Simon Kindt – Cool

Every now and then a book arrives full to bursting with an idea so thought provoking, or titillating, that nobody cares how well it’s written. Despite the novel’s faults, people who’ve hardly read books (let alone buy one) will see it for sale in a service station, or games emporium, or stacked in a toy store, and buy it just because they’ve heard the buzz this little slab of paper created.

Even while you shake your writerly head over them, you can’t deny the power of the ideas that gave us Fifty Shades, Ready Player One, Da Vinci Code or even those Potter books.

The rest of us can’t rely on coming up with a world defining idea.

We’re going to have to haul ourselves out of the ordinary with our word skills, and that’s where the gift that is poetry enters the mix. While prose is all about sentences and what comes next, it’s the poetic eye (or is that ear) that adds the colour and feeling to the prosaic. When your writing is too flat, too ordinary, too bolted down to reality, it’s poetry that helps writers add sensory detail, playfulness, and a rich imagery deftly drawn.

Poetry is about nuance, about showing and suggesting connections. Story should be about nuance too, but it’s so easy to forget all that when your main aim is to achieve a word count.

And, of course, poetry is about language and how it fits together to create an effect as well as create a story.

Simon Kindt – in action

On Saturday, May 19, Queensland Writers’ Centre is bringing Brisbane poet, arts worker and teacher Simon Kindt, to Bundaberg, to our rooms at 80A Woongarra Street.

The morning session, The Spaces Between: An Introduction to Poetic Writing   is an exploration of metaphor, imagery and writing for sound, designed for writers who want to test the notion that poetry can lift there words out of the doldrums.

The afternoon session focusses on bringing poetry off the page. Beyond the Page: Exploring Movement, Sound and Music  is for beginner and intermediate writers, and explores the power of sound and music intrinsic to poetry.

To book, click on the links above. Costs per session range from $30 QWC members’ concession to $55 non-member non-concession.