What's happening with Stopping all Stations?

Stopping all Stations is currently in recess.

A poem to enjoy in the meantime:

 Mark Tredinnick's winning poem in the 2012 Cardiff International Poetry Competition.

Margaret River Sestets
There's a continent between us now, taut
                                                    with distance. I'd rather lie in the poem of your hand,
but your hand's somewhere and I'm somewhere else, so I take the red road, instead, to Sheoak Drive.
The grasses thrum like a squadron of spitfires, a sound so palpable
I wait for it to come in a cloud across the early summer pastures,
                                                     but nothing's troubling them except a little light weather
                                                               and nothing's bothering the grey blueblood mare, either,
or the purple-hooded parrot at its post-pastoral repose, but me. The country between the road and the coast
has got busy clouding its mind these past five years with bad ideas – big ones, but no better for that –
                                                      yet still there are eucalypts that stand and bow their heads

And, in the offseason, drop seed cases fat as artillery shells
                                                      onto the recycled Cambrian geology, bombs almost big enough
to shelter in if things get rough at home. Still, the trees we don't call blackboys anymore hang out
along the fenceline, mobsters in grass skirts, black glasses (you know the routine),
weapons bulging; it's still the same old bad old days, the way they look at things.
                                        Walking west, past them, I eat around the bruises in a peach and toss
what's left of it for the hell of it to the parrot in its wired field. None of the boys turns a hair.
But when I cross the road and find a log to sit on and log this stuff
                                                                   on my phone, it takes a full ten seconds

For a troop of ants to storm my boots and find places under my jeans
                                          my jeans are meant to keep unfound. Because of the vines, I guess,
and the olives, the lavender and the limestone and the languid yellow light, they tell you it's like Provence here,
but that would ignore the jarrah and the marri, the black roos and the butcher birds,
                                                   the wattlebirds and white-faced herons, the nasal mutter
of the honeyeaters, the Australian tripthongs of the frogs in the pond, nights,
the black ducks in their black thongs, the throngs of roadside lizards.
Hell, I don't care what they call it – this is landscape that wants you for lunch.

My whole life an addiction to country, falling forever for places
                                             that were never going to be any good for me. We carry our countries
into the world with us and through it and sometimes out again. Undiscovered. Undisclosed.
Just the other day, for instance, I watched a whale
                                                     hump its country down the coast from Cape Naturaliste
to Smiths Beach, breaching and hopping the sky and waving, not drowning,
not by any means, breathing its longing out and taking my long looking back in.
Sometimes you eat the landscape back.
                                                     There's a place near here where every day

The day dies in the sea, and that night, the one
                                                      after the afternoon of the whale,
                                                                                           I turned and watched the moon rise full
from the Yallingup ridge, birth split from death by no time at all and a meagre 180 degrees. They'd told me
everything would be new this time, and this seemed a promising start.
                                                       But later on, the same stars came up, and in the soak, the same
banjo rehearsed the same songs, strings loose as a gossip's tongue. My life is a secret I'm sick of keeping.
Orion bends in the northeast to tighten his sandals. Nothing to say, nothing to show for his love-hungry hunt
through all time. Maybe the beginning begins in the morning,
                                       when the sun rolls the stone away in the garden, pulls on her shoes.
                                                                                            pulls up my socks and starts running.

Derek Mahon

Stopping all Stations is still on a break, but keep checking in for news about up and coming events later in the year.

Here is a poem by Derek Mahon I found in my travels recently. And here is an article about how Mahon based his poem on JG Farrrell's novel Trouble. Enjoy!

A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford  Derek Mahon

  Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the ­asphodels.
   -Seferis, Mythistorema

 for J. G. Farrell

Even now there are places where a thought might grow—
Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned
To a slow clock of condensation,
An echo trapped for ever, and a flutter
Of wildflowers in the lift shaft,
Indian compounds where the wind dances
And a door bangs with diminished confidence,
Lime crevices behind rippling rainbarrels,
Dog corners for bone burials;
And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford, 

Deep in the grounds of a burnt out hotel,
Among the bathtubs and the washbasins
A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.
This is the one star in their firmament
Or frames a star within a star.
What should they do there but desire ?
So many days beyond the rhododendrons
With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,
They have learnt patience and silence
Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.

They have been waiting for us in a foetor
Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,
Since the gravel crunching, interminable departure
Of the expropriated mycologist.
He never came back, and light since then
Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain.
Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew
And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something—
A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue
Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.

There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking
Into the earth that nourished it;
And nightmares, born of these and the grim
Dominion of stale air and rank moisture.
Those nearest the door grow strong—
'Elbow room! Elbow room!'
The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling
Utensils and broken flower pots, groaning
For their deliverance, have been so long
Expectant that there is left only the posture.

A half century, without visitors, in the dark—
Poor preparation for the cracking lock
And creak of hinges. Magi, moonmen,
Powdery prisoners of the old regime,
Web throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought
And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream
At the flash bulb firing squad we wake them with
Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.
Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,

They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
'Save us, save us,' they seem to say,
'Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naive labours have been in vain!'

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.