It is Sunday after the Mardi Gras and I’ve spent some of it reading the TLS and looking through a friend’s photographs from her time, last night, on the float for Newtown Gym. It isn’t the ideal morning for thinking of school things, as school is asleep and kids are probably playing with footballs or in cinemas rather than thinking of Red Room. But. Gareth’s blogs from his time, last week, at Killara High School, are such engrossing reading:
“It was easier this time / to write a poem for you. / I knew you / a little. / Not so much invention required: / I didn’t need to make it rain this time. / I had seen your faces, heard you laugh / a little. / Not so many drafts this time, / the early morning flush of our unknowing filled / a little.
As with the first, I began this second workshop with a poem written for the occasion. We turned the lights off then and the class and I (via my video recording) entered a WWII bunker chamber at Port Kembla; a cavern layered dark with graffiti opened up before us. A whale’s pale eye hung suspended in a room off to the side and the low walk down the dark central passageway swelled with the sound of singing. ‘What language was that,’ asked a student when the sonic reverberations of my voice had subsided. I told her it was just improvised sound but I didn’t mean JUST, I meant sound as pure poetic expression so I told the students a little about Hugo Ball and Dada sound-poetry. I did an impromptu sound poem and they laughed ( a little) and I said if you want to laugh have a look at Hugo Ball’s tall hat made out of cardboard – now that is funny!
Today was a day of writing and we got straight down to it. A poem in three stanza focused on the student’s significant objects – and some had made it to class: rocks, photographs, jodhpurs, surf boards, figurines, pens and more. The poems began speaking of the sea rolling, split-personality pens, DVDs due for return, lime-green metallic tins, adventures on horseback and ascent from the scene of a funeral. The poems are speaking still in their drafting and redrafting and I’ll be back next week to hear the students sounding out their words. I think I’ll take in some Hugo Ball, show them an image of him up on stage in his stiff cardboard suit, in his high canonical hat and play them his texts performed – poetry beyond words, pure sound in flight.” GARETH JENKINS
