ANZAC Day

Today is ANZAC day, April 25th. This day is for Australians and New Zealanders to remember those who have died in war. ANZAC day is acknowledging that sometimes war occurs in order to protect something worth dying for. This day is not about glorifying war.

I feel that this day is not just about those who did not return from war, for those who did return were forever changed. When I was a child it was my Great-Grandfather Da who took me fishing and gave me one of my first jobs sweeping floors. Da was in the British Navy and survived World War II. Yet even towards the end of his life the impact of war still lingered. Often I remember him and think about the impact war had on him and many of our family. In trying to understand my thoughts drifted across the fields of the many battles that have occurred in the last 100 years.
From this the poem Red Tears came into being.

On this day I remember Da and those like him who survived, but have had to learn to live with all that they faced in war.





Da is the one of
the far right of
this picture.

Anzac Day by Allison Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Australia License.
Based on a work at allisonbrown.blogspot.com.

Finding poetry in Toastmasters

I became involved in Toastmasters over a year ago for a variety of reasons. If you have no idea what Toastmasters is then go and read about Toastmasters NZ. It has only been in recent weeks that I admitted to someone aloud that one of my main motivations for going to Toastmasters is to build towards going to a poetry reading so I can read one of my poems out. I feel that I still have a way to go before I am ready to this meet goal even though I have already read out some of my poems to other members of my club. Also, by posting this goal here I am documenting what I am working towards as a poet.

I do not fear of public speaking and speaking my mind in front of a group of people has never been a major problem. Yet I have found that I have gained so much from being a toastmaster, which was not what I expected.

• Running a meeting;
  
• Providing constructive feedback that allows someone else to know where they are doing well and where they still can grow;
  
• Being asked something on the spot and having the skills to respond in a structured and confident way
• Sounding more confident when I speak because I'm now aware what can make you sound less assured. Such as saying "Ums and Ahs" rather than pausing and taking a deep breath before continuing.
  

Last night at Toastmasters (13 April 2010) I was the Toastmaster for the evening and the theme I selected for the session was "Thinking outside the book". I selected this theme because I wanted to share with the rest of my club what working as a Librarian is like when your job is far from traditional. When I created the program adding my poem The Idealised Librarian seemed to make perfect sense, because after 10 years this poem still helps explain why I am a Librarian. What was fascinating about adding this poem was the reaction by someone else there - "Did you write this?" and the expression on their face :-). Being able to blend my poetry into the different roles in Toastmasters makes what I do there unique. The opportunity to express myself through my poetry in such a warm and friendly environment has helped me feel that my main goal is achievable.



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Feedburner and twitter working together

At the beginning of 2009 I added FeedBurner to my blogs. Since it was taken over by Google it has simply become another way to monitor access to my blogs via the RSS feeds in the same way I use Google Analytics.

Last night when I was checking FeedBurner I noticed a post titled: "Socializing your feed with Twitter" - http://adsenseforfeeds.blogspot.com/2009/12/socializing-your-feed-with-twitter.html. If you use FeedBurner and twitter this is worth checking out.

I noticed this post because I was looking for an easy way to have blog posts from the Hocken Collections blog tweeted via the Otago Library twitter account - @OtagoLibrary. I will post about how it goes :-)

Update 1: It worked for this post :-D -- Cool thing is that I can add hashtags to all these tweets or even use the tags I add to a post...

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Goals for now

I started both of my blogs so I would have a way to focus my writing. The big goal was to be published, which goes towards the overall goal of being recognised as a poet. I feel I am starting to see all of this a bit more realistically. Not matter what happens I will always write poetry. It is how I express myself. Anyone who knows me will tell you expressing myself seems to come easily to me - well to a certain degree yes it does. Yet there are some things where there is not quick explanation, but somehow even in my darker moments the words I do find seem to give the appearance of poetry.

The point of this post - just in case it is not very clear yet. I now accept that yes it is nice to be published, but this should never be the reason one writes. I love the fact that 2 of my poems Winters Sonnet 2.0 and Red Tears were published in the first issue of the Teesside Artists' Journal. Yet writing each of those poems had nothing to do with whether I would be able to find a place to have them published.

Also, whether anyone cares to read this post is up to them. This post and this moment is about accepting why I write and why I bother to share what I write. There will also be moments that my life doesn't allow for much time to write poetry, but this does not mean this is far from my thoughts.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.