Gemma Rose — Guest Poet for On Dit’s Open Mic Night
As part of On Dit’s Hearsay Launch — Open Mic Night, we are so very lucky to have a guest poet, Gemma Rose (she / they), joining us for the event.
Gemma has a formidable background in poetry, performance and creative writing. Check out her bio below!
Gemma Rose has been writing since she was very young. Her mother told her she would never be bored so long as she had her imagination, so she spent her childhood making picture books held together with string, and writing song lyrics. In year three she was disqualified from a Statewide poetry competition because it was assumed that ‘no child of 7 could have written that poem’. Not to be deterred, she has been writing ever since.
She has been published on numerous occasions in the University of Adelaide Student Magazine, On Dit, including in an 8-page featured artist spread and also in The Bent Street Journal.
Gemma’s writing has developed most through writing and working as a freelance writer / performer. Highlights of this experience have included performing as a featured artist for poetry event Draw your (S)words, performing in the 2019 Fringe with Dithyrambia, in the Feast Festival with Queers Underground and collaborating with Adelaide Dance Group, Motus Collective.
In 2020 Gemma wrote, directed, produced and performed her own Fringe show entitled Slowly but Surely showcasing the power of intersecting music and poetry and creating a platform for other young artists.
Most recently, in 2021, Gemma performed as a featured poet for Arthur Art Bar’s Creative Flow, collaborating with pianist Matthew Morrison. She has facilitated poetry night ‘Tatenda’ and was thrilled to be selected as a State Finalist in South Australia’s Poetry Slam with Spoken Word SA. In 2021 she completed a Creative Writing degree with a minor in Gender Studies. Matthew Hooton was a major inspiration to her throughout her studies and she is incredibly thankful for his advice: ‘keep reading, keep writing’.
Her Arts degree particularly her studies in sociology have ensured that she is a critical thinker unafraid of nuance and never comfortable with binary thinking. For this she is grateful to Adelaide University.
At 25 she is now studying Honours in Creative Arts, majoring in Drama and Creative Writing at Flinders University, where she is grateful to be the recipient of the Performing Arts Scholarship. For her Honours she is developing a poetry performance entitled Desire in Contradictions which explores themes of Attachment Theory, Gender Theory and cancel culture, and how they impact modern relationships. She is also working on a printmaking project this semester to produce a collection of her work with South Australian artist Dianne Longley.
Inspired by poets and writers such as Ocean Vuong, Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Samuel Wagan Watson, William Wordsworth and Rumi, she is interested to explore the sound and shape of a word and always to touch and taste an image. She loves absurdist metaphors which aren’t entirely explained to the reader and writes from lived experience as someone who is queer, disabled, has experienced trauma and has not always found the world kind. Nevertheless, she holds an unwavering belief that humans and humanity are always fundamentally good and finds poetry full of microcosmic possibilities to explore the complexity of human experience.
Next, Gemma plans to study a psychology and law double degree, as her future goals are to be a narrative therapist / psychologist. She feels that poetry and writing of lived experience has the power to heal, and justice is always worth speaking on behalf of.
‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.’
- Joan Didion, The White Album
‘If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarised to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the house of man’.
- William Wordsworth.
For a taste of Gemma’s work, read below her piece titled ‘Moon Chalk’.
Moon Chalk
Bees owned the edges of me
And you snickered
As I became more orange more obsidian
More buzz than hesitation
Your feet white in moon chalk
you said I love you to the moon and back
But I think you got lost there
Hands grow outside of you
So they can write parallel stories
For you to oscillate between
Because I put the flowers
from the poisonous bush
in my backyard in vases on my bedside table
Because I realised you didn’t care
That the semaphore sea
had found its way outside of me
inside of a bunk bed bedroom
and you had chosen not to be there
Because a heart had
grown fragile enough to hold the curse of hope
I aimed for desperation
but wound up with the
feeble attempts of
Something that smelled closer to courage
Planting feathers into bullet wounds
Barbed wire onto the rich
red well- tread ground.
I am Christmas pudding
Easter egg chocolates
Glutinous, gluttonous
hot cross buns
I am the extravagant
birthday cake your
mother bakes.
I am temporary love
Yes I gave it teeth despite
knowing it would never
taste anything close to
hope
Yes there are fresh water
pearls now
Instead of people
They play paradise at the
bottom of your water glasses
I would sing the last line
when everyone else has
stopped
Because I too needed to
feel something
For eyes that flinch at the
response to terror
The sardine tinned tears
Skin folds earthquake
ricochet at a child’s
screams
As marbles fall upon the
dirty porcelain floor of a
Suburban supermarket
Sheer amazement
A sneeze in a Japanese
subway station
But the parallel where the
worm when seeing the
bird accepts its fate
To me that’s strange
dinner party company.
I know you may never
understand
that terrifies me. When a
brain is capable of
turning into normalcy.
Hackles form like acute
triangles and cracker
crowns upon my
shoulder blades
Lactic acid forms in 206
powdery white bones
There are chorus girls
singing out of key waiting
for me
Mascara face and feeble I
plead
What’s my line again
I never learnt to
memorise
She told me I couldn’t read
To see Gemma perform live, then come along this Monday (22nd of Aug 2022) to Scott Theatre, from 6pm. Registration is free!
And don’t forget, YOU too can take the mic! Anyone from first-timers to pros are welcome, and highly encouraged to share their work.
