I was recently invited along to read at the launch of the third issue of Not Very Quiet, a Canberra-based women’s poetry journal.
Not Very Quiet is a very welcoming, social group within the Canberra literary scene. Their events are good fun and have a friendly atmosphere. The Issue 3 launch event was no exception.
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This is the third time one of my poems has been published by Not Very Quiet (thank you, NVQ!). The poem I submitted this time was called ‘What Now’.
Funnily enough, the poem was written after I had scraped the bottom of the inspiration barrel and come up with nothing but a few splinters and an unappetising smell of fish clinging to my hair. I had seen an online post about NVQ seeking poems for their third issue and I had thought it would be nice to enter. Then I realised that I had nothing to submit. What’s more, I was feeling entirely out of ideas.
So I began trying to create an idea out of nothing. Yet trying very deliberately to write poetry – to deliberately write something meaningful – comes with a certain irony. Actively trying to craft a poem with a deeper meaning feels disingenuous when not even a grain of good-quality, non-processed #organic inspiration is presenting itself. I felt like a fraud with nothing to say.
It crossed my mind, however, that plenty of people must deliberately try to write deep and meaningful things and feel fraudulent all the time – an idea I found rather amusing. So many industrious barrel-scrapers holed up at our desks, deadlines approaching! Anyway, I was tickled enough by the irony of the situation that I decided to write a poem about trying to write a poem instead.Whether a poem about the irony of writing a poem when one has nothing to say actually says something, however, remains inconclusive.
Does this poem have any worth? You decide.
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What Now (first published by Not Very Quiet here)
More frame than picture
All lamp-rubbing and no genie
Rain drowning the rutabaga
Waiting for inspiration – never strikes twice
Words of a feather, to pin into a cap;
Describe for me unseen scenes; I see
This problem is a part of me
Poetry should be more ‘O!’; less trying
And impress that we are not doing so
It’s a party one attends but is too insecure to enjoy
Trotting out ideas like daughters in finishing school; we forget
To teach them how to speak past their ivory collars.