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)

 

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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.