Poetry

Although I began writing poems in 2007 in the early 80s I'd been involved with 'Neos: Young Writers', a literary magazine funded by the Literature Board of the Australia Council. For the last 15 years I've been dealing with life and have been writing pretty consistently but submitting to journals only very sporadically (see table below).

Late in '23 - it was probably December but I have no other way to know than by consutling memory - I went back to look in my Submittable account and saw that my last submission via that site was in '13. It was a very busy year for me in terms of poetry, I wrote a large number of sonnets as well as a long work on my personal experience of love in heroic couplets. Mum declined in '14, then I moved to Sydney, mum died, and I took some time to recover. In '19 I had some health problems and went travelling, then the next year moved house. I began making art, as the 'Paramontage' page shows, in 2022. In that year I also started making long free-form poems.

Being a poet is hard. It takes a lot of resilience to keep submitting year after year, because most of the time you get little in the way of acknowledgement even. In years after '21 I've been often at poetry readings presenting my work at open mics, which has been rewarding. I saw an open call by a notable Australian publisher in '24 and so sent them a larger work made up of sonnets with a political theme. On 20 Jan '24 I took the next step and used Kindle Direct Publishing to submit a work 'Gold 4WD' for approval, the process took three or four hours.

A number of my poems have been used in paramontages as the 'Paramontage' page demonstrates, and the first paramontages were shown at Laerk Space in Newtown in Nov '23. I also put poems in mixed media works with watercolour and collage panels in them with some of these works first shown at Tiliqua Tiliqua in Enmore for my second solo show in Feb '24.