The Newcastle Young Writers’ Festival project, Sound Translations, is gaining body slowly and cautiously. The project involves sound artists taking a selection of poet voices from our Audio and Text Index and mixing them up into musical bumps and lineations for radio broadcast and as an exhibition sound scape, during the festival. I’m yet to make verbal contact with the translators. Emails say yes but the vocal chords say it directly into the ear hole, and then it becomes real. So, don’t wax your ears just yet.
I’ll be brief in the Papercuts update. Brief because we’re designing copyright details for our education resources to ensure schools don’t use our works without asking us…
So brief case lea : Pam Brown was struck down with head attacks and flu inspired fatigue and not able to meet the Pennant Hills High School class on Friday. Instead Bonny Cassidy, Fiona Wright and myself took the 40 Year 9 and 10 students in a series of poem writing and cabinet construction lessons. It was an unexpected thrill. Each student penned an object poem, the only (rule?) was blank pages are not allowed to exist. For some their blank page became two words dense. For many it was Attack of the Acronym! For others the page had become a thoughtful, experimental and enjoyable space where description met rhythm. These poems will be hammered and nailed and puttied into a poem shape fit for their own Cabinet of Lost and Found.
One of the male students with a shy and ponderous smile selected an AA battery as his object. But the boy (I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name) wanted to know what his battery was made up of. Knowing the insides of the battery would enable him to understand and articulate the insides of his poetry.
We discussed batteries as being metaphors for poems, both chambers (the poem structure / battery body) being a collection of cells all working together.
On Friday my battery knowledge was smaller than triple A but today I am battery charged so for the student with the blue AFL ball, here are some word insides for your poem:
voltage,zinc-chloride,lithium,nickel-cadium,nickel metal hydride, graphite, rod, paper, electrolytes, valves, cathodes and try incorporating battery concepts like re-charge, chemistry and exotic.
It is possible I was more charmed by this chemical metaphor than the student and the jubilation continued when the lunch bell droned and the school teacher presented the poets with an oval tray of elfin sized sandwiches and caramel slices.
