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The Most Unlikely Poetry Prize

Last Thursday I performed my cricket poem-entry in the unlikely (and amazingly international) Cricket Poetry Prize - with the paintings from the Cricket Art Prize as backdrop. Strange? Yes. This unexpected award is run somewhat mysteriously with help from several patrons including the board of the Sydney Cricket Ground. It seemed to me a very likeable bit of mischief: to entice poets with a modest but handy prize of $2000 to play the sporty possibiltities of poems about a national obsession. After all, Warnie has been more newsworthy than any poet, so why not let a poet hit the news with a poem about Warnie? None did, it seems, but then he was going to press with his own bad poetry. It seemed like a good lark anyway. 

I had been advised of my 'shortlisting' (ah, it was a 20-long list) a month earlier. This was announced as quite an achievement. Clearly the organiser isn't a literary person. Some weeks later I heard the short shortlisted poets had read their work at the SCG and a winner was announced. Lucky for the organisers no poet from the many international entries was shortlisted...

The travelling art show came to Melbourne: 40 paintings of the finalists were hung at The Age's head office and two local poets were asked to read their poems. Well, if you start a lark you should see it through. I could remind people just how great Wesley Hall had been. Free wine and handy hot nibbles. The paintings were probably better than the poems overall. It was never going to be surprising. But it got stranger. There were artists there who because they hadn't made the cut referred to themselves as failed artists. This stuff makes me run. 

And stranger - that night I heard that the 20 long-shortlisted poems had been performed in a Sydney pub with actors reading the works aloud and with audience whoops and howls taken as judgement. Howzat? This despite the organisers naming two judges - a poet and a PR person - as, um, judges. Very handy. Local poets could go along and cheer their own poems. And the top four poems are from NSW. 

It's only fun, or should be, but this does look like a loaded dice. Or biting the ball? It's wonky.

Innovation

Last week I became Poet-in-Residence for Creative Innovation 2011, a conference presenting the ideas and advice of speakers who have extensive track records in driving, facilitating and/or theorising innovation. Not in the artistic sense but in areas of the cognitive sciences, industry, institutions, business, etc. So this event became an increasingly strange experience for me: a poet more used to appearing as a writer/reader/speaker and lecturer ... than as entertainment.

Being less inclined to copy the main line and more amused by what I see as the ironies, I read a few poems that looked at the oddities and paradoxes of innovation and learning. Especially Artificial Intelligence and its masters. I think some of the audience followed my poems, but I really can't be sure. Audiences at poetry readings are hard enough to 'read' - unless they're laughing at funny poems - but at least they make a range of noises, from said laughter to that almost audible silence, and the range of ah and mmm sounds as the poem ends... 

The speakers were not only brilliant people in their own fields, they all spoke brilliantly. This is highly unusual. It was the only conference I've been at where I never once looked at the time in that vain attempt to pull the end closer.

Weeks later, it still feels odd to have been part of the frame. However, in years to come... it will be fascinating to see how the predictions of speakers such as Ray Kurzweil turn out. He is a man who seems to second-guess the future with alarming precision (and a swag of stats on rates of change and innovation as his guide). If there were Nobels in his fields of inquiry he'd have one. He is confident artificial intelligence will not only be with us but ahead of us, intellectually, within 20 years or so. That computer innovation will be astoundingly advanced. That we will have robotic T-cells circulating in our bloodstreams and spare-parts repair shops as standard practice. Practical immortality? As he says, it will come: so hang in there!

http://www.creativeinnovationglobal.com.au/ci2011/

More animals, briefly

Sitting with one of the puss cats tonight made me consider - for the first time - not how much I like animals but how long I've been sitting beside one. Or been in close contact with them.

As a child, my first 12 years on the farm meant we had several cats and at least one dog and all the cattle, which is a visual if not always a tactile harvest. When I went to high school I boarded in a larger country town, now a small rural city, and was without animals (except the teenage kind) nearby for four years. It was my first extended period away from them.

My years at an Agricultural College provided fortnightly contact with farm animals of the eccentric menagerie known only to staff and students of such places in such an era - on one farm there were: beef and dairy cattle, a range of sheep breeds, pigs, chooks, turkeys, horses, rabbits, cats and dogs. During my cattle research years I looked after 'experimental' animals - beef cattle - hands-on, every day for nearly three years. 

In the city I moved from house to house for another four years or so and no one had pets until I bought a pup in the mid 70s ... and since then I have had a cat or dog, or both, or two cats at any one time, with only one year gap in all that time. 

It makes, say, only nine or so years without them. Fifty-ish with them close by. Nearly forty years with animals inside the house. What a privilege.

Cats and Silence

I dislike those people who think people are divisible as liking cats or liking dogs, as if this liking only operated through us as preference – things being mutually exclusive. I have had three dogs as pets, over 20 years, and three cats over 25 years, with some overlap of dog and cat. None of these numbers include my childhood years on the farm, where we had several cats and one or two dogs all the time. And cows. It's just ... cows are hard work in an apartment. It's said that Newfoundland dogs are too, they will leap into the bath with you, onto the lounge, onto the bed... they weight up to 100kgs.

Cats have become my favourites now because we don't have to walk them, or pay them much attention if we're busy, they aren't breathily, breathlessly, or foul-breath needy. Dogs are shouters. And cats are quiet. Beautifully, marvelously quiet. Cats do silence brilliantly. They can walk silently, leap and land silently, wash, well, quietly, and move up against you softly and silently. So when they do make some noise – snoring whiffily as they sleep, or crunching biscuits, or chewing off their drying claws, or yowling with cat-existential concern - it becomes a delight and a burst of difference. Knowing how ferocious cats can be, and all have the potential to be, they are quite movingly gentle in their soft grace when affectionate, their silent co-coordinating stepping over obstacles, their wanting all four paw-pads touching you when they sit beside you ...

Our cats look us in the eye and the boy cat, Evan, is especially smart and even (no, really?) seems capable of uncatlike empathy (well, almost) in his attentions. Not quite as closely-attentive as a dog, no solace like dog licking solace, but some mysterious sense of coming when silent company is more than welcome.