overland 200 - my poem 'on a role' and other interesting collaborative things

enigma of a fever chart

not sleep or sleeplessness. fever an alphabet in my head. blocked

nose, slack mouth. push a weighted stretch into night's panorama.

time moves the air around my bed. words jiggle in books. two

hundred pages fall where the floor is. darkness paces curiosity

turns stars, disaffection, off. the twittering parts.

freaks play with dream and with fire. i churn its bulk, cross to the

window. earth's amber bridge glows. pops, sparks, yawns. loose

bits. how to measure its worth? other dawns exist, they settle on

other lips. you could chart whether i've drooled words all night,

or heaped a mouthful of ash sludge onto my pillow.

When Derek first mentioned this project, I was interested and quite excited about the prospect of contributing to a collaborative enterprise and I said yes immediately. I thought about the way to approach my ten lines a fair bit prior to actually starting the poem, and I admit that I did wait for some form of outside inspiration to edge me forward in the first instance. I desired to commence from a place, more loosely liminal than structured, at least in the first instance.

As the project required the twenty poets to give a nod to the idea of 'on a role' a past, present and future, maybe our own vision, maybe not visionary at all, I waited and pondered at a time when I was not well, but not sick enough to take to my bed, just not one hundred percent. I was re reading Val McDermid's Tony Hill books, being drawn into the strange and shocking world that character inhabits, both inside and outside of himself.

I had noticed that many of the books used quotations (in epigraph form or in titles) from the poetry of T.S. Eliot, specifically from the collection Four Quartets featuring the poems Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding. So I re read these poems again and then, felt I had a connection which would work for my 'on a role' the past. The T.S. Eliot poems are what got me moving into the poem, gave me the title and some re mixed lines within. Once I started, I gave myself time every day for ten days, forced myself on some days to go back to the poem and rattle it, and take it somewhere else.

One of the more successful aspects of the process, (for me as the author) was deciding early on to align the notion of 'on a role' the present, within my body. The body functions and the particular state of my body during the creation of my ten lines. Ideas began then, on the way to look at this poem from the viewpoint of 'on a role' the future, and it is here that I also had to travel back again, prior to gaining a sense of how the future might be a feature in my piece.

Before I left Queensland, to travel to Tasmania and live in Tasmania permanently I had to clear through so much paper, poems, notes, unfinished ideas and decided to hold a bonfire in the back yard and burn all of this work. The bonfire was lit each night for several nights, and I watched the work (which would never be good enough to satisfy me, or inspire me to keep) go up in dazzling flames. When I got settled in Tasmania, I dreamed about the process of this burning and thought about some of the poems and ideas that I'd burned - but thought about them in a different way, looking at them forward, rather than backward. Thinking that this burning, this dreaming, in fact was my 'on a role' the future.

An interesting part of this process, a personal 'tic' or viewpoint I have, is a conviction that most of the better work I produce, comes about like a fever. As I've now been in Tasmania for nearly a year, I've decided to put together some of the poetry I've written here under the working title 'Shack Life Fevers'.

I like the idea of approaching writing from different directions every now and then. Quite a while back, on the online discussion group Poneme (sadly now just a mere ghostly and sometimes icky presence compared to what it once was), a few of us developed work using unfamiliar processes, and then we included a series of 'studio notes' which outlined the way we approached the content of our individual work. This work was published in Haiku Review #5http://www.haikureview.net/HR5 and it situates well against the collaborative poem just developed for Overland 200.

Whilst still on the notion of collaborative experiments, I'd like to include another poem, developed by Jen Crawford and myself, during the hey days of the old poneme, and which Jen included in her book bad appendix published by Titus Books in 2008.

I'll mention the process we used first and then leave you with the poem. We both agreed to take a failed poem, one which we would not use intact, and work through that poem emailing changes and adding and shifting the work from two poems into one and expanding and contracting it until we both felt the work was done with us.

A surprise for us both, I think, was the discovery half way through the project process, that Jen had begun with her own failed Emily Dickinson poem and I had begun with my own failed Virginia Woolf poem. We did want to disrupt language and engage with its gaps and silences and I think we did that. And the poem...

something familiar about the way there are

air something wha tissue

issue that land. coul me there?

***

just there on the bank / this air catches leaves

here under hear silent mouth yes

something’s fa way there are

***

see?see?see?see?see? going

is bank / riverbed

bubbles

***

it still there? itstillFriday? star

tle about paid words any photos

no photos from that land. could it still be night time there?

***

the mouth’s issue is silent / going under

going and

no words left / can’t even hear / the

***

good. yes, the journalists are very well paid. anyway what

n’t I see? on the for coffee. it was

bank coff ee under

***

did I think I wanted to remember? see? corruption

core upt er

the Ouse / uneven air bubbles / and

***

mouth’s Ouse /

no/no/no on the silent

body’s

***

the

the

ideas /

***

body’s ideas / startle the riverbed

why can’t I see? on the Friday we went for coffee. it was

silent / I wanted to reme ruption

***

the

catches

it was the no the just the

***

good. yes, re very well pai

leaves

member? leaves there catches yes

***

there words

startle

the

***

on left /

/ good I to /left anyway it

can’t