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Sally Murphy, Australian author

Kids – a Pantoum

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Here’s my effort for Week 2 of the 52 Week Illustration challenge . Because the visual artists are pushing themselves to try new things, I’ve decided that I shall push myself to experiment with new forms.

This week I read a pantoum in the verse novel I was reading (Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs by Ron Koertge)  which reminded me that this form is both fun and challenging to write. So I had to have a go for myself. (If you don’t know what a pantoum is, read the poem first, see if you can figure the pattern, then read more here.

The theme for this week’s challenge is ‘kids’ which, of course, could be either baby goats or children. My effort is, I think, about goats – but could easily apply to children too!

Here goes – enjoy!

Kids


Kids love to gambol and play
In meadow or garden or field
They leap and they jump through the day
With pleasure completely revealed
In meadow or garden or field
They bleat and they pounce and they frolic
With pleasure completely revealed
Around them no-one’s melancholic
They bleat and they pounce and they frolic
Graze a little then frolic some more
Around them no-one’s melancholic
Pure joy is what they live for
Graze a little then frolic some more
They don’t care what the future may hold
Pure joy is what they live for
Never thinking about growing old
They don’t care what the future may hold
They leap and they jump through the day
Never thinking about growing old
Kids love to gambol and play
 Sally Murphy, 2014

5 Cool Things About Poetry

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Okay – as a poet and verse novelist, this topic might seem a bit of a no-brainer, because if I didn’t love poetry I probably wouldn’t write it. But in my teaching day job I am just starting on a poetry unit with my two year eight classes, and believe me, these kids need a little convincing that poetry is cool. So, having devoted yesterday’s lessons to sharing some of my poetry with them and (hopefully) showing them that poems can be cool, I thought it might be a good topic for a blog. So, here goes, with my list of cool things about poetry.
  
    1.    It’s quick to read. Generally speaking, prose takes much longer to read than poetry. A poem can be as short as a few lines, yet still say a lot. And verse novels, whilst a little longer than single poems, are generally quicker to read than prose – which is a real bonus for a reluctant reader.

2.   It can say a lot. In just a few words, or a line or two, a poem can capture an emotion, a look, a feeling. I read my classes the opening page of Pearl Verses the World yesterday – and the students could quickly connect with Pearl’s isolation. 

3.    It leaves you thinking. The best poems don’t tell you how to think or feel. They evoke feelings, certainly, and present ideas and images, but then leave you to form your own response.

4.   4.    It can be a lot of fun. I read Pemberthy Bear 
      to  my year eights as well – and whilst I could see them initially resistant to being read a pretty pink picture book, they liked it enough to ask me today if I’d read it again. They also laughed at my poems about spiders and baked beans. And, when I read on a little into Pearl, they realised that even such a sad story could have light moments, when we came across Pearl’s first limerick.
5.    
           5  It’s easy to write. Don’t get me wrong, poetry can be a lot of hard work. But for young writers I always find that they feel a real sense of accomplishment when they produce their first poems. Often kids who are really daunted at the thought of writing a story or an essay are much more willing to write when they realise they only need a few lines to make a poem. And with list poems and other structures their success levels are really high. 
I love poetry – and I’m hopeful of making a few converts.

Lorraine Marwood’s blog tour

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Today I am delighted to welcome brilliant poet and friend Lorraine Marwood, who is here as part of her blog tour to celebrate the release of her new poetry collection, A Ute Picnic. As a poet myself, I wanted to explore how Lorraine (and her publisher) went about putting the collection together.

Welcome Lorraine. Tell us a bit about the collection.  What can readers expect to find?

Now that’s an interesting question because when I’m close to such a collection as this, based on farming incidents, I had no idea how my editors were going to sort the poems.  It is indeed a different discipline to arrange poems in a collection.
So diverse structure is what the reader can expect- from a prose poem to a small concrete poem, to a joke, to two word poems.

I really appreciated the way my editor placed the poems into different sections and arranged an ordered flow of topics.  For example the book is divided into four sections- Past Hay season and other poems about living on the land, cow tracks and facts and other poems about animals and nature, the Front line and other poems about chance and hardship, eight rules of rodeo riding and other poems about country fun.

I was so happy that my publisher understood poetry and could echo that understanding through the naming of the sections and the grouping of the poems.

Are the poems new, or have some been published before?  If so where?

A collection should reflect the poet’s ability to have the poems individually published before over a range of magazines- however this really applies to a literary collection- it’s one marker for the publisher to know that the poet is publishable!  So yes a small number of poems have been published before- namely A Ute Picnic, Eight rules of rodeo riding, cow tracks and facts in School Magazine NSW.  This outlet was one of the first encouragers of my poems and Ron Pretty of Five Islands Press who published two collections of my poems before this collection.
But the vast majority of the poems are new.

How does a poet know when its time to put together a collection?

Wow! Now that’s a good question.  It’s time when the poems begin to mount up- say fifty poems or more over a number of years.  It is more intense writing in that a poem is a short story in itself- even if it is sometimes a mini short story. I’d like to think that this collection can sit side by side with my verse novel ‘Star Jumps’.

And how do you select what to put in the collection and what to leave out?

A poem needs to have enough substance to evoke a sensory picture or to show us a different aspect from the everyday run of the mill.  It needs to be a complete mini world in itself.

So when we decided on a collection with a rural theme I selected (and I have many hundreds and hundreds of poems) what I thought would work in a collection in terms of diversity and format.
My editors did the final choosing and I wrote new poems trawled for fragments (in my note books) and ideas that could be reworked.

How does the publication process differ for a poetry collection than for say, a single work of prose or a verse novel?

I think a collection is more flexible but seems to take much longer to write- over a number of years to garner the differences of style and subject matter.   It probably has to work harder to attract an audience too.  A verse novel is linear in narrative, a poetry collection takes little side gullies to flesh out a concept, an image, an emotion to a fuller extent.

What next for Lorraine Marwood?

What indeed?  Perhaps another collection of poems, perhaps a different verse novel, perhaps a prose novel- what is for certain is that I won’t stop writing.  I have lots of ideas in various stages of development- whether one develops more quickly than another is dependent upon my passion, diligence and hopefully a vision of where the idea is heading.

I will also continue to follow another passion- teaching writing- especially poetry workshops.

Thanks so much Sally for hosting today’s blog spot- I’ve enjoyed  the indulgence of talking about poetry!

You’re welcome, Lorraine. It’s been great having you.
A Ute Picnic is available now online and in good book stores.

Tomorrow Lorraine will be visiting Claire Saxby at  her blog. Do drop by.

What Jo Burnell Likes About Children’s Poetry

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Today’s guest blogger is Jo Burnell, here to tell us what it is that she likes about children’s poetry and to join in the celebrations for the release of Toppling. Welcome Jo – and over to you.


What makes poetry?
Can an entire novel be written in verse?
Do there have to be rules?

Sally Murphy’s delightful verse novel Toppling crosses a few boundaries by its very existence. Her choice of simple language allows easy reading but does not remove the ease of poetic flow.

When I went to school, writing poetry meant following rules. One day we had to start each new line with the next letter in a chosen word.
Acrostic poems just made me cross.

Cinquain poems have me baffled. Who on earth thought them up? Wrapped at each end by the title, describing words, actions and feelings fill the three lines in between. There’s nothing plain about the formation of Cinquain. At least you don’t have to rhyme.

Colour poems ignite the senses. Pick a colour. Any colour will do, and fill each line with the way that colour tastes, feels, smells and sounds to you.

Diamente rules just drive me mental. The result might be pretty, but where’s the freedom in following a rule for almost every word?

Haiku goes further than the rest. It controls every syllable. I’m in a World War 3 concentration camp struggling to breathe when I try to write Haiku.

At least with a limerick, I get a run-on and then worry about the details later. However, knowing that the last word in lines one 1 and 3, and 2 and 4 must rhyme and certain syllables must be stressed or unstressed just causes the blood Pressure to rise.

Give me a monster poem any day where all I have to do is write about a monster.

Better still, give me a copy of Toppling, where the words flow freely. Gentle wisdom snuggles between the lines, waiting to be discovered. That is my idea of verse. Where the joy of the read is not disturbed by rules.

Thanks Jo. You say such lovely things about my book-baby. And I’m with you – too many rules can make writing poetry tough.

Jo Burnell is a Paediatric Speech Pathologist and writer.
One of her passions is to get struggling and reluctant readers excited about books.

She is the UQP reviewer for Buzz Words
and regularly posts guest reviews on ‘The Reading Stack‘
Her poem ‘Junior Tragics’ made it to the top 20 in the 2009 Cricket Poetry Prize

What Kim Miller Likes About Children’s Poetry

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What I’m loving about having so many visitors to my blog guest blogging about children’s poetry is the wonderful variety of responses. Today’s post is no exception. When I first read it, it made me laugh out loud, then it brought tears to my eyes. Without any further introduction, I’d like to welcome Kim Miller, here to tell you what it is he likes about poetry for children. Welcome, Kim.

The thing I like most about poetry for kids is that kids like it so much themselves. Ask a ten year old boy in school to write an essay on the Prime Minister and he will hold it against you until well into adult life. Ask him to write a poem about the Prime Minister and he will take it as license to be funny and creative and probably what he thinks is a little bit naughty.

There is something about poetry that frees kids into an allowable silliness, which is a good thing in this world that has had to get along without Monty Python’s Flying Circus for such a long time.

The prime minister’s name is Kevin
Some people think he’s from heaven
But if you ask my Dad
He’ll tell you he is bad
Cos he can only count to oh seven.

OK, I just made that one up myself, but if there had been a ten year old boy wandering past I would have asked him to do it. It’s as close to ten year old thinking as I can manage in a hurry.

Of course there are serious poems as well, here’s one from a central NSW school from the 1950s. (Does anyone else remember the 1950s?)

Drought.

Black crows circle in the sky
Waiting for a thirsty sheep to die
When along came a man with a great big gun
And shot the sheep, just for fun.

The crows took first the eyes and then the rest
And then the man relized the sheep was his best.

Crazed with thirst in the blazing sun
He had nothing with him except his gun
The only thing in sight was an old dead tree
And his last words were, “Woe is me.”

I have no idea when that was written, I was probably eight or ten years old, but my mother gave it back to me after cleaning out some very dusty place thirty something years later. It is the only surviving work of my entire schooling, torn from an old school book and written with a nib pen and ink from the inkwell. And it is a poem. It is not an essay on the value of giving a child a good literary education. Oh yeah, the spelling error at line 6 is in the original.

Kids these days are so much better served with poetry than I was, or so I thought when my son Sam and I used to laugh along with Dr Seuss’s ‘Green Eggs and Ham.’ But that same Sam learnt ‘Tiger Tiger’ by heart at about the age I wrote my Drought poem. William Blake wrote Tiger Tiger about two hundred years before my son walked the same earth.

Australian kids’ author and poet, Collin Thompson, has his own reduction of Blake’s masterpiece. ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright. I wonder who set you alight.’ They refused to publish it in the British version of one of his books of poems.

When it comes to publishing there’s nobody like the Brits
They censor the Aussies and give me the spits.
Of course the final word of the previous line
Has been censored already by somebody who thinks things should rhyme but not sound coarse and at least they replaced it with another bodily function.

OK, I just made that one up as well. But when I was in year nine I could have done the same, probably without the skill of creating tension by closing with a line so badly wrong in both scan and metre. (Oh dear, Sally, I do hope your readers get all the irony here.)

And before you start to think that I’m only on about boys and poetry here, I checked with my wife about her experiences of poetry in school. She started rattling off Ogden Nash pieces that were obviously lying quietly but very close to the surface. My wife owns up to the same sixty years as me, so those memories were well planted back in a previous millenium. And Ogden Nash of all people, in his day the ‘bad boy’ poet for polite people.

Before I finish there’s another aspect of children and poetry that I’d like to put before you. Poetry can be the most powerful way for an adult to communicate the experience of being a child to another adult. I have written stuff for most of my life. What I wrote as a child was soon destroyed, but as an adult I have written much poetry about my childhood, which was characterised by periods of severe abuse. For example, one of those poems is titled, ‘There Was A Man with a Camera at a Kid’s Camp.’ Is there any need to spell out the implications of such a title?

My eldest brother is a psychotherapist. He trained in London at Tavistock, one of the great training institutes. He has worked with people in crisis for decades. He has a PhD under his belt and is internationally known as a conference speaker. He is not normally caught up in the emotional life of his patients.

Some years ago we sat talking about our growing years. He was away in boarding school for some years while I was placed in the care of a criminally violent woman. X-rays show broken bones that were never treated from that period of my life.

My brother and I spoke into the night, trying to make sense of our fractured family life. I brought out a poem that I had written about that woman, as there came a limit to my capacity to describe the time. By halfway through the poem he was awash with tears, silent tears but unrelenting.

That poem was written when I was an adult but it was written by a little boy who lived still within my psyche. There was no fun in it, nothing silly or mildly naughty, no irony or deliberate miscontruing of events for effect. There was only poetry, the placement of words on a page so that the emotional state of one person is transferred to another as if by skillful surgery.

I had fearful flashbacks of that woman for many years. But one day they finished. I can remember the day of the final flashbck, it was in church when there was a visiting choir and she suddenly appeared in front of me, screaming until she went into dust. And I can remember the poem that I wrote of that day. It begins;
She came screaming like a banshee
at the heels of singing children
…
The singing children were from the present day choir of the school where my brother had been sent in those long ago lost years. The final verse starts with the lines;
And the children kept on singing
– was that my brother in the middle? –
for they knew not what they’d unleashed in my mind
…
And it closes with;
For when my brother’s choir came singing
the dragon lady died.

I sent my brother the poem. It was the All Saint’s College choir on All Saints day in All Saints Cathedral in Bathurst, NSW.
‘Ah yes,’ said my brother. ‘All Saints day. The day after all the ghosts come out to haunt the living, but they die in the sunshine.’
Poetic, don’t you think? When we consider children and poetry we should not be blind to the link between child and adult that lives in the one person.

And now it’s time to finish with a flourish. My recent YA novel, called ‘They Told Me I Had To Write This’ has a poem by the narrator towards the end. The boy is a bit like me, he’s had to navigate some serious abuse in his life. I thought I’d end with that poem, but I’ve changed my mind.

This is a poem from a collection I’m slowly building called, ‘Poems about snot and other stuff for ten year old boys.’

Sunday Tea Time with David Attenburgh

A crocodile eats an antelope
That’s stooping down to drink.
A lioness eats a zebra
And black and white turns pink.
A grizzly eats a salmon
Before it’s got time to think.
I love Sunday tea time telly
But our set’s gone on the blink.
(And that’s really sad.)

Kim Miller
www.kimmiller.id.au/clem  and  http://scribblygum.wordpress.com/

Thanks so much for coming, Kim. Your post has left me with much to think about.

What Janeen Brian Likes About Children’s Poetry

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Another day, another guest blogger. I am delighted today to welcome Janeen Brian to my blog to share what it is she likes about chidlren’s poetry. Welcome Janeen.

Congratulations, Sally! Looking forward to reading Toppling.

I never knew I’d end up as a writer. Or a poet. Lots of us didn’t. I liked spare or pared down writing. I liked reading it and I liked writing it, which wasn’t as often before I turned thirty as afterwards. Something to do with circumstances of life.

As a child, I liked poetry because of the images and the emotions that rose up from words. They seemed to nourish what was then a very safe, comfortable, but culturally bland, baby-boomer childhood. I liked the fact that rhymes could make you laugh out loud. Or you could chew on them for hours, like a piece of gum, though they always remained fresh, unlike gum. I thought some rhymes were very clever.

But it wasn’t until much, much later, that I made a huge discovery. And that discovery helped open the door as to what helps produce good poems and how to enjoy others’ poetry even more.
Come close and I’ll whisper what I discovered!

Those of you who read or write picture books, will at some stage have come to the realisation that picture books essentially are a short story written in poetic language. Yes, poetic language. Not lah-de-dah waffle as some people assume, but based on the use of strong, poetic techniques.
Much earlier in my writing apprenticeship and still very ignorant, I was consumed by a problem. That problem was this: why was it that the text in some picture books seem to bounce off the page, and I mean bounce, while other texts were fine to read, but remained flat and anchored to the page?

The secret was astonishingly simple. And I found it out all by myself.

Nouns and verbs.
Till then I had never really acknowledged the POWER of NOUNS or the VERVE of VERBS!

That’s what gave spring, colour and frisson to the text in the picture books!

That’s what gives it to poetry too.

That’s why I love them!

Here are two of my newest poems – yet to be sent out.

A wind like this

A wind like this is

a selfish brute

slurping moisture

from grass and stems so

plants collapse.

Hurling confetti blossom

across yards and roads.

Twisting branches that

hiss and groan in protest.

In a wind like this

only the windchime is ecstatic.

-0-

Usual cat

Usual cat finds a curl-up shape

in pools of sunlight

armchair caresses

or rustled down

leaf bed.

Our cat went adventuring

struck out

for greater heights

tipping-toeing along

springy branch

to a curl-up shape

of his own.

Round,

cobbled with twigs and

soft gatherings

a hollow cup

of feathers long since flown.

Our cat sleeps

in a bird’s nest.

-0-

Janeen has had over 100 poems and verses published in children’s magazines and her work appears in 14 anthologies and three picture books. The latest book of poems, co-authored with Mark Carthew, is called Machino Supremo! – a fun, illustrated book about the life of all sorts of machines! Her latest picture book, Shirl and the Wollomby Show  (Janeen is pictured above with the illustrator, Kat Chadwick) is written in rhyme.


www.janeenbrian.com

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