Thursday, September 23, 2010

Marble Tornedo

My girlfriend Heather experienced a
weather adventure. The havoc she caused
upset the boys squatting at marbles.
She had several hundred of her own, shoulder-
slung in a string bag, betting everyone.
As the storm bullied clouds off Barrenjoey,
she joined their game with forty of their
Tom Bowlers, Cat’s-eyes and Peewees in the rink.
At the line, the wind lifted her skirt, her plaits
like marionette strings. The Big Bonker she fired
carried itself nicely to a suitable distance
inside the circle, shooting glass for miles.
Strangely, though she collected all their marbles,
she wasn’t injured by their hailstones,
and remained intact.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Saturday, September 11, 2010

John Ashbery on PBS News














A Perfect Hat

I forget what it is I would rather be doing.
Floral and verbal, I am in the thick
of what I would rather be doing, jumping off a cliff,
rousing subordinates. There are just so many things
one would rather be caught out doing, like measuring the tree,
the swift shadow of which menaces us and bluebirds.
Oh the mill sang of many things but its wheel
was always rolling whether you noticed it or not.
The wheel that is still today but much larger.
It cautioned us to leave but we slept
the exact duration of the idea that never leaves us now.

And this is the perfect poem after teaching Personification on Saturday 11th September, so I thought I would post Ashbery's poem here. During class, we had a long discussion about 'pathetic fallacy' and the difference between this kind of trope and personification. I felt that if we were to worry about such terminology as 'pathetic fallacy' this might stifle our creativity while writing personification. Eventually, we reasoned, that we could attribute human feelings to a poem. Here Ashbery attributes "thinking" (or is it some kind of annoyance for the poet?) to the voice of the hat. Rainer Maria Rilke attributes the emotion of 'loss of freedom' in his poem, The Panther.


Bounty

Bounty
Prose Poetry

The Five Lives of Ms Bennett

The Five Lives of Ms Bennett
A Family Saga

The Ozone Cafe

The Ozone Cafe
White Collar Crime

The Last Asbestos Town

The Last Asbestos Town
Available from Amazon

Evangelyne

Evangelyne
Published by Australian Poetry Centre, Melbourne

of Arc & Shadow

of Arc & Shadow
Published by Sunline Press, WA

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MBA (Wrtg) ECowan

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Perth, Western Australia, Australia
Helen Hagemann holds an MA in Writing from Edith Cowan University, has three poetry books: Evangelyne & Other Poems published by Australian Poetry, Melbourne (2009) and of Arc & Shadow published by Sunline Press, Perth (2013). Bounty: prose poetry is published by Oz.one Publishing in 2024. She has three novels published The Last Asbestos Town (2020), The Ozone Café (2021) and The Five Lives of Ms Bennett a result of her Masters degree at ECU (2006), is published by Oz.one Publishing (2023).

Helen Hagemann MBA (Wrtg): ECowan

Helen Hagemann MBA (Wrtg): ECowan
Author & Poet

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