Snatches

I'm having a series of poems performed in the Melbourne Fringe Festival. My series is called Poems for Old Housemates and it's about people I've lived with, the temporary familys I've made in that wandering sharehouse life that marks every member of my generation.
Snatches is a collection of poems and writings turned into performance pieces, and Poems for Old Housemates will be worked in there somewhere.
Shows are:
Wednesday the 5th of October, 7:30 pm
Friday the 7th of October, 7:30pm
Both performances are at Kaleide theatre at RMIT and cost $5/$10
For more information please see the Melbourne Fringe Festival website or the RMIT website.

Bus Shelter Poetry update

A quick update on the Bus Shelter Poetry Competition - Folding the Leader is also going to be published with the other bus shelter poems in fourW twenty-two.
I believe the launch will be in November, but check out the Booranga Writers' Centre events page for updates.

Germinate

The winter edition of Germinate is now out. My poem, Soulmates, has been nicely nestled beside recipes for silverbeet triangles and baked silverbeet. Download via the link below.

Germinate Winter Edition 2011

fourW twenty-two

I just found out that a poem of mine, Possum Magic, is going to be published in the 2011 edition of fourW. The poem is about the time I spent working on the play version of the children's book of the same title.

There will be launches in three different cities for your convenience, so really you must make it to one:

Wagga Wagga Civic Library on Saturday 19th November 2011 at 2.30 pm
Carlton Courthouse Theatre (Melbourne) on Sunday 20th November 2011 at 2.30 pm
Gleebooks (Sydney) on Saturday 26th November 2011 at 2.30 pm

For more information check out the Booranga Writers' Centre website.

Poetry Idol 2011

I'm one of the poets selected to perform at Poetry Idol Audition Day :)

Here's a link to the facebook event, and a link to the website, and here's a bit more info:

20 poets performing on Sunday the 7th of August 12 pm at the St Kilda Library.

20 poets... 2 minutes each... 10 poets with the chance to read at the 2011 Melbourne Writers' Festival... the audience votes!

It is free entry and there is limited seating. Bookings essential: at http://www.trybooking.com/​RFD

Poets in no particular order:

Maria Pinto
Bronwen Manger
Emily Manger
Toby Guthrie
Andrea Louise Thomas
Gaylene Carbis
Julie Fox Muir
Debbie Lee
Bronwyn Lovell
Hannah Dickiinson
Lisa D'onofrio
Nelson Oliver
Henry Shires
Avril Bradley
Stephen Smithyman
Laura Smith
Belinda panaou
Fiona Baranowski
Amelia Xie
Primrose White

Folding the Leader

Hey peeps, a quick update on the bus shelter poetry thang. The launch was today, and below is a photo of the most excellent (and huuuuge) poster that is now up in Wagga bus stops. I'd love to know who the graphic designer was... they made it so pretty :)



Here's my poem:

Folding The Leader

Hands black and blue
with newspaper print
we've waited from four for the sun to rise
and the bones to warm
and the load to come
and now, still cold, the rolla-door still open
the sun still breathing fog
we production-line:
fold and insert
fold
and insert
fold
insert
fold, insert,
fold.
Hands and faces black and blue
with newspaper print
on my first job.
Bones still cold, I teach you the words to "Boogie Wit' Me Baby"
and you sing the words you want to sing.

This is my most excellent cuz's poster:



This one belongs to David Gilbey:



And here are some people at the launch:

Bus Shelter Poetry launch

Hey hey Wagga people, Saturday is the launch of the Bus Shelter Poetry thang. It's at 1pm on the steps of the Sturt Mall. There's going to be some great poets reading their stuff, and you'll get to see the poster with my poem on it :)

I'm not going to make it because sadly my bank account can't manage the flight and the days off work, but if you're in the area I would love love love it if you took some photos and sent them my way.

If you have any questions have a chat with Booranga Writers' Centre, you can find their facebook group here.

Germinate

My my it's been a busy couple of weeks for being a poet. I got a call the other day from Germinate, who managed to get their hands on Soulmates and want to publish it. So nice. There's something very sweet about being published without trying.

Germinate is the little zine put out by the Australian Student Environment Network twice a year. Check out the last issue here. I'll blog again when the issue I'm in comes out.

twiku

Hey peeps, if you're interested in my wordiness it might be worth following me on twitter. I often chuck up quick three line psuedo-haiku there. They probably don't count as proper poetry, but I rather like them.

Here's a few:

On stage he straddles his double bass
rooting like a bull.
Jazz musicians have more fun.


Winter tramstop, dawn-long wait.
Harmonica prancing in my palm
will blow the fog away.


Skating at night
I see tuxedoed men
and a boy who smiles like Grandad.


City lights claw the Yarra.
Were they calmer
before Crown?


Roadworks in heavy rain
and heavy yellow raincoats.
Steam rises from hot tar.


Business district, 5pm
a tubby woman in tubby heels
strikes the starter pedal,
becomes a dolphin.


Easter night walk home
work pants filled with dead battries.
Cars pass, candle bright.

© Laura Smith 2011

zine!

My zine is sold out! I just went for a visit to Sticky Institute and got my first stash of zinester money. Oh what a lovely $12 dollars it is!

Tell it Like it Is: Pop!

Hello me dears. I'm going to be one of the feature poets at the super-awesome-fun-times gig that's coming up this friday at Footscray Community Art Centre. Come along for some good ol fashioned poeting.

Pop! Facebook event

Here's the blurb:

Footscray Community Art Centre present a Tell It Like It Is special event: Pop!
Hosted by Rhys Rodgers, featuring performances by ten of Melbourne's finest spoken word super stars, & live interactive installations by Awkward/Amazing.

Come watch ten of Melbourne's premier poets cover their favorite pop songs.

Gaga, Madonna, the Beatles and the Backstreet Boys, watch out.

These word smiths are not afraid to inject irony and subvert meanings.
Whether you are a lover of pop music or prose, you are guaranteed a hilarious evening of entertainment.

Tell it Like it Is
Friday 27 May
The Basement Lounge
7pm
Tickets at the door $10 (cash only)

Wagga Bus Shelter Poetry Contest

Super news today! I've been selected to have one of my poems placed on bus stops around Wagga Wagga. Booranga Writers' Centre and Wagga City Council have come together to start up a public poetry project with poems that respond to or reflect the local environment. Wagga is my hometown, so it's great to have some of my stuff return to the old place.

The eight poems that have been chosen are:

‘Bifocal’ – Lachlan Brown
Untitled – Heather Shaw (who is utterly wonderful)
Silage – Diana Harley
Wollundry Lagoon – David Gilbey
Neenish Tart – David Prater
Folding The Leader – Laura Smith
Flood, 1974 – Susan Hawthorne
Hairy Panic – Claire Baker

Stillcraic

Wonderful Jennifer Compton has chosen one of my poems to be included in her Tuesday Poem series on her blog, Stillcraic. I'm gobsmacked and flattered that Jennifer remembered my poem after hearing it read in Boxhill a year or so ago, and even more flattered that she would publish it. Several people gave lovely responses. It was touching.

Take a look at it here.

archive: Entertainment as Activism

First published in 2009 on artsHub as part of a column I wrote for them on arts and environmentalism.

Entertainment as Activism

I was raised to be a hippy. My parents were part of that era, back in the 80s, when we knew for sure that we could break things, that global warming was a problem. When we watched Mad Max and Waterworld and knew for sure that that was our future.

As a kid I knew that if I asked to eat McDonalds my parents wouldn't refuse by saying "It's bad for you, it causes heart disease" but by saying "It's bad for the environment, it causes litter" and pleas for some funky new toy with batteries wouldn't be turned down with "It's a waste of money" but with "It's a waste of resources."

Some of the biggest brawls between my sister and I were about whether we could leave the light on at night. I can't remember who was on which side, but I remember what the sides were - our fights pitched the fear of the dark against the fear of the death of the planet via squandered electricity.

It must have been like being brought up catholic: with the guilt, and the sins, and the imagery of hot hell. I even have a disdain for born-again hippies, especially the ones who have trouble realising that their dreadlock wax and their rag-brown cheesecloth wraparound pants have been made in a ship-distant sweatshop.

Every part of my life is still ritualised in hippy habits: almost everything I own is second-hand or found, my garden is a shower-fed miracle, my power is green, I've eaten a monk's diet since I was fourteen, and my friends are slightly irritated at my preaching.

With all this you'd think that I would be comfortable living as an activist, but I'm not. I think Gunns are a bunch of bastards, but I won't go down to Tasmania to stop them logging. It's not their fault: somewhere down the other end of the line someone is buying toilet paper made from old growth forests. Demand for the product needs to stop so that production can.

Which brings me to art, and me, and why I'm in the art/ entertainment industry.

I followed the news media on every protest I went to, and never did I see a spread that gave the public a real analysis of the reasons people have for risking injury and criminal charges to throw themselves at bulldozers and fences and ships.

Protest is effective as a short-term rescue plan, and it brings attention to broad words like "sustainability" and "war" and "rights", but I've never seen it change the bad habits of the warm watchers sitting at home. There's rarely a nicely constructed argument in Tuesday's paper for people to engage with, interpret, learn from. News never gives a clear vision of the world we're moving towards if we don't change our habits. But that's ok, it's not the media's fault.

That's what Mad Max is for.

It never mattered that Mad Max's environmental/ resource catastrophe was probably caused by nuclear war, it gave us a visual reference for ideas that would otherwise have been too abstract to have a long-term dedication to.

Just as the church has always needed art to supplement its heavier texts, so environmentalism needs entertainment to drag the facts from science and explain them.

© Laura Smith 2009

archive: Christmas 2008

First published in The Etiquette Files in 2009, which was published by Holmesglen TAFE.

Christmas 2008

My wet hands
still resting on
the white, slatted door
I call out to the verandah:
"I like that about
your house - that
it's bad form to
be the one who
flushes the toilet."

Jillian's hands
still resting on
the weather-varnished chair arms
she turns her back
to the sun:
"If it's yellow
let it mellow;
if it's brown
flush it down;
if it's red
go to bed;
if it's black
call the quack."

It's summer in Hobart
and even the breeze
is warm with wine.

© Laura Smith 2009

archive: Some People continued

Below you'll find a video interview that I did for the project.

Kailyn Yong's blog about us meeting up to make the video below.

archive: Some People

In 2010 I worked with RMIT students Kang Hee Dong and Kailyn Yong to interpret one of my poems into video form. This is part of the PROD (Poets Ride Online Dangerously) program, which is ongoing. Please see the site they created for the original videos.

Some People

They're not reviewers
who unfurl back row centre
who sometimes bring a notebook
or a friend.

Not Front of House staff
who loosen the back door
smile at the tech
and break training
to stand in the aisle
and block the fire exit.

Not the producer
who perches in an aisle seat
laughs once
twice
then leaves.

Not the comedian's mates
who dam-burst in
laugh over-loud at some jokes
and settle through the rest.

Not other comics
bringing the job with them
to the second row.

They're ticket holders.
They choose a row
five or six back from the front
three or four forward
from the back.
They walk to the end of the row
lull into the wall
like it's a dry place to come
and it's raining in every other room.

Some people
come to comedy shows
alone.

© Laura Smith 2009

archive: The Prime Minister's Song

Commissioned and first performed by Ecopella in 2010. To be sung to the tune of "The Major General's Song" by Gilbert and Sullivan.

The Prime Minister's Song

I am the very model of a modern Pri-ime Minister
I've information on China, the US, and Antarctica,
I know the US president, and quote the words of barristers.
From u-utegate to shakes of sauce, I’ll parrot to the media.
I’m very well acquainted, mate, with matters I administer
I’m baby faced and mostly chaste and somehow vaguely sinister.

About Japanese whaling I am teeming with a lot o' news,
With many cheerful facts about how we’ll make them pay their dues.
I'm very good at promising to go to court and force a change;
I know the legal arguments that blow their science out of range:

In short, in matters on China, the US and Antarctica,
I am the very model of a modern Pri-ime Minister.

I know our mythic history, King Arthur's and things christian;
I wear a hard hat with a grin, I've a pretty taste for Mandarin.
My choice of words is quite absurd, my sentence structure can concuss:
that might be why the Libs would rather bicker wildly than discuss.
For who can tell sub-terms of reference from conceptual synthesis
I’ll chorus on the natural complementality of the habits of multilaterally appropriate processes.

(pause, pulls comical faces)
Um...

I’ll fulfil some election promises, but only just symbolically;
apologise for wrong things done, and then I’ll keep the policy.
When the money’s looking tight, I’ll get the mob to spend some more.
When climate change is here to stay I’ll whistle HMAS Pinafore.

In short, in matters on China, the US and Antarctica,
I am the very model of a modern Pri-ime Minister.

On things environmental I am far from sentimental
I’ve got a goal for dirty coal: my corporate tax breaks will be mental.
I’ll sign Kyoto Protocol when everyone has let it go
I won’t admit my ETS is poorly made and just for show.

I’ve a tendency for tantrums, but am passive in diplomacy
when refuge-es try to land, I’ve got war ships to put to sea.
But then, when whalers stalk our shores, I’m overcome by lethargy;
I’ll let Sea Shepherd fight our wars (they might have better strategy).
For, my politic knowledge, though I'm smu-ug and front-benchery,
has only been brought down to the beginning of last century;

But still, in matters on China, the US and Antarctica,
I am the very model of a modern Pri-ime Minister.

© Laura Smith 2010

archive: Drilling Holes

The following poem was published as part of the RMIT_Poetry project which took place over the Melbourne Writers Festival in 2010. Poems were published as tweets, on the LED tickers at Fed Square, and on paper in Poetry4U anthology. Check out my tweet here. The Poetry4U project is ongoing, so check it out at the Transmesh blog.

Drilling Holes

For fear of drilling holes into the earth,
Superman pees skywards.
With each rain he waters the fecund lemon trees
of Metropolis.

© Laura Smith 2010

Paradise Anthology Launch

Two of my poems, Syd and Harry, are to be published in the Paradise Anthology. Sadly the Paradise Anthology website is no longer functional, but you can check out the flyer below or go to the St Kilda Festival website for more information about the launch.

archive: City Girl

City Girl was first performed as a short play by the Riverina Theatre Company in 2005. It has since been read as a poem at various poetry readings, including the Travel reading at Mart130 Cafe.

City Girl Being Morose in a Rural Landscape

In this place they always assume that I want a middy instead of a schooner, and the people act like it's something to be proud of, or something odd, to be a girl who drinks beer.

In this place the bands are so talented that the covers they play sound exactly like the CD.
And the pubs are full of people who seem to be satisfied with handshake friendships.
Are full of people who seem to think that this dancing's fun.
Are full of people who look like people from back home.
And I'm that creepy new chick who keeps staring.

In this place my mum's cooking makes me fart more and shit less.
I know no one but old acquaintances, who send me back to high school depression. Whose faces I remember, but whose laughs I've forgotten. Who I recognise through hair colour, not by the way they walk.

In this place the sky is a different colour. A greyer, dust laden, shade of blue. And the horizon is longer and thinner. A bony thin landscape. Lethargic and dazed.
Not like my voluptuous flamenco dancer of a city back home.
In this place it's too dry for mould to grow on the walls, and the snot flakes from the sides of my nose like paint in too much sun.
Because the sun is everywhere, even up there, and I think I know how the brits felt, coming here to this prying heat.

In this place that calls the river a beach, but where people can die without seeing the sea, can die without seeing my singing smoggy coast, in this place friends are an e-mail, and a battle with a modem-stealing sibling, away.
And the beauty I've become used to is even further.

In this place I need to learn again that the ants will bite your feet as you peg if you don't dance around the clothesline, and that grass has to be watered to be green. And I need to learn to drive to live a life.

This place that I left because a conversation about theatre might turn into a debate about whether those two girls should have kissed on stage.
And there's a risk of enjoying being a checkout chick, and a risk of being a sullen one.

This place where suddenly supermarkets are lonely places.
Where I'll take up moshing again, even though I left it when I left this town of a city.
Because it's only here, in this place, that I need it to beat out my frustrations.
This place where change collects on my bookshelves and I can't walk in my room for the childhood souvenirs. Where I have Billy Holiday and twenty-eight hats and a clothes dummy and family.

In this place where leaving is the only thing to do, sometimes I feel at home.

© Laura Smith 2005

archive: Soft Furnishings

Published in Teetering on a Highwire in 2009.

Soft Furnishings

First week on the sewing machines
learning about dust on her teeth
and not to wear loose sleeves
Hannah got her thumb in the way of the foot
and needle-punched it
nail to print.

When she twitched her hand away
the needle broke off at the shaft:
pierced through her thumb
from nail to print.

And her thumb became a needle
the wound an eye
the yarn
threaded through the point of the needle
and through the eye of her thumb
was still yarn
to be threaded and stitched.

From other machines
came quick hands
used to threading,
took Hannah's thumb
and drew the yarn out.

Like every needle
her thumb felt the tug
of the thread
inside
and like every machine
her inner works
shuddered
but the needle
was steady.

In her shuddering world
Hannah was the needle
her mouth
the eye
that the thread of her cry
was drawn through
and, like every needle
she was steady.

© Laura Smith 2009