BLOWHOLE by Meg McKinlay

On the ocean road, we are tourists
of calamity; our father parks us close
to crumbling edges
and alarm. The sea puckers slick
rock-cheeks of disapproval, exhales
one body, consumes
the rest.


Meg says, "This poem actually began as a kind of exercise in 'writing short'. My natural tendency has always been to write fairly long poems, giving myself license to range freely across an idea until I feel I've exhausted its associative or narrative possibilities. I was astonished when this rather glaring feature of my work was pointed out to me, somehow having failed to notice it myself. At the time, I was putting together my first collection, Cleanskin, so I decided to try a few poems in which I consciously wrote against that impulse, staying tightly focused on a single image or idea.

'Blowhole' has its origins in childhood travels with my family up and down the Great Ocean Road in Victoria. We always seemed to be stopping to stare at a place where something awful had happened - a shipwreck site or the place where some once-great monument had crashed into the ocean. And of course, there were all those signs warning us not to get too close to the edges, that the cliffs could disintegrate beneath us at any moment, and so on. I was remembering all this, and thinking too, about the blowholes we had seen on those trips. I was fascinated by them, finding the violent but predictable movement of the water really hypnotic and investing it, I think, with the danger and threat associated with those other sites. So those connections started forming and I began playing around with the images, thinking there might be something there I could work with. For me, there's usually a moment when things start to coalesce, when I start to feel I'm on my way to a poem, rather than just pottering about with words; for this poem, it was when the phrase 'tourists of calamity' came to me. The rest followed fairly quickly after that and I managed to retain a reasonably tight focus and rein in my impulse to go exploring up and down the coastline and all the way through my childhood. There are a couple of other poems in Cleanskin which mine this sort of territory and these are actually bits and pieces which splintered off this poem to become new poems in their own right. It was really interesting for me to negotiate that process, to push those ideas out of 'Blowhole' and let them develop elsewhere into something different.

So this is a simple little poem, which is what I was after, but there's a neatness about it, a self-containment combined with a kind of larger, suggestive undercurrent, that I find pleasing. And I guess that's a little like blowholes themselves, so I like the way that works, too."

From Meg's website:

Cleanskin was published by The Westerly Centre as part of ArtsWA's "A Few New Words" initiative for emerging West Australian poets. It has gone out to Westerly subscribers with that year's issue, and can be purchased separately from The Westerly Centre, University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA. It consists of 24 pages of poems, mostly new work, and a CD of me [Meg] reading and discussing some of the poems, which was a lot of fun to do.

Meg McKinlay
Children's Writer & Poet
http://www.megmckinlay.com