Tag Archives: The Blue Dressing Gown – poems

February 24, 2012 · 6:36 pm

February Pin-Up Week #4: Ross Donlon Catches Poems

February has but a handful of days left, which means Summer is also all but gone… It is also time to say goodbye to our February Pin-Up Poet, Ross Donlon, but never fear, he will be hear in Brisbane before the month is out performing at Riverbend Books and SpeedPoets. And he is also running a workshop while he is in town, which is what we got to talking about this week.

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I wanted to ask about the workshop you are running in Brisbane titled ‘Catching Poems’. What can participants expect to come away with at the end of the day?

Yes, I’ve begun to call my workshops ‘Catching Poems’ picking up on what someone said – I forget who, ‘The world is full of poems. They just need an edit.’  The class will be writing poems to begin and reading poems aloud in the last session.

I have a couple of mantras I put on the board and one is by Frank O’Hara : ‘Follow Your Nerve’.

So the aim is to have the class come away with a number of drafts from short bursts of intensive writing following some ideas and stimulus and models I supply. Ideally there will be ‘useful lines’ or ‘useful passages’, even a ‘useful phrase’, they they can then take home and build into a finished poem from the exercises.

It is not a class where poets will be pondering and mulling for an extended period of time and chatting with me. Others are put off or lose concentration with that muttering, I think. I do ‘go around the class’ and invite poets to read their ‘best bit’ be it a  phrase, or line, or sentence or pasage – more as the class develops and poets become more relaxed. So, if the class goes away with, say 6 ‘useful bits’ in 6 different kinds of poems to work – that’s what I’m after.

I was at the last launch of a major Australian literary journal. There were six readers, including me, but an observer present said that only three of us could be understood. The rest were too fast and  / or indistinct because they were too far from the mike. Diction is helped if the pace is right. So I think this is a useful skill to learn whether for reading poetry – or at your wedding!

So in the last session we will do microphone  technique and reading for an audience where each person reads a poem they have chosen (not their own)  using the mike. I will model what I do, then  it’s likely each poet will go through their poem a couple of times with me offering some advice.

In sum, I hope the class will take away: some useful drafts / some new poems and names to follow up / some ideas about reading technique.

I’m also happy to do a Q and A if there’s time about my experiences as regards publishing or reading or anything else about writing and reading poetry.

There are still places left in the workshop, so for those lucky enough to be able to attend, here are the details:

Catching Poems w/ Ross Donlon

Join award-winning Victorian poet Ross Donlon for an all-day session, giving poets ideas to catch and edit poems as well as tips and practice on how to read for public performance. This is a hands-on workshop using both formal and more open structures, so poets can expect to take away a number of drafts. There will be time for writing and sharing. The afternoon session will also include tips on mic use and public performance techniques with flexibility for other interests which may arise from the early session.

Ross is published in both newspapers and academic journals and has read at festivals both in Australia and England. He has won prizes both for the written and spoken word, including the Launceston Cup, premier spoken word event of the Tasmanian Poetry Festival and the Wenlock Festival Poetry Prize (U.K.) judged by Carol Ann Duffy, English Poet Laureate. His latest book, The Blue Dressing Gown and other poems, is published by Profile Poetry.

When: Sunday 4th March 2012
Time: 10am – 3pm
Where: Room 1.A, State Library of Queensland
Cost: $65

Please contact sarah.qldpoetry@gmail.com for further information or to enrol in the workshop.

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At Haberfield Demonstration School

I was with the boys in our group
at the meeting place, a peppercorn tree,
eating lunch inside the shadow.
The peppercorns’ bright, spicy scent
remains in memory
the way it stays on fingers with the stain.

Soon I would be ready for the Big School.
Boys were separated from the girls’
asphalt playground of rectangles, circles and squares.
Boys played wars up
and down a sloping paddock beyond the classrooms.
We heard the cries a continent away.

Suddenly the talk came to fathers and what they did.
As turns edged around the circle like a clock
I discovered that I could not speak.
What was it that could I not say?

The bell saved me as I was falling.
A huge part of who I thought I was
had avalanched, as if a shelf dropped
from a mountain.

I was an obedient child
but I ran home from school then to Nan,
my family skittled by a missing pin.

We sat on her bed and looked at photographs
and a face the size of a fingernail.
Bill. From the war.
She fanned out pictures like playing cards.

It was a summer’s day.
The bedroom’s lace curtains glowed in the heat.
Wind blew sweet scent from Peek Frean’s biscuit factory.
The bitumen noise of cars rushed down our street.

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February 17, 2012 · 6:47 pm

February Pin-Up Week #3: Ross Donlon on the art of reading

February is racing along and the Brisbane Poetry Scene is set to explode with a number of gigs over the coming weeks. One of the featured readers at said gigs is our February Pin-Up Poet, Ross Donlon, so this week, I asked Ross about the art of reading.

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On your first visit to the Tasmanian Poetry Festival, you took out the coveted Tasmanian Poetry Cup which is awarded to the poet who receives the loudest audience response. I have had the pleasure of seeing you read on a handful of occasions and you always seem to be incredibly ‘present’ in your work. What is it you love about being in front of an audience and what kind of experience do you hope to create for them?

I was thrilled to win the Launceston Cup, only the second mainliner (if you’ll pardon the joke) to do so at that time – Lauren Williams, a poet I greatly admire, was the other. I enjoy the reading experience, especially, of course, if you get a sense of connection with an audience. I have read to nobody at all – and did read (seriously – in Shepparton), with 5  other poets reading to an audience of 2 (Ceduna) – as well as larger crowds. Once I sold 6 books to an audience of 4, so I was very pleased about that. I’ve come a long way from the man aged 25 who couldn’t speak at his own wedding for shyness. Of course, sometimes the chemistry is all there on both sides, sometimes not quite. Festival crowds are generous I’ve found. Sometimes the small inner sanctum type audience is harder to reach.

I came to teaching eventually, which was the key for me – facing classes of Year 9s makes you find things in yourself – I found that part of my thing was to sometimes ‘play’ with the audience/class in that show teachers do – and I did some lectures for Yr 12 texts, taught professional writing at Deakin and Melbourne unis, so all of that helped.

Frankly, I do like to entertain at a reading, meaning I do like to throw a lighter or humorous (we hope) poem into the mix. It seems to me that a more thoughtful or discursive poem has a chance of being heard more if you’ve just made people laugh – and I’m on about the total experience of being human, so some light in the dark – and I like to display range of form and content. I’m an emotional poet but interested in social commentary (Geoff Page described me in a review as ‘Swiftian’ – I loved that).

I am not an intellectual poet but I want to be understood without sacrificing craft.

I like to give an audience a good time but push them emotionally or share an experience in a new or fresh way, if that makes any sense.

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Ross will feature at both SpeedPoets and the first Riverbend Books Reading for 2012. Here are the details for Riverbend, and believe me, this is an event that regularly sells out, so make sure you book your ticket soon!

Queensland Poetry Festival, QLD Writers Centre & Riverbend Books are proud to present the first event in the Riverbend Poetry Series for 2012. The February event features local poetic powerhouse, Samuel Wagan Watson and winner of the 2011 Val Vallis Award, Rachael Briggs alongside vibrant Central QLD poet, Kristin Hannaford and recent winner of the Wenlock Festival Poetry Prize (UK), Ross Donlon (VIC).

The Riverbend Poetry Series is one of the state’s finest, so be there to get the 2012 readings off to a flying start!

Date: Tuesday February 28
Location: Riverbend Books, 193 Oxford St. Bulimba
Time: Doors open for the event at 6pm for a 6:30pm start
Tickets: $10
Bookings: Online or call the store on (o7) 3899 8555

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And since it was Valentine’s Day this week, I will leave you with one of Ross’s love poems. The simmering, with her.

with her

and at last she comes to bed
the blue nightie
caught below her knees
and as she bends -  like a girl picking flowers -
her breast moves with the movement down
her hair falls to one side

there’s a scent of rose and jasmine
and her nightcream glows
as she switches off the light
and climbs towards me
while I wait in my singlet and skin
with a useless book and glasses

nearly sixty
yet we slide beneath the sheet
like children slipping beneath the first wave of summer
and it’s she who turns  first
to fold her hair before it’s caught
as I turn to hold her
my palm floating across her back
pausing then stroking again – like soothing  something young and wild
shifting her thigh across mine
kissing her lips like a kiss before sleep
when it’s really hello how are you tonight?
as she sighs and says
this is nice
and our bodies move together
like an answer

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February 10, 2012 · 8:49 pm

February Pin-Up Week #2: Ross Donlon talks residencies and prize winning poems

Last week, I posted the first part of my discussion with February Pin-Up Poet, Ross Donlon. This week the discussion continues as Ross talks candidly about residencies and ‘prize winning poems.’

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You have had a great deal of success in recent years, winning The Wenlock Festival Poetry Prize and the Varuna Dorothy Hewett Flagship Fellowship for Poetry in 2010 as well as being awarded residencies in Norway and Varuna. I would love to hear about some of the experiences that these opportunities have brought about. I am also interested to know, how they may have shaped your work as a poet.

(Part 1 of the interview can be found here)

I found the residency in Norway by surfing the web. I had decided I was not well credentialed enough to land an Australia Council Rome or Paris, so I would go my own way, pay my own fare but see if I could land somewhere in Scandinavia and stay there for free. There was more luck in that I connected with terrific people in an Artists’ House in Western Norway, on Hardangerfjord.

I did quite a lot of writing in Aalvik for nearly three months, met marvelous people from all over the world and wrote the draft, among others, of Midsummer Night, which lately won the MPU International Poetry Competition. It is a more discursive poem for me, taking in a few things, including witch burnings in 1621 – but also how a state expresses regret – after using torture to get to the ‘truth’  – and yes, I wonder why there aren’t memorials in this country expressing regret for the destruction of the indigenous culture which was overwhelmed after the invasion of 1788. I hadn’t thought about it quite like that before I went to Norway.

I have been invited back and am going back in March this year for 6/7 weeks to work a bit more closely with local visual artists. In a knock-on effect, Els, one of the co-ordinators of the house, put me in touch with someone in Germany, who has offered me 10 days in Heidelberg, so I’ll be there in June.

In more luck, I was selected by Varuna – it works as a kind of draw from submissions – to have a month at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland and I’ll be there for all of May. I want to see if there are poems there for me about my Irish ancestors – the people who left for Australia and the U.S.

All of the above have enriched my life beyond measure – naturally there are down parts eg wrecked back for a few months – but not enough to take away the thrills! The only downside is that these places and people become part of your life and I want to be there as well as here regularly. I need a Poet’s Pocket Lear Jet.

What else has it meant? Well, I have also been as professional as I can be. I have an excellent website designer who helps –so that I can give fair due to what I’ve done to be able to roll it all along a bit more. The ‘it’ for me is in the travel and meeting great, creative people – it all feeds my creativity. I hope to get residencies in the United States, where I now have contacts and who knows where else. I love Italy, for example, and would love a few months there – still skipping the  Australia Council.

It’s funny, I never saw myself as a ‘prize winning poet’ and never thought I wrote such a thing as a ‘prize wining poem’ – and there is such a poem. For one thing (and it’s a topic of interest to me) most major competitions in Australia call for longer poems of 100 – even 200 lines. I don’t think this is so common in England and so I wonder about that – and the thinking behind it. Is the notion that you can’t say anything significant in a poem unless you use 100 to 200 lines?  If that’s the case I don’t agree.

Shaping my work? Although poems about my father were a focus for about 18 months – and some go back ten years – I am largely an intuitive poet and so it’s more ‘what comes up’. I have about 25-30 poems towards a new book. There’s a lot of death in them – but from all angles – but I think they’ll be more travel. ‘Death and Travel’ – that’s not a bad couple of subjects?

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The Boy and the Suitcase

A suitcase was known to a small boy.

It was a tartan patterned suitcase, made in China, manufactured in a large factory that made backpacks, bags and the like. A production line of hundreds of workers worked in the factory and had done so for years.

I think there may even be a museum somewhere whose purpose is to display the history of bags, packs and suitcases with their various designs and uses.

The tartan suit case was unusual in that it lived in two homes. In one house it was kept in a dark wardrobe with safe, folded clothes. In the other house it stayed on the floor between noises in the kitchen and bedroom, some muted, some loud. There were sometimes sudden floods of light.

Every month the suitcase traveled between the two houses by car. When it was time to visit, neat sets of clothes and toys were packed and the suitcase would travel in the car with the boy.

On the last visit there were hours of calm, then suddenly an explosion of sound and then silence. A day passed. The lid was opened with a burst of light and crying, and the boy was folded like clothes into the suitcase, after which it was closed, locked and carried to a car.

It will not be the first time a suitcase has been placed in water to drown. It may not be the first time a small boy has been pressed into a suitcase, to play or be punished. It may not be the first time a tartan suitcase of moderate size has risen to the surface of a suburban lake and been opened to find a small boy inside.

But it always seems as though it is the first time.

Then, as old rites in ancient Egypt or the peat bogs of Denmark, the case will be opened and a body raised to the small sun watching in the sky like a host.

(first published in Meanjin)

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You can read more of Ross’s poetry at:

Mascara Literary Review, Stillcraic and at the Varuna Blog where you can also hear Ross reading from his collection, The Blue Dressing Gown.

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February 3, 2012 · 6:43 pm

February Pin-Up Week #1: introducing, Ross Donlon

January has come and gone and already the year is gathering momentum. The poetry event calendar in Brisbane is really starting to fill up and one of the fine poets to be hitting our stages this month is Victorian, Ross Donlon. And I am ecstatic that Ross has agreed to be the February Pin-Up! Here’s part 1 of our discussion about his recent successes.

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You have had a great deal of success in recent years, winning The Wenlock Festival Poetry Prize and the Varuna Dorothy Hewett Flagship Fellowship for Poetry in 2010 as well as being awarded residencies in Norway and Varuna. I would love to hear about some of the experiences that these opportunities have brought about. I am also interested to know, how they may have shaped your work as a poet.

It’s been a lovely and unexpected run – and a lot I see now, connected to the suite of poems I had in mind to write about my father. It was that concept, I guess, that won the Dorothy Hewett. It seems to be something that appeals to people – the lost father sort of thing – that has carried over to the Wenlock prize and the book itself. The book has been very well received and had a couple of lovely reviews, but it is the ‘father section’ (the section I was most worried about) which has worked.

Varuna was very important because of the boost to my confidence. I had never won anything like this before – had won no poetry competitions at all – even been placed – in Australia. And in the time I had there I produced a body of useful drafts as well as being able to transcribe a number of primary source documents (some of which I broke into line breaks to become found poems in the book). At this stage I was worried that the originals would overwhelm any poems I could write about or around them, but that seems to have worked out well. I wrote the long prose poem /short story based on Raymond Chandler’s hard boiled detective, Philip Marlow’s, voice there

I wrote the first draft of The Blue Dressing Gown when I was at a residency in Hobart. It was the best poem in a group of four called ‘Relics’. Then at the Tasmanian Writers’ Centre I saw a flyer for the Arvon International Competition (which I’d never heard of before)  and that it would be judged by Carol Ann Duffy, whose work I admire both for the skill and accessibility. I thought, although it was a bit short, The Blue Dressing Gown might appeal to her.

Being shortlisted for the Arvon in 2010 (from over 4,000 international entries) was huge and I had to go to London for the occasion, whether I came first or bottom of the shortlist, so I did – with the help of CAL.

As turned out I won the Wenlock Festival Award within the Arvon, since they were looking for a poem that touched on the theme of ‘the pity of war.’ (Wenlock is in Shropshire – Wilfred Owen / Houseman territory)  I hadn’t seen my poem like that but there you go. I can see why it could.

I was very well received in London and made friends with the Wenlock Festival chairperson,  Liz Roberts, who was there for the awards – that led to an invitation to spend a few days in Wenlock with her and Ennis – that to an invitation to read as a feature at the festival in 2011. You can see that luck has played a part in this. I am also invited to read there in April this year as well as run a poetry workshop for them.

More faith in the way I write and hopefully put over a poem is what I have got out of it – following my own way.

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Trawling in the Arctic

Sometimes we trawled with the midnight sun
a gold bullet hole in the horizon,
sometimes in sleet, the cod masked in ice.
Once we trawled in the tail of a cyclone
the stern under wash, the sea slashed
black and white into spray.

We got to the galley by counting waves,
sliding and crashing across the deck
and I thought of the seafarer,
in the Old English poem,
a peat bog man, offshore in a storm,
caught by cold, raw wind wracking,
ice biting, as he hunted for home.

Still young, I watched a coast creep by
while the ship rode waves like a surfer,
then rucked my oilskin around my ears
and ran, regardless of wind, spray
and counting.
At such times, looking out
from my own tightrope, I trawl for my father
in a ‘Frisco dive, rain ramming, his walk home wet,
lit only by neon, and nobody there.

I reflect, like someone watching the sea,
how he waited for ships from the Ferry Hotel,
the irony tolling across the Pacific
to a war wife and son in Sydney;
one barely known, one never seen,
as he buffeted life towards death.

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Born in Sydney, Ross Donlon now lives in Castlemaine, Victoria, where he convenes a popular poetry reading and publishes Mark Time Books. He is published in newspapers and journals and has featured at poetry festivals in Australia and England. He won the Launceston Cup, the premier spoken word prize of the Tasmanian Poetry Festival in 2009 and was the Varuna Writers’ House Dorothy Hewett Fellow in 2010.

He has won international poetry competitions including, The Wenlock Festival Poetry Prize (U.K.) judged by Carol Ann Duffy (2010) and the MPU International Poetry Competition (2011) and was shortlisted for this year’s Bridport Prize (U.K.) from 8, 200 entries.

His latest book, The Blue Dressing Gown and other poems, is published by Profile Poetry.

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