Taking a break

We're taking some time out for a few months and will be back on track a little later in the year with a line-up of special events.


Check in from time to time for updates and some random poetry. Here's one to go on with.

Sympathy

Paul Laurence Dunbar
(June 27, 1872 – February 9, 1906 – an African American poet, novelist, and playwright)

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting—
I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!

November 2011

Thank you to everyone who came along to make the final Stopping all Stations for the year one to remember. We had some great open readings, as always, and of course Matt Hetherington was thoroughly engaging, mesmerising, poignant, funny, provocative, original ...

Thanks to Carl Boettcher for taking the pics. Enjoy ...

Matt Hetherington

Thanks for dropping by. Our last event for 2011 is on Saturday November 19 at 2.30pm. After that Stopping all Stations will be having a break - so come along and help us finish up the year with MATT HETHERINGTON! Bring your poems, short stories, shopping lists, friends, neighbours, aunties and uncles and make this a Stopping all Stations to remember.

See you at the Cafe!

Matt Hetherington lives in Melbourne, Australia, and is a writer, musician, lover, non-god-father, humble self-promoter, sky-digger, vegetarian bludger, DJ, frustrated housewife, connoisseur of fine scents and dog-biscuits, twin brother, old-school soccer nut, poverty-stricken aristocrat, and a Bodhisattva wannabe (i.e. he likes the Buddhist saying “There are no Buddhists, there are just people on the way.”) 

He has translated poetry from Spanish, French, and Turkish, and some selections of his own poetry have been translated into Arabic, Russian, German, Dutch, and Italian. His most recent poetry collection is I Think We Have, and he is also on the board of the Australian Haiku Society.

October 2011

Thanks to everyone who made our October event such a fine occasion. Shari Kosher and Philip Salom were our stars with their poignant and engaging readings. Also several people in the open section read for the first time. A special afternoon indeed.

Only a few images to share with you this month. Wrong camera setting. Sorry those of you who were expecting to see a pic of yourselves strutting your stuff!

Stay tuned for details of our last event in November!

Philip Salom and Shari Lynelle Kocher-Campbell

If you've been meaning to get along to Stopping all Stations but haven't made it yet, you'd better be quick as there are two events to go! Saturday October 15 will feature Philip Salom and Shari Lynelle Kocher-Campbell.

Philip Salom has published over a dozen books, and has received major national and international acclaim – including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in London - for collections such as Sky Poems, New and Selected Poems, A Cretive Life and Feeding the Ghost. In 2003 he was awarded the Christopher Brennan Award, recognising a lifetime achievement in poetry. His recent book The Well Mouth, a collection of voices from the underworld, was named a Sydney Morning Herald Book of the Year, also an Adelaide Review Book of the Year, and is now in its third printing. His poems have also twice won the Newcastle Poetry Prize. His novel Toccata and Rain was shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal in Literature; and Playback won the WA Premiers Prize for fiction.

Late last year Puncher & Wattmann published his satirical verse-novel Keepers, which is set in a creative arts school of some generic kind... Philip has a fascination with writing poems set within differently imagined worlds for each book - and he has now taken this into two new works written with assumed identities. So The Keeper of Fish, written through a heteronymic character from Keepers, will be published in 2011, along with the third book in the trilogy - Keeping Carter, which features the poetry of MA Carter.

Shari Lynelle Kocher-Campbell has published widely and is an award winning emerging poet. Her work has been published in literary journals and magazines across Australia, including Blue Dog, Famous Reporter, Going Down Swinging, Island, Meanjin, The New England Review, Overland, Page Seventeen, and Swamp Writing. In 2002, she won first prize in the UNE Literary Awards for her sequence poem ‘Unborn Child’, and since then she has been nominated for various awards, including recent commendations in the Martha Richardson Memorial Poetry Prize, the John Masefield Poetry Prize and first place in the Page Seventeen poetry competition for 2010. Shari holds an MA in Creative Writing from Melbourne University, where she is currently enrolled as a PhD candidate. She has lived in many places, including Townsville, Sydney, Adelaide, rural NSW, and Dublin, Ireland. For the moment, she finds herself based with her family in the Yarra Valley, Victoria, going back and forth between Melbourne and Millgrove on a fairly constant basis. She is currently working on her second book, a discontinuous verse novel inspired by the archaeological discovery of the three perfectly preserved five hundred year old Inca child mummies atop Mt. Lullaillaco on the border of Argentina and Chile by Johan Reinhard and Constanza Ceruti in 1999. Shari will be reading from some of this new work, as well as several poems from her first collection a small cup of sky.

September 2011

Our September event provided a wonderful afternoon of poetry with Michelle Leber and Vicki Thorton featuring. The open section also offered an amazing array of talented readers.

Vicki Thornton and Michelle Leber

This month Saturday September 17 at 2.30pm we have another fantastic line-up with Michelle Leber and Vicki Thornton our featured readers.

Vicki Thornton is a writer of fiction, non fiction and poetry, and lives in the Dandenong Ranges. She has four children’s readers (Thomson Nelson and Oxford University Press) and the Last Days of Summer (Ginninderra Press), her short story collection, was published in 2007. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of publications including Divan, Page Seventeen, Tamba, Poetrix and Polestar. She is proud to have a poem in the AP Dear Dad anthology, now in it’s 2nd edition.

Michelle Leber is a coastal poet living close to the beaches of Port Philip Bay, with a special interest in myth, birdlife, botany, habitat and art. She was born to Slovenian parents who had migrated to Australia, has been involved in the Melbourne poetry community for over 20 years and in recent years has performed her work locally and interstate. Her poetry has been published in newspapers, journals and anthologies, including in The Best Australian Poems series in 2009 and 2010; it has been showcased as electronic banner text at Federation Square and has travelled on trains (under the Moving Galleries project). Her poem about the artist Ellis Rowan was commended in the Rosemary Dobson Prize. In 2009, Michelle received a writing residency at the Varuna Writers’ House in the Blue Mountains of NSW, and in 2010 she became one of four poets published by the Australian Poetry Centre. There were over 200 attendees at the launch of her first poetry collection, The Weeping Grass.