A new initiative from WA Poets Inc where a poem of merit and/or displays creativity and innovation is featured.
4 October 2021
Trainspotting by Coral Carter with Marcus John
During the first lockdown during 2020 I was living in Port Augusta South Australia in a house opposite the east-west railway. I began to notice the graffiti on the goods-vans were colourful and, in some cases, humorous and as trains often stopped across the road opposite our house I decided to take photos of them. Lockdown did not preclude me running across the road to take a photo and so it happened that I have a large collection of graffiti photos. What to do with them? I thought I would include them in a poem combining company names and graffiti. Two voices were needed for the project and I knew my friend Marcus John had performed other poems with friends and he would be keen. We first performed “Trainspotting from the Bedroom Window” at Perth Poetry Club with train recordings from Freesound kangaroo vindalooThe performance provoked such positive feedback I decided to record our voices and combine voices, pics and train sounds into a short video. Recordings were made by Girraween Mob and the video created by Stewart Carter.
Coral Carter
Coral Carter was born and educated Western Australia. Coral has had two video productions shown in Perth on the Big Screen which used to be in the Perth Cultural Precinct, summer sky blues a poem and photos of blue skies and skylinesforty Western Australian poets writing to photographs taken from Coral’s blog skyporn. She runs Mulla Mulla Press which publishes poetry. Her first collection was Descended from Thieves Mulla Mulla Press 2013 and recently launchedBackyard Listening Mulla Mulla Press 2019. She performs regularly at Perth Poetry Club.
Marcus John
Marcus John, (aka Splodge) is a British-born, performance poet, writer, singer and artist. His unique and instantly recognisable space and breath, word and noise, thought and emotion filled poems, with their unconventional physical structure, leave the tools of timing, poise and mental structure open to interpretation. His poetry is written to perform. A listener is captivated by words and the velvet smooth, booming voice of Marcus John. Marcus has performed at many festivals including Blazing Swan. Publications include 111 Indifference Press and bodies Wide Load Zines 2016. A regular performer at Perth Poetry Club for many years.
21 September 2021
DIRTY LAUNDRY by Yael Harris
DIRTY LAUNDRY is Yael’s first visual art project, a Poetry-Art Installation depicting the loss of self-identity to domesticity, motherhood, and wifehood. A fusion of romantic flashbacks and inner reflections cathartically ironed on pieces of laundry. The installation was launched at the Spoken Word night, Bunbury Fringe 2021, with part 2 presented at the 2021 Perth Poetry Festival.
“The poems used in the installation were written mostly in 2015/16 in the shadow of my crumbling marriage. Only later, in 2020 when I reviewed them with fresh eyes, I started experimenting, firstly with printing them on index cards pegged to a washing line, then the idea evolved into using iron-on transfers to iron the poems on pieces of laundry items. It took 7 months to slowly create all the pieces during an extended artist in residency at ‘The Origins Centre’ in Balingup.”
CREDITS:
Poetry, art and performance – Yael Harris ©2021
Mentorship – Vahri McKenzi, Jaya Penelope
Videography – Sam Harris, Dean Lomax
Editor: Dean Lomax
Installation Poles – “Three”, curtesy of Dan Depiazzi
Performed at the Bunbury Fringe 2021
BIO: Yael lived quite an unusual life—from childhood, growing up in a communal children’s house on a kibbutz in Israel, followed by an exhilarating decade in the music industry in Tel-Aviv, being one of the pioneers of ‘the indie rock revolution’ of the 90s. She then spent several years in London, and later travelled and lived in rural India where she birthed her second daughter. Since 2008 she is settled in Balingup.
Yael started writing fairly recently when flashbacks from her past came flooding in. The first series of flashbacks from her travel years, called; ‘No Yesterdays’, was published as part of the photobook ‘The Middle of Somewhere’ (Ceiba 2015), followed by a second series focusing on her past love life – ‘Off My Chest’, which was published in Westerly New Creative—(UWA 2016).