Kanomi (Nth Keppel Island) poetry wokshop in paradise, do you fancy that?

Kanomi (North Keppel Island) is a truly beautiful and eco smart environment off the coast of Yeppoon, Central Queensland, and unlike its sister island Great Keppel, is not an open tourist Island, as much of Kanomi is classified for use by Queensland Education Department,(which includes other stakeholder status).

The workshops are very relaxing and the environment is outstanding: shared community huts facing the foreshore and ocean; numerous eco smart projects; full internet access and office facilities; great catering and many walking tracks (don't bring the hairdryer).

Last time I was on the Island, dolphins were visable daily, and even followed the boat from the Island well past the half way point towards the mainland on our trip home. The workshops cater to all levels of writing skills and mixed genre, poetry is always well catered for, even if you want to skip the bulk of workshop process and just write, worth thinking about?
Here is the blurb from the Uni, and when it's up on the website, I'll post a link and a picture...



Footprints in the Sand: Writing as a Journey

Idiom 23 Magazine’s workshop on
Creative Writing and a Sense of Place
North Keppel Island Environmental Education Centre

September 12-14, 2008

Writer in Residence Dr Lynda Hawryluk
with Kristin Hannaford, Louise Waller and Steve Butler

Cost: $160 includes boat trip, share cabin accommodation and meals.

Transport: Departs from Roslyn Bay Marina for North Keppel Island at 10am on Friday and returns approx. 3pm on Sunday. (Saturday morning departure can be negotiated for visitors travelling long distances).

Inquiries to: Dr Liz Huf
07 49232573 or 07 49383746
l.huf@cqu.edu.au

How to be a poet

how to be a poet

in the mornings
leave the dishes
they will get done - later

go outside
dream a little
listen to the trees talking
the air whispering
birds gossiping

let your words slide
drop off the page
cluster into twos and threes
let them dance
forming their own rhythm

in the evenings
leave the dishes
they will wait till - later

go outside
taste the darkness
savour smells
jasmine, woodsmoke
eucalyptus after rain

let your words discover
small silences
let them drift
pooling in shadows
bubbling into poems

© Heather Matthew 2008

how to be a poet

read everything and everyone
over and over
ignore the naysayers
all the time
pull the knives out
one at a time
look in the mirror
face the image
and don't moan
if you don't like
what you see
ask yourself 'so what'
about everything you write
don't just want to be a poet
don't just try to be a poet
and if you are still writing poetry
don't expect to be published
don't expect anything
not everyone is a writer
not everything is worth reading
life is more important than dreaming
about life and writing about dreams that
are replacing living your life
and for goodness sake, don't
think that just because it seems
like a good story, that if you write
it down, somebody else will think
it is great, there is no great
just the slog and the life and the
poetry and the chance that
you might get it right

draft

Spectare’s thoughts absently

caressed his anger
like a suppressed familiar cat,
half-forgotten as myth. Its threadbare
fur prickled. Its claws bit,
for company, and he felt
imagined pain his owned, his very,
and went out into it, the story,
donning a voice like a coat,
to stand before the self-sure,
feeling as absurd as a man
with a cat on his head,
in the bared town-hall square

like a box orator shouting
at enmities of air:

There are still stars unnamed to us, and more.

(I've been nudging this around in the past week - David Bircumshaw)

Launch of Indigo Journal #2

For all WA poets, or WA visitors
Out of the Asylum Writers' Group with Christchurch Grammar Centre for Ethics invites you to the launch of Indigo Journal Volume 2.
Featuring Frank Sheehan in conversation with Les Murray
Friday 28 March @ 7.30pm
Christchurch Chapel Queenslea Drive Claremont. RSVP by Friday 21 March to dwcontac@bigpond.net.au or 9335 3736

strangling heaven

How do you know that
you're strangling heaven?
Taught to irrelevant
standardized scales
Taught to be standardized,
Christian White Males
or wherever you're placed
and timed
Taught to believe the sublime
is but an affectation,
drug-induced hallucination,
not to be relied upon
when creditors come to call
demanding payment
for providing you with life.
Selling your soul for nickels and dimes,
the working-class creed.
Giving in to everyday crimes,
habituated to need
secondhand pleasures,
pirated treasures
that never succeed in
destroying the pain,
the long season of Hell
you strive to explain
"it's his fault" "it's their fault"
"it's my fault"
all victims of blame.
And you're strangling heaven.
You're making it impossible to survive,
denying your passion to thrive,
denying your worth,
the blessing of birth onto
this mortal stage.
You pace in your cage
as if castrated of will.
And heaven so wants you,
surrounds you, offers
your most deeply hoped for love,
boundless happiness, life eternal,
every pocket of your soul
exquisitely fulfilled.
Heaven offers you her open arms,
and you, in your hellish nightmare,
strangle her
unaware.

(c) March 12, 2008 Laurie Corzett/libramoon

http://emergingvisions.blogspot.com

International poem of the week

I loved this poem of the week that came through my email via poetry international.
http://international.poetryinternationalweb.org

GARMENT


Will it stretch that far? Will it go round three
Continents or four, three hearts or more,
And still slide through a ring ?
Worn and unravelled night and day without
A break, past two time zones, retain
Its sleek, original shape?
How many machines can we put it through,
How many phones, planes, taped voices
And still find it wearable?
Is our love elastic, or some finer,
clinging, skinlike, inward-breathing weave
To make all this bearable ?


© 1993, Ruth Vanita

Ruth Vanita is a poet, editor, translator, academic and activist. Her book of poems, Play of Light (Penguin India) was published in 1994. She is Professor at the University of Montana, formerly Reader at Delhi University. She was founding co-editor of Manushi, an influential journal about women and society, from 1978 to 1990.

http://india.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=11022