Is there ever a straight path forward? What happens when we wander in the so-called weeds, a ramble of body and ideas?
I’ll be giving a poetry reading on Saturday July 6, 2pm at the No Vacancy Gallery in the QV centre, as part of the women, work and wandering festival. This is a free event, but you do need to register.
It would be tremendous to see you there.
As many of you will know, it’s just recently been the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birth – that amazing American poet of teeming cities, meditations on life and loving, and of course that great and terrible experience of the Civil War. My poem, selected for this celebratory collection, Endlessly Rocking (ed Stan Galloway and Nicole Yurcaba), takes as its point of reference, the figure of Whitman as he travelled to the hospitals of the Civil War, horrified by the scale of the suffering and spectacle and beauty of so many violently damaged young men.
The poem is dedicated not only to Whitman himsef, that ‘bewhiskered emissay,’ but to my friend, fellow writer and Whitman -o-phile, Lindsay Tuggle.
I hope you enjoy my review in Mascara of Tricia Dearborn’s fantastic new collection, Autobiochemistry (UWAP 2019)
This is from a cycle of poems written in memory of my dear young friend, Sophie Ellis. This particular poem is for her mother, my dear friend Kerry.
Pietà
For Kerry Dawson
Lay her here,
heavy as stone
across my shoulder, breast, the generosity of lap;
I long for this weight
Let the cataract of her hair fall
over my arms, across my face,
covering my eyes:
Child of my blood and sinew,
beloved daughter of my dreaming,
turn your face toward me
again,
here, into the crook of my neck;
I have shielded you before:
And in the hollows of the night when
my arms lie useless and
desperate for you –
then lean against me again,
returned to me on this crushing
tide of longing,
scooped out of darkness –
be present and
homed
beside the persistent beating of my heart.
On the rise in the middle paddock, grey fantails twirl and
arabesque through morning air dense with possibility, catching
the hands of the leaves and the light and our patient attention.
I wrote this paper a few years ago now in Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledges – but I’ve been returning to this ‘epistemology of wandering’ as evoked so wonderfully by Oliver’s poetic.
Ramble! Enjoy!
‘Drifting in the Weeds of Heaven: Mary Oliver and the Poetics of the Immeasurable’
http://www.rhizomes.net/issue13/lucas.html
Last week I did an inspiring workshop with Mark Tredinnick – a whole day dedicated to listening to, writing, thinking and talking about poetry. He introduced us to the form of the Sijo – a kind of Korean version of the haiku. I think I may have taken some liberties with the form, but here is another I wrote today.
You don’t have to go far to feel the kindness of the
Light to sit in a well of quiet sun beside the rosemary, the
Crush of mown grass, the heaviness of spent lavender nodding as I pass.
Like so many of us, I’ve been thinking a lot about Mary Oliver since her recent death. Remembering how important and influential she has been to me both in terms of the craft of poetry itself and its necessary basis in a grounded perception of the world. Her work has achieved what I think the best of poetry can only sometimes do – to make us, the readers, sit up and take greater note of the extra-ordinariness of life which is embedded within the fabric of the everyday, to take ownership of the ‘one wild and precious life’ which we have, perhaps even to become better people.
A couple of poems, and lines from poems, have been coming back to mind. In particular, ‘Work,’ from White Pine (1994), for me, expresses so simply and yet effectively this balance between being in the world, open to seeing a pond, ‘catching the rain/on its broad back,’ and the ethical labour of poetry, what it might craft with ‘the linen of words/and the pins of punctuation.’
Have a listen: ‘Work,’ by Mary Oliver
Here’s me reading my Lake Mungo Series – as part of Plumwood Mountain’s epic poetry protest against the Adani Mine: Poets Speaking up to Adani 30 Oct 2017
May we listen to and care for all our world heritage areas.
