I am the cloaked detective
the silent choir
top of the slush pile
I am sleeping in your pocket
a gatherer of secrets
in my nest of old headlines
I am Icarus, scaling the maze
before flight, and Houdini
with supple spine
I am a mathematician
I multiply
I am looking to master
mischief’s map, wherever
X might mark the spot
(Previously published in Frame Lines, 2008. Revised, 2013.)
Back in August of 2010, Frances Whiting interviewed me for a story in the Courier Mail’s QWeekend. Standing amongst such heavyweights as Bruce Dawe, David Robotham, Graham Nunn, John Tranter and Felicity Plunkett, I represented Emerging Poets; it was thrilling — and definitely nerve-wracking. But it was a lovely article: a six-page spread that came out just in time for the 2010 Queensland Poetry Festival. Russell Shakespeare photographed me in Toowong Cemetery (about a year into my graveyard obsession), and kindly allowed me to reproduce some of the photos that didn’t make it into QWeekend.
You can still download and read the whole article: The Thrill of the Quill.
Tash D. of the Factory Diaries interviewed (and filmed!) me last week. Here are the results!
Tash D met up with local poet and writer, Zenobia Frost for a lovely chat about Brisbane’ macabre history, happy acorn socks and poetry.
Photo by Tash D
Firstly, why don’t you introduce yourself to our readers:
I’m Zenobia Frost. I’m a local poet and editor of things. I guess those are my two primary hats. I also sometimes run events and, what else do I do? What else do I do Tash?
Be Awesome?
I do lots of things. I have happy acorn socks, perform stuff. I promised to be eloquent and now I’ve lied to you!
What kind of style would you describe your poetry as being?
It’s always a tricky question. I remember one of the first people that asked me that and I really had to think about it was as an interviewer at Subway. It’s like how do you describe poetry to someone who’s going…
View original post 1,796 more words
A little blast from the past — Going Down Swinging #25 featured a poem performed by me and Timothy Tate (as Colouring by Numbers). Look how young we were!
(A silly shape-poem from 2008 — it came to mind in this week’s sleepy, grey Brisbane weather.)
Director Lucas Stibbard warns audiences that Delicacy is not a nice play — a wonderfully delicate phrase to use. This two-person, one-hour play, inspired by the life of German cannibal Armin Meiwes and his lover/meal, will make you squirm and cringe for what feels like hours. Although the show turns on the question of “will they or won’t they consummate their cannibalistic plan?” — a morbid twist on the old romantic trope — the characters’ domestic exchanges generate some of the most keenly felt discomfort.
Neil (Cameron Hurry), the character to be eaten, flits between psychotic bursts of aggression and agitated silence. Even when utterly still, as when he watches porn at the dining-room table, he vibrates with explosive unpredictability. Denny (Gregory Scurr) is a picture of passivity, absorbing Neil’s physical and verbal abuse to respond with praise and apologies, attending to Neil’s every whim. A review of an earlier production of Delicacy compares Denny to a manservant. In contrast, Stibbard and Scurr’s Denny, though servile, also achieves a fine layer of menace. If he feeds, praises and dotes on Neil, he does so in the manner of a attendant to a human sacrifice.
Costume designer Rachel Cherry transforms the mostly vegetarian Denny into a butcher figure with a simple transparent plastic apron. Their monochromatic clothes — Denny in pink, Neil in red — continually remind us of the blood, its flow and its release, that is at the heart of this play. Elongated silences punctuate Neil’s outbursts; in these silences Denny’s mask slips. Deep shadows in his eyes, created at these precise moments by Cameron Parish’s clever lighting, reveal a brooding and impenetrable core. These indirect touches sustain a brilliantly tense and uneasy mood in a play that is quite coy about the cannibalism that forms its gothic centre. Early on, our only clues are cryptic references in otherwise domestic dialogue.
Similarly, Bec Woods’ set is ever so slightly unnerving: recognisably domestic — a dining room and a kitchen — but exaggerated, distorted. The kitchen bench extends too far and ends up looking industrial. When Denny cooks, the kitchen dwarfs him. The dining room table seems huge with Denny and Neil crowded together in one corner. In stark contrast, a single, preposterously strong light above the dining table occasionally constricts the stage to illuminate just the table, creating a claustrophobic mood where before the space had seemed unmanageably large.
My one problem with the play involves its script. The story diverges quite significantly from the events that inspire it, which is not in itself a problem. The problem is that these divergences strip the original story of its interesting nuances. To recap the headlines, two otherwise likeable and normal-looking men, who shared affection, consensually agreed that one should eat the other. The men were well-regarded in their neighbourhoods — likable, relatable cannibals. It’s a true story that raises compelling questions.
On the other hand, Julian Hobba’s script turns both of these people into eminently unlikeable characters — selfish, childish, and violent — which immediately throws up a wall between them and the audience, letting viewers off the hook. There’s no chance that they will empathise with either Denny or Neil, short-circuiting the original story’s moral quandary.
Ultimately this play is not so much about cannibalism as it is a play that involves cannibalism. This story doesn’t plumb the depths of what it might mean to perform the act of eating another human, but it is a well-told gothic tale — tense, suspenseful, and shocking.
Delicacy runs at the Brisbane Arts Theatre until Jun 15. http://www.artstheatre.com.au
JEREMY THOMPSON was assistant arts editor at OffStreet Press. His work has been published in Small Packages, Rave Magazine, Voiceworks, and Notes From The Gean.
In January, we made the big move over the hill from, er, Toowong to Bardon. Our home had been a huge sharehouse we established with friends; three years later, it was a mould mansion we were ready to leave. Still, the day the real estate put up the sign, we felt a bit like our house had turned around and told us she was planning to dump us anyway. Fair enough, I suppose.
Today I set up a facebook page to divide up my public poeting and private grumpy-cat-posting (in so far as those two things can be separated). Now I’ve cross-posted that news everywhere, I’ll shut up about it. Exciting chapbook news coming soon. Thank you for following. :)
Moving
In the end,
it’s like clearing a hotel room:
the twice-over sweep of bare cupboards,
claiming the shower’s last piece of soap
and counting keys, you drive
away with your last look.
You will line up
your toothbrushes
in the habit of a new bathroom.
But when your nose follows
its old tricks, driving you back,
and you see the sign gone
from the fence post, you realise
you scrubbed yourself out
of that ghosting house.
And it just moved on without you.
Alchemy has procured some collaborative-arts gold for its May show this Friday: Scrambled Legs, circus duo Claire Ogden and Shane Smith; Tari Hujan, a five-piece band who transmute genres; and that poet who likes graveyards and cats and stuff, Zenobia Frost, occasionally accompanied by charismatic cellist, Wayne Jennings (the Ragtag Band).
Frankie Vandellous hosts this splendid, free monthly event. Come along and support Brisbane arts!
Alchemy: A Little May Magic
5.30pm, Friday, 17 May
Brisbane Square Library
In 2000, I was 11. We’d just moved back to Brisbane from Cambridge, UK, and I had failed to get my Hogwarts letter. I can’t say Year 6 was great. It was my fifth primary school across three countries. I was a busty nerd with an English accent; I spent a lot of time in the library. I did have a couple of friends. One, whom I doted on, gave me two things to remember her by: a pair of old black sneakers (which I wore, worn and repainted and worn again, until Mum binned them) and a kitten.
Late in 2000 that friend’s moggy found herself in the family way. These are the little dudes that emerged: four boys (I think), and two girls. Mum let me choose one. I met them when they were three weeks old, eyes barely opened. There was a little grey girl with apricot patches and a tinier tortoiseshell. I’m a pretty indecisive person. I deliberated at length. I tried to talk my parents into letting me have both — it seemed cruel, anyway, to separate them. In the end, though, I think I pitied the tortoiseshell runt. I named her after the short-lived slayer-with-the-dreadful-accent who fought alongside Buffy in season two: Kendra.
Kendra was a difficult kitten. She drove my mother mad by shitting exclusively behind the TV, all over the cords. She climbed the blinds. She licked powerpoints. It seemed she had the deathwish of her namesake. But she had an enormous head on an impossibly-tiny body (see Exhibit B, above); she won us over pretty quickly.
Kendra had a taste for adventure early in life, but time made her a homebody. We had to chickenwire the fences in her first year to prevent her running out onto the busy road in Hamilton. I remember her darting up the jacaranda out the front, only to come face to face with a pair of crows, who just laughed at her. I had to pry her claws off the bark; she had just frozen there.
When I was 13 and Kendra was two — the first year of high school — we moved into a house my parents designed and built in the true suburbs. (It features a park built on the grounds of a demolished abattoir/tannery. Lovely!) My parents have a wonderful and beloved native garden. Kendra’s favourite spots were under the frangipani, on a warm paver hidden in the palms out the front, and close — but not too close — to the pool. Inside, she preferred the diamond-shaped motif at the centre of the foyer tiles, her old pink chair, and wherever Mum is.
Around 2008, Kendra struck up a rare friendship with a very handsome Cornish rex from across the road. (He was intelligent enough to answer my question — “Where do you come from?!” — and lead me to his front door.) His name was Romeo. (I’m serious. It suited him, too.) He was charming enough that my parents didn’t mind him dropping by, strolling right into the house, to hang out. (It’s unfortunate I can’t find his photos — he looked like Hipster Simba.) He was an adventurous tom; it wasn’t long before we heard he’d met a car on the adjoining road.
I remember taking a couple of photos of Romeo with Kendra around to his family. Grandma and about four young children answered the door; Grandma eyed shaved-headed me with suspicion and gave me a talking down for mentioning that the cat had died in front of the children. “He has gone on holiday.” She handed the photos to the youngest of the children, who wandered outside and dropped them in a puddle. They shut the door in my face.
The remainder of the neighbourhood’s tomcats were less friendly. Kendra stopped going outside, except for essential garden visits, a while after that.
Kendra seemed determined to get past her runty beginnings. No matter how strict the diet, Kendra continued in her quest to become the roly-poliest of cats. Belly-rubs were pretty much currency in the Kendra Frost household. I wish I could find the photo of her sitting at the set dining table, evidently awaiting dinner with the rest of us [edit: found it!]. Her favourite foods were: anything. She even ate vegetables on occasion.
Kendra was extremely affectionate. She was the apple of Dad’s eye and seemed to have a knack for knowing when Mum was unwell. Given her bad knees and kidney and stomach troubles, she was a good contender for best tempered in a family of chronic pains. (Though we did have to whip out the Kitty Valium to get her into the bath.) She won over (most of) my partners as the years wore on. She was pretty good at giving (or denying) the tick of approval. If she liked you, she’d snuggle in behind your knees when you slept.
I saw her three days before she died, and she was very happy to see me. I scooped her up and carted her around the house for a longer-than-usual while. She had a sort of pleasant vastness. (She made a great pillow.) We had started to worry she might be running out of time — she’d been making a lot of trips to the vet — but it was an abstract idea. Who knows what “soon” means?
My parents found Kendra on the tiles close to their bedroom door. She died during the three hours they were at Cloud Atlas. Mum was bewildered — just that day she had washed all of the kitty blankets at once. They buried her with one of them — one of my baby blankets — in the patch of garden where I’d planted sporadically successful rosebushes years before. I’d had an overwhelmingly good day; my parents decided to wait until the next day to tell me. Kendra and I had been friends for 13 years. I guess I would’ve liked to have seen the body. But I appreciated my parents’ gesture, and it couldn’t be helped.
This weekend we planted daffodil bulbs over Kendra’s grave. I spend a fair amount of time in cemeteries, but I don’t typically know anyone in them. Even as an adult it’s hard to get your head around the idea that your friend is under the ground.
Now, I know you few readers are good folks who understand it’s only a token gesture to give a measly 1000 words to a cat you spent half your life-to-date with. (I once had a boss belittle me repeatedly for grieving the death of a pet rat.) But it’s funny — we humans, or most of us, spend our lives trying to do stuff that might make our lives memorable. Domesticated or not, animals don’t have that goal and most don’t get that chance. Kendra wasn’t the first cat in space and nothing about her was meme-able. She doesn’t have a tombstone. She wasn’t even registered with the council. But my parents’ house seems horribly empty now. And we love her a lot. So here we are.
Kendra Frost
1 Sept. 2000 – 11 Mar. 2013
Died at Brisbane
On Sunday night, a friend prodded me with a link. “Have you seen this? You have fanmail.” I thought it best to reply to Aimee Lindorff in kind.
I’m glad you made it to Riverbend, despite the rain. My reasons are selfish: I really needed your letter this week.
When the page first loaded on my phone and I could see my name at the top, it was a strange thing indeed. What was I in for? My first thought was that I was, in the abstract sense, In Trouble. Perhaps it’s a full name thing. (I don’t have a string of middle names for a parent to invoke.)
At the time your letter arrived, I was making pizza with my boyfriend. We stopped to read and I absent-mindedly worried a hole in the wrong end of the packet of pizza bases. Maybe I shouldn’t make a big deal out of it. But it’s not every day someone I don’t know writes me a review-letter and publishes it in a literary journal (read: never), so blast it. I’ll make a big deal.
Earlier this week I sat down with my manuscript with the aim of making revisions before sending it to the next publisher. I may have had a tiny tantrum. Pages may have found their way, haphazardly, all over the room. There were plenty of factors at work leading to this little game of 72-poem pick-up, sure, but above all it was one of those moments where this whole art thing seemed pretty pointless.
I’m not saying that writing is really a lofty spiritual calling — it isn’t — but damn it was good, great, brilliant to hear that my poems had brought someone such pleasure. Even better, it was a privilege to read your eloquent reaction and your memories of Toowong and its cemetery. Every time I reread the address, it’s a warm, fuzzy shock.
I am going to print it out and stick it near my desk. Possibly also on the fridge. Thank you.
Zenobia
P.S. I am glad you liked my cat-lady dress.
Zenobia Frost 