Category: poetry

poetry, Writing

Festival Fun!

carolyncordon

The Adelaide Plains Poets writing group, has been running a ‘Festival of Words’ for the past 5 years. This is certainly a thing to be proud of, and the fact we have made a profit every year, gives us one more thing to be proud of.

This year, 2019, we are going to have a Festival over 5 nights and days, and venturing into new events and new venues, as well as the usual ones. It is getting close to Festival time, and I am proud to present our program, here:

http://festivalofwords.info/programme.html

This Festival is put on by a small writing group, but a group that is not afraid to take on challenges. We have a sub-committee who are doing great things, to make this Festival one that brings an exciting mix of word related events, written, spoken, with writing workshops, writing exercises, a Keynote Speaker of note, and a fun train journey!

And throughout the festival, friendship and food feature, at various venues in the Greater Adelaide Plains region. The event will be opened by the Mayor of Gawler, Karen Redmond, who has been extremely supportive of our group, and especially of this Festival.

The theme of this Festival is Location, and it is an interesting one again. We pride ourselves of the interesting themes we have for our Festivals. One of the important things our writing group does is to run a national poetry competition, which has the same theme as the Festival. The winners of the Poetry Competition are announced on the final day of the Festival, with the winning poems being read at the Gawler Poets at the Pub, with will be the final event for the Festival.

This Gawler Poets at the Pub event began more than twenty years ago, and is still going strong. There isn’t always a large number of attendees, but the quality of the poetry read is always high.

If you’re anywhere near Gawler toward the end of July this year, make sure you check out the Program, and find something interesting to do, you’ll be glad you did!

 

 

poetry

Getting Poetry Published

carolyncordon
Get Your Poetry Collection Published
I’ve just been looking at online thoughts about the pay to be considered idea for poetry, and wonder how you feel about it? There is no charge to submit to a full length collection to Ginninderra Press, nor to Pure Slush/Truth Serum Press (two important South Australian Publishers), but there are certainly reading fees if you wish to submit to many other publishers.
How do you feel about the idea of paying a fee to submit your poetry? I don’t feel that is something I wish to take part in. My finances don’t run to paying money to have a poetry collection considered for publication, not at the moment anyway.
I am willing to pay a competition fee, for entering a poetry competition, and I am the Competition Secretary for Adelaide Plains Poets, a writing group that also runs a national poetry competition every year. This competition has a fee for entering, for the Open (Adult) section, but not for the two student sections, it is free for them to enter, but the students can only submit one poem.
This competition has cash prizes for the top three entries in each of the sections, quite good prizes, and the fee is only $10 for the first entry, and $5 for subsequent entries, from each adult entrant. I haven’t taken a big look at such things, but I think our fee per possible prize ration is fair.
So, What Do You Think?

I hope to get responses from other poets about this issue. Both from poets who submit manuscripts for possible publication, and those who submit individual poems or groups of up to five or so for publication in a journal or other literary publication.

This website has the article with some interesting information. I think the idea of paying big dollars for a little result is something that has been going on for many years. Poets or wannabees, are often ripped off by unruly types.

There are many ‘publishers’ who are more than willing to assist people who want to self-publish their work, and charge exorbitant fees too, with little in the way of producing a quality book one to be proud of, nor much  money put into the marketing of the books.

Please leave a message, this is an important thing. Poets tend to not be rich people with lots of money to spare.

 

poetry, writing exercise

A Small Workshop

carolyncordon

I’m a writer, and like many other writers, I find a variety of ways to go, as a writer, beyond just writing books. I write poems, I write articles and blog posts, such as this one, and I also do writing workshops, sometimes paid ones, other times just for a community group perhaps.

This workshop is one I am going to be presenting at a group that meets regularly in Gawler, a town I spend a lot of time in, even though I don’t live there. Many of my friends live in Gawler, and my writing group meets every week, in a lovely, historic hotel in Gawler.

This workshop is happening at a community centre, not a hotel, but that’s still a good thing. Anyway, this is the Workshop, take a look and give it a go. Feel free to ask any questions you have about it, in the comments section.

 

Workshop – Loved Little Things

Writing simple little poems can be easy, if you scale back what you want to write, and just stick to closely watching one small aspect of something you love, or love doing. It may be a hobby, for instance knitting, and you could write about a favourite item of clothing you’ve knitted in your past.

Or it could be cooking, and you choose cake making as your topic, and perhaps write a poem about a kind of cake you like to make. I used to enjoy making muffins, and I’ve written about vegetable muffins in the past, I think. I was very ‘into’ vegetables, in a former line of volunteer work – I was a Community Foodie, teaching people about healthy eating, and cooking.

Nature is one of my favourite things to write poems about, and the poem I’ve got on my notes here today is about a little part of Nature, the ant. I used rhythm and rhyme in my poem, but that isn’t necessary, it’s up to you to choose your poetic style. Or if you’re not in a poetic mood today, any form of writing will be fine,

You might write a small note about your small thing, or perhaps write a letter to it, or about it. Any kind of writing will be fine. So take that small part of the thing you love, and insert yourself, and your thoughts and wondering into the piece of writing. Think about how you relate to, or gain joy from, your loved thing, and write about that.

This little poem was one I wrote last year, think it was, after seeing a line of ants on our front veranda, and then over the course of a few days, realising there was always a line of ants in exactly the same spot. I thought it was an interesting little thing. I am a poet, and as a poet, I find myself looking, seeing, and finding many little bits of not much, that can broaden out, and become something – a poem.

Make your small piece your own, make it quirky, make it cute, make it something you’re proud of, or something that makes you small to yourself. Just write it!

 

macro photo of five orange ants
Photo by Poranimm Athithawatthee on Pexels.com

Ant March

 

Ants are marching, tramp, tramp, tramp

Ants are busy, gathering food

Ants are climbing, up that ramp

Ants in an adventurous mood

 

Ants on the veranda, ants on the lawn

Ants are spreading all around

Ants near that sheep that’s just been shorn

Ants up a tree, ants on the ground

 

What are they up to, those little ants

Will they bite if they get the chance?

I’m going to keep myself well away,

We’ll meet up again, on another day!

 

My poem is a rhyming poem, with the first two verses using this rhyming scheme: abab, cdcd, with final verse eeff
Can you see what I mean there with the term ‘rhyming scheme’? The letters refer to the rhyming final word in each line, ‘a’ is the words tram and ramp, ‘b’ is the words food and mood. and so on. I hope that makes sense for you. And I hope you get some nice small poems about ‘Loved Little Things’!

 

 

Carolyn

 

Carolyn Cordon, writer, poet, blogger, newsletter editor

poetry

Working On My Next Big Thing

carolyncordon

I know I’m actually supposed to be writing a novel, but I have to admit to myself that I’m not a novelist, not really, at heart, and in my mind, I’m a poet. So that said, even though I have a partly written novel in need of further words written, and some kind of sense made of the various written sections, I am not feeling committed to seeing that novel in print, even though I’m still thinking about the characters.

I’m a poet, so these past few days, I’ve been working on putting together my next possible poetry collection. I’m still conscious of my undue haste in trying to get a different poetry collection published, and had it rejected by the chosen publisher (deservedly so, I agree). But this collection, I hope, won’t be rejected, I like this collection of poems.

Many of the poems in this new collection are very new poems, there are no poems dragged out from years ago, and I’m enjoying the idea of getting some things I’ve written in draft form, in the past year or so, ‘scrubbed up and polished’ to be fine poems, living up to my hopes when I first came up with them.

This new collection is contemporary, dealing with people, for the most part, with a few animal/nature related poems, that may or may not make it to the final collection. I’ll wait and see how I feel about that much later on. My previous poetry collection was all about the animals I’ve known in my life, from pets, to wild animals to the creepy crawlies around where I live. I enjoyed putting together that collection, titled “Tense and Still”, It would be great if this current work in progress could be as good as, or better than that one.

One thing I’m definitely going to do this time, is to have other poet friends read this new collection, to give me feedback, before I send it to a potential publisher. That’s one of the reasons the previous ‘collection’ met such an ignoble end, it was a mish-mash, a jumbled mess, that looked exactly like that, it indicated a confused person, who didn’t pay enough attention to, or care about her work and words on that occasion.

This time will be very different. I have a title I’m fond of, that others have agreed is an arresting title for a collection. I have quite a few poems I feel are exceptionally good, I have a bit of a strand of meaning running through the ideas in the poems, and I feel I will be able to hook the poems to the strand, so it flows along in good and poetic ways.

At the moment, even though I have the poem titles in a particular order, I am not set on that. My next step, after looking for and typing up another few poems I have around my papers/notebooks, is to print out all of the poems, and have a good read of them all, and make piles of related poems.

Then I’ll leave it for a day or so, then take another look, think about it all, and see if I feel I’ve got a collection that ‘works’. Then I hand it over to those few poet friends, for feedback. I’m hoping that within a year, this will be a poetry collection, written, submitted, and published, then launched.

Keep an idea here, for further news. And please feel free to ask me about this process, if there’s anything you’d like to know.

poetry

Ways To Make Yourself Feel Silly

carolyncordon

Sometimes, I’m sure all of us do something to make ourselves feel silly. Whether community worker, writer, accountant, bar person, I’m sure every know and then, all of us do something we’d perhaps rather we hadn’t done.

I certainly can confess for doing silly things, things I wish I hadn’t done, in the past. And sometimes ‘in the past’ can be quite recent. I’m confessing right here, right now, that I did a regrettable and very ‘silly’ thing today.

I went to an excellent poetry workshop today, looking at the body, and poetic responses to the subject. The workshop was excellent, and the presenter, Chiara, was well worth listening to. This is the description for the workshop series:

‘Using the canvas of the human anatomy, explore how to personify and more genuinely connect with the most immediate part of our lives, our bodies. Pulling our focus and vision inwards, towards ourselves, and away from the cacophony of external, larger lens of global news and information. Using the personal stories and relationships we have with our own bodies, and pre-existing text from medical books, advertisements, and other media to creatively spark another way of thinking.’

I very much enjoyed this first session that I attended today, with many words written on the subject of ‘the body’ from a variety of different angles. My words were written on lines writing paper, placed in a blue folder, and the writing paper pad also had writing from my writing group from the precious Thursday.

Why am I talking about this, and how is this relevant? Well, I’m sorry to say that that blue folder, containing my notes from today’s workshop, and notes from last Thursday’s meeting didn’t make it home with me today. I arrived home this afternoon, when I realise I only had my handbag, and there was no folder, or notes. Boo, hiss!

Silly, silly, me.

I remember the general gist of what we did today, and hope I can write some more on the subjects we worked on today …

But honestly, sometimes I wonder whether I should be allowed on by myself! I’d had the fortethought to visit the ‘facilities’ before embarking on the long trip home, so congratulations to me for that, but I neglected to bring the folder with me, afterwards, I guess.

Ah well, all is not lost, fortunately, Chiara took photographs of some of the words written at the session today, including two of my own pages, so the words I wrote are not lost forever, hooray for that! This was a smart move on her part, and I am grateful to Chiara for that, for sure.

I don’t know whether these were fantastic words, but they were mine, and on a subject quite important to me, really, so hooray, anyway! Silly me, for sure today, but also poetic me as well, and I had a good session of poetry, with a group of other poets who were not my usual poets I did poetry with, some yes, but certainly not all. This is a good thing!

Mixing and matching, catching up with new people, in a new venue, these are good things. It’s easy to get too comfortable, catching up with the same crew, at the same place, every time …

Many thanks to the State Library for putting on this session, with the Poet in residence, Chiara Gabrielli!