The waves and sky were magical, last Thursday. By the water’s edge at Rushcutters Bay, Graeme, Petra, Sandra and Luke read their ‘Sea Things’ poems. At the party we screened the ten minute documentary about the leg to Thursday Island and sold poems in bottles, for $2. or more. It was just one of those nights – if you missed it you missed one of the best Arts events, this year. I say this not as the person who organized it (okay, I am that too) but as an individual who had the joy of feeling the poetry in the veins, breathing in the experience of the night and with it – superb poetic works read alongside perfected rhythm of waves against wood. The poems commissioned for this project have triumphed in describing aspects of the sea, exploring the philosophies and mythologies associated with it but without any cliches at all. The poems all edge around time, death, melancholy, history and the human’s place in the brine and waves. Yet, none of the poems sounds like a death knell that accompanies so many poems about sea. Typical sea worn words like ‘ebb’, ;eddy’, ‘glisten’ and ‘time’ are not used to force us into feeling melancholy. The crowd of about fifty were riveted as each poet spoke out their songs to the sea. Contributors to the duffle bag had driven from around NSW to be at the event. The most disappointing aspect was there were not more Sydney poets present to support their contemporaries and share in the experience. Perhaps that’s a Thursday night close to Christmas or perhaps people turn up to poetry events only if they’re performing? Maybe Red Room needs a larger marketing budget? Or maybe it’s because many people my age are more interested in the price of gold, looking after their kids or watching television.
Sea Things after the event
Sea Things Event tonight. Rain stay in the sea, please.
The sitar is warming up the lounge room as I go through the notes for tonight’s event.
Details:
Thursday 26th November 2009
6-7.30 PM
The Royal Australian Naval Sailing Association
SIr David Martin Reserve
New Beach Road
Rushcutters Bay
Our ‘Sea Things’ film is finished and Tyler is happy – both of us amazed by how much improved the visuals are with quality sound – that sonic life improves the visual images; as if it is a physical substance that paints the pictures. I am hearing Graham’s poem in my mind’s chamber, over and over he is talking about a ‘drowned cathedral’ a ‘Neanderthal skull’ and ‘church bats’. The more I recall his poem the more Gothic it is becoming.
The duffle bags are roped up and ready for the car trip to the space. All the poets arrive this morning and at 2 O’clock we depart to the venue space to set up. Tamryn has made the most exquisite poems-in-bottles which shall be for sale for a tiny donation of $2 or more.
Friday is markedly different from Thursday where I sat at a deliriously classy restaurant and listened to stories about climate change being a governmental conspiracy, how the inner city is still in need of quality after school care for kids with nowhere to go when the bell rings and then myself, fumbling out reasons why poetry transforms the big and the little worlds, all the time thinking, a poem would better explain what I want to say but, nerves and all, I couldn’t recite one.
Audio post on Sea Things
‘You Send It’ has just belled in my in-box to alert me that Elliott has masterfully completed all the audio and sound post-production on our film, Sea Things. What would Red Room do without his skills? I imagine we’d be silent more often and I may have had multiple heart attacks, since our inception, trying to edit the hours and hours of audio material Red Room has gathered. Thank you, Elliott. Now you can return to making your music and winning awards!
Now, it’s up to Tyler to complete our creation and then, tomorrow evening, we shall screen it for all of you who make our event. Compared to the experiences I’ve had editing our previous films, this time I have been amazed that in three days we can weave together a ten minute piece. Part of that comes from paying people professional wages (okay, excluding Elliott who works pro-bono for us) and not depending on favours or mates’ rates. The other reason is that a deadline, as we all know, can prevent us from procrastinating or from indulging our creative fantasies.
I have a zippingly high level of epinephrine when doing these projects (perhaps all things) and today’s mantra is that others need to sleep and eat, even if I do not, quite so much. Having said that, my eyes refused to open this morning and when they did they were so heavy they remained alert for under thirty seconds, shut and then lifted an hour later. Now I’m writing about eyes, they can sense it, and I feel them weighing down, trying to take me to sleep.
Listen eyes, I don’t think so. Open!
Editing on Pitt Street
Tyler (tall hatted person to the left) has almost completed the editing of ‘Sea Things’. It’s taken an extra day, that is if you judge a full day as being made of 8 hours (I think it’s 10 hours). Tyler and I extended the piece to ten minutes long, because the sea was so slow, anything faster would fail. It’s been a challenge (read that word with a euphemistic awareness) .. to get the editing done in just a few days. A select viewing audience of my two most trusted advisors were invited to view the film and comment on it: more sea. less maps.length. Good advice which was put into action immediately.
This particular film is required to document the project in a style an audience, totally uninformed about the project, can comprehend. Equally, the film must enrich the creative being and offer newness to those involved in or familiar with this endeavour.
I think it works and I think it doesn’t work. What the film has done is made me aware of personalities in projects; that the only way one gets a special result if those who made the film care more about the film than any other job at hand. If you’re working with anyone less than obsessed the film you get will be weaker than the original idea that it was born out of.
It is always people that make or break things. Yes, things.
Feet on shore at last
The Sea (all that I just saw of it) persists to dominate my days and nights. No matter that the ship journey from Cairns to Thursday Island is now a memory, it is the preparation for next Thursday’s ‘Sea Things’ celebration that consumes me; editing the footage, with Tyler, that we took whilst on our voyage and working out the song, narration and length to best tell our story. Reviewing the filmed material I am refreshed and amazed, as I was during the trip, by how odd this project is: chasing a duffle bag of poems; being dumped on a boat and then a Tropical Island, with strangers; editing a film in three days; Graham reading in crocodile infested waters, witnessing a shark being hooked by a ten year old denizen of Horn Island; living off Arnotts biscuits; being diseased by freckles; developing a lip rash from the toxicity in mangoes; working with school students atop Green Hill; paying for a room at the Grand Hotel which we never stayed in; eating Israeli delights whilst staring at Palm trees; never having any part of the adventure turn out as planned.
I shan’t re-tell all the tales in one blog but invite you to the film screening and poet readings, all part of Sea Things on:
November 26th from 6-7:30PM; The Royal Australian Naval Association, Sir David Martin Reserve, New Beach Road, Rushcutters Bay, Sydney. RSVP 02 9319 5090 or tamryn@redroomcompany.org
Robyn recounts the DUFFLE BAG Adventure
Sea Things followers: here is a very entertaining account of how one of our poetic ambassadors collected the duffle bag.
Hi Johanna
A sweltering Darwin morning, the build-up in full swing. A road to the coast that I, a very new Darwinian have not travelled before. And why? To collect a duffle bag of poems. Somehow it all seems rather covert, certainly out of the ordinary.
I hand over my brand new NT driver’s license to an oil-stained man at a boom gate. My visitor’s pass in hand I am allowed to proceed, and follow a long curved road down towards the East Arm Wharf. A large sign announces that private vehicles must stop here, so I park, and walk across a huge expanse of bitumen sparsely populated by men and massive machines. The heat is oppressive and rises in enervating waves off the tar.
As I finally reach the wharf a kindly woman in an air-conditioned car pulls up and offers me a lift. The car is like a fridge. Grateful doesn’t begin to cover it.
At the P&O office no-one can believe I walked so far. Apparently I should have ignored the sign. I ask a bunch of blokes in overalls about a duffle bag full of poems and they exchange looks that subtly suggest insanity on my part, but one escorts me to the other office – where female office staff receive me in much the same way.
But wait… there is a bag of poems… she’s not crazy after all! (Well, not completely … she did walk all that way…)
And one of the ‘overalls’ is kind enough to give me another air-conditioned lift all the way back to my car.
Ciao!
Robyn McLean
Office manager
NT Writers’ Centre
Frogs Hollow Centre for the Arts
56 McMinn St
GPO Box 2255
Darwin NT 0801
t: 08 89412651
f: 08 89412115
e: info@ntwriters.com.au
w: www.ntwriters.com.au
Report from Darwin
A triangle of red marks my back where the Darwin sun beams scorched me, today on Stokes Hill Wharf. But, who cares about a burn when we have a duffle bag to fill and then to Express Post by Emergency Sea Plane, to Thursday Island. Working backwards: I’m now at home trying to pack but keen to read one of my birthday books, some Bolano, Neruda or the latest Quarterly Essay.
The plane home was four hours and the passenger to my right was trying hard not to throw up, think about a cigarette or drop his head into my lap. This evening’s sunset was mythical and I read a story, ‘The Boat’ all the way home. The morning was spent on the Wharf and between reading poems and rallying the fish market dwellers as our audience, I was wondering how the AGM for Red Room’s Patron went, today. The ABC were most enthusiastic in Darwin: local and regional radio and poems read over the airwaves. I had a dream of crocodiles and a lot of blood on an anonymous bathroom floor. In the middle of the night there was a Darwin storm with cracks of lightening and thumps of thunder. Already I miss my friends in Darwin and already I want to sit in a waterfall and be amazed that stones and rocks can be such perfect pinks. R
termite country
Our duffle bag has been safely shipped to Cairns where it is currently being housed by David J Delaney. Can you believe that David has swung myself and Gretchen 5 star accommodation in Cairns because the hotel staff are friendly to and famliar with all this poets? ‘Tis true!
Here, in Darwin, I am preparing to venture into the heat and explore the Wharf for tomorrow. My legs are limping having swum a few too many laps in a freshwater pool and then followed that by a hike through Litchfield Park where the ominous colony of magnetic termite mounds hold fort.
It is hard to stay still, mentally or bodily; Thursday Island and the Trinity Bay are calling me and now that we have Tyler, as our cameraman, Gretchen from the ABC, Graeme our poet and all the sharks prepared – I am thinking that we are going to create a shipping tale to rival Robinson Crusoe.
Fannie Bay
Monsoon winds climbing into the evening, reminds me of being in India, almost two years ago which seems like yesterday and like forever-ago. I’m here in Darwin preparing for Tuesday’s 11AM farewell to the duffle bag of poems, from Stokes Hill Wharf. Happily, there are a few days to explore Darwin with the guidance of one of my truest friends and her husband-to-be and my husband-not-to-be-but-ten-years-means-multitudes. Compared to the expenses incurred from flights during this project, the Darwin journey is free since I purchased plane tickets on my Frequent Flyers and am being housed in a friend’s home, in Fannie Bay. I am also smiling thanks to recent support from The Shark Island Foundation, towards the film component of ‘Sea Things’. Phew.
My body was cooled in twenty laps of a pool at Nightcliff, enveloped in expanse of water and lots of babies with little guts, wandering the pool edges, looking for their reflections. It was only a few poems ago I was in Brisbane with Luke Beesley, sitting under a tree, reading poems and sharing sea tales with school students and a Captain. The Brisbane handover was, as each handover is, memorable for the good spirit that flowed from the poems to the poet to the mariner. In a few minutes I’ll head out to the Ski Club from belated Birthday drinks and feel young in comparison to the surrounding rocks and owners of them.
Brisbane this Wednesday, Parliament House, last Wednesday
Friends, I am late for walking my parent’s dog, Dolly. Yesterday Dolly helped me by panting and following my every toe placement around the house as I and gorgeous E unpacked boxes into my new home, in Glebe. Today though, I left her to sleep at mother and father’s house as her ancient Staffy coat was beginning to smell out the wood polished floorboards of the new home.
I’m writing to let you know that the event at Parliament House, on Wednesday last, was great fun. With a mixture of readers – politicians, poets, musicians, students, reading their work. The crowd was mostly over thirty, except for The Red Room crew and Francis from The Week and the audience was Anglo Saxon and did not reflect the diversity of poetic cultures in the state. What was successful included the venue, the involvement of politicians, the guest readers, the partnerships developed between Red Room and The Week and the Government and the magnificent greenery looking in at us, from the Botanic Gardens.
As I had no inviting to do myself it meant minimal anxiety over bums on seats and even when there were no seats left, I was able to close my worries and concentrate on the poems being read. David Malouf and Judith Beveridge were stars.
The division bell, to everyone’s annoyance, rang through Judith’s final poem only to cease the moment I took the microphone – a frustration for all. For once, cheese platters didn’t look like an impoverished last minute attempt at sophistication.
On the Sea front – we’ll be holding our Brisbane duffle bag exchange this Wednesday at 11AM, in Brisbane. Make certain any of you with poems, turn up and slot your magic verse into the canvas bag, your very selves.