridges
searching for scraps

the bankruptcy notice
waiting on the table
to take everything
they don’t have

Poetry (sort of) Review: Ashes in the Air – Ali Alizadeh

I used to think there was a divide between ‘page’ and ‘performance’ poetry. I was clearly in the later camp and didn’t think I liked much poetry for the page, except perhaps Sylvia Plath. But Ashes in the Air by Ali Alizadeh was part of showing me that it’s just a matter of finding page poetry that you like, understand and can connect with.

I’m not exactly sure how you read a poetry book, let alone review. I suppose everyone is different. I basically read it cover to cover, perhaps like you’d read a prose novel, with a pause after each poem to think and breathe. I stopped at a few poems in particular, either to read them over because I was really moved by them or because a first reading was not sufficient and it took me a few more to gain full understanding, or at least enough to get something out of it. I think perhaps you read poetry books a few times and keep coming back to it. Or that’s how I intend to approach it.

But I think reading poetry collections in general can feel a little foreign, to even spoken word poets like myself. I was force fed a bit of poetry in school, but never really made it a habit, beyond being struck by Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’ and ‘Meatworks by Robert Gray. They are two poems in particular that I remember as moving me. I was introduced to spoken word much later and found it accessible, much more than some of the poetry I read in various literary journals and so my opinion about the page and stage divide began to form in my head.

This is important for readers to see where I’m coming from with this review. I have often felt that page poetry requires an advanced education to gain full understanding, which is very much the opposite of something like slam, but Alizadeh’s collection Ashes in the Air really impressed with me with how accessible it felt to me, even though I had to read a couple a few times over. Is that how you read poetry? Is there a right way?

I bought the book after meeting Ali at the Emerging Writers’ Festival in May. In one of the ‘Embassy sessions,’ one of the issues that came up was about the poet’s persona and whether that was important. I feel like it is, and that meeting the poet in question helped to gain an understanding of his work. It’s just a matter of knowing some basic biographical details, perhaps how he speaks and the issues he’s concerned about outside of poetry that allow for this. Does it allow a poet to get to the heart of creating the imagery and poetics without having to labour over explaining details to put the poems in context?

His poetry deals with issues of travel, migration, coming from Iran and living in Australia. The poems that struck me the most were ‘Shut Up’ about an Iranian asylum seeker in detention (I’m always on the look-out for affecting poetry about refugees and asylum seekers in Australia) as well as ‘The Guns of Northcote’ which talks of gentrification and poverty in Melbourne.

Often the choice of how the lines are placed, and where there are line breaks are not obvious to me, with all page poetry, but in this case, it does not prevent me from that simple level of understanding and from there, the more subtle. The form does not force you to live or die in making sense of it, but it allows you to focus on the content of the poems, and the images, which to me seems the most important part. You can write nice sounding poetry, but if it fails to mean anything then it leaves the reader wanting. Alizadeh does not leave me wanting.

Does slam in Australia have a disinclination to anger and the critical?

I’ve been thinking a lot about writing process lately and how to transfer ideas, images, feelings into words and finding the right medium. The point of blogging about this is to help deconstruct some of it in the hope of breaking out of old habits and writing what is right in the right medium.

Sam Cooney’s piece in The Emerging Writer goes into this struggle a bit, when writing about the real world and how hard it is to do it justice in words, and I’ve been thinking about that quite a bit.

A few days ago I was asking people to leave comments on how they approach the process. Please keep telling your own creative stories. I love to read them. Process is a boring word. It makes it sound like a mechanical automatic kind of thing, but it really is something you have to allow to be organic, like transcribing a dance in your head. I have multiple ideas and a few mediums I’m working in. I am no longer just a prose writer, but a poet, spoken word artist, blogger and non-fiction writer. This opens me up to using a variety of ways to tell a story, get across a thought or image, but sometimes it can be restricting, like thinking I need to write a spoken word piece and finding an idea to shove into that container when it might not fit. Or an idea that could very well fit, but assumptions and tropes of that mode of writing holds me back

Which brings me to another thought I’ve been having about slam poetry, and spoken word. One of the first things that I loved about being able to perform poetry and then writing it for performance was that I could express anger. Some people cringe at anger, look down upon it as an unhealthy emotion, but I actually love it. I love the rant also. And although I may have missed the mark, made a few mistakes etc, when I first started playing with it, it’s an area I want to explore further. In the space of open mic and the more traditional poetry nights, the content is fine. You can be dark and it can feel like you don’t have to ‘please’ people in the same way that slam does.

Does slam in Australia have a predisposition the positive and inspirational? I know that’s not the worst thing in the world until you consider it’s opposite. Does slam in Australia have a disinclination to the angry or critical? I know it is not really meant to be a competition but often that pressure and appealing to the audience gets the better of you. People are looking for the funny, the uplifting, positive, inspiration, that beautiful inspiration line, simile or metaphor that gets the audience clicking fingers. I say Slam in Australia because American poets like Ken Arkind seem to be articulating anger so beautifully and get the right reaction. Maybe I just haven’t hit the mark yet.

Anger isn’t meant to be negative. It’s about working out what you want to get rid of in order to build something new. It’s cathartic. And I have something I want to write, so I could do it, and see what comes up.

It’s fine to focus on the audience, to write for them, for it not to be self-indulgent, but sometimes it can be a barrier to reaching some of the people in the audience. My favourite moment from a slam was after performing ‘Unless You’re Free’ at Slamalamadingdong one night and a stranger came up to me and thanked me because he’d just quit his ‘shitty job’ and he related to the poem. Sometimes things like that matter much more than the score.

Poetic process between slam, spoken, and the page. How do you do it?

One of the roads I went further down during this year’s Emerging Writers’ Festival was the tricky path of page poetry. After working on poems for the page with much more success in first semester, thanks to a helpful teacher, I feel like I actually might be getting it.

Photo by Amir Kuckovic (Creative Commons)

I’ve had a complicated relationship with poems for the page. I felt like there was a complicated art to it, even with free verse, that I hadn’t yet mastered. Which was why spoken word appealed to me. I found the language more accessible and natural, and it was probably by listening to a lot of spoken word, night after night, that I discovered what I liked and what I didn’t. It’s helped to construct my own poems within that body of Melbourne spoken word poetry.

But in the last year or so, my shorter more concise ideas have found more of a home inside the short page poem and I’ve found I’ve written a couple that I’ve actually liked. I still read them live, but now I’m finding that divide between poetry for the stage and page is increasingly blurred.

I’ve never really learnt in the formal sense how to write either. I’ve never gone to a workshop or really deconstructed the ‘bones of my poems’ like I would a short story. And yet, I feel like these things are more important than when writing prose. But now I am thinking about how I approach my process, for both or as separate forms. How I write page poetry now, after discovering some page poetry that I’ve liked, is making me wonder how I go about writing spoken word.

I used to write them much like I’d write a page poem, with short lines and lots of line breaks, and I suppose some poems will still be written like that, but it seems more suited to shorter pieces. And when putting together I set, I’ve really noticed how much shorter most of my pieces are compared to others. Do slammers and more spoken storytellers write pieces like they might write a tight piece of poetic prose? My prose has become more poetic, rich with images. Do I write spoken word like that?

Sure, there is no right or wrong process but I would be curious to hear how others approach the different forms. Do you write it like prose or like traditional poetry? How much do you edit? Do you edit as you try to memorise? Do you write in one hit?

Bubble

Bunkered down
writers inside Town Hall
escape into a bubble of
pure creativity, receding
yet emerging without distractions

Just for a short time
we create a ghetto
amongst traditional buildings
and feel guilty about
embellishing, gorging on
the process

Last night’s literary conversation
oozes out of pores
smelling of gin
clashing with espresso
jump-starting our minds
for another day
just one more day

‘The Melbourne Poetry Scene’ on Overland

Today on the Overland blog, my post, ‘The Melbourne Poetry Scene’ talks about, well, the Melbourne poetry scene:

I discovered the Melbourne poetry scene about two years ago, on a train home to Coburg one night. I ran into Santo Cazzati on his way to read poetry in a pub in Brunswick. That’s how I learned about Passionate Tongues at the Brunswick Hotel: by word of mouth. And from there, the Dan, the Spinning Room and the Overload Poetry Festival. I found a whole swathe of readings, slams and events had been going on right under this poet’s nose. An entire world was opened up through one man mentioning the scene in passing and it amazed me that I had never come across any of it before. I had gone to festivals, literary events and book launches, but never knew that underneath Melbourne, there existed a world of poetry.

Continue Reading…

On the first day back…

On the first day back,
office workers
shuffle aimlessly
in the ghost
of last year’s
busy streets
and corporate nightmare

And we wonder
as we arrive to empty offices
that if dooms day had arrived early
we would have liked the memo
so we could join everyone else

First poem of 2012

There is something really amazing about writing your first poem, the first from 2012, after writing got a bit hard and painful for a few weeks. After much anguish, including over trivial things such as stationary, I blessed a new notebook with words and instantly felt better.

I hope 2012 brings many moments like this, with perhaps less anguish. Here is my first poem of 2012. In the coming days, I’ll let you know what else is in store for this year in my writing and this blog.

—

Like a junkie
poetic withdrawals
leave you shaking
searching frantic
for exactly the right pen

like the right vein
shallow
wet and visible
except the pen is there
to release poison
cleansing

The search for release
comes at all costs
sweating in the heat
forgetting your stomach
eating at its insides
but if only you could find
that perfect pen

bleed black onto paper
then speak it
seal your fix
open and unashamed
acutely aware of a strange
addiction
only addicts really understand

unlike the judging eyes
of normal people
who bottle everything up
look at you with pity
even disdain
if you dare disclose:
“I’m a writer.”

Left with desire
to find others
not just to read or listen
but to understand the words
that split out of you
messy like heavy sobs

when finally, it is done
you feel better, calmer
sometimes a little ashamed
that you went through that
all of it
just for a poem

You know then
that you are not normal
dysfunctional amongst the functional
but normal, calm and at home
standing facing odd friends
and strangers alike
finally functional amongst
the beautifully dysfunctional
your family of poets