Talkin' Poetry with Lorraine Marwood

This is a poetry sort of month for me - so it gives me great (perfectly timed!!) pleasure to join the blog tour (read = party) for Lorraine Marwood's latest collection of poetry, A Ute Picnic and Other Australian Poems. I love this line "Cat snores flip up, out onto the warm croak of day". I love the whole book. And the front cover.

Now I know Lorraine won't mention it but just in case you don't know, her verse novel Starjumps was shortlisted in the Prime Minister's Literary Awards for Children's Fiction. Go poetry!

Welcome Lorraine. Tell us more...

To hunger for poetry

To celebrate the release of my latest collection of poems “A Ute picnic and other Australian poems', I've been thinking about writing and about poetry.

Often when I take workshops with poetry the catch cry seems to be how do you tackle poetry teaching? Is it because we don't consider poetry the daily necessity like prose, newspapers, non -fiction? Or is it that we have this idea that poetry exists on another level which means that our heads have to be up in the clouds or that poetry is abstract? Yet all around us little snatches of images and glimpses of poetry tremble at the edge of our vision if we would only recognise them.

To me poetry is very concrete. If it's about an abstract topic like love then a poem should be able to conjure up love in sensory detail, so that it is tangible to the reader. It needs strong nouns and verbs and specific detail.

I have lots of ideas for ways to use poetry; incidentally amongst art work, on cards, make a daily fragment of poetry on yearly calendars, record the journey of my garden through poetry, record the telling details of life as my children grew up... these are the strengths of poetry. Sketching the minutiae of life in word pictures.

Here's one fragment:

Outside

The air outside this room is not static
now that the wind ripples under the
earth’s carpet- ripples in long drawn out
air socks, shaking the dust of autumn out
about the lawn, above privet hedge, becoming a skipping
rope for the white cabbage moth to toss and turn
like some flimsy ship in full sail.
© Lorraine Marwood

Then there's the idea that poetry needs to have an accountability ticket, a meal ticket...
And to this end I wrote strategies for encouraging children to write in the magazine 'Literature Base'- I combined my love of literacy with my love of the writing process -trying to make that writing process a bit more transparent for both teacher and student. I wrote techniques for mask poetry, conversation poetry,show -off poetry, Images poetry to name a few. Techniques that I would use as a way into a written piece. Providing scaffolding yet allowing freedom of risk taking.

And it works. The techniques I have devised- using all my literacy and teaching knowledge and experience has resulted in 50 minutes of power packed poetry encouragement- I love hearing the students read their poems. And they can write some powerful lines!

When I was co-judge of the Dorothy MacKellar poetry competition for two years with fellow poet Claire Saxby, I was struck by how much secondary students especially, needed the outlet of poetry- all that angst about who they were, who loved them, betrayal, trust... they NEED the vehicle of poetry to express these innermost feelings.

And this is the secret surprise with poetry. I never know what will flow out onto the paper. It's like upending a special box where little bits of treasure have been accumulating for a long time.
Recently I went back to the writing journals I kept thirty years ago- gulp and I'm utterly amazed at how much poetry I was writing then and the lines and the topics are like early prototypes of some of the poems that are now in my latest collection. There was a huge gap during the child rearing years when I suppressed my need to write and so the journals were dormant until the sixth child was at pre school. Then the writing/poems became a torrent.

To me journalling in poetry, in snatches this way has led to published work over the years. It's exercising the writing muscles for the real race later on.

The poignancy and timelessness of a poetic moment is best expressed in this four line poem below- written when I was 21( a long time ago) yet this same moon lights the night sky again and again.

Egg yolk moon rising
behind night silhouettes
soundless, tasteless, untouchable
yet immeasurably beautiful

© Lorraine Marwood

Thanks Sandy for your generous hosting of a taste of poetry. http://www.lorrainemarwood.com/

And a final note from me because Lorraine would never say an awful pun like this but... tomorrow the poetry ute will be pulling in to Sheryl Gwyther's blog.

I Love Verse Novels

I am a big fan of the verse novel. Until Stephen Herrick's Cold Skin (2008) landed in my reviewer pile, I had never read one. I thought they were full of poetry. And while I like poetry, I never seem to have the time it requires from me.

But a review is a job (although a really fun one!) - and the cover was particularly striking - so I started reading. An hour and a half later I had finished. The verse novel might be poetry but in its most readable form. Rather than being daunting, it is very accessible. In fact, a verse novel is a book of with many very short chapters to be read with little bites or a long buffet style feast.

Immediately after reading Cold Skin, I sought out Herrick's backlist. Lonesome Howl remains a favourite - great cover, great story, haunting words. And then I sought out even Herrick himself. I was a true convert.

I moved along to read as many verse novels as possible. My favourites so far - excluding the two already mentioned - Irini Savviddes Against the Tide, Sally Murphy's Pearl Verses the World and Steven Herrick's Do Wrong Ron. On my deskto read next is Lorraine Marwood's latest, Starjumps. I'm already entranced by the cover. And on my to read list asap is Sherryl Clark's Sixth Grade Style Queen (Not), CBCA 2008 Honour Book for Young Readers.

So far I haven't made it outside Australia - so many verse novels to catch up with before I head overseas. I'll keep you posted and in the interim - my interview with Steven Herrick. And just in case anyone wants to ask, am I going to write one? *sigh* I would love to have a go but so many other ideas are calling I don't think I have enough time left in life.

The Verse Master - reprinted from The Reading Stack (March 2008)
The author of over ten verse novels, short listed many times for the CBCA Book of the Year, Steven Herrick is undoubtedly Australia’s master of the verse novel. I asked him whether he found young readers reluctant to try a format readily associated with poetry. He explained that while some were hesitant, once they read the first few pages, they were generally hooked. “Many teenage boys, in particular, have told me they really enjoyed the economy of words – they were into the story before they knew it.”

Steven’s comment describes my own experience perfectly. I picked up Cold Skin, attracted by the striking and sinister cover. I’d never read a verse novel before. I was intrigued, so I read a few pages immediately. Soon, I was totally engrossed. Verse novels are high impact. The reader automatically develops a close personal relationship with the narrators. The stream of dialogue makes the verse novel very confronting. At the same time it is like being in a conversation. Very accessible. And so is Steven himself. You can hear him on YouTube and he is a regular performer touring from North Queensland to Tasmania to Croatia, Spain and the Netherlands. “I think my job is two-fold – to write poetry and perform it.”

Steven writes verse novels for a wide audience. I recently read Do Wrong Ron, the story of a boy who can do nothing right until he meets Charlie the guinea pig and lonely Isabelle. Together they plan something special for Isabelle’s nana. This is a wonderful story of friendship and working together. Lonesome Howl is a novel for young adult readers, the story of two children on isolated farms learning to overcome prejudice as they search for the mythical wolf. It is a story of family – its strengths and weaknesses.

I asked Steven about his preferred target audience. Not only did he not have one, it was irrelevant to him. “What I’m trying to do is write a coherent story with interesting characters. The fact that those characters might be ten years old, or eighteen, or eighty doesn’t change my priority… which is to get inside their head and enjoy spending time with them.” Steven’s novels do more than that. They place us all inside his characters’ heads.

In the murder mystery Cold Skin there are nine narrators – young and old, victim and suspect, family and strangers, enemies and friends. But no matter what category each might fall into, we know them equally well. As we read each page, we are hearing them speak directly to us. “I wanted to write about how one incident can have such a profound effect on the whole ommunity,” Steven said. What better way to do it than to allow us to directly look through so many eyes.