Jul
03

Pride Week: Fury’s Top 5 Poets

To round off the Metre Maid’s celebration of all things PRIDE & all things POETIC, the amazingly talented and charming FURY gives us a delicious eye-feast that is her TOP 5 FAV POETS. So all you have to do is listen, get inspired and remember to always be furious!

 

Fury is a Melbourne based writer and poet who flits between book covers and sheet covers. She loves love, OkCupid and poetry that punches you in the diaphram. You can check out her work at littlefurycreatures.wordpress.com or soundcloud.com/fury

Jul
02

Pride Week: Emma Haller

Featured today is cool-cat Emma Haller and her poem, DRIFTING. Below we have a conversation about poetry and how sexuality inspires Haller’s poetry. Here at Metre Maids love having discussions surrounding poetry and where our poets feel their poetry comes from. We each have a different place that we pull stuff from, and it’s still important to talk about. Without further ado:

 

DRIFTING

Strength holds me,
a coin among the cloud,
shoulders wide and engulfing.

Freckles she once hid,
shine bright,
the Sun and I kissing her elbows in cheeky glee.

Waves creep up,
flew back,
and distill.

I half smile,
feeling myself drifting, towards an unsullied place.

I clasp her hip,
hold my breath in the tenderness,
the opportunity of her world.

A sadness lingered,
I hope for clarity.
Phantom limbs,
scrambling together as one.

 

How did ‘Drifting’ come to be?
 Moving from one relationship to another, it caused a re-evaluation of every facet of my life, and it was a significant and intense relationship so I wanted to capture a sense of that. I tried to convey that new relationships have a wonderful crisp edge to them, the butterflies and all those cliches are real.

How does your sexuality inform your poetic imagery?
 I think sexuality is fluid and informs everything I do. My emotions, I’ve come to realise are important, and sometimes you need to let whatever feelings you’re having inform your day-to-day life. My sexuality is vital to who I am as a person and I try to channel feeling however I am able.

What poet do you most look up to and why, how do they speak to you?
Gwen Harwood is a main influence for me, I studied her a lot throughout school. Her poetry has a lovely naturalistic quality and has always been relaxing to read. Also a bit of Emily Dickinson as well, apparently she was obsessed with white clothing which is fun, Judith Wright’s poetry is also engaging.

What is your editing process like?
 I read the poem out and try to gauge it’s sound and meaning for the reader/audience. I edit as I go, usually on a computer but I edit a lot in my journal. All my ideas are written down first, then I piece the stanzas together if I see some links or interesting connections.

What is the best tip you’ve received for dealing with critique?
 Focus on what you are trying to convey. I’m learning strategies to be able to teach poetry, and putting myself in my student’s shoes is important every now and then. Critique is important and discussions around interpretations have always been enjoyable. I love teaching and writing, they are large parts of my life and wouldn’t have it any other way.

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Emma Haller, a curious observer from childhood, grew up on the Mornington Peninsula where coastal living and traditional Aussie charm helped shape an evocative voice. Her poetry explores the manifold nature of human emotions and poems such as ‘Drifting’ seem to offer contemporary thoughts on relationships as being beautifully despondent experiences. There is an emotional truth that lingers throughout her poems, memorable for their honesty and stunningly constructed design. Currently, Emma is completing a double degree in Arts/Education (Secondary) at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia) and writes poetry in her spare time.
Jun
28

Pride Week: ReVerse Butcher on Sticking To Your Subjectives

Today we feature a spoken word performance excerpt by ReVerse Butcher during her feature poet set at the Dan O’Connell (Melbourne, Australia) poetry reading on 11th of May 2013. The poem, STICK TO YOUR SUBJECTIVES, was baked in her brain after being forced to absorb 3 years of Foucault’s writings at university and speaks back to her identity-bending alienpoet persona. She both agrees and disagrees with Foucault.

 

If you missed ReVerse Butcher’s Collage Poetry you should really CLICK HERE!

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ReVerse Butcher is from outer space. She often surfaces publicly on Earth doing a thing called poetry. ReVerse Butcher thinks that poetry should not be looked down upon as a lesser form of literary stimulation simply because it mostly is a solitary pleasure. Poetry can be a group OR solo activity, it often masks its shifting identities, and also frequently hybridises with other genres to better ensure its own survival in hostile territories. You’ll never catch it, unless it wants you too.

ReVerse Butcher finds language both sexy and confusing, so she does with it what any self-respecting alienpoet should do with confusing and sexy things. She cuts it up. Mostly then she glues it to other things and makes cut-ups & collages, better (dis)orders from existing (dis)orders. Not everything she performs or publishes is a collage, but everything that is performed or published is fodder for one.

 

Jun
27

Pride Week: ReVerse Butcher Features Collage Poetry

The Revenge -- ReVerse Butcher 2012

THE REVENGE – ReVerse Butcher (2012)

ReVerse Butcher’s collage poetry style is one that hybridizes cut-up theory, erasure poetry, plundergraphic theory and other experimental writing techniques such as the Jeff Noon’s Cobralingus language filter system, among other methods of her own invention. The idea is to enter into, to take control of, and change the meanings of dominant meanings and source texts. ReVerse Butcher believes that reality is only possible because of language, both flawed systems at best. By accident, she discovered the two systems were not only linked but co-dependent, which meant if you found a way to change one system, the other would mimic the alterations with unexpected creative results. She focuses on destabilizing theoretical binaries by using context as her plaything, in exposing meaning to be a multiple, changeable and uncontrollable thing.

 

Identity Fakers -- ReVerse Butcher 2013

IDENTITY FAKES – ReVerse Butcher (2013)

She focusses on paradoxes as the way to do this, by using source texts that have received a certain amount of privilege and have achieved a sense of artistic legitimacy which she feels may be dangerous to leave unquestioned. As a feminist writer, ReVerse Butcher is always looking for ways to create or exploit new or existing schisms in culture where the power held by conservative men is shaken loose, if even only for a few moments.

 

SUDDEN MOVEMENTS - ReVerse Butcher (2013)

SUDDEN MOVEMENTS – ReVerse Butcher (2013)

These pieces are part of a larger series and creative practice/method that calls for an emotional and intellectual reaction, and is an ethical intervention. It hopes to achieve, through the intelligent application of absurdity, what feminist collagist and cut-up agent Kathy Acker suggests might be:

 

…the only reaction against an unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense.

WHAT MAKES ME THINK I'M DYING - ReVerse Butcher (2012)

WHAT MAKES ME THINK I’M DYING – ReVerse Butcher (2012)

 

SONY DSC

 

ReVerse Butcher is from outer space. She often surfaces publicly on Earth doing a thing called poetry. ReVerse Butcher thinks that poetry should not be looked down upon as a lesser form of literary stimulation simply because it mostly is a solitary pleasure. Poetry can be a group OR solo activity, it often masks its shifting identities, and also frequently hybridises with other genres to better ensure its own survival in hostile territories. You’ll never catch it, unless it wants you too.

ReVerse Butcher finds language both sexy and confusing, so she does with it what any self-respecting alienpoet should do with confusing and sexy things. She cuts it up. Mostly then she glues it to other things and makes cut-ups & collages, better (dis)orders from existing (dis)orders. Not everything she performs or publishes is a collage, but everything that is performed or published is fodder for one.

 

Jun
25

Pride Week: Chloe Brien

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Kicking off Pride Week 2013 with a beautiful piece of poetry from Chloe Brien. This piece shows us how to see, how to fall head first into a disaster, into love and then learn how to walk without a second shadow.  A perfect way to celebrate the beginning of Pride Week on Metre Maids. We will be featuring more poetry and pieces on Pride throughout the end of June.

ANATOMY OF ABSENCE 

Abandoned weatherboard house, room of syringes and
their plastic wrappers. I watch her scrawl poetry
across plasterboard walls of the living room—
kicked in television and carpet depressions
where a couch used to be. Rain of chalk dust, green,
pink and yellow on her shoes, streaking black stockings,
bruising the purple jacket — colours she’d never wear.

I read the poetry she uncurls. I’m not sure if it’s hers
or another’s. In that moment I can’t care. Beautiful,
I breathe. And she says, Read more…

May
20

Amy May Nunn: A dyslexic poet, and the wrongness/rightness of words

I couldn’t read until I was 9 years old, I stared at the words and imagined all sorts of things, longingly filling in the blanks for myself. I pretended to read out loud, I loved the sound of words and how it felt when I was telling a story, but the idea of words was something I only ever enjoyed in private, in places where there were no consequences. School was a treacherous place, and words were hostile, they humiliated me, they played cruel tricks. At the age of nine, after weeks of unsuccessfully tackling the classic b and d problem (confusing one for the other that is), in a fit of intense frustration, I marched up to the white board in front of my entire class and wrote ‘Amy is dumb’, or that’s what I meant to write, what I had in fact written was ‘Amy is bum’. There was of course much laughter, the creation of a new nick name ‘Nunn bum’ and an ongoing practical joke involving a peanut butter sandwich left on my chair. Okay so not my finest moment, but one that began a strange and significant chain of events. This was the moment I quietly promised myself to get even one day, to use the enemy’s weapons against them, wreak havoc, to show them all.

At the age of 12 I moved with my family to Australia, where unfortunately dyslexia is barely recognised within the education system. I was put into a ‘special needs’ class with children who had severe mental disabilities, and spent my days feeling utterly lost, isolated and deeply ashamed. After a few years of my mother pleading with teachers and doing everything in her power to bend a very rigid system, it eventually became clear that my best option was to live with my father back in London for a trial period, where I could attend a dyslexic school. Read more…

May
15

Rosanna Stevens On Sex in a Shed in an Orchard, and what you can learn by doing it in a classroom

 

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University of Queensland Press, 1999.

There’s this book of poetry I take with me to every single poetry workshop I run. It’s Steven Herrick’s young adult poetry novella, A PLACE LIKE THIS. My mum used to buy me books sometimes – she’d give them to me after school in the car. This was one of those books. A PLACE LIKE THIS was published in 1999 by Queensland University Press. It’s the companion volume to Herrick’s other YA verse novel, LOVE, GHOSTS, AND NOSE HAIR, but you don’t need to know that to enjoy its story. The cover is so reminiscent of the 90’s I almost expect The Ferals were occupying the space beneath that sepia corrugated iron backdrop.

As a high school student, there where times when felt like I couldn’t write poetry because I limited myself to thinking poetry was only the rhyme and rhythm available to read and dissect in the classroom. In senior years were asked to pull apart poetry until it didn’t mean what you thought it meant anymore – until it was only techniques and metaphors you argued in essays. By year 12 I could differentiate between the poetry I was asked to practice my thinking on in the classroom, and the poetry of my home-life. Home-life poetry was the stuff I could imagine to, relate to, and marvel at the music of, because there weren’t guidelines or rubrics instructing me otherwise. Two things made this happen for me: growing up, my mum used to play Pablo Neruda’s poetry, read by celebrities including, but not limited to, Julia Roberts, Glenn Close and Madonna, on a CD on repeat in the car everywhere, all the time. It only competed with Vonda Shepherd in her basement bar with its brooding lawyers on the Ally McBeal soundtrack, and Eva Cassidy’s Songbird. By year 12, when I didn’t understand a poem, the Neruda CD taught me to read work aloud and listen to my own words. I learnt to love Margaret Atwood’s JOURNEY TO THE INTERIOR– an old HSC ‘journeys’ text, that way. Also, my Mum bought me A PLACE LIKE THIS, and the book switched something on for me.
Read more…

Apr
25

Amber Beilharz Interviews Jo Langdon: Revisiting SNOWLINE

vw84cover_largeQ: Voiceworks published your poem ‘Darlings’ in issue #84 PULP. How did you find the process?

I was so thrilled to see ‘Darling’ find its first home in ‘PULP’. That issue was published a little while before my 25th birthday, so I was almost but not quite too old to be sending poems to Voiceworks! As for the process, Voiceworks is very hands on, and I so admire the time and energy the editors put into their writers’ work, especially young and emerging writers. On the other hand, I’m inclined to feel that work should be accepted or not accept as is; that there’s something sort of tricky about accepting a piece of writing conditionally, with suggested edits, especially where such edits are extensive or significant. I suppose this depends on the writer and their experiences, and whether they’re looking for feedback, or to workshop what they’ve written. And honestly, who doesn’t love a reader—someone who will read your work closely and offer a detailed response of some sort? That Voiceworks also offers feedback to both successful and unsuccessful contributors is something else I really appreciate. Read more…

Apr
22

Vermont Flavor: Kris Underwood on Celebrating National Poetry Month Locally

April may be the cruelest month, but then along comes poetry and makes it better. National Poetry Month was originally founded by the American Academy of Poets in 1996 and has taken on a life of its own since then.

Storywalk 2013. Photo courtesy of Poem City.

Storywalk 2013. Photo courtesy of Poem City.

Montpelier, Vermont is a small town (smallest capital in the United States!), but has a huge community of creative types-particularly poets, writers and artists.

Every April downtown Montpelier is inundated with poetry by local poets for the entire month: children’s, well-knowns and unknowns. More than 200 poets are featured in a full text public display in the windows of local businesses.

PoemCity2013 is the main exhibit for the event and has been happening during the month of April for the past three years in celebration of National Poetry Month. They have support from the Kellogg-Hubbard Library , Vermont College of Fine Arts, MontpelierAlive! and several other local organizations.

One of the exhibits features Storywalk, an installation of the children’s book, “Mary Had a Little Lamp,” at the Kellogg-Hubbard Library. You can see pages from the book posted all around the outside of the library building, so you can read the story as you take a stroll. There are readings, workshops and poetry related events the entire month of April to keep you busy and inspired. A popular event is the Bear Pond Poetry reading. It’s been going on for fifteen years. I hadn’t realized it’s been around for so long! It doesn’t seem so at all! All events are open to the public and free of charge. Former Vermont Poet Laureate, Ellen Bryant Voight, kicked off the beginning of the event with a reading at the Vermont State House.

Among the featured poets is the current Vermont Poet Laureate, Sydnea Lea’s “Quicksilver Spring,” “Ritual,” and “My Wife’s Back,” displayed at the Vermont Arts Council. Peggy Sapphire’s “A Woman” and April Ossman’s “His Mother’s Hair” are displayed as well. If you are wondering, yes, I do have a poem hanging in the window at the gelato place in town- right on the main drag.

I’m curious to know how other cities-and you-celebrate National Poetry Month. Have you read or written anything so far you thought was the best thing ever? Do you find you have more inspiration during the month of April?

Kris Underwood.

Kris Underwood.

Kris Underwood is the Social Media Editor at Hunger Mountain, the Vermont College of Fine Arts journal of the arts. Her poetry has appeared in Literary Mama, Poetry Midwest and The Barefoot Review. Other writing has been featured at the Hunger Mountain blog, the VCFA blog: 36 College St. and the Ploughshares blog. Visit her blog at http://krisunderwood.blogspot.com/

Apr
20

Sorry, Felinghetti: Jessy Randall on the World’s Use for Poetry.

I’m going to celebrate National Poetry Month by having an argument with a 94-year-old-man.

In his 2001 poem “Challenges to Young Poets,” Lawrence Ferlinghetti (born 1919) says “To be a poet at sixteen is to be sixteen; to be a poet at forty is to be a poet.” (He’s probably referencing the 19th century artist Eugene Delacroix, who said something similar.)

Jessy Randall.

Jessy Randall.

I disagree. I think to be a poet at sixteen is to be a poet, and to be a poet at forty is to be a poet. But I do agree that most teenage poets do not stay poets, and I lament that.

When I was in high school I knew many great poets. I was in class with them. I saw them every day. I read their poems every week. I knew they were much better than I was. I KNEW it, objectively. (In college I would argue against the idea of objective quality as hard as I argued for it in high school, but that’s another story.)

Everyone wrote poetry then. Some people hid it more than others, but I was an editor of the high school literary magazine and I’m telling you, EVERYONE wrote poetry. Even the people you would least suspect.

But then, somewhere along the line, they all stopped (except me). I wish they hadn’t. They were so good! I would like to read what they would have written, if they’d kept on writing.

I don’t usually try to defend poetry or say that it helps the world. I’m usually not certain that poetry does anything except make me (and some other people) occasionally happy or sad or some other emotion. This week, however, I read a poem that made me think poetry might serve a larger function.

After the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon, everyone around me (physically and virtually) was upset and didn’t know what to say or do. We mostly threw up our hands. Maybe we reached out to each other a little bit, but mostly we threw up our hands, as we do after school shootings (see this article in The Onion).

Poet Scott Poole, however, wrote a poem. I know Scott a little bit. We read together last year in Spokane, Washington. I’m a huge fan. He is hilarious. Not this time, though. Here’s the poem he shared on Facebook: Read more…