“I introduced the ‘Cabinet of Lost and Found’ to year 9 students from Killara High School this morning. The stolen bird from the original 2007 installation drew them towards poetry with a ripple of laughter that snaked around the room. I had set myself some pre-class homework: to write a poem in anticipation of the workshop. We started with this in its four versions from hand-written early-morning scrawl (drafting and more drafting!), to something approaching a poem: “The car door sticks in wet grass / kids howling the raining playground playing / my way to your class to speak of poetry / furious-wet words in furnace-flight.” All this water on a bright sunny morning? – well it was raining when I wrote it. The relative merits of regular and irregular rhyming came up, and the objects (or their images) that may inhabit our eventual poetic cabinet were described: surfboards, people, uniforms, fortune-cookies, video games. I read ‘Premonitions’, showing objects that inspired me to write it: a scarf and my hand-made books. I admitted that I didn’t really see a psychic in New York as the poem suggests – just a narrative device! I showed the class an image of the entrance to Hill 60 – a WWII Bunker Chamber at Port Kembla, the object that inspired my ‘Owen’ writings. Next workshop I’ll take them inside”
February 10th, 2010
