For 'Francesca' who made me a poet
Bio
David Emmett left school at sixteen. Some of his books are stolen—mostly by other people.
Qualifications
None that I am currently aware of.
Prior Experience
Publication in Voiceworks and Rabbit.

I envision as a small chapbook this collection of poetry titled 'Pop Songs'. It is poetry that has technique drawn from the shape of my thinking as well as the scaffold of the page. Its subject is the incongruous narratives of the mundane and is written in the lyric of pop songs or so I here translate that idiom to a new medium of longer and shorter poems. I am concerned less with the minimalism and condensed lyric of much contemporary work but instead with a total effect that is visible like the new day behind shutters and indeed the breath of the line far beyond that. I allow my work itself to risk sentimentality. The collection is loosely divided into three sections.

some thoughts about poetry in writing this :
it is , in fact , poets who will outlive cockroaches & though it will be the end of the world the intervening hours , the dawn & dusk , will be wasted on last poems & the handwriting will be illegible & it will be a bad poem at the summit of the slush pile you make no mistake about that .

the idea that poetry is saying more with language when it strikes out beyond its otherwise function , i.e. to articulate a delicate shorthand of things , well is it saying more ? no , it is saying the same . it’s the same crying out if it’s crying out at all . a poem just had more time .

a good poem is a conversation we would like to be having if we were more considered people , more clever & probably funnier , more generous & less vain , more honest & less anxious , & so on . it’s like how you notice that in bed with the one you think you love you sometimes say in new ways what you’ve been thinking for a long time .

i write these poems for the breath of it & a way of telling the time from the passing of feeling but the breath of it that is i think a kind of poetry we can go on praying for . i’m here now & so still you are . thank you .

Pop Songs

YOUR FACES LOOKED DIFFERENT AS CHILDREN (Second Full Take)

YOUR FACES LOOKED DIFFERENT AS CHILDREN

The Falling Night

a thing or two about my mother

he turns away again ( just relax , take it easy

if poetry is not photography

Bio
David Emmett left school at sixteen. Some of his books are stolen—mostly by other people.
Qualifications
None that I am currently aware of.
Prior Experience
Publication in Voiceworks and Rabbit.


I envision as a small chapbook this collection of poetry titled 'Pop Songs'. It is poetry that has technique drawn from the shape of my thinking as well as the scaffold of the page. Its subject is the incongruous narratives of the mundane and is written in the lyric of pop songs or so I here translate that idiom to a new medium of longer and shorter poems. I am concerned less with the minimalism and condensed lyric of much contemporary work but instead with a total effect that is visible like the new day behind shutters and indeed the breath of the line far beyond that. I allow my work itself to risk sentimentality. The collection is loosely divided into three sections.

some thoughts about poetry in writing this :
it is , in fact , poets who will outlive cockroaches & though it will be the end of the world the intervening hours , the dawn & dusk , will be wasted on last poems & the handwriting will be illegible & it will be a bad poem at the summit of the slush pile you make no mistake about that .

the idea that poetry is saying more with language when it strikes out beyond its otherwise function , i.e. to articulate a delicate shorthand of things , well is it saying more ? no , it is saying the same . it’s the same crying out if it’s crying out at all . a poem just had more time .

a good poem is a conversation we would like to be having if we were more considered people , more clever & probably funnier , more generous & less vain , more honest & less anxious , & so on . it’s like how you notice that in bed with the one you think you love you sometimes say in new ways what you’ve been thinking for a long time .

i write these poems for the breath of it & a way of telling the time from the passing of feeling but the breath of it that is i think a kind of poetry we can go on praying for . i’m here now & so still you are . thank you .

The poetry of Melbourne Poet David Emmett

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