Pink Blossom

I went to the toilet then I wiped. There was blood. Ordinarily, and once a month, not such bloggable news. But on this afternoon it was, as I was 11 weeks pregnant.

It wasn't until I became a stepmother that I discovered how adept a woman can become at holding her tongue. And it wasn't until I had a miscarriage that I realised how much goes on in women's lives that doesn't get talked about openly.

What are we hiding? What are we afraid will happen if we assert a new kind of openness?

It's funny that what prompted me to blog about it is what one man said and what another man sang. Maybe funny's the wrong word.

PJ wrote a poem about losing our baby and our dear friend Anthony Petrucci put it to music.

Here it is: the sadness and the wonder of it all.

dn ʎɐʍ sıɥʇ

˙ǝɹǝɥ ɯoɹɟ

Upstanding Citizen

Wombats and Wires

Yesterday after work, PJ and I went up to the neighbourhood centre for the Wombat Awards ceremony – an award given in recognition and appreciation of a person's contributions to our local community.

This is Ken, the winner of the 2009 award. He is a shy man and as he spoke to the small casual crowd, his cheeks went pink with embarrasment at being the centre of attention.

I have recently been invited to sit on the board of the neighbourhood centre so for me last night was also an opportunity to meet the other board members in an informal setting.

After conversations with these and other interesting people, egg sandwiches and glasses of bubbly, PJ and I came home and watched Man on Wire, about the highwire walker, Philippe Petit.

Oh what beauty! What audacity and poetry! One individual holding onto the hearts and dreams of every individual, balanced, poised up in the sky like a breath personified.

Yet after he walked between the twin towers Petit alienated his girlfriend and the friends who had helped propel him to his height of fame. The grand performer composing poems with his body on a blank sky; his best work now behind him, his contribution to an economy of extravagance. He walks his wire at the end of the film, a man alone in his garden – a community of one.

Your Dog Dies

Yesterday's post about my name being sounded out reminds me of this Raymond Carver poem. It's one of my favourites.

Your Dog Dies

it gets run over by a van.

you find it at the side of the road

and bury it.

you feel bad about it.

you feel bad personally,

but you feel bad for your daughter

because it was her pet,

and she loved it so.

she used to croon to it

and let it sleep in her bed.

you write a poem about it.

you call it a poem for your daughter,

about the dog getting run over by a van

and how you looked after it,

took it out into the woods

and buried it deep, deep,

and that poem turns out so good

you're almost glad the little dog

was run over, or else you'd never

have written that good poem.

then you sit down to write

a poem about writing a poem

about the death of that dog,

but while you're writing you

hear a woman scream

your name, your first name,

both syllables,

and your heart stops.

after a minute, you continue writing.

she screams again.

you wonder how long this can go on.

Without the Rind

Several months ago, I wrote about World Dividers; how the world can be divided into two categories, those who do certain things and those who don't.

I was too quick to judge, it seems. 

Last week I had tea with someone I know very well. This is her iPod with the protective plastic still on the click wheel. When I saw it I was shocked. I always thought people who left the plastic on their electricals were scared of life, like old people who cover their couches with clear PVC.

But now I've changed my mind. This person I know is fierce in her approach to living.

Protective layers make me think of these lines from Nin Andrews's poem, Notes on the Orgasm:

The orgasm will peel you like an orange. You may feel exposed, raw, even wounded. The orgasm wants you to live life without the rind.

When We Lost Teeth

Z lost another tooth!

When I was growing up, when we lost teeth, the Tooth Fairy would visit and leave us some money and a poem about how the tooth was lost.

It looks like that same fairy visits Z now.

Click for bigger.

The Birthing

My folks are in town and I spent the better part of this morning with my mum sitting at a corner table at a café writing in our journals.

One of the techniques we use to get us started, something Mum has been doing for years, is to take a line from a poem and then incorporate it into our work: The line itself, a single word, or maybe just the sentiment.

Today's poem:

O

I don't do drop ins. There I've said it.

I know they're a part of living in a small community in the country, but I really haven't got the hang of them yet. People coming over, dropping in, swinging by.

I grew up on a main road in the city so we never had friends just stopping in. And now I work from home and honour the distinction between my private and public self.

There are however people who I love dropping in. My sister who lives nearby and a handful of friends who won't be alarmed if I hang out the washing while we chat, if the house is untidy or if I am still in my walking gear from that morning.

Our delightful friend, O is one such person. When he drops round he makes our day all that much better, even when it's not going badly. He recently sent me some of his latest poems that make me feel like he's just come by when I read them.

More here.

Critical Animals

At the beginning of October, PJ and I and our wonderful friend O are heading up to Newcastle for This is Not Art. We have just booked our flights and I am very excited. 

One component of the festival is Critical Animals, a creative research symposium where we three Victorians will be presenting papers - PJ's is about how the corporatised State abuses our landbase, O is presenting a series of poems on the correlation between suffering and joy in the everyday, and mine is a paper on gender ethics and violence on YouTube. 

Our panel is called Pathologies of Civilisation, and for anyone who's going to be in that neck of the woods on Thursday, 2nd of October, come on down to the Hunter Room, Newcastle City Hall at 11.30am.

Yesterday the event organisers sent through this image for participants to include on their, "website, blog, myspace, facebook, email signature, t-shirt, full-sleeve tatt, etc, etc."

Slow

PJ received a call about the caterers.

He is giving a paper next week at an international poetics conference at the State Library. The event is fully catered and on the forms he had to fill out, he was asked if he had any dietary requirements.

He wrote Slow Food - a term the organiser had never heard, and which had completely baffled the caterers. The caterers!

Think Fast Food, he told them, and it's the opposite.

Today's blog post was going to end here, with a nice wrap up about the fast food approach to everything that once was nourishing. I even thought about composing a victual verse.

But. My laptop died this morning (for the third time in its two year life). Lucky for me PJ is not working from home today and I am able to get a few things done on his computer. Though I am unable to get my work done as the software I need has gone too.

And so. I am forced to revert to the analogue. To take deep breaths and go about my offline business. To. Slow. Right. Down. And notice all the things that I haven't been noticing.

More Than the Show Itself

Nine years ago, PJ won a competition to create a sculpture that runs alongside our local library.

His Poemscape: A Physical Anthology comprises 18 hand-carved local Eucalyptus plinths, each with a brass plaque on top containing a poem. Beside each plinth, he planted an apple tree.

In summer we water the trees, in winter PJ prunes them and at the end of apple season we take all the fallen fruit home to compost. 

In autumn, I love riding my bike past the trees and picking an apple to munch on. In fact, one of my favourite things to do is to go biking around this hilly town, filling my basket with fruit gleaned from public trees to eat if they're ripe and stew if they're too much so.

Agnes Varda's gorgeous film, The Gleaners and I, is a political, moral, aesthetic and personal enquiry into the age old tradition of gleaning, which these days falls under the banner of freeganism.

I am thinking of PJ's Poemscape, Varda's film and Freeganism, because of a UK game show that I read about that is due to air online this month.

Ready Steady Skip is a game show where "needlessly wasted food is recovered from the bin and turned into delicious dishes before your very eyes!"

The Iron Chef meets Oscar the Grouch?

Like freegans, I'm not interested in being part of the conventional shopping economy, and I am very much interested in becoming a producer, not a consumer. It is this aspect - of self-sufficiency - that interests me about the show, more than the show itself.