CCN information
Latest Forum Posts
- 2012 Gold Rose Promotion - Update
Thu Feb 09, 2012 12:03 pm by coastcelebrant
- Beach Weddings in Adelaide?
Fri Feb 03, 2012 6:56 am by solo - DO I NEED PERMISSION TO PRINT COPIES OF SONG WORDS?
Tue Jan 31, 2012 12:07 am by solo - How much does a celebrant cost?
Thu Jan 05, 2012 8:37 am by solo - Post Draw mileage for promoting yourself and ASKACELEBRANT
Wed Jan 04, 2012 7:11 am by rona
Women's Network Australia
Right words at the rite time |
 |
 |
 |
On Popular PoetryBy Kerry Cue © Kerry Cue All rights reserved. Re-printed with permission Kerry Cue is an author and journalist whose latest book is Forgotten Wisdom: A Search for the Lost Art of Happiness. More on Kerry below. Poets of Australia, you are letting us, the public, down. You can, of course, write whatever you bloody well choose in your poems, with or without full stops, capital letters or verbs. You can take your inspiration from Keats, kestrels and cathedrals or expose your postmodernist angst with some poetic self-flagellation. No problem. I am here to tell you what we the public, needs as regards poetry. You must have noticed. we actually do need poetry in our lives. We read poetry at the most ceremonial moments in life such as weddings or funerals. The sad truth, however, is that most poets we choose to read out load at social gatherings are dead. Khalil Gilbran kicked the bucket, metaphorically speaking, more than 75 years ago, while the Sufi poet Rumi has been dead for centuries. Moreover, when couples choose poetry for their weddings they often turn their backs on contemporary poets and call on the likes of an Apache poem written, possibly by a nameless Hollywood scriptwriter for a B-grade western. What's going on ? Some of you would insist that poetry is not a service industry. Too true. Yet despite the sweat and labour you put into wordsmithing, few want to read what you write. You are producing a one legged table. There are those who would appreciate a one-legged table. There are those that would appreciate the craftsmanship but few would know what to do with it. As a consequence, publishers have lost interest in printing poetry - you try and sell a one-legged table - and there are those few newspapers and magazines that publish poetry show it in small spaces in tight corners. More over, many poets who write for magazines and newspapers seem to have no idea that the poem is published in such a journal for the purpose of being read by the public. Some poems seem to have been slung together from clues of a cryptic crossword. Others read like a sheet of newspaper wrapping itself around your face in a strong wind. The poem arrives suddenly, you struggle with it and before you know it, it has gone. Then there are the poets, who seem to be speaking to someone standing behind you, their worthy thoughts flying over your shoulder to some bespectacled academic who stands there nodding knowingly and taking notes. Who has the time to read a poem that has to be sedated and strapped to the table so the meaning can be extracted like a tooth by a cold-hearted professor? (Just a little tribute to Billy Collins.) We the public want immediate access to a poem that speaks directly to us. We know this is possible because W.H.Ausen's poem, Funeral Blues, ("Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone") read out at the funeral in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral kick-started a poetry revival in Britain. This is not surprising. The poem is a raw outcry of grief and grief is a very common emotion. More significantly, neuroscience can now tell us why this poem stands like a monolith rising above the postmodern literary fog.  During our long walk through time, evolution left its imprint in our brain. At the bottom of your skull is the reptile brain ticking over basic functions, On top of it sits the mammal brain. This survival brain generates all emotional responses.Wrapped over these chunks of evolution is the human brain, left and right. Bit the emotional brain is not conscious. You can not tell yourself to cheer up or stop worrying because your chatty human brain is talking to an animal, but you know that already. You know you cannot pluck happiness out of the air nor will away your worries. We are however, visual creatures. You can access your emotional brain through pictures, through pictorial language and Auden was a master of the craft, producing exquisite and useful goods. Your right brain thinks in pictures and therefore understands parables, myths, proverbs and allegories. Your left brain doesn't get metaphors. It does its best while your right brain reaches for the stars. Your left brain uses language directly to label and sort your world view and it can trap your emotional thinking. Pictorial language can, however, free you from pacing up and down in the cage of your logical thoughts. You can not harm me Kerry Cue studied Science/Engineering at Melbourne University and taught maths and science for 10 demanding years before becoming a best selling author of over 17 humorous and thought provoking books including Life On a G-String, Australia Unbuttoned and I Left My Heart in Chinkapook and my Knickers in New York. Her first book, Crooks, Chooks and Bloody Ratbags, an unreliable guide to her childhood, won one of the few awards ever offered in this country for humorous writing at Adelaide Arts Festival in 1983. In her latest book, Forgotten Wisdom, A Search for the Lost Art of Happiness (Published in April) Cue uses the new science of the brain to explain that you must shut off the chatty little voice in your head and use Right brain thought to fully understand your emotions. She has written for radio (A Letter to Alan Border became a classic of backyard cricket and was recorded on an Australia All Over CD with Macca) and TV, notably The Comedy Company. She has written for nearly every newspaper in Australia including The West Australian, The Advertiser (SA), The Sydney Morning Herald and The Daily Telegraph(NSW) and is currently a columnist for the Herald Sun(Vic), The Canberra Times(ACT) and The Courier Mail (Qld). She wrote for Home Beautiful, among other magazines, for 5 years until they saw inside her house. She has made numerous recordings for the ABC and appeared on many radio and TV chat shows over the years including a stint on The Einstein Factor brains trust panel where 5 years of university education and 10 years of teaching high school science finally paid off when she knew that an echidna was a monotreme! An electrifying speaker with over 20 years experience, Kerry combines humour and insight in her keynote addresses and workshops so that participants not only leave her presentations laughing but also armed with refreshing and creative ideas on how to deal with life. Her one day Happiness Won’t Wait Workshops, which run annually and open to the public for the first time in 2008, use humour and insight so participants can rethink and renew attitudes to life, love and relationships. Forgotten Wisdom
Forgotten Wisdom is the new ‘Emotional Intelligence’ if written with the soul of a poet as Kerry Cue combines the cold facts of science with words that shimmer with life on the page. To purchase Kerry's book see http://www.kerrycue.net/buy.php # Editors Note: This line of Kerry's "The right words delivered at the right time can change your life" leapt from the page, and whispered in my ear ....... "celebrants and poets" have a lot in common.
|