This WordSpace session for secondary students features 2 contemporary poets.

Emma Neale and James Brown

DATE: Thursday June 9, 2005
TIME: 11.30am – 12.30pm

In this digital chat, Emma Neale and James Brown will consider big questions such as 'What makes a poem poetry?' and, 'What can poetry offer in the age of laptops, cellphones and DVDs?'

Emma Neale and James Brown are looking forward to talking to you and your students about their writing and career and answering questions about what it means to be a poet in the twenty-first century. They will also read some of their works.

Emma Neale

Emma Neale is a poet and prose writer. Her first novel, Night Swimming in 1998, was followed by a collection of poetry, Sleeve Notes in 1999.

Emma has been praised for the integrity and tenderness of her writing. Bernadette Hall notes her work is "...all very human, with the special kind of soundness that delights again and again".

In her latest collection of poetry, How to Make a Million (2002), she explores the tricks, turns, and seductions of language itself.

More: http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/nealemma.html

James Brown

James Brown's poems have appeared in many journals since 1992. He has been awarded fellowships and bursaries and his work has been extensively anthologised.

His third collection, Favourite Monsters (2002), is a book of many voices, and of subjects ranging from politics to parenthood, art to religion. In March 2002, Brown published a booklet under the pseudonym Dr Ernest M Bluespire. Entitled Instructions for Poetry Readings, it offers Dr Bluespires' well-schooled advice on how to successfully give or attend a poetry reading. Recently, he designed a Poetry Course for the Whitireia Polytechnic Online Creative Writing Course.

James has been described as a "bricoleur"... "a home handy-man with found language; and, unlike many of them, he puts it to proper use, makes poems with neatly mitred corners and doors that are hung straight". (Anne French)

David Eggleton writes: "Brown is ever intent on disrupting the reader's expectations, on offering something unexpected. He wants to convey a sense of shock, surprise, discovery. He's out to show how ambitious language can be as a form of communication".

More: http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/brownjames.html

TO REGISTER FOR THIS VIDEO-CONFERENCE, CONTACT digitalconversations@cwa.co.nz BY WEDNESDAY 8 JUNE 2005.
Telephone: (04) 382 6506