I'm Back!

I can’t believe it’s been almost nine months since I performed poetry. I could have had a baby in that time! Oh, wait...actually, I did. Then raised her up into a beautiful, chubby eight month old girl, started my son at school and embarked on all sorts of other unromantic un-bohemian un-poet-like domesticities.

There were many revelations during my time off the Melbourne poetry circuit. I thought I’d desperately miss performing. I didn’t. I thought I’d write much more poetry. I didn’t (maybe ten poems or so in the last six months). After two thirds of a year barely writing and not reading much either, I thought poetry would all but forget I existed. Seemed it had.

But then last week poetry came knocking, red-eyed and apologetic, at the inside of my skull like it was there all along - just couch-potatoing around lying low with a dreadful hangover. And after I finished beating poetry about the ears with the pumpkin masher I’d been using to make baby food, we sat down, sheepish, together and made sweet, sweet poems all night long.

And since then, poetry and I haven’t been able to keep our metaphors off each other. We’ve even been secretly making plans for our next book. Well, not so secretly now I guess, since I just online-outed us. So things, it seems, are looking a little less dirty nappyish and increasingly more poetic.

But tomorrow afternoon? Tomorrow afternoon will be the real writer’s block breaker or maker. I’m performing a feature set at the Dan O’Connell Hotel in Carlton. There are two fifteen minute sets to fill, so in addition to performing my fifteen minute work (for only the second time in public) Some Dream Was Brewing (which Going Down Swinging commissioned for the Melbourne Writers Festival last year), I’ll be reading new poems and also performing the choreopoem The First Word with African Writers Tinashe and Fadzai, who I’ve been mentoring for the Still Waters African Women Writers Network. The madness kicks off around 2pm and won't be done till 5pm. There's open mic, if you're game (and lots of liquid bravado to be had)

Then next Thursday evening, the choreopoem will be performed by the three of us in the BMW Edge theatre at Federation Square at the opening night of the Emerging Writers Festival (tickets available here). And on the following Sunday, you can catch me at the Melbourne Town Hall program for the Emerging Writers Festival as part of a panel discussion for the topic:

A Different Voice:You’re a 50 year old woman, your character is a 12 year old boy… How to handle voice? Character? Is it research or does it come naturally? Do people assume you are your characters? How to get realistic dialogue? With Alan Bissett, Maxine Clarke, Simmone Howell and Tony Moore. Hosted by Ruby J Murray (book here to attend)

Ladies and gentlepoets of the blogosphere, I’m back!