Bio-poetics

        I grew up on the Central Coast of NSW in Ettalong Beach, where I swam every
day after school. I boated to Lion Island, and beyond to Palm Beach. I went
to Gosford High School, where I learnt about Henry Kendall who wrote about
the bellbirds at Sommersby Falls and when I left school, poetry died. I
think that happens to most people, it’s never big enough or strong enough to
last a lifetime for most.
         Only a few are touched by poetry. As writers of poetry we are the
daydreamers and the nightdreamers. Dreaming hours into a dim midnight
searching for one small word. Yet, as daydreamers we shape the world. When
we write about ourselves we mirror the human race. When we write emotion we
bleed. When we write about the environment and ecology we record what may
disappear. When we write about the ‘other’ we embellish their ‘rite of
passage.’ We are the David, of David and Goliath. We have to fight hard, in
the size of our production, against the giants of the industry. We have to
fight hard to surface poetry before it meets the arrows of extinction. We
have to create microcosms (worlds within worlds) before we go underground in
our mouldy, old books. We all have to hold hands, including the established
poet, the young poet, the novice poet, so that we can reach out across the
world and be seen as a united front. We can no longer be pretentious or
assume that we are superior about a genre that is slowly disappearing from
the book store shelves. We have to flood the world with poetry.



Picture me

In a photograph at nineteen
you discover love
breathless intimacy
fertility
baby bouncers
you hang them on walls
like trophies of life
into 18 years
and it’s teenage socks
the wind drying them
in the back draught of a faulty exhaust
P-plate bouncing in the distance—
a sale sign leaning on a red brick wall
a crooked, wooden gate
—foundations in the architecture
of those leaving tomorrow

          I have a photograph
of 300 years wrapped between
the pages of memory
—in my pictures we are frozen specimens
one prisoner (1803), one drunken coalminer
a fireman, two bean counters, three deaf aunties
an architect, scholar, babies in the sea
an investment guru, alt.country-singer
grandmas with grumpy men
some nudging heaven
picture me
amongst these crazy people

Helen Hagemann



>From: Frances Sbrocchi <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
> poetics <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Introduction
>Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 11:04:19 +0800
>
>What does one say in an autobiography? I claim crone status,
>lurker, reader and sometime poet, to being a displaced Canuck,
>to having paid my dues by writing for many years, and, most importantly
>to wanting to hear, read, and know the poetry of this day. I still write
>and publish from time to time. Perhaps to write without pretension
>and with some clarity is all that I do:
>
> Tansy Field
>
>Is home the house my father built?
>the house that is no longer there
>drying pea vines tangle
>and yellow tansy mirrors summer sun
>milkweed and wild oats narrow
> and the road has no place to go
>
>Is home a far country
>wider than memory?
>The northern continent?
>A generic?
>A planet?
>
>Or is my home the place we landed
> on tarmac where the scent
> of Jasmine mingles with heat?
>At the city edged by lace of lights
>light trembles into the sea
>
>The cottage greets us
>lamp lighting
>as we open the dark green gate
>and melds our shadows
>
>Yet we'll say, “ We went home last winter
>it was summer there.”

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