Fractal Distraction

I have not shared any poems for some time now so here is one that is going into my revised Conversations with Myself that shall be included in a larger, self-published collection of stories and poems.

the wonder of mathematical progression
and endless repetition
through variance unmeasured
to produce coastlines
of wonder
drawing the eye
inward
downward
until I fall forward
into a living kaleidoscope
of alternate reality
wilder than any
worm’s porthole
until I emerge on the
other side
where I first began
this mesmerising journey.

a little update

I have been very naughty in not updating in this blog more often.

The news is that I have several poetry projects on the go.

I am generally not one for competitions but there is a competition for bush poetry that I have some suitable pieces for submission so am reviewing these prior to sending off.

My university research studies are looking at aspects of World War 1. One thing that keeps coming through time and time again is how much more an active pursuit that poetry was back then. I keep coming across poems written by soldiers and not just the noted war poets like Owen and Sassoon but ordinary men in the trenches. This has inspired a potential collection of my own. I have a journal where I record ideas, thoughts and images for potential poems. The ultimate objective is a collection of poems reflecting the WW1 experience. The image of a photograph of an Australian soldier laying dead in a German trench following the disaster of the Battle of Fromelles, simply will not go away. He literally looks as if he was curled up asleep but with one arm part raised as if reaching for something as he died. The notes for that potential piece keep growing and growing.

The other little item of poetic news is that I am currently editing my own first small collection of my poems - actually I am tossing in a couple of very short pieces of fiction to up the page count slightly. This is being done as a gift for someone but after the first 'edition' bound by a copy shop looked pretty crappy, I decided to go the whole Print On Demand (POD) route which means more editing and layout work to be done. A local artist has agreed to potentially collaborate a little with me on this project and we shall be meeting in the near future to discuss her possibly doing a drawing or two for the book.

Now, because my feet are cold and the second X-Files film is on, I am going to kick the heater into a higher gear and concentrate on agents Moulder and Scully for a while.

Eye to the Telescope

Eye to the Telescope is an online poetry journal that is calling for submissions for its next issue. I intend submitting some work. Unfortunately for my friends outside the Antipodes, entry is limited to poets from Australia and New Zealand.

More details here: eyetothetelescope.com/submit.html

An important announcement

Well, it has happened. Tomorrow I pick up the hardcopy of my first poetry collection, Conversations With Myself.

This is only a short run. So short, in fact, that it only has one volume - in total.

What I have done is put together a small volume of my poetry as a Mother's Day gift for my mother. It shall be spiral-bound tomorrow, ready for posting off.

It is the thought that counts, isn't it? :-)

High Street

High Street

I remember the early morning milko.
Clip clop! His horse’s hooves rang out as
its breath misted in the cold morning air.

Further back the baker also came,
his steed as brown as crusted bread.
Will that be a loaf of white today ma’am?

Dragging mum by the hand to street’s end.
Look – there – a steam train hauling grain.
Wave, just in case the driver sees us!

Pennies were no longer the currency,
but polished up with fine steel wool,
we dove for their glow in the blue-green depths.

These are some things from my past,
when I was just a fey wide-eyed child,
unsullied by life’s foul realities.

Just a few reflections from my childhood when we lived on High Street.

spider's haiku

I found this female Garden Orb-weaving spider frantically spinning a web just on dusk and managed to get a reasonable picture of it.

Rain

drumming, thrumming
percussion on a fibreglass skin
beneath which I sit
while kettledrum thunder
rolls in the distance
as rain hammers down
relentlessly

toxic black natural poisons
flooding rivers that swell,
rising against banks
gathering pace
foaming like crazed latte against levee walls
sweeping people away when the levee breaks
desperate fingers clinging to street poles
while a frog rides a snake's back to safety



Inspired by sitting beneath a fibreglass shelter during the rain while up north, Queensland suffers a staggering degree of disaster by flood. During all that, a frog was actually observed clinging to the back of a snake that was swimming to safety.

To help those affected by the terrible floods here in Queensland Australia http://bit.ly/fQdQ9n

This poem was published in the speculative fiction anthology, Masques back in 2008. I might as well share it here as well now. It was inspired by an unusual self-portrait I saw where the subject was actually hidden behind a strange, plastic mask.

Outside the frame

Hidden behind multi-coloured plastic,
shaped as molten wax -
devil’s deal to hide a world?

Eyes agape through carven holes as
bare mouth hides behind that slash.
A scream or laughing out loud?

Might you be sneering at the world
within your visored fastness of
flesh and petro-chemical bricks?

Or screaming to be freed from
plasticised alien embrace
in colours like bad acid?

Maybe it is ET’s dreams,
drawn across your human face as
beautiful, insane nebulae.

Hey – any room in there for me?

A Christmas Ode from Ross

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

And the children lay sleeping, all tucked up in their beds,

Dreams of their Christmas day loot, dancing through their fat little heads.

Mum and Dad sat up worrying, having been desperate all day,

'Cos to pay for their Christmas, a credit card bill they'd now have to pay.

It seemed a good idea at the time, all the food and presents they'd bought,

But when the bailiff comes calling, it's off to the bankruptcy court.

Upon the night breeze, from a long way away,

Hark - hear the sounds, it's the bells of a sleigh.

Gasping with amazement, everyone rushed out into the cold

And to their surprise, Santa showered them with gold.

When I say gold, I'm afraid that I really mean lead,

You see old Santa's gone mad, gone quite queer in the head.

The sleigh flew on by, the reindeer all puffed and tiring

While Santa leaned out, with a machine gun a-firing.

"Take that ya greedy bastards", he was heard to scream out,

And laughed at the corpses, lying there all mangled about.

But alas for poor Santa, he then slipped in the dark,

For as usual he was drunk - yes as pissed as a fart.

He fell down toward the roof, down through the chimney he fell,

Into a fireplace blazing bright, like the flames down in hell.

His whisky laden breath, the sparks did then ignite,

And with a roar he exploded, the flames lighting up the dark night.

So that's the end of my tale, my sad story's been told,

And it's a sign of the times, that Santa's paranoia took hold.

I had a moral to relate, when I began this grand fable,

But I forget what it was, so I'll just say ..........

Have a Merry

Christmas,

and a Happy New Year!!!

There was a young addict...

There was a young addict called Haddock
Who went to get high in the attic
But the hit that he got
Was a hot heroin shot
And now Haddock the addict has had it.

(it sounds better than it looks)

The science of the pool table

National Science Week was back in August. As part of this, submissions had been called for a poetry anthology with the theme of science. The organisers showed distinct taste and wisdom in ignoring all three of my submitted poems as they were utter rubbish. However I found myself doing part of the hosting duties for a function in Canberra as part of the national launch of the resulting three chapbooks. I also found myself down as one of the readers as part of the 'entertainment' for the evening.

Needing something appropriate for the theme and in an attempt to be 'entertaining', I penned the following in a few minutes the day before. It seemed to go over fairly well.

The Science of the Pool Table

The bar, it had fallen silent
Wagers, there were a stack
Only two balls upon the table
The white cue ball and the black

I picked up my pool cue
As the butt drooped from my lip
And while I stared down at the felt
I asked 'anyone got a tip?'

Izzy Newton on his bar stool
Rubbed his head the apple had swollen
Downed the last of his schooner
And said 'Remember my laws of motion.

For every action that occurs
There is an equal reaction
So to drop the black into the pocket
The right force will make it happen.'

Pythagoras, he wasn't having that:
'He has to know how far to hit 'em
And for him to work that out
He needs my bloody theorem.'

So I calculated all the angles
And gave the ball a weighted smack
But instead of winning the game
I fouled the white in off the black.

My opponent Einstein he took my money
and declared in tone so negative
'Don't worry about losing again my friend,
Cos everything is relative.'

How the poet needs to observe

The origins of this post are in another of my blogs, Words by Ross: http://bit.ly/aYj7JV.

I have not posted in here for some time now. In part this is because my own poetry writing has lagged somewhat of late with other things going on, not least of which being a return to having a 'real' job.

One of the advantages of my new job at the Belconnen Arts Centre is being able to see and interact with artists of different types. The Centre's Director actually introduced me to one painter who is also a volunteer at the Centre, as having an arts practice of my own as a writer. I have to admit to being somewhat embarrassed by that description as I do not consider myself an 'artist' as such. I am nowhere near being at that level.

The Centre currently has an exhibition entitled Earth Connections, as a celebration of Earth Day. One of the exhibits is a an electronic piece, a looping slide-show of images of a river. I was able to speak to the artist, Karen Williams yesterday. She explained that the images all came from one small stretch of the Molonglo River. As we talked, I began seeing things in what she was showing me. While still images, they were all of movement, either water in movement or reeds flattened by flood waters. Images of things started to appear to me as they had appeared to the artist. This wavering line of froth and bubbles looks somewhat like the head and neck of a swan. That particular bubble in the midst of a ripple is an eye peeking out at you.

As we spoke, I was struck by the fact that as a kid I used to look at things and see images within them, such as faces in whorls on a piece of polished wood. As an older adult, I seemed to have lost that form of observation. It was a salutary reminder that as a writer, I need to look not just at the immediate surface but what is within that surface or below it and what occupies negative space around an object. That form of looking at things then informs, influences and inspires.

As an aspiring poet, I am reminded that to create poetry, I need to look deeply, to see things that may lie beneath the surface. I like to think that I did that to a degree with my poem, Earth Beat. I now want to go out with my camera and journal, photographing, writing, observing and thinking, all to see what is beneath the surface of things around me, using this to inspire more verse.

I am in love

I have fallen in love - with Emily Dickinson's poetry. I keep coming across lines in her work that resonate so strongly.

This is my letter to the world
that never wrote to me

Such heart-aching loneliness echoes through those words. The words of someone lonely, isolated. That is probably why I feel such a closeness to her work. Dickinson eventually became an recluse. I have felt like that all too often, wishing the whole world would just leave me the hell alone.

While I have a number of her poems in anthologies and some that were available off the Internet, I decided to investigate an anthology of her poems. I found one earlier today - selected poems. It seemed to be quite an accessible work, roughly comparable to Sylvia Plath's collected works in the same series by that particular publisher. Then I saw her collected works - about three times the size. I had not realised how prolific she was, and by her death, none it published.

That ginormous anthology is too much for me. For now I think that I shall continue to enjoy and study the few that I already have.

Those two lines would also make a beaut intro to a novel.

tanka - some observations

While I have not posted here in quite some time, I have still been exploring poetry. Admittedly not as much as I might like but between having a life (of sorts), building my freelance portfolio, taking on editing work and pursing matters for several organisations I am heavily involved with, that has left me not that much time. And of course, the world comes to a stand-still on Thursdays evenings for me to watch Law & Order: SVU.

I recently submitted some tanka to the tanka journal, Eucalyptus. These were rejected but I was given some advice on why they failed to capture the editors attention, along with some suggested reading. Like a good little swot, I have been doing some of that reading and have come to an important realisation.

The tanka that I submitted were little more than observing and telling, rather than drawing a reader in by their emotions. Intellectually I knew that this needed to be done, but utterly failed to do so.

I was also fixating on the strict technical form of 5-7-5-7-7 syllable counts per line respectively. But I now realise there was a flaw to my approach. That structure reflected the original Japanese structural approach. But within the original Japanese, this structure also reflected the structure of the language itself that significantly differs from English. The individual Japanese sound units tend to be short and of equal length. That is not the case with English which has far greater use of polysyllabic words, varying length of syllables, with both stressed and unstressed syllables. Again, intellectually I knew this but yet again, I failed to appreciate the significance of that point.

As English has a significantly different structure to Japanese, it becomes decidedly difficult to strictly emulate a structure that reflects a language whose sound units are so different. For that reason, to obtain the same poetic effect as intended with tanka, we need to relax inhibitions on going outside of that strict regime of 5-7-5-7-7.

What I had done was to slip quietly back into my left-brain, anal-retentive, analytical mode. Of course, being a banker-cum-accountant-cum-economic-statistician, that is not entirely unexpected. Yet it is poetry that has helped me not only realise the limitations of that mind-set, but helped me to develop much more abstract thinking than in the past. Those left-brain shackles are still there, although somewhat more rubbery than in the past.

I shall have to study these matters further and start experimenting more. But, alas, for now I had best get to work on an editing job I want to get finished.

Parallel Import Restrictions to remain!

In the face of strenuous opposition around the country, the Australian Productivity Commission had recommended to the government some time back that Parallel Import Restrictions on books be lifted. The whole slew of recommendations were, in my opinion, a poorly considered short-term view. The justification was that books would become cheaper. The income base of existing authors would supposedly be protected by recommended introduction of government grants. Tough luck for those who were not already published authors and faced an even steeper uphill climb under the Fels scenario. There were other means of making books cheaper, such as lifting tax on them. Instead, Professor Allan Fels and his cohorts argued strongly that the only means of making books cheaper was to allow excess production from other countries to be dumped on the Australian market. Significantly, countries such as the UK and USA, while being in a position to shift more product onto the market outside of current Australian publishing channels, flatly refused to lift their own restrictions.

This morning, the Australian Competition Minister announced that the government would not be implementing the recommendations. This is a victory for the entire Australian publishing industry. Significantly, about the only voices in favour of the Fels recommendations were a narrow coterie of big business interests.

Following is a press release from the Australian Society of Authors. While it is rather gratuitous as there were definitely more than just the ASA campaigning against these recommendations, nonetheless it does reflect wide-spread pleasure and relief at this morning's announcement. Ironically, Prof Fels was due to be debating this very subject at 12:30pm today at the National Press Club, with the CEO of Melbourne University Publishing. The topic? What price cheaper books? I wonder what dear Prof Fels had to say?

From: Jeremy Fisher [mailto:jeremy@asauthors.org]
Sent: Wednesday, 11 November 2009 11:24 AM
To: Jeremy Fisher
Subject: PRESS RELEASE: ASA Members Victors in Parallel Importation Debate!

PRESS RELEASE: ASA Members Victors in Parallel Importation Debate

The ASA congratulates its members and our colleagues in the Australian publishing industry in their united, sustained and ultimately successful campaign to retain territorial copyright.

“The ASA membership has once again demonstrated its quiet strength,” ASA Executive Director Dr Jeremy Fisher declared. “Our members have been constantly telephoning and writing to their parliamentary representatives pointing out how the removal of territorial copyright would destroy Australia’s literary culture and publishing industry. Their persistence has been rewarded. Our leaders have listened. Today’s announcement by Competition Minister Craig Emerson that the parallel importation restrictions in our Copyright Act will remain unchanged is a clear victory for Australia’s literary creators.”

Dr Fisher also acknowledged that the Australian publishing industry was facing significant pressures and authors needed to bear these in mind.

“Minister Emerson correctly highlights the fact that e-books and digital technology are having an impact on the Australian publishing industry,” Dr Fisher said. “The ASA welcomes change. We constantly seek new means to increase authors’ incomes. We are currently in discussions relating to fair contracts for authors with regard to e-books and products such as Kindle. We have also taken an active role in the US-based Google Book Settlement, which will see authors being able to pursue income streams for out-of-print works. The ASA will always seek improved income streams for its members in both print and digital forms.”

Dr Fisher has announced that he will leave the ASA on December 11 to take up the position of Senior Lecturer in Writing at the University of New England.

Soil Song

Soil Song
By Ross C. Hamilton

I feel the earth, warm and fertile,
trying to grow my fingers
as through the loam and mulch,
my hands delve in quest of meaning.

Is this an answer to a modern disease?
A means to best the degradation of our soul
by feeling the earth's blood
crumble through our fingers?

The question, unasked,
goes unanswered, as I
plunge my hand in the soil once more,
to simply enjoy the feeling.

Ross C. Hamilton
2009

Earth Beat

Earth Beat
By Ross C. Hamilton

Is it the flesh of my hand
that writes
or a message from my bones
dictating distant memories
of farthermost racial origins?
Do the earth's granite bones
then serve to sing to us
in their age-long songs?

I press my ear to the ground
to listen
and hear a silent heartbeat
calling to my flesh
to write my song once more.

© Ross C. Hamilton
2009

I have not posted anything in here for a while. I have been doing some work on my poetry from time to time. Today I got off my increasingly fat backside and submitted some for publication. If said publishers don't like them, no great loss and I shall publish them here.

Some other poems are reaching a point of being 'finished' that I shall probably post here soon. In other writing I like to get paid for my efforts. With my poetry however, I am quite happy to just share.

Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure of being the invited guest speaker at the August meeting of the Fellowship of Australian Writers, ACT Branch. The FAW was described to me not long ago as once having been essentially the union for Australian writers. I have to say in my previous years of involvement with the union movement, I have never walked into a union meeting to the sound of a harp playing and greeted by a hug from the organiser!

For anyone who may be interested, I have uploaded my speaking notes and a handout to my website, www.rosshamilton.net, on the Latest News page.

Poetry Challenge - Day 6 - clerihew

The clerihew targets actual people in four lines. The first is their name, the 3rd and 4th longer than the first two with lines often irregular in length.

The first I have previously posted but liked it so much that I decided to use it again.

Captain Ricky Ponting,
loves to go a-tonking,
except for those lonely days
when he tosses his wicket away.

Ned Kelly
was very merry
until those final fateful days
heralded by the hotel flames.

Ned Kelly was an Australian bushranger, famous for wearing crude armour, who was finally taken at a country hotel. The police set the building on fire with Ned emerging to engage the police in a wild gun battle until badly wounded and captured.

Little Johnny Howard
was a bloody coward.
He had to lie to become PM
and the lies continued without end.

John Howard was Australian Prime Minister, 1996-2007. History has since proven him to have been an appalling liar.

Ross Hamilton
is a funny one.
He'd rather sit up all night writing
than asleep in his bed and farting.