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Yesterday held a wonderful afternoon of poetry with the brilliant Mike Ladd and Rachael Mead, bookended with music by classical guitarist Alain Valodze.
Part of the annual Nature Festival, the event was held in Prospect Community Garden, with Mike and Rachael taking turns to read poems that either responded to each other’s or continued the thread in some way.
Both shared pieces that focused on place, belonging and home. Mike read ‘What the creek said’ and spoke about water having legal rights, alongside poems about his mother, flying in over the Coorong from the Eastern states and ‘Black Swans Mating’ from his collection Invisible Mending published by Wakefield Press to illustrate how nature never fails to surprise. Rachael fell back to the days of walking down Rundle Street with her dad when she was a young girl, then fast forward to turning 13 in the year Return of the Jedi hit screens, living in a bushfire zone and one of my favourite poems from her collection The Flaw in the Pattern (UWA Publishing) called ‘The dog, the blackbird and the anxious mind’.
Both are passionate about the environment and draw attention to the damage being inflicted and the beauty it offers regardless. Paired with fruit and cheese platters and Alain’s dulcet tones, who’s featured at WOMADelaide no less, all in an abundant garden, it really was a wonderful afternoon well spent.
I’ve attended two workshops recently organised through Writers SA – Mark Tredinnick’s The Little Red Writing Workshop and Rachael Mead’s Writing the Landscape.
Mark is an award-winning poet and widely published, however this session focused on craft and technique that can be applied to any style of writing. Participants ranged from academics to creative writers, who were given a crash course in Mark’s fifteen rules and received a copy of his book in which they’re explored in more detail.
Mark shared his extensive knowledge and experience, along with some memorable quotes, such as E B White defining writing as the process of the “self escaping onto the page”, which can apply to both the writer and reader. We looked at structure and rhythm, language and voice, being urged to copy a well-made sentence and examine how it’s constructed. Mark’s message was “writing better means getting out of your own way”, write from rather than of the self and master punctuation to help your audience breathe your story.
Rachael is also a widely acclaimed poet whose work I admire and her session explored eco-poetics – an activist way of writing nature poetry in that it has both agency and impact, providing an ecological rather than humanistic perspective, the essence of her latest collection.
Rachael introduced us to four approaches, explaining that eco-poetry is a challenge to dominant discourse, chipping away at anthropocentrism. We read work by Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver and Judith Wright, poems grounded in place with biological, cultural and physical forces at play. Personal and sensory aspects are fundamental to eco-poetics, macro combined with micro to produce a multi-layered piece that seeks an emotive rather than intellectual response. Rachael’s workshop spanned a morning, but there’s enough material to easily fill a day.
And so I’ve acquired new skills to flex and drafts to develop, and a new awareness of self – the impact it has on writing and the world in which both exist.
J V Birch 