As some of you may know, I’ve been working on the ABC mini-series The Slap based on Christos Tsiolkas’ novel. It has recently been bought by the BBC and the eight-part series, which began airing on the ABC in Australia nearly four weeks ago to much acclaim, is due to begin airing Thursday nights at 10 p.m. on BBC 4, beginning Oct 27th. Watch the trailer here.
Ivor Indyk reviews it here in the Sydney Morning Herald.
I will be giving an online poetry workshop through Australian Poetry from Nov 7 to December 5th, 2011.
Why do we write poetry? Why do we get stuck sometimes and lack inspiration? How do we inspire or re-inspire ourselves when writing poetry is an important part of our lives?
“Using found text to create biographical poems or poems triggered by other people’s lives, writing through the lens of a character (animal or human), and other exercises to get un-stuck, this workshop will explore the reasons why we write and how to help yourself when you find yourself unable to. The aim will be to push beyond yourself and discover poems you didn’t know were there. Poems that take you beyond your individual experience while keeping your unique voice intact.
This is a workshop aimed to create an atmosphere of experiment and freedom to take your writing to a deeper and more unexpected place.”
I really want to explore and help others explore the dynamic work I found when I started writing about Charles Darwin in poetry and how that work has continued now as I embark on a new book of poems from the point of view of an animal. The aim is to better find yourself within your poetry through a mask of character. It’s also a great way of getting unstuck when you find yourself struck with writers’ block or are having trouble making enough space for writing.
Online workshops run for four weeks and operate by participants emailing the tutor their poetry on the first date of the workshop. The tutor will respond with feedback and direction on the same day. Participants will then continue to submit their work, improving their piece based on feedback offered weekly, for the duration of the course.
To sign up for my online course, please click here.
I’m completely hopeless about keeping up this blog. Since I last posted I have not lifted my head from the computer and my various screenwriting responsibilities, except to go to Borneo on a documentary recce for Project Borneo 3D, a feature documentary I’ve been writing with filmmaker Cathy Henkel and Virgo Productions, largely about the work of Willie Smits, orangutan conservationist. Despite the chest cold I suffered from, care of the lovely Scottish February weather, Borneo was an amazing place and the rescued, orphaned orangutans I met at the Sintang Rescue Centre that Willie and Richard Zimmerman set up (though due to chest cold I couldn’t touch them) crystallised Darwin’s experiences for me; how meeting Jenny the Orangutan, helped him to formulate ideas of evolution. Watching as Jimo reached out his cage with his empty water bottle to be filled (as much as an attempt to make human contact as to obtain water) and then proceeded to keep it safe on his shelf or, once emptied, stored it in the bottom of his tyre swing, it was immediately clear that we share 97 per cent DNA with them. Log onto Orangutan Outreach and meet and even adopt the orphans, or watch the beautiful short films that French filmmaker Patrick Rouxel made of Jimo and Raja’s rescues last year on the Orangutan Outreach YouTube channel. They are both very moving. Sadly, the littlest of the orangutans, Luna, went missing a couple of weeks ago. The animal smuggling industry is still a huge problem, despite Willie’s and others best efforts. Fingers crossed they find her alive, sweet little Luna.
Despite all of my orangutan focus these last few months, I am not starting a new book of poems about them. Instead, it is another animal, far stranger, and still secret, that has captured my poetic brain…
I read at Glasgow’s Word Per Minute earlier this year. They do a great job of assembling and recording poets, novelists, filmmakers, musicians and artists from all over Scotland, which I suppose I now must consider myself a part of, given I spend close to half of my time here…Here is a recording of my reading from The Darwin Poems they have posted.
I have an essay published in Birkbeck, University of London’s Journal 19. It is a special issue: ‘Science, Literature and the Darwin Legacy’ which has been beautifully edited by Paul White, Carolyn Burdett and Ana Parajo Vadillo.
From the blurb:
“This issue, guest edited by Carolyn Burdett, Ana Parejo Vadillo, and Paul White, takes the Darwin anniversary year as an occasion to reflect on the role that Darwin’s work has played in focusing the field of literature and science on the interplay of biology and the novel.
Opening new avenues in poetry, serial fiction, life writing, and the visual arts, in physics, geology, paleontology, sociology, and genomics, it explores ways in which Darwin, notwithstanding the polemics and lionizing that surround his legacy, may still be a force of cultural creation and critique.”
The issue includes essays by Gillian Beer, Adelene Buckland, Paul White, David Amigoni, Gowan Dawson, John Robert Holmes, Daniel Walter Brown, Julia Voss, Angelique Richardson, John Dupre and myself. Check it out.
The Darwin Poems has been shortlisted for the 2009 ALS Gold Medal for an outstanding work of literature from the previous year.
The list in alphabetical order is:
Emily Ballou, The Darwin Poems
Steven Carroll, The Lost Life
Eva Hornung, Dog Boy
Cate Kennedy, The World Beneath
David Malouf, Ransom
I’ve been writing an essay on Darwin and metaphor and came across this entry from the ‘N’ notebook [Metaphysics and Expression] of 1838-39 (the line breaks are my own and the ellipses refer to a long break of text about Darwin’s children):
“Hope is the expectant eye.
looking to distant object, brightened
& moistened by emotion,–…
Expression of affection
is accompanied by slight
protrusion of lips
as if
going to say
‘my dear,’
just what smile is to laugh.–”
I was just searching out an answer to a question posed by Dr. Paul White of the Darwin Correspondence Project in relation to the death of Charles Darwin and never remembering where I find anything, I returned to The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online and to Emma’s diary for the year 1882 and discovered a choice morsel for poetry which I had previously, annoyingly, missed. In my writing of Darwin’s life I somehow failed to include Emma’s diary entry for April 20th, 1882:
“Polly died.
All the sons arrived.”
For anybody who doesn’t know, Polly was Darwin’s favorite dog in his latter years. She was a white terrier that slept in Darwin’s study and accompanied him on his daily ‘sandwalk’. Apparently, she died the day after Darwin did, something I have previously never read about. If I had managed to discover this earlier, I would have called the poem: April 20th, 1882 and placed it after “The Green Need” and before “Afterwards”, which is an account of Emma’s life after Darwin’s death. What perfect brevity and rhythm Emma’s words have.
I finally saw the episode of ABC TV’s Bush Slam at Corryong, Victoria that I recorded last March, and discovered that my poem was edited by a third in the course of post-production. As I’ve had such nice comments from people about the poem, I thought I’d post it here in its entirety (though you can also read the whole version on the ABC website). While the poem as broadcast still holds together, I think it has lost some of its rhythm. It is reproduced in two parts (pages) below. If you live in Australia, you can still download the episodes for another week or so.
copyright Emily Ballou, 2009
copyright Emily Ballou, 2009
I promised a couple of months ago, to post Ryan Van Winkle’s poem and this is how slow I am! I blame my transcontinental lifestyle and flying between Australia and the UK twice in six weeks. But I am settled into the new year now, and although newly married and not personally struggling with cohabitation, l did love listening to Ryan read this when I was in Glasgow in late November, my new Edinburgh/American poet-friend. The poem I asked for was about toast, but it’s already been published elsewhere, so he has generously allowed me to reproduce ‘The Apartment’.
However…the stanzas in the version Ryan sent me were alternating tabulations across the page of mostly four lines each and I have tried eight times to not only reproduce the tabulations but to just put the stanza breaks in, but this blog will simply not let me add spaces between stanzas (though I have done it before and have no idea how I did!). This is a frustrated poet this morning…Ryan I’m very sorry because all the stanzas have been run on together.
If anybody knows how to better reproduce poems on these blogs, I’d appreciate any tips…
The Apartment
Our new walls,
empty in the dusk,
hang like sheets
before first light.
There is a driven nail
by the stove that could
hold a pan if the walls
stay sturdy. And the
old tenants left a mirror in the
bedroom which looks back at
staring walls with fine cracks
like a museum’s basement vase.
There are brown smears
in the study; chocolate, blood
or shit, we don’t know what
will happen to us here or what
will settle on rented walls
or if nothing will settle
at all. We’ve just moved
and already we are bitter
cranberries in each other’s
mouths, biting about photos,
the place of the table, lay
of the bed. The apartment is a City
Hall we cannot fight. So we turn
like lawyers, against each other,
let the walls stare. There is a mirror
to look into, a nail to hang onto.
Our unopened boxes hide in corners
and closets like beaten children.
And we will take the blood
off the walls and the dust
from the shelves. We have one
year together in a place that
is empty at dusk, and feels like fog
inside and between us
so I cannot see you, and Christ,
tomorrow, we will live here.
