Redroom Company

Kara Kidman arrived, Out of the Box, in a pearly pink shirt and with a packet of scrumptious sugary sweets that were so chewy I almost got jaw lock and lost my incisors. The mastications prior to the show meant our mouths were ready for good conversation but, as it happened, we played all then ten songs I selected for the program. To sit for an hour in the middle of the day and listen to ‘my top ten’ was indulgent and informative : my mood is acoustic.

After Kara’s show I tramped back through Red-land to the 583 where Brett the camera man collected a set of film lights I had rescued from the tip. Ms Ann-Marie was busily mailing out invitations to our next event and at 3 I arrived in the KPMG tower to number crunch with Matthew. Two hours later Matthew was eating his mum’s lamb shanks and I was reading about a girl who had no spatial reasoning and ran herself into the front of a car, thinking she could swerve and miss it. Not so. We think one thing and the body always does another.

Curse this mixed state!

On the kitchen table-main desk, in The Red Room, lie four square canvas portraits of Tim Thorne as painted and generously donated to us by the artist, Orlan Erin Raleigh. This quartet of works are alive in muted beige and grey, each face drips in and out of perspective. In Monday’s light the faces more resemble the artist than the subject.

These works, along with a larger version of the face, were exhibited as part of ‘The Poet’s Life Works’ event held last Wednesday, in an unassuming brick fronted gallery space, Chalkhorse. The event celebrated the work of Tasmanian poet, Tim Thorne.

Broken into three distinct sections Tim read and also talked about his writing subjects and styles that include philosophy, national and world politics and love. The final section was dedicated to the poem commissioned for the event. The audience adored the vitality, wit and cultural satire that wove the poem together.

Tim’s commissioned poem, along with all those poems and art works commissioned for our series, will feature in our poem-book to be printed and distributed in the final event of the series, on August 27th.

The crowd was intimate. I tell a lie if I say I was pleased with the audience density; I wasn’t. Why were there not more poets supporting such a skillful writer and performer of poetry.? Not only has Tim published twelve books of poems he has been an active teacher, promoter and publisher of poetry, his entire writing life. Tim is well respected as poetry editor and renown for his entertaining and inspirational launching of other people’s books and mentoring of emerging poets. Tim has taught in a range of communities, such as prisons.

It is poets like Tim that dig poetry out of a pit of obscurity and elitist discourses and share language and craft with all of us. I wonder if there were less poets present at this event because by focusing on one poet only, others feel abandoned at not having been selected themselves? Is it because there are too many events on, on Wednesday nights and poetry doesn’t rate up there with going to bed early? Is it because the event location was obscure? Or, is our ‘The Poet’s Life Works’ series more traditional than Red Room normally creates and the quieter creations get lost in the rabble if more energy isn’t put in to promoting?

Or perhaps, because Red Room events are so often sold out or reach their space capacity, the public thinks we don’t need their support - well how wrong you are - public and poets - The Red Room Company wants you!

There is a gigantic plastic tub of edible treats that have been made by Chef A’Hoy for our event, tomorrow night…I spy piles of poem cards, sunglasses and pages upon pages of my scribbled notes…Not far from the office there is a disconcerting sound of dogs yelping but… having looked up and down the street from up high, nothing to be seen or reported…I am paraphrasing ‘Spain’ .. ‘Yesterday all the past …. But today the struggle’…. The magic team have sourced all props and Mr Harris, our sax player for the gig tomorrow night is rehearsing songs by singers starting with ‘Little’ … Rain or rainbow, we’ll be ready to poem at 6:30PM. I wonder if the rest of Sydney’s poets will support their own kind and experience the world of Tim?

Download the poster.
It is repulsive how much there is to consume at Bondi Junction and even if you are not acting out a purchase your head will ache from sponging up the smell of sugar rolled and honey roasted cashew nuts. The scent of plastic and lipstick permeates the entire complex. I did, however, have some joy at the shops as I managed to enter and exit Westfield Bondi Junction without losing my car, my calm or more cash than I had meant to due to. I peeked in the book supermarket but there were no Tim Thorne collections so I left in a private huff.

Dorothy Porter was the focus of our minds and our lips, last night at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s, ‘Inspired Reading’ event. A circle of about thirteen readers of ‘The Monkey’s Mask’ spoke of strangulation, Raymond Chandler, sex and cats. We were surrounded by an exhibition, curated by Glenn Barkley that celebrates a selection of contemporary Australian poetry. As always, when one reads or discusses Porter’s poetry there is ‘passion’ moving through the language, the atmosphere, tingling up physical and psychic body. Last night we defined and refined what ‘passion’ was, is and can be but in the end there was an acceptance that ‘passion’, like the energies of emotion, cannot be intellectualized, it must be lived out and certainly not placed in quotation marks, as I have just done. The presences last night made the night - Porter’s sister, mother and niece were all present and they were unbelievably generous in their conversation - as if the spirit of giving and feeling that is present in Porter’s language and stories must come from blood.

A magical anthology of petals, leaves and stems was delivered to our doorstep, yesterday. Flowers carried all the way from Australia via a local village florist. (Thank you for sending them. My heart opened wide). This afternoon I placed my nose to the tips of the tulips and inhaled their redness - I had a flash of that terrifyingly violent and mournful poem that was one of Sylvia’s creations:

“The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their colour,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.”

(Poem: ‘Tulips’ by Sylvia Plath
Volume: The Collected Poems
Year: Published/Written in 1961 )

Tomorrow at my grandfather’s funeral I’ll wear, around my neck, a locket that my grandmother just gave me. The locket is black jet enamel, with a pearl and rose gold design and most amazingly the locket holds a lock of blond hair that once was on my great grand-mother’s head!

Alive, my grandfather was not really high on romanticism or sentiment that characterized the Victorian era but something amount his devotion and praise of the smallest acts, creatures and objects is illustrated in this locket.

As I try to prepare for tomorrow I can’t help but catch Britain’s evening news-entertainment which is all about the overwhelmed Scottish feline lover, Susan Boyle. Even the Prime Minister is sending her messages of love and I can’t get the saccharine version of the French Revolution out of my head … I dreamed a dream in times gone by …

Roses like I’ve never seen, never smelt before. Song thrush, blackbirds and foxes. In England for my grandfather’s funeral and so long as the sun shines the sadness won’t defeat the Spring beauty.

Margie Cronin delivered The Red Room Company’s inaugural mini-essay-lecture last night at ‘The Poet’s Life Works’. This unique event was held inside a studio. Outside there was night and rain and upstairs another Writers’ Festival event. Reflections swam around fish bowls of poems and tangible insinuations about Margie’s work. These bowls and their contents had been sourced by us after discussions with the poet about the skeletons in her closets. The event we created to showcase Margie’s work is the first of four intimate studies of Australian poets in a series that is an alternative to previous Red events. Having just completed Dust Poems and other projects where there are lots of poets and little time to engage with them, ‘The Poet’s Life Works’ studies ask the audience, the poet and the creators of the event to spend time concentrating on the life time of one poet.

Margie was tough to talk with. Her inventive, quirky mind means the reader enjoys every syllable she speaks and she speaks speedily, all the time letting the poetry speak to us. Perhaps this blurring of the line between prose, poetry and fiction saves her work from being egotistic autobiography. We had not enough time to talk of her interest in law and society, in misjudgment and sacrifice. And we had enough time to learn that her thoughts and self are already in poetry, not poetry as a way to expurgate her thoughts. There is no other poet in this country who write and moves through languages of all places (kids, farms, theaters, skin, heavens) as Margie does. She pushes poetic certainties to new heights so less isn’t more it is More or less Than .. and we decide what.

This morning myself and the team moved part of Margie’s installation into Pier 2/3 and I couldn’t help noticing so many poetry projects, not Red Room created, all around. Seeing how others have taken on past Red Room ideas and made them their own had me thinking of Margie’s concept that people just ‘move stuff around’. That it is so easy to take what is already there but almost impossible to build on what is before the there and thus, ahead of the rest.

We waited for the tram to carry us to Spencer Street station and then aboard the nauseous interior of a Skybus to the airport and by 9PM onto a plane bound for Sydney-home. We had, for one night, been staying with the Nicholson Street nuns in a King sized bed which the memorably cute hotel receptionist had upgraded the pair of us to. We, that is Bonny and I, are regulars at this particular hotel and this week we made our second trip to Melbourne to celebrate Papercuts at Fitzroy High.

Lisa Gorton was the poet selected to work with the students and the result is a selection of top quality illustrated poems on toilet doors in the school and local community. Lisa attended the evening launch in a yellow and black ensemble, the sharpness of form, zest of colour and sensuous, satin textures reflect (no doubt unconsciously) key elements of her own writing. The food of the night had the theme of ‘toilet’ and light brown meringue twists that resembled turd were served on a silver platter. The students read before a shower curtain and half way through the readings one of the students phoned in, all the way from Manchester, to read his poem.

Serious as teaching and learning poetry is, I cannot help but praise the comedy of how a ceramic bowl produces poetry.