Who's the One?

So I slept in this morning, and spent a long time waking up with a pot of tea and a Sunday morning, no-rush read of the weekend papers (and thanks to the magic of daylight savings, it's not even midday yet) discovering in the process that poet Michael Farrell won this year's Peter Porter Poetry Prize, which is one of Australia’s most respected awards, and which comes with a handy $4000 boost to his possibly impoverished, starving-in-a-garret lifestyle.
What I love about his winning poem Beautiful Mother is that Michael bravely used a scene from Kimba the White Lion that he saw when he was about five. In it, Kimba is swimming from a shipwreck back to the jungle and is getting tired and is about to give up when a vision of his mother is formed by the stars in the sky encouraging him onwards. The thing is, I remember that scene! I even get a bit teary just thinking about poor Kimba, all alone without his Mum and Dad. Not a victim of circumstances, our little lion remained brave and honest and true. What a role model. Even if although he did get into a few fur-flying fisticuffs, like all heroes, he always did so reluctantly, and always showed mercy towards his pummelled foes.
Anyway, hats off to a poet who is unafraid to put references to Friedrich Schiller and Kimba the White Lion together to create art: You've always associated the two terms together/ partly due to your reading of Schiller / partly due to your watching of Kimba. Kimba sublimates / his mother in the water. You've always thought / your mother a baroque figure...
To celebrate this daring cross fertilization of ideas and brighten your Sunday, pop across to YouTube and sing-along with this. Come on, you know you want to. I can't believe how choked up I get listening to it. I'm a tiny child again, and the world is full of honest and brave people, and Good always triumphs over Evil. Memories and nostalgia can evoke powerful emotions. No wonder poets tap into them.

Kimba (Kimba) Kimba (Kimba) Kimba (Kimba)

Who lives down in deepest darkest Africa?(Africa)
Who's the one who brought the jungle fame?
Who's the king of animals in Africa?
Kimba the White Lion is his name!

When we get in trouble and we're in a fight
Who's the one who just won't turn and run?
Who believes in doing good and doing right?
Kimba the White Lion is the one!

Pugilist poets

I started and left the Arvo JOb early yesterday, and braved the madness of peak hour commuting (blah!), to get home in time to attend the local Victorian heat of the Australian Poetry Slam 2011. I also wanted to meet up with people from the local writers' centre again. The Slam was a lot of fun, although not necessarily about the best poems winning so much as the best spoken-word performers. It was good to see poets of all shapes, sizes and ages, ranging from the painfully shy, whispering kind hunched over the microphone to the perennial, young-Byron types oozing confidence, waving their arms and loudly delivering highly polished acts. It's nice to know that some things never change, and that no matter how hi-tech, lazy-minded or complacent society becomes, there still exist genuine, sensitive, outraged, rebel poets to point out the beauty of life or slap us awake with their words.

But now I must go. I did much much chatting, drinking and chip eating, for poetry seems to call for that sort of thing, and my bed beckons.

Sunday Poem

Once I wanted to ban the bomb
And create a world of peace and love.
Now I want to ban bogan bass
And up feral fundaments sub-woofers shove.

Pot and Poem

A GOOD POT TO BE ON A PUBLIC HOLIDAY...









I, in the meantime, got some hard writing done (another @#%@&*% uncooperative short story), and some fun writing done i.e. a SF poem, which I subsequently sent off.

And now for something completely different

I've spent a nice, lazy Good Friday sleeping in, pottering about the house, reading, and messing around with a couple of SF themed prose poems, one a horror piece about alien sex, the other about the love between a married couple of different species growing stale.

This is my new, fun thing to do, or rather, it's an old fun thing that I loved doing as a kid and which I've started doing again recently. There's something about train travel that seems to be conducive to the assembling of a poem, and working on one perks me up more than a cup of coffee. I love the playing around with delicious sounding words and rhythmic sentences and amusing ideas, and since I have no illusions about ever becoming a Poet Laureate, or even a Poet Averageate, there's no self-imposed pressure of creating something publishable.

However, that said, following Heinlein's Rules of Writing (send out everything you finish) I did submit my first effort, and it was - knock me over with a feather - accepted!!

So now you can read Paradigm Shift over in issue #142 of AntipodeanSF.

This piece was conceived 18/8-09 on the train as a Very Dark and Serious Short Story, but once I sat down at a keyboard and the first line came out, it changed to a much lighter poem. I submitted it the first time 15/9-09, but it was rejected. I sent it out again 4/10-09 and it was accepted seven weeks later. I hope you enjoy it. I was certainly mightily entertained by the writing of it.

Oh, and HAPPY BIRTHDAY Hans Christian Andersen. You were a huge influence on me when I was a child, both because of your stories and because of your Danishness. Danny Kaye had something to do with it as well.

These pictures are by Anne Anderson, an art nouveau illustrator of children's books. She illustrated more than 100 books, some with her husband, Alan Wright, whose style is somewhat similar.