Grace Notes @ Snarkattack

I was lucky enough las year to go to some Melbourne Writers’ Festival events. Apparently Melbourne is a designated City of Literature by UNESCO. I understand one has to bid and pay an exorbitant amount for this privilege.

The first event I went to with Ryan & T was a special screening of The Leopard at ACMI, directed by Visconti, and based on the novel by Lampedusa. Italian neo-realist cinema is quite a treat and I’d been wanting to see this film for ages but it rarely shows (and you can tell by the print, it’s not in fab condition). The Leopard is about a time in Italy when the aristocracy no longer enjoys the prestige it once used to – the working classes are tired of all the corruption and privileges afforded to this social class when in effect, they do so little for it and are lucky merely to be born in the right circumstances. The main character, played by an exceedingly debonair Burt Lancaster, is in an odd position in that he realises his nobility is on the way out.

I was hoping to read the novel before I saw the film, but time did not afford me that pleasure. Nevertheless, the film is an excellent piece on social history. A few of the ball scenes were a little long, but to be honest it’s hard to fault Visconti.

The second event was an all-day workshop with the American poet Emily Ballou, who has written a verse novel about Darwin. The workshop was held at RMIT City campus, which is pretty easy to get to via public transport.

This is probably one of the best workshops I’ve been to – she introduced me to so many exercises and prompts which is perfect for people who go through terrible bouts of writers’ block. We wrote poems based on…

- words plucked out of the dictionary at random
- picture prompts – a magazine page from National Geographic as inspiration
- taking an existing piece of literature and creating a ‘found’ text by striking out words from the given passage
- writing a stanza in addition to one written by the participant next to us

I have at least three poems from this workshop that I can work on, so I was pretty chuffed.

Last event, which I had so much fun at was the official launch of McSweeney’s 32, at The Toff In Town, in the city. All eventgoers got a copy of the beautiful quarterly – and they’ve never, ever launched outside of the States! Everyone seemed pretty excited.

The editor, Eli Horowitz was in attendance to talk to us, as were two of the contributors to read passages from their stories. Then there were a few acts – Suitcase Royale (surreal comedy act), The Bent Leather Band (instruments of electronic and leather-bound manipulation), and a fellow who read a cyberpunk manifesto (even though I swear one already exists, by Donna Haraway). There were some really cool steampunk furnishings on stage, too.

I didn’t get to go to as many events as I wanted, but the MWF was ridiculous fun. Bonus for being able to give Emily Ballou a lift to another MWF event, and she was adorably clad in Emily Dickinson-inspired attire (I believe she was reading her work). I really need to track down a copy of her verse novel on Darwin and recommend other poetry-inspired folk do so too.

Just a short update – I got shortlisted for the Varuna Longlines competition. Alas, I didn’t get into the programme, but it was nice to hear that my folio was considered for a good while. Apparently, six or so poems at the end are weaker and need to be replaced with some better ones. Hopefully, I can do that, and reapply next year. Yea for some healthy goals!

I also found out this week that my poem ‘Knot’ will be showing up on the Optus Board in Federation Square as part of the Overload Poetry Festival, which runs from 3-14 September. I’m very excited and I don’t even know if I’ll actually be able to catch my own poem up there as it’s a electronic feed sort of thing.

I was lucky enough to attend some fabulous events as part of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival this year – more about that soon.

Poetry and popular culture have rare occasion to meet so it was quite cool to learn that on The Colbert Report, they had Paul Muldoon as a guest.

Watch the video clip here.

It’s quite the match made in heaven, given that poetry when not wailing about love, death and/or sex, is most likely going to be satirical.

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I was reading a few poems from the Yeats volume I have, mentioned here and was struck by the notion that Irish mythology, or perhaps Yeats’ retelling of it, is raunchier than an episode of The Bold and the Beautiful and the like. Bloody hell! Where to begin???
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I think the snark in me is officially on holidays…or currently too sick to write anything of true substance (or even to attempt to).

Managed to read, gee, all of…2 poems by Chatterton? The one I liked the most was the one ‘dedicated’ to Horace Walpole, author of the famous (and lengthy) Gothic classic The Castle of Otranto. I think I have one friend who has read the whole thing!

Chatterton didn’t like Walpole because when he sent his ‘medieval’ Rowley poems to Walpole for evaluation or whatever, Walpole was the one who raised the ‘fraudulent’ alarm. Chatterton has a little note at the end of the poem to claim that his sister persuaded him to not send it to Walpole as intended.

Shame – imagine the ruckus it would have created! Chuckle.

Merci de M D. Piecoup pour cette citation sublime sur l’art de poesie:

Thanks to Mr D. Piecoup for this inspiring passage on the poetic art:

“In spite of difference of soil and climate, of
language and manners, of laws and customs,
in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things violently
destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and
knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is
spread over the whole earth, and over all time. The
objects of the Poet’s thoughts are every where; though
the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his
favorite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can
find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his
wings. Poetry is the first and last of all
knowledge–it is as immortal as the heart of man.”

-William Wordsworth

I said it to my mentor the other day; poets are like flute-players are like rabbits. Just too many of them in existence. Groan.

I’m starting to really love the internet. Yep, turning into a real geek.

First I upload all my bookmarks onto del.icio.us after an horrid scare installing (and uninstalling) Mozilla Firefox, and then…

I found the Yeats poem that Sean Bean’s character is reciting in the film Equilibrium (as mentioned here, thanks to the following site.

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

-William Butler Yeats

Ah. Don’t knock Yeats, he knew how to turn out a decent ditty or two. That site could get very, very addictive.

Will post a real book reference so you can find the poem the traditional way too.

As promised, book reference. The edition I have (the one they recommended for first-year lit students when I was still at uni) is A. Norman Jeffares, Poems of W. B. Yeats, (Houndsmill, Basingstoke & London: Macmillan, 1988) 171. In section 10: ‘Love and Sex’. In the annotations at the back of the book, Yeats is apparently quoted as having said that this poem was a way to lose a lady. I rather think the opposite would happen nowadays (do men today even have dreams? All they seem to dream of…is themselves).