Posts

Navigating the Crossroads of Palliative Care & Dementia: A Poet's Perspective

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NOTE: This post is a bit longer than usual & contains a 10 minute presentation.   I recently had the enormous privilege of presenting poetry at the 2024 Palliative Care Summit: 'Navigating the Crossroads: Building the intersection between Palliative Care & Neurodegenerative Disease'. The summit was hosted by Palliative Care WA in the Pan Pacific hotel in Perth. I mention this because it's the place I was held in quarantine while my mother died in a nursing home just a few kilometres away. Perth's hard border control at the time was brutal. While many people have understandably just wanted to move on and forget about the pandemic, it's taken me a bit longer to do that. For a long time, the sorrow and grief seemed knitted into my skin.    Of course, I could have said no to the summit. But I sensed that this occassion was bigger than me, that these poems might serve others, that performing them might also help me work through residual grief, resentment, and an...

Performing Poetry in Sydney

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  Poetica Petit: A night of poetry and music I’m super-pleased  to announce that on April 11th I'll be performing poetry (feature poet) at Poetic Petit at the Woollhara Gallery in Redleaf, Sydney.  In 2022 I won the Woollhara Digital Literary Award for Poetry but wasn't able to get to Sydney. So, belatedly, I'll be reading the poem that won that award, A Poem To My Mother That She Will Never Read plus some new work. I'm grateful to Miriam Hechtman for the opportunity. Ilan Kidron will be performing some music on the night & there is also an open mic section. Poetica Petit is presented in partnership with Woollahra Council and held at the Cultural Hub, in the newly refurbished Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf.  READ MORE HERE     POETICA PETIT POETRY NIGHT Thursday, April 11, 6-8pm Woollahra Gallery, Redleaf TIX HERE $20 including some refreshments

POETS, How Might Submitting Your Work Work For You?

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Meeting Nick Drake, published in *82Review, 21.1 Lately, I've been thinking about what it means to submit work to literary journals, and my process of doing that. At the beginning of 2024, I had grand plans for my submitting my poetry to journals across the world. I would write and submit every single month , update my submission spreadsheet regularly, not delay in resubmitting work when the inevitable rejections came through. etc. etc. How's that going for me? Well, I did submit work to 4 journals in January then wrote a submission for an arts grant in February, and haven't submitted anything since! I planned to get back into this month and was all set to submit to Westerly Mag but I didn't bcs I wrote the wrong date in my diary & missed the deadline LOL. Truth is, I suck at these kinds of plans, and I know I suck at them, so why do I persist in the planning? I think it has to do with intention and process. Firstly, intention. It's a little trick of the mind. ...

FANDANGO: Performance Poetry in Adelaide Fringe 2024

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I'm super-pleased to be a part of this excellent line-up of spoken word performers in this year's Adelaide Fringe! Fandango is a showcase of spoken word artists and their fandoms and obsessions. WHAT: FANDANGO, spoken word poetry WHERE: Laneway Garden Stage at Mixed Creative, Port Adelaide WHEN: Friday, March 1st, 8pm TIX: $10 Click Here to Book Fringe Tix   Hosted by Pam Makin and Tracey O’Callaghan Featuring Aubrey, Avalanche, Jazz, Caroline Reid, Tegan Sabine, Kerryn Tredrea, and Todd Alan Wight I'm performing a set Breaking Up With Bob Dylan: “When I listened to Dylan all through the nineties, he was already as old as my parents. I didn’t care. It was his 1960s stuff I was listening to, that became the lyrical soundtrack to my fuqd-up 20s. I lined up for concert tix, read the books, learned the lyrics & played his songs with gusto on the guitar. Thirty years later, when he played Bonython Park, I tried to break up with him. But he wasn’t having a bar of it ....

VIDEO POEM: To Touch & Taste a Comet, featuring Caroline Reid in a bedroom in Melbourne

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Between 2018-2021 I worked with 3 emerging film makers to create 6 video poems.  To Touch and Taste a Comet was the second of those video poems. SYNOPSIS & CONTEXT: The poem To Touch & Taste a Comet speaks to being a late bloomer & not giving up on your dreams/ambition despite living in a world that values youth, early (visible) success and a particular kind of beauty (perfect/smooth). It's a world that values & rewards a particular kind of filming making too... not too complex, clear narrative, crisp focus with a young, pretty, sexy, cool protagonist. Much of what I love about this video poem is how film maker Patrick Zoerner weaves imagery that emphasises texture, pattern & mood with images of the not-so-young/not-so-cool poet (me).  When I first re-visited the video so that I could write this blog, I have to admit I cringed a little. It's tempting to apologise for my double-chin & jowls, thick torso, my awkwardness and kind of arty-posiness. But...