Welcome to episode 2 of Bladi Da, I decided to call it.
I was trying to work out what the hell am I going to call this thing, you know?
I went blah blah, and then I went Bladi Da.
And then that just felt right, and I'm usually not good at naming things.
So yeah, that felt like okay, must be on the right track, or path, or whatever.
Today I just want to talk randomly about ideas on poems and getting into them, finding your
way into a poem, and just writing and finding your style and your voice.
Just a few random things I've picked up over quite some time of writing.
I've been writing properly for, properly inverted commons, I don't know, 12 years, and maybe
coming up with creative ideas since I was 16, so that's 30 years I'll say.
Yeah, how I found my way into poetry was, really just, I wanted to be a cartoonist.
I loved drawing, and I loved writing and putting them together.
I did that for, yeah, 15, 20 years.
Eventually just found just plain old words, unadorned, felt more real somehow.
Even though I love the confluence of drawings and words and the symphony, they can kind
of create like 1 plus 1 equals 2, or sorry, more like 3.
But yeah, I did find myself just loving, just plain old words, they're kind of, they
really, they leave nothing to the imagination, but everything to the imagination, if that
makes sense.
But anyway, one of my first thoughts I'm writing is finding your perceived inadequacies and
then call them style.
So I've always been in a rush to do things, because I'm kind of, I'm scared that if they
get to stay in my mind, they'll never exist.
I always felt that magic, that's magic for a thought to become a real thing that you
can touch with your hands or turn the page with your hands.
If that, if, yeah, that sort of, yeah, blows my mind that something can go from the head
into the real world.
But yeah, laziness is a style, just I rush, I often rush things and just like fire hydrant,
the shit out of ideas and thoughts, even if they're crap.
And yeah, 99% of the stuff I write is pretty average to bad.
And I can feel the mechanics of my brain and the, and I've got a preconceived destination
and that's usually the shit stuff, because I, I know it's not an adventure.
But yeah, laziness as a style is, yeah, I've eventually just turned my, my often poor inability
to structure a sentence or even order ideas and edit into, I felt like it became like
a, like, almost as a, yeah, it felt like a style in the end.
Like to begin with, I was, I was very unconfident about it and it made me feel like, ah, I'm
not good enough or this stuff is just rubbish.
But I kind of love the energy that I'm just going blah, blah, blah, blah, blah on a page.
And then pulling it back a little bit, like a bit of editing doesn't go astray.
But yeah, I kind of feel, I feel like I'd try to be efficient with things and get you,
get you out and that go, that'll do.
It's like, yeah, it often doesn't work for me, but the ones that do, it's like, yeah,
fuck yeah, that works.
I don't know how that, why that is working, but I can feel an extra energy behind it.
Because, yeah, and sort of speaking to that, I always felt like just my stuff and how I
play life.
If I was a football team, using analogy, I'd be, I feel like I've got all my players
up forward and no one in defense.
So I feel like I'm kicking a bunch of goals, but also conceding a shitload as well.
So I feel like, um, so often there's no, there's no balance in that, but those, those kind
of games that I'm playing, all, all attacking no defense.
I reckon I often lose, lose those games by just only a few goals because I'm kicking
a shitload, but I often think, fuck the score line.
I'm just worrying about the highlights real and you know, it's get a sort of a fun highlights
real if you're, if you're kicking a bunch of goals, even if you don't win.
It's like, yeah, that's, that still works for me.
Um, and that's what I love about poetry.
Poetry is about losing games.
It's not all, it's not about, um, yeah, just winning a, winning a Premiership or whatever
the fuck year after year.
Another thought on writing poems, I love my favorite personal ones that I've written.
Uh, when they, they're not even a poem to begin with, they start off as something else
and I don't even see the potential of them as a, as a poem.
I haven't sat down at a desk and gone, I am going to write a poem.
Usually those poems are pretty shit.
Um, yeah, so one of, one of my, one of my favorite ones as I started off, there was
a, there was a door in a house, um, a share house and it was broken and the person I was
living with asked me, can you fix it and um, said I wouldn't even know how to fix a broken
door, but I can probably write a poem about the broken door and how it makes me feel.
And I said that as a joke thinking that's, that's pretty funny.
And that's that, I'd, I'd retell that joke sometimes thinking that's pretty hilarious
over a few years.
And then one day I thought, um, that's, that could actually be an actual poem.
I was right about like my, how unhandy man that I am, um, or how uninterested I am in
being a handy man and, and just writing about my feelings about a broken door.
And um, that, that poem, um, which started as a joke and turned into kind of this almost
meta to do slightly melancholy, um, sort on, um, yeah, fixing things by not fixing things,
but with words.
Um, but it was a short list for, um, Newcastle poetry prize, which was, yeah, that, that
was like, yeah, it was crazy, but it started as a joke.
And there was another poem I wrote that, um, where it started off as me going to the Melbourne
cemetery, which I had been for over 20 years.
And I'd, I'd go there and write in this beautiful garden or play guitar or, um, bring a picnic
with friends or whatever, and, um, and sometimes I just have a nap there in the garden in the
afternoon in spring and it, and it was, yeah, a sort of a beautiful poetic feeling.
It felt, it felt good.
Um, and, but, um, I ended up writing that as a joke in, um, where it was, it, it starts,
it goes, dear diary today, I had a lovely nap in the Melbourne cemetery, just practicing.
Yeah.
So I put just practicing on the end of it and just to give it a bit of a stupidness to
it.
Um, um, but yeah, I love, I think that's the best stuff is when you intend on doing something
and then, and then trick, trick yourself.
It's like, it's like, you know, you can't, you can't tickle yourself, but along the way
you trick yourself some, somehow into being able to tickle yourself.
And that's, I kind of feel, yeah, the best poems for me, uh, when you are actually able
to tickle yourself, um, they, but they begin as nothing, but then you almost take a U-turn
or a side street or, and you end up in a place that you weren't expecting, almost adventure,
adventure poetry.
Um, yeah, that not, that doesn't often happen.
I feel like I can get stuck in my little ruts of, um, going to the same places, the same,
same thoughts, pressing the same buttons and pulling the same levers.
Um, so yeah, those poems are, are rare.
Um, every now and again they happen.
And yeah, this is a thought that I had pretty recently.
Um, I'm not even sure if I believe it yet, but I'm just, just going to put it out there.
That I've thought that some, some, yeah, poems are like novels, but just the first sentence
of the novel without the plotting story that lasts another hundred or more pages.
I kind of feel like in that way, I kind of feel like poems are beginnings that don't end,
but when you put the poem down, the whole, the, the rest of the tip of the iceberg becomes
the whole iceberg throughout the day after you've read the poem, as it just keeps extrapolating
and becoming something, um, bigger.
I kind of feel like, yeah, they're the best poems that just, they're just the first sentence
of a novel.
Um, and often novelists try to find their best sentence, um, as the first sentence and,
and the last sentence, but um, yeah, I kind of feel like they, they're just the first
paragraph of a beautiful novel and the whole, the rest of the book, just unpack.
So like a, a book of poems is sometimes like 40 novels.
Um, well, if they're not sort of going over the same idea.
Um, yeah.
And just one, one more idea I had like always felt my best writing is, um, is, is holding
a feeling in my head and that feeling is either usually personal or comes from a piece of
music or, or a combination of the two.
Um, and then try, then try to write towards that feeling.
Um, so writing off the edge of a cliff and, and writing towards the anchored feeling on
the other side of that cliff face and, and floating, building a bridge through midair
just with words, one word after the other.
And when it works, it's, yeah, it's so, it's, it's incredible.
It feels so good, but again, they're less than 1% of anything that I've been able to
write, but kind of feel like it's worth digging.
Like I kind of feel like the, the older I get, the harder it is to dig for good ideas.
Cause I feel like I've gone over the same old stuff and chasing the same old veins, veins
of gold.
Um, so much digging or so many holes.
I'm just, you know, um, yeah, they're hard to get, but I kind of feel like, yeah, they're,
they're still there.