Canals and fans in Orange are far away as I write to you from the bedside of my Grandmother, who is in a Nursing home, in England. That’s about as personal as I’ll get on a public blog so, let’s talk about one of the most exciting programs Red Room is running, our ‘Papercuts’ education program. This recent post, below, is composed by poet, Lindsay Tuggle who has been working with the school, Brisbane Water. Lindsay’s poetry is featured in the ‘Poems to Share’ sets and she was a feature poet in ‘Dust Poems’.
From Lindsay:
“ Last week I had the privilege to spend two days with Ms Genelle Farquhar’s year eight students at Brisbane Waters. I was meant to teach them something about what it means to write and read poetry (to whatever degree it is possible to teach these things . . . . I tend to believe, as I hope I conveyed to my fellow poetry students, that poetry is a way of seeing and being present in the world. Poetry to me is the absolute freedom to mould language into whatever shapes the mind conjures). In the end, they taught me so much that I can only hope to have reciprocated. After writing and reading alongside them, I have emerged with an altered view of how to write, read, and listen to poetry. I am so grateful to Genelle and all of the students for these new insights.
I arrived at Brisbane Waters relatively exhausted after a semester of intensive teaching and on the heels of submitting my doctoral dissertation. I felt a profound sense of honour and responsibility to invite these students to see the world through the ever-changing eyes of poets. I was anxious because I felt so far away from my own identity as a writer of poetry; it had been months since I’d written a new poem. By the end, I had awakened again to my own poetic interiority, and am intensely proud and honoured by the collection of work that was produced throughout the Cabinet of Lost and Found workshops.
We began by each writing a poem from the perspective of an animal of our choosing. The work that emerged from this exercise overwhelmingly addressed the countless ecological crises that surround us. Many centred on the lives of animals marked by impending danger and habitat destruction; the students spoke the language of diasporic species with startling fluency. We then broke into pairs, and I asked the students to combine both of their poems to create a new poem, and therefore a new creature. The resulting poems were both disturbing and hauntingly beautiful. Many spoke of mutation and the aftereffects of the imposition of human agency on other entities. The creatures that arose from their collective imagination were almost entirely “alone in the world,” left behind to suffer the consequences of genetic mutations that often left them unable to navigate their environment, such as the “crocobird” whose feathers and scales rendered her unable to fly or slither, and the flying leopard, who circles, endlessly “mutated,” “searcing for an abandoned site.” I hope that the poems that comprise this tragic menagerie will be included in the Cabinet, for they truly are both lost and found.
We spent most of our remaining time together discussing the talismanic objects contained in our collective Cabinet of Lost and Found. This eerily mnemonic, and often profoundly sad, collection of artefacts offered a wealth of material for writing exercises and draft poems. I am deeply honoured to be trusted with the writing of a poem that contains, in some way, elements of each of these objects, and very much look forward to returning to Brisbane Waters to hear the final drafts of all the students work, and to read my own.”
Tonight a group of eight of us readers at the Struga Festival climbed and whirled around the town of Ohrid. An early evening whim and we left the hotel and scrambled in a taxi in search of seaside churches and wine; we found these things, and more. Dinner discussions about chaos, Texan vernacular, Swedish conservatism and Alexander the Great’s horses versus elephants battles, took us into the early morning. And still, the moon is not full.
The days shape at random and although there is a printed program nothing is certain. Events to begin at 9am start at 11am. The crowd can be in the hundreds, with the Prime Minister of Macedonia present, (such as last night) or, an audience of two.
