Author: Zenobia Frost

Voiceworks V-v-v-voom!

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In their latest issue, Fluid, Voiceworks magazine has kindly included two of my poems: The Waiting and A Letter to the Romans Sealed with Beeswax (surely my longest ever title – it’s my very own call-to-arms poem, dedicated to my namesake, Palmyra’s warrior queen). Not only that, there’ s an interview with me (and a number of other fine young writers) about the writing process. So grab Voiceworks for a bit of a Zen-fix, and lots of great writings and artworks by Australia’s under-25s. The cool ones who aren’t nuisances on public transport. Or so I like to think.

Anyhoo, a poem to tempt your tastebuds:

The Waiting

My limbs are made of moths
that flutter under skin.
The storm quivers across the bay.

I have been at home
all day in your dressing gown.

I told work the truth for once; I said,
My limbs are made of moths.
My head is trying to fly off
and I’m just getting lighter and lighter.

The ocean is the colour of the sky
is the colour of the ocean. In this blue gown
no one would notice if I slipped out.
I stroke the window’s fading frame,
tracing the timber’s severed years. The sky darkens

and I move the candle to the sill.
I watch like I’m waiting for a fisherman
to come home. I wait like I’m watching
for a chance to open the window.

Adventure!

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melbpasstonguesWe — that is, Rob Morris, Kristin Hannaford and Belinda Jeffrey (tour coordinator extraordinaire) — set off on a poetry tour of Sydney, Melbourne and Launceston back at the end of September. The trip couldn’t have gone better, but here are my highlights:

  • Stumbling across a little red door that opened onto the Cafe Lounge, which led to a strange series of events in which I received a free bottle of champagne, which I enjoyed on the balcony of a mansion – trespassing, having climbed up and over the hotel roof – in Launceston with Nathan Curnow, Sarah Day and Ross Donlon, and later Kristin and Belinda.
  • Exploring Sydney with my buddy Clare, whom we in Brisvegas wish we could see more of.
  • Getting revved up at Passionate Tongues in Melbourne, and chilling out at the lovely Spinning Room the next night.
  • Visiting every vintage shop in Australia with Rob, who is a real groover. Losing Rob. Finding that every vintage shop attendant understood what I meant when I asked, “Have you seen a madly poetic sort of chap in a jacket?” (“Yes. He went next door.”)
  • Having a glorious afternoon in Melbourne’s laneways with my old friend Ange from high school, now a med student. Ange and I found (and I purchased) an utterly splendid walking cane (with elephant head), whom I named Oscar. And then we met a witch.
  • Accidently using Oscar to get into the short queue at the Dali exhibition at night (which was, in itself, spectacular).
  • Haemorhaging cash at Route 66.
  • Exploring the park and meeting the monkeys (one of whom I swear was eating chewing gum) in Launceston.
  • Meet all the lovely, lovely people at the Tasmanian Poetry Festival. Hanging out with Nathan, Ross, Sarah and Kevin Gillam. I learnt so much from them and from my tour mates.
  • Selling books! And improving my performance, I hope. I felt like I was.
  • Getting checked over for explosives on every single domestic flight. I must look like a firework, or something. Maybe it’s the hat.

You can read Belinda Jeffrey’s account of our tour here.

Dolly, Mr Boots, and Other Good Things

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Mr BootsI am listening to Lion Island. They are the perfect soundtrack to a lazy Sunday on which I’ve got nothing much done, but feel quite, quite content. They launched their debut EP at Ric’s bar on Friday night, and it’s a cracker. They’ve come so far so quickly, and they deserve it. I’m biased, I know — my sisterthing plays trumpet (“and when she’s not playing the trumpet,” says one reviewer, “she’s playing the smile”), but they’re really, really worth a listen. And when you’ve finished listening, you can pop along to the uncharTED website (they’ve been short-listed for an amazing award), and vote them all the way to the Big Day Out.

There’s been lots going on in the world of Zen. I moved out of home just over a month ago, and my new place is a haven on the hill, overlooking Brisbane. It fits me perfectly, and my housemates — both fuzzy and unfuzzy — are quite lovely. The humans in the house bake a lot, so it always smells good, and the cats in the house are eccentric and aristocratic.

I went on tour a few weeks ago, courtesy of Arts Queensland, the Qld Writers Centre and the Qld Poetry Festival. It was wild. Adventure stories to come. In a minute. Promise.

My new place is a short walk from Toowong Cemetery, and I’ve become a bit obsessed with it and its 127 000 quiet inhabitDollyants. I’ve started planning out a rather large project: a book of poems in which history and whimsy overlap, and we meet the cemetery’s earliest dead. There are so many gravestones there that can only barely be read, now, and I want to write their stories before they disappear. In the 1970s, the council removed about a thousand old memorials – I fear this might happen again, to make way for the newly deceased. Thus, my quest begins! I am on the hunt for stories about Brisbanites buried between 1971 and 1950, in particular.

The hill — all 250 acres of land there — was first used as a graveyard, the history books say, in 1871 (Colonel Samuel Blackall in January, baby Ann Hill in November, and then another four), and wasn’t officially opened until 1876, and yet I’ve found graves dating back to 1863 (Malynn tomb, pictured) in some of the most overgrown parts of the cemetery. If anyone has any clues as to why this might be, please let me know. (This site says the cemetery was established, as Brisbane General Cemetery, in 1866, but that’s still three years after my earliest grave-find.)

Malynn GraveI anticipate I’ll be spending a lot of time at the John Oxley and State libraries in coming months, and I’ll definitely be getting hold of ‘Friends of Toowong Cemetery’, who apparently conduct free tours. I go gravewalking a couple of times a week; anyone who’d like to come along on adventures is welcome. It’s easy to walk for two or three hours in there and never pass the same gravestone twice. It’s a veritable museum.

Hoop pines rise
from the jaws of skeletons:
a final word.

Aboard the Poetry Tour Bus

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Hurrah! I’m very excited to have been chosen to join Robert Morris and Kristin Hannaford on a week-long poetry tour at the end of September. The Queensland Writers Centre and Queensland Poetry Festival are sending us to Sydney, Melbourne and Launceston. Can’t wait!

I’ve never really seen much of Australia before—I’ve certainly never been to Tasmania—so I’m looking forward to exploring. I’m sure that Rob and I will find quality vintage-hunting time along the way. More news to come as tickets (and gigs) are booked.

If you haven’t already, don’t forget to book your tickets for the QPF opening night event, A Tangle of Possibilities, featuring AF Harrold (UK), Elizabeth Bachinsky (Canada), Neil Murray & the 2009 Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence Hinemoana Baker (the festival begins with a lady with fine taste in hats? Perfect!). And I’ll be MCing!

It’s all happening this coming weekend, Friday 21st to Sunday 23rd of August, and it’ll be a blast. Tickets are now on sale from Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts or by calling the box office on: (07) 3872 9000.

Full/Phone/Door: $20
Concession: $15
Groups of 5 or more: $15

With help from The Little Oxford Dictionary, 1941

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sky

noun
1. the vault of heaven
2. the firmament

lark

noun
1. species of small bird, including the skylark
2. frolic, spree; an amusing incident

skylark

noun
1. Alauda arvensis, a small species of bird—plain in colouring, and not at all like its verbly cousin. The male has broad wings and two or three minutes of song in him; females prefer the male that can sing and hover the longest.

intransitive verb
1. (of sailing) to run up and down the rigging of a ship in sport
2. to gambol; to frolic; to indulge in horseplay; to indulge in lark
3. to play tricks or practical jokes

“Skylarking presents a hazard in the workplace.”
—Australian Occupational Health and Safety Legislation, 1998

she was slender in the summer

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(It’s cold; let’s have a summer poem)

she was slender in the summer
heat the way it unfurled across
her skin like ink through blotting
paper beads of sweat like dew
dancing naked in my garden
because we can tangled vines
as walls and sprinklers (hoses
with holes cut in them) serving
as marble fountains at the heart
of our labyrinth record player
dragged outside flowery yellow
music she says sounds like sun
shine white bread with butter or
daisies threaded through her
hair it took me an hour and
now they’re falling out as she
whirls between the rose bushes
snow on green grass i take the
petals one by one and arrange
them artfully on her pink tongue

Zenobia Frost
Previously published in The Definite Article

Jeff around the Riverbend

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That pun was so awful I don’t think it even qualifies as a pun.

Anyhoo, the last Riverbend: Poetry on the Deck reading for the year happened last Tuesday, and it was a pretty groovy reading. One of the five poets (all of whom you’ll be able to see perform at the Qld Poetry Festival) was Jeffrey Harpeng, one of Australia’s leading writers of haiku, haibun, tanka and tanka prose. It was one of the best readings I’d heard from him, and it prompted me to tell you, gentle readers, to catch his poems in your nets—or catch him for a chat at the festival, because I’ve never heard him say anything not worth listening to.

Jeff found poems “on a pilgrimage to metaphysics,” when “the shallowness of the world just didn’t seem credible.” He makes words that make my brain pop.

“I was a small cloud of facts, a short story, barely begun.”

You can read some of his poetry online here, here or here. Catch an interview with him at Another Lost Shark.

On a totally different note, the other night at Miss Bertie’s cabaret  burlesque (The JOYnt, South Brisbane) I saw two talented chaps, Yorgi n Gørski, juggle hats, and my life was more or less complete. I must learn this most essential of skills: millinery manipulation malarky. Now.

—

The Cure and A Strange Whirring Noise

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It occurs to me that I’ve posted a lot of advertisements lately, but not many zenrambles, and zenrambles at the very least amuse the Zen.

So yes, I’m listening to The Cure and A Strange Whirring Noise, both of which are coming out of my computer, but one of which doesn’t belong. I wonder how long it will be until this PC pops. Technology hates me. My typewriter never gives me this kind of trouble, but my typewriter isn’t, well, networked.

The Cure best-of/singles collection, The Cure Galore, I bought while wandering round the city this evening enjoying the rain. I like their clean sound. There’s nothing wishy-washy about The Cure. I also think Robert Smith looked a lot darker than his music sounds, which makes me think of Edward Scissorhands.

Edward Scissorhands was made by an American filmmaker. By startling coincidence, I recently travelled to the States. (How’s that for a subtle segue?) I wasn’t going to see Tim Burton, though (we don’t talk much anymore); I was going to see three people: a dear friend in Milwaukee, Fonzie, and Neil Gaiman.

I found all three, and I didn’t even have to go very far.

I stayed with my friend’s family in Milwaukee, and in the first week headed downtown to find the Fonz. Wisconsin buses are like Brisbane buses, and we had to thump the bus stop with the enthusiasm of Fonzie himself to make the bus materialise. We weren’t sure where to get off, either, but again, the Fonz guided us, and—though we pressed the buzzer more or less at random—the bus stopped directly opposite His Coolness. And here he is, standing immortal, Milwaukee’s own bronze Fonz:

Fonzie Milwaukee

Fonzie’s luck stayed with us throughout the day. Later, I found a book dated 1768 in a second-hand book warehouse (like Black Books x 1000000), previously owned by Lady Douglas, Scottish painter. She was 18 at the time the book was published. The book itself, Orlando Innamorato (Orlando in Love), is deliciously bound and ancient and smells wonderful.

Leon's

Back to the 50s. I became quite addicted to cheesy 50s-themed soda fountains, milkbars and diners in the US, and I’m very sad that they don’t abound in Australia. Leon’s, a drive-in frozen custard (oh my! tasty stuff) joint, is said to be the place  that the Happy Days diner was based on. Though I couldn’t see the link, they did do ambrosail sundaes.

But I digress. Neil Gaiman (and how he escaped me!). For my last weekend, we caught the bus down to Chicago and stayed in a hostel in the city’s centre. After getting thoroughly lost (I’ll read the map in future, thanks), we realised our hostel was just down the road from the Printer’s Row literary festival. Nice coincidence. Not only that, Neil, whom I was intending to hunt down somehow, happened to be giving a speech there.

Unfortunately for me, Neil is smart and the event was booked out, so I wasn’t able to talk to him about whether it would be okay for me to take a bubble bath with Amanda Palmer at his house. But I was this close.

Oh, this blog is getting long. My giddy aunt. I should leave it here, and sleep. I was going to tell you about American supermarkets, walking tours of haunted and non-existent Chicago neighbourhoods, Woodland Pattern Books, Riverbend Books, Jeff Harpeng’s glorious poems, my annoying poetry-writing habits, gloves, rat pizzas, pirates, and hat juggling—but these must wait for another time. Let it be said that life is good: the flu is finally clearing up; debts are being paid off; after an uncomfortably long hiatus, I’m writing things again; the Brisbane rental market looks like it might soon be affordable; and I’m making marvellous (and charmingly unrealistic) plans, as per usual.

Spring in the North Woods, Wisconsin