all of this is important

Here’s a new poem which I wrote recently and performed at Beeble Poets and the Ipswich heat of the Woodford Poetry Slam competition. And who said love poetry can’t be slammin’?

Anyway this was my first foray into Slam, and was a very enjoyable night seeing fellow Beeble Poets Cameron Hughes and Vuong Pham take out the quinella…Vuong proving that there IS a place also for haiku sequences at a Slam event!

all of this is important
For Chris

it is like the tiny way summer penetrates the frangipani
tree, a bundle of thumbs waiting behind my front fence

or the slow sound of a crow in the weight of mid morning
an arrowhead launch through the city’s heat blister

it is like the way changeling night comes of age, when peak
hour has crawled like a beaten dog into honeycomb shadow

or the way the tinfoil backed river winds through the places
we’ve mapped, intimacy clicking into the same viewfinder

it is like the way emptiness holds up the sky and how
the holes we look through are burned by the same stars

all of this is important, this day and all of its parts

not because it is important
but because you are not here

Vanessa Page, 2011

2011 Ipswich Poetry Feast

On Friday night I attended the Ipswich Poetry Feast Awards evening…for the fourth consecutive year as a prize winner which was very exciting! This year three of my poems won prizes, ‘Chrysalid’ was Highly Commended in the Open Category, ‘Final’ won second prize in the Local category and ‘Limestone Park’ won the Ipswich category.

All the poems are now up at the following site:
http://www.ipswichpoetryfeast.com.au/2011/winners.htm

How wonderful also to see such a strong showing from my fellow City of Ipswich poets Brett Dionysius and Vuong Pham who took home a share of the prizes. Please check out their poems – in particular Brett’s dense and brilliant sequence ‘Heartland’ and Vuong’s beautiful shape poem ‘Petrichor’.

And now, the poems…

Second Prize
Final
by Vanessa Page
Rosewood, Qld

Coming over the seven mile bridge
the Bremer River was still kissing the road,
the contents of its belly hung like scarecrow
detritus, out on the fence posts to dry

You’d lain in state like a crumpled love note
for bleached hours after the waters receded
deep in a row of quiescent post-wars,
ants working round you like a bicycle chain

When I arrived there, you were softened
by the end of day’s orange-sherbet glow
your gaping nightgown flannel like a husk
and your hair as sudden as a final wing-beat

In the kitchen, birthright was already placing
its claim on your crystal set, cutting words
with bee-sting mouths and shaking out the
sum of you like an embroidered sampler

I pick up your hand like a beaten stone
and even now, broken and gone, you fix all this.

Judges Report:
2nd Place: Final by Vanessa Page
Final is a poem of aching loss. The opening images create a haunting atmosphere, which is skillfully maintained throughout the poem. As we reach the Seven Mile Bridge, the Bremer is ‘kissing the road, the contents of its belly hung like scarecrow detritus’. This image of a scarecrow’s spilled belly, prepares us for the image of the body that lies ‘like a crumpled love note’ inside its post-war home; ‘hair as sudden as a final wingbeat’; but nothing can prepare us for the ‘bee-sting mouths’ squabbling over crystal sets and other human possessions. It is an image that struck a chord with me on first reading and continues to startle. With grace, the poet delivers a final couplet that moves us on from these ‘cutting words’ of greed, taking the hand of their lost loved one in a healing gesture.

Open Age Winner

Limestone Park
by Vanessa Page
Rosewood, Qld

Night is pulling close, one lungful at a time
so cold and so clear, at the top of Limestone Park

a fist of glow worm streets show themselves to
June’s dead sherbet sky, and the gloaming answers

you can cut perfect words from this looking glass sheet
one hand cupping the world and another lost in stillness

as transitions are made on porches all over the city
and evening is an avalanche of opened doors and ears

up here, floodlights have turned the trees into spectators
over children scooping and tumbling like confetti flakes

all around, endings and beginnings are being marked
out in tail light parentheses and keyless exits

as darkness falls, thick and familiar
over a thousand tin-lidded anthologies

Highly Commended

Chrysalid
by Vanessa Page
Rosewood, Qld

This day is made for breaking.

I lie awake in myopic fug. Outside
my window, the agapanthus heads
are inviting deconstruction.

There are only incidental details left.

I inhabit the shadows like silk-sheen,
resting my fingertips on your objects.

Your pieces have grown into monuments.

There’s no fix for this.
No interventional gestalt. I feed each
hour by hand to a paper tiger.

I do not recognise the shape a week makes.

This day is made for breaking.

When I imagine my return, it will be by
increment. A thing of weight, measured out.

I’ll pour a litre of milk down the sink,
slide a curtain open
and the sky will shatter.

Judges Report:
Highly Commended: Chrysalid by Vanessa Page
On a day ‘made for breaking’, agapanthus heads invite destruction, milk is poured down the sink and the sky shatters as curtains are slid open. There is a sharp edge to this poem; many of the images cutting with the clarity of a diamond.

Lovers

Here’s the poem created for ‘The world can wait” exhibition in Toowoomba. This poem came about sitting on my front steps looking at the moon on a beautiful early winter night…

Lovers

Tonight I’m watching the
pregnant moon slow-dance
with a purple caped sky, and

thinking about how Neil Young
could fold love and desire
in the same corner of the night

When you come to me, it’s late
winter is talking in glass vowels
and the world is a fixed element

Tonight, I’ll love you in fiction
with hands to realise your face, and
a mouth to press you with diamonds

and the moon will hang like a
beautiful and radiant witness
over these limbs and breathless words

© Vanessa Page 2011

SpeedPoets Open Mic poem

Here is the poem I read in the finals round yesterday:

Gone#2

I travel north
to be in the places
where you have been

drinking alone in the surf club

lying awake
listening to the ocean
making conversation

missing you

missing you

missing you

© Vanessa Page 2011

Photos from Riverbend

Riverbend Poetry Series

Well it was a wet, rainy night for the Riverbend Poetry Series II at Bulimba, but it was lovely to see so many poetry lovers out at the event and I have a great time reading some of my poems. It definitely is getting easier! I very much enjoyed the performances of fellow poets David Stavanger, Julie Beveridge and Max Ryan. So many unique voices on the one bill. I will post up some photos in the next couple of days but in the meantime you can head to the Queensland Poetry Festival website: http://www.queenslandpoetryfestival.com to see coverage of the event. Unfortunately Memory Bone was not available for purchase on the night, but once it is available I will post details on how to obtain a copy.
In the meantime, here’s a new poem which I performed at Riverbend:

Acceptance
Oh how this leaden aching
has short changed memory

tonight, only the
silhouettes of us remain

two beige truths,
pummelled slowly into a fiction

and when I peel you down to
heartwood to bury you at last

I am punch-drunk by
the idea of permanence

So, will any of this even matter?

For when the stars stand a little brighter,
marking out our previous conversations

the sky will still haemorrhage with light.

Vanessa Page, 2011

For a boy out west

For a boy out west
He plays out the same three nights
on an outback cinema screen
finding the shape of the face he once
knew in the stars, and using fingertips
thick with timber kisses to move
in his mind’s eye, so tenderly,
that he’s barely moving them at all
travelling that pair of hips, more than
once, using the roadmaps in his hands
to find a way through his mind
then wrapping the last of love
like a winding sheet close to his bones,
to bind the thought to his body
and when sleep passes him over,
he lies awake, just breathing.
anaesthetised beneath the night sounds.

© 2011 Vanessa Page

Ipswich International Poetry Feast Pics

The Harvinator, Brett Dionysius, Me

Here’s a photo from the Feast:

Here’s the judges’ report:

Highly Commended: Waiting by Vanessa Page
This entry illustrates the power of economy. ‘..how silk sheeted sky spills over to inhabit/the impressions you’ve left’. Intensely observed detail and language crammed with meaning convey the emotional quality of this kind of waiting.

poems

Harvey accompanied me to Speed Poets during October and read two of his pieces. He’s asked that I put one up on my blog…so here it is:

Poems

Magical poems
Happy poems
Sad poems
Wierd poems
Scary poems
Bad poems

Poems are really all the same
Poems are about what you are feeling

© 2010 Harvey Brown

2010 Ipswich International Poetry Feast

Last night the below piece took out a Highly Commended at the 2010 Ipswich International Poetry Feast. I’m so pleased. It has changed a little since its initial submission and is included in the Memory Bone manuscript which will be published soon, so while the original will be posted on the poetry feast website soon, I’m going to post its most recent incarnation here.

This is a great little competition that attracts some really great poets. The wonderful Brett Dionysius who was also the Press Press prize winner this year, took out the major prizes on the night, and it was great to see a fellow Queenslander and local take it out.

Here is my entry:

Mistress
It’s in the way the foliage deepens to viridian, each
time you leave

and in how the sky spills over to inhabit the
impressions you’ve left

These tiny fissures, these sweet little fractures.

I paint what’s left of the afternoon with a brush as fine
as eyelashes

a weeping emulsion, watercolour thin

In this kind of emptiness, even the sound of a leaf
detaching and spinning back to earth booms

I am a fulcrum. I am carved from stone.