Once more a poem to begin the class; one charting the progress of you opening up to me, me opening my ‘true’ self to you so that we can speak each other’s name with just the right tone, at just the right volume, sounding out the sequence of syllables needed for you to turn your head, share your mind. Speaking of sounding-out syllables Hugo Ball appeared on screen in his cardboard hat and his cardboard cloak and stiff tubular legs that required he be lifted up onto stage, as he couldn’t bend his knees. I played the class his Dada sound poem ‘Karawane’, as performed by the experimental Canadian poet Christian Bok; all rap and rata-tat-tat at pace; all push out and suck in; all in your face – they liked that, silenced by those first explosive sound waves ‘jolofanto bambla o falli bambla’ and laughing excitedly as the final ‘ba–umf’ vibrations settled into the walls, the floor, their pores. The class have to perform their poems for assessment later in the week so I was emphasising the power of vocalised sound – communication without words, a universal language approaching that of music: “Bring Ball’s intensity to your delivery, even if you are using ‘real’ words.”

And there were real words to be discovered, object poems to be extended, details to be added to already constructed stanzas and new stanzas to be created: stanzas in which the students place their own objects in their own imagined cabinets and perhaps it will be these particular imaginings that shape Killara High School’s final poetic installation. I wrote about my own personal cabinet too, and the book of Pharmaceutical Formulary I would place there. When I imagined this cabinet open I realised there were already things in it; objects I hadn’t intended to write about, ones that held memories of experiences had while traveling – I read it for the class: “I have this special spot: It’s a secret. / I will tell you though, now that we know each other, a little. / There’s a space at the back of my kitchen cupboard / the one above the greased-up tiles, / above the scarred glass elements. / It’s dusty and dark but dry enough / and here I store my precious objects: a volcanic rock / from the top of Africa’s Kilimanjaro and a tiny cup / with which I was fed poison, sold jewels / and almost died. / The jewels are here too, Aquamarines in their little box / with the cat on the lid. / I look at them sometimes and remember / his /reptilian face, / eyes without lashes / long fingers spooning liquid into my cup / then raping the table like impatient spider’s legs. / There are other things here too – amid them I place / the blue book and its formulas. / I close the cupboard door, my cabinet is a secret one -  / its not about display, its about keeping things / safe.  / You wont tell any one – / will you?”

I walked around the class and showed them the volcanic rock and the jewels in their little cat box and then the students read their own work out; enunciating poetic phrases about horses, footballs, rocks and photos; warrior pens, birds and lost friends; childhood carts, paper that cuts, old men, mint dispensers, surfboards, packets of chips and more; and it was wonderful to hear them enliven their texts, shape sound into words loosed into our ears. I left them, on this our last meeting, with another performance: the aftermath of a car crash told with text, projected images, and improvised guitar – I spoke with and against my prerecorded voice, the embodied and disembodied conversing, singing, poetry dissolving into sound into poetry amid the ricochet of flying glass.” BY GARETH JENKINS

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“Session 1 :Living in the Southwest you are often reminded of the distance from the city, whether it’s driving down the clogged artery of the M5, or sitting on a train as it slides through the suburbs. Luckily today, though, I only had to drive 6 minutes down the road to Macquarie Fields High School. The school has both comprehensive and selective students and is surrounded by brown playing fields.

My first session involved meeting the students and so it began with 15 of us cosily wedged into a room affectionately known as ‘the fish bowl’. There is something strange about a glass room in the centre of a building. Other students would look into the windows between classes, but we knew that this would become our crucible for the next four sessions, the place where intense poetic craft could occur.

The students were from heaps of different backgrounds, and many of them enjoyed reading poetry. Yet only a few had actually written their own stuff. I told them that we had formed the first Macquarie Fields Poetry Team. The softball players perhaps didn’t take me seriously. After suggesting some names (sadly, no one took mine seriously: ‘The “P” squad’ would have been great!), our assisting teacher Mrs Imelda Judge came up with a cracker. Macquarie Fields Live Poet’s Society. So there we were, the Live Poet’s Society. 15 of us in a fishbowl, ready to take on the world (or at least the suburb)!

We continued by thinking about what makes good poetry, reading a couple of poems and analysing the things that we liked about them. Then, I shared the brief, which involved writing a poem in response to Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s First Speech in the Colony, to be read at the unveiling of the statue commemorating 200 years since his governing began. For many on the team, this was both challenging and daunting. Many of these guys and girls hadn’t actually written poetry before. But with true Live Poet’s courage they stepped up to the plate.

Next, we split up into pairs and read about sections of Macquarie’s life from the Australian Biographical Dictionary, just to get a feel for those traits and quirks that made up the man himself. Then we shared these with the group. Our team was particularly taken by Macquarie’s attempts to give emancipated convicts jobs, and to break down those barriers of class which were so evident in the colony at the time.

After this, the team read Macquarie’s speech itself, getting a feel for its language and themes. Each member then chose one phrase from the speech as the heading for a poem they would write that week. Even at this stage, the team was already making fascinating connections between the 200-year-old speech and the suburb in which they lived. Natalie, for example, thought about “all classes” and then reminded us of the gated golf-course community down the road. I wondered how political this poem would get….

Session 2- We have just emerged from the fishbowl after an incredible session! We had some unforseen personnel changes, and only about half our team had completed poems but the standard was fantastic. In this hour and a bit we read some of these works and began the process of editing. This is a tough thing for many poets, to expose themselves to the criticism of a group, but these guys were remarkable, both in their encouragement of each other and in their suggestions for ways that poems could be improved

Molica started us off with a poem so strong that the hairs on my arms stood up! Her work was a response to the phrase “strict justice and impartiality” from Macquarie’s speech. Her opening lines were, “He guards the pillars of life/ with aspirations of a mended future.” The image was of Macquarie, who saw himself as the great builder, projecting his hopes onto the future of the colony. Lauren and Aashna reminded us that ‘aspirations’ has a meaning that is also much more contemporary, fitting well with many in who live in the suburb of Macquarie Fields. We then worked hard to get the most out of a couple of lines later on the poem. Here, Ayon picked up on patterns of fire and water, and how Macquarie may have seen himself attempting to hold back waves of chaos. We also heard from Sean, who is a strong editor and who offered useful suggestions for word choice and order.

Ayon’s poem was similarly strong, using a repetition of the line ‘will now terminate forever’ to give the work a revolutionary feel. The clever thing about this poem was its irony and the way it worked in the school’s own motto. Here, we tried to focus on moving away from generality and abstract concepts and toward some of those concrete poetic images that make any poem unique. We also considered how Macquarie’s line could be interpreted in our society and thought about how this poem could bridge that gap between the time of the speech and the contemporary moment.

Aashna’s poem was a wonderfully crafted rhyming verse, musing on the notion of peace. However, in the context of our larger work, the team thought that rhyming probably wouldn’t fit with the rest of the poems. So these poets (including Aashna) voted to refigure this poem without the rhyme!

Brendan had written 14 lines on “species of vice and immorality”. This perhaps was the most political poem of the writing we discussed. This work cast Macquarie in his role as defender of order and decency, linking this to the creation of “perfect moral crusaders”. Again the irony was apparent, and we considered how to link this line with our society which in many ways is different to Macquarie’s dream.

So all up, a fantastic day for the Macquarie Fields High Live Poet’s Society. I can’t wait for session 3 when we go through the rest of the poems!”

LACHLAN BROWN

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“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

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I too have been using all modes of motion, except the 431 from Glebe, to work on Red Room activities. I am concerned that Joel and Tamryn think I spend my life meeting people and never actually working – what if they’re right and all these talks with people and attempt to share our work with those of the beaming eyes is a waste of time?

.. not these magnificent boxes of poems that we’ve created with Corban and Blair, ‘Poems-to-Share’.  I have happily been spruiking the boxes this week but playing an Avon lady is a weak point. I’m wondering if, by simply carrying a box around with me in public spaces, people will see the name of the box and subliminally be drawn to seek the box out, later when they’re at home and lonely because their wife, their life or their day at work is without the language of spark.

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Enough of financial woe. How about we talk about mission statements – how to write one that doesn’t evade the truth. How easy to define strategy but the soul of what we do in the Red Room is really playing hard to articulate in a sentence. Perhaps the phrase ‘mission statement’ is outmoded, I mean a mantra or maybe a bill of poem-rights, a call to arms or a manifesto. Whatever name the statement takes it is to explain to those who don’t know who or what Red Room is, what it is. I, for one, often need to remind myself of the vision beyond and before the strategy.

Outside our building, there is tar being smoothed over old Elizabeth St footpath.  I think my foot was the first foot to walk on the slab of new street, street that now marks the outside world from the red room’s inside.

You only have to knock!

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Now, the cars are heading home and I’m running back through this week which has been pleasingly dominated by meeting interesting people from places I didn’t think would join forces with the Red Room : glass rooms with spy cameras; poetry scribing entrepreneurs and our lovely new intern, Emilia, from Sweden. How lucky this company is to have selected the word ‘company’ for ourselves and with it comrades and companionship.

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Last night at an intimate, perfect evening at ‘Italy’ .. apart from the slightly horrific experience of receiving the bill. E and I had as much fun talking and sharing as we did spying on a unique couple, across from us : every ten minutes they broke their talking to scurry to the outside street to smoke or to do something else in the lane shadows.

I was here for Red business and spent the last few days talking with Paul at The Australian Poetry Center about how his team there may support Red Room’s education program and our other innovations. Good progress was made. I had a hasty glass of wine with Mr Wallace-Crabbe and found it hard to compete with the giant glass of Red he sipped and that he was on his way from and back to the grand opening of the ‘Wheeler Center’.

I have focused on education discussions this trip and, at a small cafe in the middle of somewhere in the city, with E, met with Eytan who, as a working English and Art teacher at Caulfield Grammar, told us the 101 problems with Julia’s new website.
Now, back to writing about Tagore and a return to my own version of fasting which is no alcohol and minimal outings until my poems are completed.

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Here is a poem Mr Fletcher just emailed me, about the Island, by Barty.

THE BALLAD OF COCKATOO DOCK

Of all the docks upon the blue
There was no dockyard, old or new,
To touch the dock at Cockatoo.

Of all the ministerial clan
There was no nicer, worthier man
Than Admiral O’Sullivan.

Of course we mean E. W.
O’Sullivan, the hero who
Controlled the dock at Cockatoo.

To workmen he explained his views–
“You need not toil unless you choose,
Your only work is drawing screws.”

And sometimes to their great surprise
When votes of censure filled the skies
He used to give them all a rise.

“What odds about a pound or two?”
Exclaimed the great E. W.
O’Sullivan at Cockatoo.

The dockyard superintendent, he
Was not at all what he should be–
He sneered at all this sympathy.

So when he gave a man the sack
O’Sullivan got on his track
And straightway went and fetched him back.

And with a sympathetic tear
He’d say, “How dare you interfere,
You most misguided engineer?

“Your sordid manners please amend–
No man can possibly offend
Who has a Member for a friend.

“With euchre, or a friendly rub,
And whisky from the nearest ‘pub’,
We’ll make the dockyard like a club.

“Heave ho, my hearties, play away,
We’ll do no weary work today.
What odds–the public has to pay!

“And if the public should complain
I’ll go to Broken Hill by train
To watch McCarthy making rain.”

And there, with nothing else to do
No doubt the great E. W.
Will straightway raise McCarthy’s screw.

The Evening News, 9 July 1903

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Applications for Red Room’s two job positions have closed and this week we will be selecting the new family members. Each and every individual who has applied would be terrific in their own way and to select the best person for each role is going to be decided by our committee. I had moments of terror a month ago, thinking not one person would apply and I’d have to put myself forward as a candidate and train myself to work 100 hours, each day. Hours in the day – Kevin Hart flies back home and some time we spent together involved him recounting conference papers and and conference people. Most of the time I listened to his tales of everything. Really, everything. I am happily full of wondering about that word – exorbitant.

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Back in Hobart – the bag has arrived safely and the contents will be sorted for the first of a quartet of exhibitions of the duffle bag.

An Enormous thanks to our Poetry Commander, Commander Vine, who  picked up the bag for us and was, yet again, involved in a media frenzy (!) as  journalists at the Hobart Mercury snapped the handover.

Our darling Ms Bonny Cassidy has left the building and when I return to The Red Room it will be to assess new applicants for the role of Education Officer. In the meantime Ms Bennett is overseeing the 2010 beginning of Red activities and the rest of the world carries on as if Christmas never was.

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Here, in Berlin, the people and the family in Sydney seem not to exist as though I have forgotten them and they me. This anonymous but acceptable act of vanishing is the one of the most wonderful and confronting aspect of travel.

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My German phrases include: ‘ich verstehe nicht’ and ‘bis dan’.  I am also using words stolen by the English to spice up my conversational skills (or lack) – such as ‘wanderlust’ , ‘poltergeist’ and ‘Dummkopf’.

The Red Room is worlds away from the snow and this state of extreme calm that is created by cold weather and no mobile phone. I have left the work in the capable hands of our Patron, Bonny and Tamryn. The last week in The Room was heavy with sadness at our wonderful Ms Cassidy moving on to full time teaching work and then learning.

The marvellous news is that NSW Arts have provided us with funds towards a range of our projects for 2010. With this income we will be able to kick start the year at The Sydney Writers’ Festival and tour our ‘Sea Things’ exhibition. There was a moment of terror when we learnt the Australia Council’s Literature Board had rejected our application for funding and instead put all their eggs in one basket that wasn’t ours.

But,

right now, the lima beans are boiling and we’re about to begin the first of a series of baking cakes and gingerbread. The sounds here are of aluminium being scrubbed and soft socks on wooden floors and the occasional snap and pop of fireworks.

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If I was to reveal my true self last week, I’d be in a state of stress and frustration as Red Room was knocked back twice from The Australia Council. Luckily, the Council is one body that will meet up and discuss why we failed to raise funds for two projects in 2010. I am terrified that because we have a high profile Patron people will, wrongly, assume we have stocks and shares and Swiss bank accounts with poetry funds in it. Or, what if, because Red Room has survived through partnerships with other people, not just the Arts funding bodies, this, incorrectly suggests, we don’t still need funding from the Australia Council. Oh, all these worries and all I want to do is read Tagore and write about India which seems like I was there only a month or so ago.

Now, I have to go and find the poem Al Gore wrote, about climate change. It has been described as ’stupid’ and also likened to Yeats’ work. Scary.

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+ Red Room is having a party tonight, co-hosted with our design partners, Boccalatte. If you want to attend you must rsvp to tamryn@redroomcompany.org
+ Bonny has been in New Zealand writing and traveling and in the meantime we’ve been seeking funding for our 2010 education program. We will get there.
+ The tiny white rose has opened this morning. A pleasing contrast to the wilting chili tree.
+ We have begun to circulate our job advertisements for a x2 day a week Education Officer and x1 day a week copy/grant/poem editor. If you imagine doing such work please email me directly at johanna@redroomcompany.org.
+ I have new worry lines after the news we were unsuccessful in our grant applications to The Harold Mitchell Foundation and The Australia Council. I am wearing black today.
+ We have attended some excellent English Teachers’ Conferences, these last few weeks. In Sydney, myself, Bonny and Tony Britten presented to a room of poetry interested teachers and heard the report from Macquarie Fields High School about how both teachers and students were transformed by the poetry of Lachlan Brown and our program.
+ The cat next door has very heavy breathing and sounds more like a pug than a tabby. I think it is a cross-breed.
+ Berlin is less than ten days away and I have purchased Afghani socks to wear, so to keep my toes attached.
+ I had the pleasure of attending a special screening of Jane Campion’s ‘Bright Star’. I was moved by the film. Beautiful score, steadfast Abbie and memorable recitations of poetry. I am glad not to be anywhere near catching consumption.

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