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Showing posts with label Australian. Show all posts. The posts are listed in chronological order. Click the post title to read more.

Friday, 1 June 2012 in , , , , ,

Samuel Wagan Watson, 'jaded Olympic moments'

Cathy Freeman carries the Australian and Indigenous flags on her
victory lap after winning Gold at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.
Image credit: Allsport va Getty Images: Nick Wilson.

Samuel Wagan Watson was born in 1972, of Irish, German, Bundjalung and Birrigubba descent. His dad is novelist and political activist Sam Watson. Watson has published six books of poetry; 2004's Smoke Encrypted Whispers won the NSW Premier's Literary Award and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry.

Watson writes vividly of everyday experience in imagistic yet tactile language, is brilliantly intertextual and postmodern, with a sharp understanding of postcolonial politics and the nature of the Australian identity. He is also my favourite contemporary Australian poet.

Many of Watson's poems are easily accessible to high school students, and allow scope for talking about the Big Issues of contemporary Australia. His is a richly textured voice that is nevertheless relatable - a voice kids can talk to, rather than just about.

'jaded Olympic moments' takes place on the eve of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, and juxtaposes a recent break-in and theft with the pageantry and patriotism of the Opening Ceremony to make a point about the place of Indigenous Australians in the Australian identity and its history. A good comparison text is unofficial Olympic poet's Mark O'Connor's 'Coming Home Strong', written for Cathy Freeman after her Gold medal win at the Games. I've included links to questions, a scaffold of themes and an annotated copy of the poem below the text.

jaded Olympic moments
for Jennifer Cullen



they made their way through the sliding-door
and stole the lot
                        video, mini-disc equipment, fly-fishing reels, my
                        son’s piggy bank
and my literary award
                                    all on the eve of the Games
capping off a sterling period of post-funeral melancholy
after my young cousin’s passing

then, sitting on Jen’s couch
as the ochre-kissed women came out
and did their thing in the center of the stadium
we had tears in our eyes
                                    thinking, that’s our mob!
but no,
only a romantic would think that
it’s still very much an US and THEM kind of deal in this
            modern dreaming,
we’re city people without a language
                                                            and some of us have even less
but then the coppers rang
            said they’d caught them
                                                three smack-head white boys
                                                                                             18, 19, 20
the gear was gone without a trace
                                    the video, the piggy bank, the literary award
and it made sense
                           ‘cause if blackfellas had broken into the house
they would have taken Dad’s 10ft Landrights flag

‘cause it was worth just as much
                                                    as Cathy Freeman’s gold


Questions

Annotated poem

Themes scaffold

Monday, 21 May 2012 in , , , ,

New on Tues: 'Paradise', by Emma Jones

Every Tuesday I'll try to post a contemporary poem. I picked Tuesday so I could have that annoyingly assonantal title.



Up first is Australian poet Emma Jones, whose first collection The Striped World was published in 2009 by Big Deal publisher Faber & Faber. It promptly went on to win the Queensland Premier's Literary Award, and good thing too, because it is brilliant. The poems are particularly interested in place: places real and imaginary, places and the people that remember it. 'Paradise' has become one of my all-time favourite poems.

What you wanted was simple: What is your kind of paradise?

Paradise
Emma Jones

Faber & Faber

What you wanted was simple:
a house with a fence and a kind of gulled
light arching up from it to shake in the poplars
or some other brand of European tree
(or was it American?) you'd plant
just for the birds to nest in and so
the crows who'd settle there
could settle like pilgrims.
Darling, all day I've watched the garden make its way
down the road. It stops at the houses
where the lights are on and the hose reel is tidy
and climbs to the windows to look inside
like a child with its eyes of flared rhododendrons
and sunflowers that shutter the wind like bombs
so buttered and brave the sweet peas gallop
and the undergrowths fizz through the fences
and pause at some to shake into asters and weep.
The garden is a mythical beast and a pilgrim.
And when the houses stroll out it eats up
their papers and screens their evangelical dogs.
Barbeque eater,
yankee doodle,
if the garden should leave
where would we age
and park our poodle?
"This is paradise," you said,
a young expansive American saint.
And widened your arms to take it in,
that suburb, spread, with seas in it.

Source: Jones, Emma. The Striped World. (London: Faber & Faber), 2009.