Caroline Reid Writes

NOTE: This post is a bit longer than usual & contains a 10 minute presentation.   I recently had the enormous privilege of presenting poetry at the 2024 Palliative Care Summit: 'Navigating the Crossroads: Building the intersection between Palliative Care & Neurodegenerative Disease'. The summit was hosted by Palliative Care WA in the Pan Pacific hotel in Perth. I mention this because it's the place I was held in quarantine while my mother died in a nursing home just a few kilometres away. Perth's hard border control at the time was brutal. While many people have understandably just wanted to move on and forget about the pandemic, it's taken me a bit longer to do that. For a long time, the sorrow and grief seemed knitted into my skin.    Of course, I could have said no to the summit. But I sensed that this occassion was bigger than me, that these poems might serve others, that performing them might also help me work through residual grief, resentment, and an...

  Poetica Petit: A night of poetry and music I’m super-pleased  to announce that on April 11th I'll be performing poetry (feature poet) at Poetic Petit at the Woollhara Gallery in Redleaf, Sydney.  In 2022 I won the Woollhara Digital Literary Award for Poetry but wasn't able to get to Sydney. So, belatedly, I'll be reading the poem that won that award, A Poem To My Mother That She Will Never Read plus some new work. I'm grateful to Miriam Hechtman for the opportunity. Ilan Kidron will be performing some music on the night & there is also an open mic section. Poetica Petit is presented in partnership with Woollahra Council and held at the Cultural Hub, in the newly refurbished Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf.  READ MORE HERE     POETICA PETIT POETRY NIGHT Thursday, April 11, 6-8pm Woollahra Gallery, Redleaf TIX HERE $20 including some refreshments

Meeting Nick Drake, published in *82Review, 21.1 Lately, I've been thinking about what it means to submit work to literary journals, and my process of doing that. At the beginning of 2024, I had grand plans for my submitting my poetry to journals across the world. I would write and submit every single month , update my submission spreadsheet regularly, not delay in resubmitting work when the inevitable rejections came through. etc. etc. How's that going for me? Well, I did submit work to 4 journals in January then wrote a submission for an arts grant in February, and haven't submitted anything since! I planned to get back into this month and was all set to submit to Westerly Mag but I didn't bcs I wrote the wrong date in my diary & missed the deadline LOL. Truth is, I suck at these kinds of plans, and I know I suck at them, so why do I persist in the planning? I think it has to do with intention and process. Firstly, intention. It's a little trick of the mind. ...

I'm super-pleased to be a part of this excellent line-up of spoken word performers in this year's Adelaide Fringe! Fandango is a showcase of spoken word artists and their fandoms and obsessions. WHAT: FANDANGO, spoken word poetry WHERE: Laneway Garden Stage at Mixed Creative, Port Adelaide WHEN: Friday, March 1st, 8pm TIX: $10 Click Here to Book Fringe Tix   Hosted by Pam Makin and Tracey O’Callaghan Featuring Aubrey, Avalanche, Jazz, Caroline Reid, Tegan Sabine, Kerryn Tredrea, and Todd Alan Wight I'm performing a set Breaking Up With Bob Dylan: “When I listened to Dylan all through the nineties, he was already as old as my parents. I didn’t care. It was his 1960s stuff I was listening to, that became the lyrical soundtrack to my fuqd-up 20s. I lined up for concert tix, read the books, learned the lyrics & played his songs with gusto on the guitar. Thirty years later, when he played Bonython Park, I tried to break up with him. But he wasn’t having a bar of it ....

Between 2018-2021 I worked with 3 emerging film makers to create 6 video poems.  To Touch and Taste a Comet was the second of those video poems. SYNOPSIS & CONTEXT: The poem To Touch & Taste a Comet speaks to being a late bloomer & not giving up on your dreams/ambition despite living in a world that values youth, early (visible) success and a particular kind of beauty (perfect/smooth). It's a world that values & rewards a particular kind of filming making too... not too complex, clear narrative, crisp focus with a young, pretty, sexy, cool protagonist. Much of what I love about this video poem is how film maker Patrick Zoerner weaves imagery that emphasises texture, pattern & mood with images of the not-so-young/not-so-cool poet (me).  When I first re-visited the video so that I could write this blog, I have to admit I cringed a little. It's tempting to apologise for my double-chin & jowls, thick torso, my awkwardness and kind of arty-posiness. But...

The recent Australian Poetry Slam has me dipping into the vault again. This time it's not a video poem but a live performance. 'Stars' was recorded on stage at the Sydney Opera House in the APS National Final, 2018.     SYNOPSIS & CONTEXT: Reflecting on my own time in the APS scene, I'm proud of the performances and the poems, but also wondering what was it that drove me to compete in slams. I was first introduced to them in Adelaide 2016 when I was asked to be a 'sacrificial' poet at the SA State Slam Final. I loved  being the 'warm-up' poet but it was safe. It took me a couple more years to find the courage (was it courage?) to perform as a competitor. Ironically, I was working on a novel at the time and was writing in residence at Writers SA where I saw the poster advertising the national poetry slam every. single. day. Was it desire to win that made me compete, or something else?   It was 2016. I was 48 years old and peri-menopausal. It might see...

To celebrate Poetry Month in Australia, I am dipping into the archives to share a series of video poems & recorded performances of my poetry. Here's the second in the series, Murder Girl gets wired.   SYNOPSIS & CONTEXT Writing really is a long game. I wrote Murder Gets gets wired in 2007 after I'd relocated from Perth to Adelaide and was still elbow-deep in writing for theatre. I didn't know about prose poems. I thought I was just writing little sketches (were they poems? were they stories?) with a view to heightening ordinary fuckd-up urban and suburban folk to a kind-of mythological status. I didn't really know what I was doing. I'd give my characters names like Murder Girl, Violet Sweets, Beef Boy and they'd always drink too much & have low self-esteem. Auto-bio much? Now I can hear rhythms & a smattering of rhyme in this poem, which were the precursors to me writing and performing my first spoken word poem in 2016.   In 2020, when I receive...

To celebrate Poetry Month in Australia, I am sharing video poems and performances of some of my poems. I'll also include a synopsis, a bit of history about how the poem came about, and the full text of the poem. Here's the first one: LOST, a video poem. Enjoy!   In 2017, I won my first poetry slam hosted by Draw Your (S)words. As part of that prize I got to work with emerging film-maker Pamela Boutros to make short film or video poem of one of my poems. We spent a day shooting in Port Adelaide (Yertabulti) and made LOST. SYNOPSIS & CONTEXT: LOST is a fusion of poetry, visual art, humour; it's a blend of the personal, political, cultural, spiritual, & performative confessional. I'd written a few terrible poems, and thought I'd never write a good poem again. Not being able to write became my starting point: 'Most days   I am not a poet'. Instead of pushing away my thoughts, I began paying attention to them, my worries and regrets. I wrote them all down...

Each August in South Australia you will find thousands of artworks exhibited across the state as part of the South Australia Living Artists Festival (SALA).   This year I am part of a group exhibition titled 'The Pursuit of Happiness' along with artists Donna Gordge and Bernadette Woods. Why happiness? After Covid and some recent rough personal times, all three of us felt we needed to make work that lifted us, made us feel a little lighter.    We met once to discuss how we might approach exploring 'happiness' visually, and came up with lists of things that made us happy including stone fruit, lime-green linen, poached eggs and birds. We talked about the materials & methods we might use - family photographs, paint, posca pens, wallpaper & collage - and then we just got on and made stuff. We checked in with each other a few times online. Then, before we knew it, we were in the West Torrens Gallery hanging the works. We open on Thursday 3rd August, and the exhibit...

This year I was accepted into Vaulting Ambitions , a 5 month incubator program “designed to arm creatives to tackle the business side of their craft.”  It’s run by Libby Trainor-Parker and Matthew Trainor at Prompt Creative under a strategic partnership with City of Adelaide. There’s so much learning going on! I realised I was hungry for this kind of learning, from digital literacy to how to write a pitch letter, it's hands-on, with practical application, and we're getting to meet all kinds of industry professionals. One of the program's great strengths is the regular check-ins and mentoring sessions. A regular space that holds you accountable can seriously help with ticking off those list and bigger goals. I think what I'm saying is that the real gift here is community. Being in contact with other creative folk has made me feel less alone, more connected. I’m reminded that everyone experiences challenges when running a solo arts business; and that talking about i...

I recently delivered a writing workshop at The Adelaide City Library aimed at generating new material and drafting a piece of writing using an object or piece of clothing as a prompt. I really love presenting this workshop, and am always amazed at the diversity of work produced. Afterwards, someone asked me how they might develop their work and get better at writing poetry. They were new to poetry, didn't plan on going to university to study but wanted to work at writing and editing poetry. I realised that I didn't have a clear answer, so went away, thought about it and emailed them my suggestions few days later: READ POETRY - there are many websites where you can read free online. Here are a few examples, but there are plenty more: Red Room Poetry (AUS), Cordite Poetry (AUS), Overland (AUS), Poetry Foundation (USA) & Quartet (US). Buying anthologies (or borrowing from the library) is also a good way of getting an overview. Try The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry , Co...