One of the best things about preparing to teach classes is the amount of reading that I get to do. Am required to do, in fact. I imagine it's something like being the menu tester at a superb restaurant, or a product quality inspector at a very good chocolate factory, somewhere in Belgium, say, where …
Sing for a winner …
Thank you to those who entered the glosa competition – wow! I love what each of you did with the lines you chose, and I’m guessing you had fun doing it. (I hope so, at least!) Picking a winner was tricky, but in the end I’m going with Jac Jenkins’ wired – I think it …
Revisiting Nicky’s house
Got a lovely special delivery the other day – Doesn’t it look fantastic? Yes, but what do Dunedin Scarfie flats have to do with Joanna Preston, Tasmanaut Poet? Quite simply, they’ve included a poem of mine in it: Visit to Nicky’s House. The story goes back a way. I originally wrote the poem for the anthology Under …
time to sing – and enter a competition
Time to wheel out the first of my Pimping the Book competitions for time to sing before the dark. And for this first competition, your task is to write a glosa. What the heck is a glosa? Well, according to my notes from the class I taught in 2015 on Unusual Forms: The glosa (or glose) is an …
Goodbye, Aunt Leaf
I’ve just found out that Mary Oliver is dead. At 83, of lymphoma. Actually she died a week ago, last Thursday 17 January 2019, so I’m late to the news. It feels so strange. She was a poet whose work I love, whose poems I quote often, yet I haven’t bought a book of hers …
A Dark Feathered Art 