what are the odds, girl?!

It’s been an…’interesting’ start to the week, and yes, by ‘interesting’, I mean ‘slightly challenging’. For the most part, productive in a healthy way – I got proofs for a poem that will soon be out in the wild, and fretted over whether the scanner I had access to was doing a good enough job of photocopying/scanning marked-up pages so that the folks responsible for rendering the text for the journal could read!

That’s the good stuff to have anxiety over – I don’t want to be difficult to work with, so was worried I was being too demanding by wanting my poem to appear on the page like it should…look, anxiety doesn’t listen to humans trying to be reasonable with their brains!).

I also found out late last week that an application I submitted for an emerging producer programme through Melbourne Fringe was unsuccessful…which is hard, but that stuff happens. I personally think that in the interview, I should have discussed my personal creative practice more than I actually did – which, in hindsight sucks, but it’s helped me come up with a few ideas of how I might be able to play with recitation and performance of my poems and as well as exploring mental health (and illness), I’ve started to look at one poem in particular that I can perform/recite/experiment-like-hell with in terms of chronic physiological pain.

So some folks might know that I’m a bitter, failed musicologist. In order to get to that stage, I was a music undergrad at Melbourne Uni, when they still had double degrees covered under HECS, and the Victorian College of the Arts (the joke goes) is where the folks with actual talent went. I incurred overuse injury to both arms as a result of several years of practice without taking proper breaks in high school. Activities like writing or typing for long periods of time can also bring on the pain, or even shit beds. It recently flared up at the start of the year after pulling a muscle in my neck, and the pain in my supposedly good shoulder…UGH. Let’s just say that it was agony trying to wipe one’s arse regardless of what hand you favour

This is a very, very long introduction to my coincidental choice of zine to review, though the drink not so much – I can’t sleep, so thought I’d read the following zine by Rachael Wenona Guy, a Castlemaine-based artist. In yet more coincidences, Guy is the partner of a poet with Marfen syndrome – me and Ben (of Melbourne Spoken Word fame) were gushing about Andy’s work, some of which I’d come across in an anthology called Shaping the Fractured Self, edited and selected by Heather Taylor Johnson, which is supposed to be a chronicle of work by people whose lives are affected by chronic pain or illness. I didn’t enjoy most of the anthology, and it pains me to admit that but hopefully it’s for valid reasons. The choices made as to what poems were featured needed introductory essays – many of which couldn’t be read independent of these explanations. Having said that, Andy Jackson’s poems in the book were freaking fantastic – you had a picture immediately in your head as you read his words, and it made you feel srs feels. There were a few other authors who stood out – and sadly few examples of repetitive strain injury (which I don’t have – overuse injury is a lesser beast) and mental illnesses.

zine: Girl: poems on childhood & Eulogy (photo-essay) by Rachael Wenona Guy (2016)

drink: Magic Rock Brewing (UK)  ‘Salty Kiss’ gooseberry gose (330mL can, 4.1% ABV)

Ooooh, I think I like the Red Duck gooseberry gose better, gasp! though this Magic Rock one is probably a better example of the style? It’s bang-on with the half-salt, half-sour, whereas the Red Duck one was juicier and just a tad sweeter, and much less salty. This one feels like it has more of the sea in it (it does have sea buckthorn listed as an ingredient).

I don’t remember how or why I bought Rachael’s zine, but it was still in the envelope I’d received it in when I found it last month, after very slowly starting to sort and unpack drafts of poems, and medical evidence of hospitalisations. It’s the sort of zine that you want to read when you’re alone, and it’s very late and dead quiet, while your beloved pet sleeps on next to you, on your bed.

A few images wouldn’t leave me alone, as happens with good poetry – I liked the poems ‘Portrait’, about how the person (in the poem), her father is drawing, and she mentions something about drawing a baby’s hand. I loved ‘Robe’ because it reminded me of growing up in England (weirdly enough…!), and the following line from ‘Girl in a Tree’ which again summons memories of my own childhood in London:

(…) The girl surveys her home — it

is ordinary, yet it is everything.

Isn’t it a magical time, when this feels so true, for us?

 

 

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