Commensurate with skill

She sets flour, yeast, water
and oil beside the bowl.

I reach for the phone
and dial a pizza.

Back in rehab

I’ve got some comics up on the Comic Artist Rehab blog this month. I’ve signed up to post four panels every four days for the next four weeks, which works out to a total (I think) of twenty-eight panels, or a panel a day for a month. Joining me in this experiment will be Comic Artist Rehab founder Amber Carvan, zine/craft maven Miss Helen, and comic glitteratus Nicola Hardy. Esteemed company indeed.

This is my second go round with Comic Artist Rehab. My first time was back in 2008, when I wrote a short adventure story starring The Godlings, these three little muppet baby Indian god characters who appear in the pages of Man Bites Dog, and who also had their own weekly strip on PopImage way back when. You can check out that round of Comic Artist Rehab over here.

This time around I’m trying to shoot from the hip a bit more, more of a sketchbook/improv approach than last time. So far it seems to be working out…

Why do you write poetry? – Klare Lanson

I asked a bunch of poets the above question. I’ll feature their answers here each week until I run out or find more poets to answer the question…

Klare Lanson says:

This may sound trite, but I really don’t think I write poetry, I think poetry writes me. I’ve been writing poetry since I was a kid, using it as a way to work stuff out, to remember, to play, to challenge and have always enjoyed the way words look on a page and in midair.

These days (and in this moment of Q&A), the poetry stems from many forms in my immediate environment; in the visual image, the way of the western world, the conversations, the stories, the cinematic vision, the landscape, the sounds, the keyboard and in the clouds.

“BEATRICE! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!”

Dude, they totally made an anime based on the game based on Dante’s Inferno!

The bit I like the best – even better than the eviscerations and the scene where Dante slices someone’s head in two with a giant scythe – is that Dante and Beatrice have these plummy English accents, which is exactly how you’d imagine someone from 14th-Century Florence would talk.

Coming soon: Ern Malley 3000, the tale of two young soldiers who invent a giant sentient robot spaceship as part of an elaborate prank, only to have the robot run wild and trash the city of NeoMelbourne in a series of knock-down brawls with the alien entity known only as the Black Swan of Interplanetary Trespass (at one point the robot loses the ability to walk when its boot jets malfunciton and its pelvis explodes like a grenade, and it’s forced to complete the battle as a hovering torso).

Despite the two poets’ embarrassment, the resulting catastrophe is hailed by a group of controversial art critics as a spectacular  example of avant-garde public performance art.

Oh and everyone speaks in a French accent.

Escalation (Use only as directed)

I’ve got a poem about escalators (which, incidentally is the name my eldest daughter gave to the Bratz doll she insisted we bring home from the op shop) up on qarrtsiluni as part of their Words of Power issue, accompanied by an audio recording of yours truly performing said poem.

It was inspired by this, which I spotted at the train station on the way to work one morning:

Thanks to the folks at qarrtsiluni for accepting the poem, and to the delovely Klare Lanson for assistance with the recording.

Why do you write poetry? – jeltje

I asked a bunch of poets the above question. I’ll feature their answers here each week until I run out or find more poets to answer the question…

jeltje says:

Is it about having a burning need to edit reality? But then, film is about that, too… I actually see myself as a craftsperson, a craft poet. I love writing poetry well.

More answers next week.

30-Second Comic Recap Contest

Every year one of my favourite comic commentary blogs, Chris’s Invincible Super Blog, runs a competition where people are asked to draw their own short summary of a comic that left an impression – good or bad – on them. Quality of artwork is not an issue. I’ve always meant to get my shit together and draw something for it.

This year I managed it. So here in all its outsider art glory is my 30-second recap of Beta Ray Bill Godhunter, the three-issue space opera starring a superpowered alien horse with the power of a God who decides to kill the planet-eating alien who killed his entire race (I did a review of it here, if you want a slightly longer overview than the below).

(click for emlargenation)

If you wanna check out previous year’s entries, here’s 2008 to start with – links to earlier entries can be found at the end of that linked entry.

Poetry Mixtape for January 2010

Being a list of some poems what I found online that I quite like, in no particular order:

The Twelve Days of Christmas by Carol Ann Duffy

Ring three was black gold, O for oil –
a serpent swallowing its tail.

The fourth ring was Celebrity;
Fool’s Gold, winking on TV.

Britain’s new Poet Laureate’s 2009 Christmas poem, published in the Radio Times (think TV Week and you’ll get the gist of how odd the pairing is), is an angry modern reinterpretation of the Christmas carol decrying war, social inequality and environmental catastrophe. It’s a bit purple at times, and sometimes feels a little undergraduate in its subject matter, but technically it’s spot on and it has a genuine sense of passion and playfulness.

Why do you write poetry? – Ali Alizadeh

I asked a bunch of poets the above question. I’ll feature their answers here each week until I run out or find more poets to answer the question…

Ali Alizadeh says:

“I would have answered this question differently if I’d been asked it before my first novel came out (last year). I would have said something about the desire to communicate feelings, reach out to the reader, explore important and suppressed emotions, themes, perspectives, etc.

I’m not sure about any of that anymore, because prose fiction does all of those things so much more effectively, it seems.

The responses to my novel, from non-writers, critics as well as fellow writers, have been numerous, and incredibly sophisticated, astute and engaged. It seems people are really willing and/or mentally prepared to appreciate fiction so much more than poetry.

It probably has a lot to do with education. I remember studying 1984 and World War I poetry in Year 12 (in Brisbane); when studying the novel, our teacher went out of his way to define the genre of satire, the politics of Orwell’s society, the references, the story’s plot, characters, motifs, symbolism, etc. When teaching the poems, however, he told us something about the ‘beauty’ of poetry. And that was that.

So people are not really trained to appreciate poetry. So why bother with it?

Knit one, poem two

Once again, thanks to The Poetry Society UK and their very crafty knitted poem generator.