Book Club - Poetry Month

Final Draft - Great Conversations

This week I wanted to do something a little different for our book club. Usually I’m bringing you some kind of long form narrative (typically a novel) and opening up on my thoughts about how the particular story engages with issues or questions that get to the heart of our lives.

I love these stories, they’re immensely satisfying and I’ll definitely be back with more soon.

This week though I wanted to bring you a little poetry. Specifically I wanted to let everyone out there know about Poetry Month an initiative from Red Room Poetry.

This is the inaugural poetry month and it really is a festival of poetic art spanning styles from the traditional, through hip hop and an array of voices from throughout the community.

Poetry Month is organised and run by Red Room Poetry and it’s designed to increase the profile of Australian Poets, Poetry and Publishers.

I don’t know about you but I’ve always loved poetry. Having said that, I haven’t always made time for it in my life.

Poetry has a way of demanding your attention, slapping you in the face with a line that makes you look at the world like you’ve been wearing blinkers (spoiler alert - you have).

A collection I’ve been loving recently, though by no means underestimating as it sneaks up on me in strange ways, is Evelyn Araluen’s Drop Bear. Throughout the collection Araluen chews up ideas and visions, cliches and tropes to show us this country in ways we never thought to look…

In Index Australis, Araluen writes:

No law against that, no laws for nothing

In the age of entitlement

In the decolonial Dundee

And well may we say , we will decide

Who and how

Well may we not be lectured and well

May we do it slowly

Just there in that stanza, Araluen skewers our political class and us for our reliance on either side for their moral high ground while they leave so many languishing.

Evelyn Araluen joins poetry month as part of Fair Trade - First Nations poetic conversations, a series of conversations bringing together some of the world’s leading first nations poets.

Poetry Month will also be Featuring:

• 30 in 30 - delivering daily, original text/video poems from some of Australia’s best poets
• Poetry Workshops - with poets such as Tony Birch & Hope One
• Line Break - a weekly online poetry show
• Fair Trade - conversations with First Nations poets

Another poet who’ll be featuring as part of poetry month is Omar Sakr. His collection The Lost Arabs won amongst other accolades The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards Poetry Prize. I often wonder if the PM reads the works that get his award. I feel like if he had read The Lost Arabs we might get a little more humility, more understanding and less bluster.

One thing that scares me when I read poetry is that I might misunderstand, but then the poet always seems to leave room. Omar is an Arab Australian poet whose work addresses identities that are not my own, and yet when I read in his poem How to Destroy The Body Slowly:

You. Every day for a hundred years

If you’re so lucky

Live with this ordinary

Divinity, live with this death as long as you can

& waste not a single day on a rose.

I hear something of the insecurity and the beauty that I struggle to find in life sometimes and that we can all discover when we read Omar’s poems.

If you’re looking for more, well Poetry Month starts soon and the best part of all is it’s online, so join in wherever you are.

For more details check out https://redroompoetry.org/ and discover all the poetry events across the month....