Hooray! I’ve just found out that the three short poetry courses I pitched for the CPIT Summer School programme have been approved!
I can’t go into detail yet, but if you fancy dedicating some time to the muse this summer, you might like to pencil the following dates into your diary:
◊ 18th, 19th, 20th January 2010
◊ 30th, 31st January 2010
◊ 13th February 2010
and watch this space for further details!
(tease tease …)
Saturday was the launch of the 2009 NZPS anthology, moments in the whirlwind. It was an interesting event, as always – a quite different segment of the poetry public to those you tend to see at other Canterbury poetry events. And a decent crowd too – probably a hundred or so people. Chairs were at such a premium that almost no-one went to the buffet until the very last minute …
The highlight for me is always the kids. The teenagers pretending nonchalance; the tweens who are so happy they bounce all the way to the mic; the little kids with their parents and assorted other relatives. There was one boy in particular who was basically a blond crew cut in a grey school uniform. We’re talking suit and enormous smile, and very little else visible. 
But he had a ball, and his parents were so proud they were very nearly levitating. It was great. And it was a scene that was repeated over and over.
The trick now is keeping these kids hooked on poetry. How many of them will be back next year? The year after? Ten years from now?
Yes, at long last, The Summer King is available through Amazon! Both US and UK now have it listed, and apparently a batch has been shipped out to the US distributors, so it should be in stock any day now.
The other thing this means is the possibility for people to start leaving reviews in public places – if you’ve read The Summer King, I encourage you to click on the book’s page on one or more of the online sites (Amazon US and/or UK, The Book Depository, Fishpond etc) and give it a rating, or even write a review. (And say what you really think – I promise I won’t hunt you down. Or prompt, ask, request, suggest, demand or in any other way cause someone else to do so on my behalf.) (Cross my heart.)
Speaking of reviews, it has been officially branded as a book of “very cool poems” by Hamesh Wyatt in the ODT (you can read the full review here), and “gratifying and satisfying” by Anne Harré in A Fine Line.
The sound you can hear is my inner child, spinning around in big happy circles, going “yaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!” at the top of her voice.
We all should listen to our inner child.
I just finished reading Edward Hirsch’s The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration. It’s a fascinating read – he draws from all sorts of different sources, from Poetry to Painting to Modern Dance to Jazz, with lots of other digressions along the way. He takes Lorca’s idea of the Duende as his starting point, and how theories of artistic inspiration (and the receptivity of the artist to such inspiration) have generally held true to some variation on this theme.
The book is very learned, but not off-puttingly literary, if that makes sense. You don’t need to know much about the subjects in advance. It’s very generous in that way, but for me ended up vaguely unsatisfying. It’s a style thing, I think. He’s enormously influential as a poet-critic, and I know lots of people who love his writing. But there’s just something that doesn’t quite gel for me. Maybe it’s the way he covers so much ground, and not always terribly methodically? Except there is method there too … Don’t know. He’s an author I admire and appreciate, but don’t especially enjoy. (I know, I’m being terribly technical here in my criticism.) But if you enjoyed his How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry (a good book – try it!) then this is a good follow-on.
The weird thing is that I’ve just (more-or-less) finished writing a poem about angels. Well, a fallen angel. Lucifer. In the process of writing it, I’ve learned more things about Las Vegas than any sane person should, (resisting the temptation to toddle down to the Christchurch casino for some fact finding took a bit of won’t-power), and also more about tortoises than should be necessary for one not intending a career in herpetology. Then there’s the delving into the Old Testament etc for information on who Lucifer was, and why, etc.
It all began with an exercise I set one of my CPIT classes – write a poem inspired by the etymology of a word or phrase. I had a lovely long list of things for them to choose from, but ended up snagging myself. Apparently the word “tortoise” comes from the Greek, ‘tartarchos’, meaning ‘god of the underworld’. And as I read that out to my students, I suddenly had this picture in my head of Lucifer as a huge, ancient tortoise, presiding over a Las Vegas casino …
Just a little out of date (ok, a couple of weeks) is the news that my disturbingly talented compatriot, Emma Jones, has won the Forward Prize for Best First Book 2009 for her book, The Striped World (Faber and Faber, 2008). Apparently not only is she the first Australian to win the award, but also the first Australian to be published by Faber.
I came across Emma’s work when I was living in the UK. She won the prestigious Academi Cardiff International Poetry Prize in 2003 (you can read her winning poem here and the judge’s report here), and then took out the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2005. (She’d shared the prize with three other poets in 2002.) Her name and her poems kept cropping up. I can remember at the time noting her as someone to watch. So it was especially pleasing to find myself published beside her in New Poetries IV.
An intriguing title, The Striped World. Brings to my mind images of prisoners, thylacines, shadows, cracked earth and breaking points. My copy is on order. Can’t wait to read it.
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