Monday, September 26, 2011

The Man who fears the sky


I very much doubt that I am the first poet in the long history of our fraternity to lie awake at night and imagine away the roof over his head.

I tend to lie very still on my back (a legacy of an early childhood in callipers for which I have been dubbed by my cover girl, Suzie, “the crippled foundling”), and when taken by one of those desolate moods that visit the sleepless on a still night, I seem to be able to feel that whole vast empty expanse of sky pressing down on me. 

But slowly an even more oppressive thought springs to mind, namely that nothing but air, the colourless tasteless mixture of gases I use to breath and make words, lies between me and the infinite cogitations of chance events that drive the cosmos into which I was born with my crooked legs and hazy provenance.




As more and more of us become cocooned in the perennial urban twilight, it is easy to forget or overlook the hold the sky still has on our subconscious.

For instance, it is currently nesting season in the mountains where I live, and I feel my hair stand on end at every flap and whoosh above my head as I walk my dog through the gauntlet of magpies and currawongs in the scrub near my home. Surely this is a primordial reflex we have inherited from a time when the sky was even more menacing than it is now, although considering the satellite that is plummeting to earth as I write, we have managed to populate it with our own litany of perils. 

And as we delve deeper into the machinations of the cosmos, I mean the clockwork Newtonian stuff, we have become increasingly aware of the likelihood of a meteor striking us anywhere at anytime, one of the rare occasions when knowledge does not in fact equal power, but something very different altogether, the  colourless, odourless plague of our time. 

As a child I was lucky enough to drift through the clouds to the far side of the world. I seemed to spend half my days up there amidst the fluffy castles and kind old rabbit men while scouring for whales in the ocean miles below. I was entranced by the silent world of the sky and did not feel the weight of it then as I do now, for it did not seem an empty desolate space then, but one filled with a benign spirit. 





What has changed, I wonder? Am I merely growing old and deaf to the whispers of God, of that Great Other? Or do I merely see as far as the miracle of the wingtip and not to the clouds beyond? Are human achievements any less miraculous than a wave breaking on the shore? God, after all, did not invent the aeroplane (to paraphrase an acerbic Frenchman). Is this inability to see past the wingtip a crippling malaise in one who purports to be a poet? And could it be the source of this shapeless, floating anxiety I suffer along with so many of my contemporaries? Is the man who fears the sky the one who knows too much or too little?


* The title of this post is borrowed from a poem in Beyond the Terminus (Bluepepper), due out some time next year. 

Wednesday, September 07, 2011

REDRUM




Coming up at
The Red Room Company 
Clubhouse...



We've got an incredible line-up at The Red Room Company Clubhouse over September. Make sure you pop in and catch some inspiring, entertaining and informative events!

Three UK Poets Read at the Clubhouse


When: Wednesday September 7, 6.00pmWhere: The Red Room Company Clubhouse 77 George Street, Sydney (downstairs)What: Head to the Clubhouse for a night of poetry with visiting UK poets, Tim Claire, Luke Wright and Hannah Jane Walker, fresh from a tour of Scotland (via the Melbourne Writers Festival)

Pot Luck Poetry


When: Friday, September 9, 6.00pmWhere: Kings Cross Hotel, 244 - 248 William Street, Kings CrossWhat: Start seeing stars at this poetry reading, panel and discussion of all things astronomical.This special Clubs and Societies event features poet Kit Brookman, members of The Astronomical Society of NSW and astrologer Yasmin Boland.Sweet Damper and Gossip Society Low Tea


When:Sunday, September 11, 1:00pmWhere:The Red Room Company Clubhouse 77 George Street, Sydney What: The Delirious Bakery is a site-responsive bakery that collects and dispenses dissent via recovered oral traditions. During its residency in the Clubs & Societies historic basement storehouse, the artists and guests will host a series of ‘low teas’, where tales about the darker side of The Rocks are exchanged with each sticky bunPredominantly Orange Book Launch & Exhibition


When:Thursday, September 22, 6:30pmWhere:The Red Room Company Clubhouse 77 George Street, Sydney What: Photographer Jon Reid has elevated the humble traffic cone into the realms of art with his quirky documentary project Predominantly Orange. The limited edition book and exhibition launching September 22 is the culmination of five years of observation of the ubiquitous orange markers.Here-There-You-Me: Moments of Interaction in Art


When:Saturday, September 24, 2:00pmWhere:The Red Room Company Clubhouse 77 George Street, Sydney What: Presented and curated by The Rocks Pop Up Project, our second in a series of collective artist talks featuring, Sean O'Connell from Gaffa; Makeshift, MCA Primavera 2011 and current Red Room artist in residence; Chelle Dickins of Curly Music Box and Henry Wilson.