Three Poets, One Book

Jennie Fraine, Helen Patrice and I are old friends who like each other's poetry. In fact we all met through poetry.

Once upon a time (in the early eighties?) back home from a few years living in Africa, Jennie turned up to a poetry reading at a pub in Collingwood, Melbourne, organised by the Melbourne Branch of the Poets Union (as it was then). I was one of the organisers of the evening. We Union poets sat up and paid attention when this newcomer read. Hey, this is good stuff, this is really interesting! 

That was the beginning of our long and deep friendship. We even shared a house together for a while, when we both found ourselves surprisingly single after expecting to be partnered for life. We shared it with her young children too. (Mine were university students no longer living at home.) That was in 1992.

But before that, in the late eighties, Helen attended a poetry workshop Jennie was running. My first book, UNIVERSE CAT, was one of the teaching aids. Helen, a lover of cats as well as poetry, was impressed by my title poem and asked Jennie if she could have my address to write and tell me so. 

That was my very first fan letter for a poem. Of course I was thrilled. I wrote back to say thank you. Then I met Helen in person when I was a guest presenter at Jennie's workshop one night. Pretty soon we were great mates as well, and over the years have seen each other through all sorts of major life experiences.

(By a sweet coincidence, Jennie and Helen each have one son and one daughter, and I happen to be godmother to both their daughters.)

Jennie and Helen made their own connection, and after I moved away from Melbourne it was natural that, on my visits back there, I should sometimes meet with them both together.

Eventually facebook became a great way of staying in touch between times. And then a woman on facebook, Maggie Strongheart (what a wonderful name) got the idea of forming a group and inviting people to write about their relationship to the moon every day for a month and post the writings on the group page. This of course meant paying attention to the moon every night. She was interested to know if we would find reflections in our lives of what the moon was up to in the heavens.

Helen, Jennie and I, being poets, of course decided to do so in verse. We liked our own and each other's results so much that, at one of our Melbourne reunions, we decided to collaborate on a book. We all read each other's and our own moon poems and ticked those we thought good enough to be included – an easy way of arriving at consensus. 

The arrangement, the sequence, editorial suggestions to each other, the Foreword and 'About the Author' pages – all proved easy. Helen had a friend, John Davis, who had taken some wonderful moon photos and agreed to let us use one. We knew we needed a professional cover design, so we hired our friends at Content X Design whom Helen and I had worked with before. We were offered various options and all agreed on our preferences. We are very pleased with the resulting cover.

Then came questions of how and with whom to publish. The other two liked paper books. I persuaded them to try it as an ebook first. Smashwords seemed the best people to do it, because they're free, they offer some distribution, and they make the book available in a variety of formats to accommodate whatever device people are using. 

But formatting our manuscript according to Smashwords' preliminary requirements seemed like a major task when I looked at what it entailed. I had blithely told the others I would handle it, but after some procrastination I chickened out and we asked CXD to take care of that as well.

And so finally our book is in the Smashwords catalogue, available to buy for a mere $3.99 USD – which I think is a terrific price for something which is not a chapbook but a full-length collection by three different poets.

I read it through from start to finish today. It was months since I last did that, what with focusing on all the technical stuff, so it was almost like coming to it new. I tell you what – it's a really good book! We are all strong poets, with individual yet compatible voices. Although the poems originate with the moon, they encompass travels, love, memories, world events and personal adventures. They range over past and present, and sometimes foreshadow the future.

We say in our Foreword:

Helen and Rosemary are witches, so moon-consciousness was already part of their lives. Jennie, who describes herself as earth-bound and pragmatic, nevertheless lives her life open to possibility.

And yes, it did seem to me that my day-to-day life in some ways reflected what was going on with the moon. But perhaps that was natural, when I was so conscious of her every nuance.

For a sample viewing, or to give it to someone or buy it for yourself, click on this Smashwords link.

Three Cycles of the Moon

How exciting to have a new book out! This one is particularly thrilling, being a collaboration with two very dear friends and colleagues. Our book description at Smashwords says:

Three Cycles of the Moon is a collection of poetry by Helen Patrice, Rosemary Nissen-Wade, and Jennie Fraine. The poems were written over a month, and all to do with some aspect of or relationship to the Moon. As they move through the lunar month, their thoughts, inspirations, and responses move with them. Patrice was travelling for part of the month, Nissen-Wade, and Fraine moored in Australia.

It started on Facebook, when a woman called Maggie Strongheart invited people to spend a month writing every day about their relationship with the moon. She formed a group to share the results.

Jennie, Helen and I, being poets, naturally decided to do our entries in verse. We three are old friends who like and admire each other’s poetry. So we soon got the idea of collaborating on a collection of our moon poems from that month. We each selected those we thought were the best – of each other’s and our own – and used the ones with the most votes.

We decided to publish it as an ebook, and to use Smashwords. They make their ebooks available in a number of formats, to suit whatever device people are reading on. And because they are not charging us a fortune, we can offer the book for a mere $3.99 USD.

A photographer friend of Helen's, John Davis, supplied the wonderful image for our cover. We asked Delaina and Kristin of Content X Design for a cover design, as Helen and I had worked with them before. Then we found that formatting our book to Smashwords requirements was tricky, so we asked CXD to do that for us too.

And now here it is, listed in the Smashwords catalogue – just in time to miss the xmas market! But I’m delighted to note it’s selling already anyway. People must be wanting holiday reading. If you do too, just click on the smaller version of the cover pic at the top of the right side-bar here, and it will take you straight to the Smashwords purchase page.

It’s a terrific book and we’re very proud of it.

Literary Melbourne

From my visit in August 2O15

Meeting up with poets Jennie Fraine (left) and Leah Kaminsky (centre). We three have been friends and colleagues for decades.

Leah was about to launch her first novel, the much acclaimed The Waiting Room, set in Haifa, Israel. She took a long time perfecting it – which you may understand when I tell you  she was raising children and working as a General Practitioner at the same time. Jennie and I were privy to some early drafts and even precursors of this novel.

I don't live in Melbourne any more, and Leah had recently spent a lot of time out of Australia. We wanted a private get-together before the large public occasion of the launch.

After coffee, Jennie and I visited Collected Works bookshop, and had a chat to proprietor Kris Hemensley, whom we've also known a long time. We found one copy of my Secret Leopard still on the shelves, and also Jennie's Sexy Guys Kissing, her poems for teenage girls. (Hurry, buyers!)

Another day I paid a visit to City Basement Books for some good second-hand volumes.

This photo was taken a few nights later, at Leah's book launch. Here is Leah trying not to blush during a delightful speech by Graeme Simsion, author of The Rosie Project and The Rosie Effect. He said he read The Kite Runner at much the same time as Leah's book, and was interested to note that the scenes and characters of The Waiting Room stayed with him far more vividly afterwards.

The book itself, which very soon sold out.

The launch was at Readings book shop, St Kilda. My son David was my escort.

And while I was in town I finally caught up with old crony, poet Ken Smeaton, one of my colleagues long ago in the poetry theatre group Word of Mouth. Nowadays he makes videos recording poetry performances in Melbourne, as well as continuing to write and publish his own work. We reunioned at the home of our mutual friend, poet and artist Linda Stevenson.

'River of Stones' — the Process

I’m participating in this month’s ‘a river of stones’ over at my Stones for the River blog. I did it in January too, with great joy, and intermittently between then and now. This time around, I’m noticing more about the process, probably because my husband has joined in this time and his approach is different from mine. Well for one thing, I’m a poet and choose to write my small stones in verse; he’s a story-teller, whether in fiction or memoir, and naturally seeks to make stories out of his small stones. But it’s more than that.

I love his writing, so what I’m about to say isn’t a criticism of that — but I notice he has real trouble simply paying attention to the world around him. He produces lovely pieces that don’t end up on his blog because they’re not actually small stones. They are diary entries, records of events and the way he feels about them. He talks, for instance, of running into a couple of old friends in town yesterday. After reading what he wrote, I know that this event happened and who the people were, what he felt about the exchange, and a little of what was said between them. I know nothing of the surroundings, or what the people looked like, or how their voices sounded — no description. The ‘small stones’ idea is all about getting outside oneself and noticing the world around us. I think it’s OK to bring oneself in if necessary, but from the outside, dispassionately observed. He manages it, but it’s often a struggle.

Back in January Kaspalita, who co-founded the river of stones, posted a piece on just this. It seems many people have the same difficulty. I don’t seem to have quite as much trouble with it, and I put that down to a few years of attempting haiku, tanka and other short forms which train one to pay attention to the world. However I worry that I‘m ‘doing it wrong’ in a different way. Although there isn’t any obligatory length, I keep thinking mine are too long this time. I was convinced that I wrote much shorter ones in January, until I went back and had a look. No, they’re about the same. 

I notice, too, that both my husband and I keep falling into the significance trap. What do I mean by that? I’ve been in a long-term writers’ support group (often by email) with Jennie Fraine and Leah Kaminsky for — good heavens! — 20 years. We are devoted to what we call ‘the anti-significance factor’. One of the earliest things we identified was that trying for deep significance is death to poetry. Or, as my friend Philip Martin used to remark, people don’t like to be buttonholed by a poem and told what to think and feel. Personally, if I try to write something deep and meaningful, it paralyses me, whereas if I just play with words or forms I produce poems — sometimes even deep and meaningful ones. It’s essential to remember that art is play. I think, with a small stone, the thing itself is what matters; no need to weight it down with any extra meaning. But human beings are very good at trying to add extra significance to everything, even the simplest things.

Difficult or not, I think the task is worthwhile, not only for the writing it can produce but even more so to have us engage with the world around us. It even led to me watering my geraniums, which badly needed it, because I stopped to take a good look at them. 

Stylish Blogger Award

I just received one! It was awarded by bttrflyscar and the details are here. It was not for this blog but for my poetry blog, The Passionate Crone. I am now asked to award ten other bloggers similarly, and disclose seven things about myself. This makes for a long post, so I'm doing it here in order to leave The Passionate Crone for poems.

10 blogs

What makes a blog stylish, in my book? Primarily, the words have to be good. Most of these are poetry blogs, and all are created by poets — wonderful poets — so the words are excellent. Secondly it must look good. These ten include the minimalist, the decorative, the dynamic; all are created with an eye to their appearance, and are user-friendly too.

1. Collin Kelley’s Modern Confessional

I met Collin at the Austin International Poetry Festival in 2006, but we didn’t really get to know each other until afterwards, staying connected online. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, from where he works as an editor, promotes and encourages fellow poets, and takes a lively interest in all things cultural including pop culture and an eclectic range of music — all of which he blogs about forthrightly and entertainingly. Everything Collin does is stylish. Just click on the Books link at the top of his blog and look at those gorgeous covers! (The contents are yummy too.)

2. Jennie Fraine’s Jaywig’s Jotter

Jennie’s an extraordinary poet whose work is too little known, even though she tends to win awards on the rare occasions she competes for them. She’s an old friend of mine and I take at least part of the credit for her recent foray into blogging. She doesn’t network a lot online, being too busy supporting people in real life, working for Landmark Education. Also an artist, she has a natural elegance which her blog reflects. She has always been an excellent source of advice on my own poetry, when asked.

3. Odilia Galvan Rodriguez’s ~feathers from the muse’s wings~

Odilia used to have the most exotically beautiful blog on MySpace; it was like entering a rich other world. Now MySpace is much changed and neither she nor I frequent it any more, but fortunately she has this other blog, which — although the décor is quite different — also invites one in, as into a sanctuary. She does wonderful things with poetry, from haiku to pantoums, and including free verse. I also love that she is a passionate activist and writes often about those topics too.

4. Shanna Baldwin-Moore’s Poettree

Shanna lives in Hawaii, and enjoys living close to nature. Like some others in my list, she is artist as well as poet. She loves haiku and often turns them into haiga by marrying them with wonderful photos, drawings and computer graphics. On her blog, these are interspersed with the longer poems she also writes.

5. Rachel Phillips’s Outlasting Moths

Rachel used to have a very minimalist blog with almost no personal information. I imagined her as an elderly lady like myself, reflecting on her experiences. (I’ve never told her that.) When she revamped the blog and included personal information, I discovered she is young and outdoorsy! Her poems seem to me to have a mature sensibility, and to be beautifully crafted. They remind me a bit of Leonard Cohen – not that they could be mistaken for a Cohen song or vice versa, as both have unique voices, but her poems have a similar evocativeness, leading the reader to associations beyond the text and seemingly creating new archetypes.

6. Amanda Joy’s Little Glass Pen

Amanda Joy is an Australian poet like me, but we’ve never met as she lives on the other side of the country. She is another I first encountered on MySpace where she had a huge following; then I found out she also has this blog and many followers here too. Her work is powerful and beautiful, and often experimental. It always makes you think.

7. Samuel Paralta’s Semaphore

I only know this poet online, where I think I first encountered him on twitter. He’s a most beautiful lyric poet; I’m always in awe of what he does with words. If I could steal the gifts of just one poet in this list, I might well choose his.

8. Rob Schackne’s The Tao That Can Be Named

Rob’s an old friend I lost touch with many years ago. Recently he found me on facebook. I see from his stunning blog that his poetry has matured into accomplished work which invites as much thought as feeling. He also posts on his blog work he likes by other poets, from the famous to the relatively unknown. Like Jennie, he is one of the few I turn to for opinions on my own work, and has given me valuable commentary.

9. Pearl Pirie’s 40-Word Years

Pearl and I encountered each other when we participated in the first September poetry month at Poewar: Writers’ Resource Center in 2007, and we became interested enough in each other’s work to connect to each other’s blogs. 40-Word Years is her version of a game we both enrolled in, started by another blogger in 2008, to write every day about someone who has made an impact on you, in the same number of words as your age. We have both chosen to continue long past that first year. Hers are closer to daily than mine ended up being (I haven’t even made 365 yet); she has stuck to 40 words whereas mine have increased with each birthday; and she now includes anecdotes and tributes. She’s quirky, humorous, compassionate, clear-seeing, and she always finds the most interesting conjunctions of words to convey an essence.

10. Bette Norcross Wappner’s Surimono Garden

Bette’s another friend discovered online. She creates exquisite haiku and equally exquisite woodblock prints, combining them as haiga. I do experience her blog as like being in a peaceful, restorative garden.


7 things about me

1. When I was a little girl, I decided that there could be no better thing to do with my life than make poems. I still think so, even though I haven’t reached such heights of life-affirming beauty as I imagined then.

2. I’m not a fiction writer. I have managed some quite creditable short stories — both of them published — but nothing earth-shattering, and my few attempts at novels have been pretty bad. Luckily I have no particular desire to create fiction (except in verse). I do like writing articles and essays, so I enjoy blogging.

3. I used to read heaps of fiction; in the last 20 years or so I rather lost my taste for it and haven’t read much — except for good fantasy, which I devour. (And except for old favourites, which I like re-reading).

4. I think the greatest English-language poets have been Shakespeare, Chaucer and Yeats.

5. My favourite contemporary poets are Mary Oliver, Jared Carter and Marge Piercy. And there are lots of others I love too.

6. My secret alter ego (no longer secret!) is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I always wanted to save the world — a lot.

7. I’m quite shy but I hide it well.

Meme: 5 of my strengths as a writer

This blog has a reader, a real live reader, one I actually know about!

My reader is The Cerebral Mum and she has tagged me for the meme: Name 5 of your strengths as a writer / artist.

The most accurate way to find that out might be to ask other people! How I show up "out there" could be very different from what the inside of my own mind tells me. However, the meme asks the writer / artist to self-evaluate, and that has me looking not at the qualities readers perceive in my writing but at the strengths I bring to it, which enable me to write well (when I do).

When I say "writer", I of course mean poet. I do also write articles, had a couple of short stories published long ago, and last year completed the first draft of a rather lame NaNoWriMo novel – but poetry is my passion and my calling.

1. I know my craft.

I was brought up on poetry. My parents loved it, and my Dad often used to read poetry to my little brother and me for bedtime stories. We had the whole of The Song of Hiawatha as a serial, and loved it. I think I imbibed poetics by a sort of osmosis.

As I got older, whenever Dad brought home the latest issue of Meanjin – still Australia's foremost literary journal – I could hardly wait for my turn to devour all the new poetry. (How magical it seemed, decades later, when contributors whose work I'd loved – Philip Martin, Judith Rodriguez, Gwen Harwood – became my colleagues and friends.)

I've scribbled all my life but it was only in my thirties that I decided to try for publication. I felt that demanded more serious attention to craft than when I was doing it as a private self-indulgence. In those days there weren't all the workshops and writing courses there are now. I trained myself by reading a critical history of poetry in English and composing in all the different styles in turn. I discovered that the years of self-indulgent scribbling had actually given me a fairly good grounding already, because I had always played around with form, often making up my own.

I actually like free verse best, though I don't always write that way. I think there's much truth in the saying that you have to know the rules before you can break them successfully. I fondly believe that I don't write chopped-up prose, as many free verse "poets" do, and I'm sure that's because I spent so much time when young exploring the formalities. That being said, I do know excellent poets who have seldom if ever strayed into form. Which leads me to my next strength, which perhaps they share:

2. I have a good "ear" for poetry.

It's like an ear for music – in which I am sadly deficient, unfortunately. But I can hear instinctively, as if naturally, what distinguishes poetry from both prose and bad verse. (And btw some prose is poetry.)

I'm not sure that I could always analyse the distinction, but I know I can hear it. I don't know whether this faculty was inborn or learned. All that early exposure to poetry might have done it. On the other hand, I come from a long line of versifiers on my father's side, and my Mum also wrote very good poetry when she tried her hand at it late in life, so perhaps there is some genetic predisposition too.

And how do I know my ear is so good? Well, for one thing, I have been an independent publisher of other people's poetry and some of those books have won or been placed in important literary prizes.

3. I say my poems out loud before deciding they're finished.

It's the only way to be sure the "sound effects" are working as well as the content. If I'm undecided about different word arrangements, speaking them aloud will be the deciding factor.

4. I work hard to make my poems clear and accessible.

I hate obscurity and obfuscation. Though some people might find some of my poems hard to understand, I maintain that they are understandable. This doesn't mean everything is spelt out; there can be mystery. And I love both paradox and ambiguity – if I use a word or phrase that could be meant in various ways, be assured I mean them all! But I don't make things difficult just for the sake of it.

5. My best writing comes from the heart.

Stating the obvious, you think? But there are poets who try to be clever, and/or write in an intellectual way at the expense of feeling. When I do that, it doesn't work; I need my heart to be engaged too. If I write from the head only, the poetry is hollow. I have always cherished the recollection of an outburst from the late jenny boult (aka MM Bliss) at a poetry conference in Melbourne back in the eighties. There was a panel session about what was essential for the creation of poetry. It went on and on with no resolution. People got more and more pompous and abstract, until finally jenny (who had a cold at the time) boomed hoarsely from the floor, "Deeply felt, for God's sake, deeply felt!" As I remember it, she halted the whole discussion. Talk about cutting through the crap, lol!

******

A second opinion

I thought I would ask someone else too, to try and see myself as others see me, and chose my friend Helen Patrice. Because we have a mutual mentorship scheme, she has been very familiar with my work for a long time. She replied:

"Five of your strengths as a writer: honesty; sense of the right word; true appreciation of others; breadth of consideration of topic; ability to bring humanity and the personal to any subject."

(I did ask some others as well, but no-one else has responded yet. How ominous is this?)


Later

I spoke too soon. Here is a response from Leah Kaminsky:

"Lush femininity, depth of soul, simplicity of language which is all the more powerful because of that, accessibility of meaning rather than obscurity, playfulness of language, dedication and devotion as a writer, generosity to other writers - me especially!!!!, child-like eye for detail and magic of ordinary things."

Leah and I are two-thirds of a writers' support group which has existed since 1991, even when we all lived in different countries for a while. The other person is Jennie Fraine, whose own response to my question is:

"Sensuality, you have the reader walk flat-footed with you through a picture to a bitey ending, ability to write on an endless array of topics."


I am tagging satyapriya, Savvyology, Muse du Jour and pearl.