The Basement Tapes: We Ride Like Birds

Monday, November 19, 2007

We Ride Like Birds

We ride like birds
our heads are feathers
our face is blood
our thoughts are weather

we lay in sky
we talk like songs
our plans in darkness
can float like swans

our friends are branches
our loves are leaves
we pray for moonlight
the wind it breathes

we’re black in snowfall
we’re death and laughter
we scavenge silver
have seen here after

our dreams are mothers
our tracks are smoke
we whisper children
we smell their hope

the love of fathers
the hunting crows
the silent heavens
the rain that blows

we know this somewhere
we know this flight
we sleep in maps
and eat the night

we ride like birds
we’re death and laughter
our heads are feathers
our tracks are smoke

- Mark Mordue

* Above image 'Crow on a branch' by Maruyama Kyo (1733-1795)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: Hey Mark - wow it's been a long time. almost 4 years now since you started teaching a much younger and much much more naive me writing.

I found your blog because I was in Camilla Nelson's office today and she had it up on the screen, so I decided to look it up when I get home.

I have my own (it will hopefully be more regularly starting from today now that my Honours Thesis has been submitted) at www.samuelwebster.com/blog if you're interested.

We'll have to catch up now that the BA Communications is all said and done for me.

Looking forward to following your work avidly,
Sam; November 21, 2007 at 4:52 PM
Matthew da Silva said...: "we smell their hope"

A fab line - xtremely evocative. Just sneaks in there unawares and BANG.

Didn't like the rhyming scheme (lns 2 & 4, with the exception of the final stanza) at first but it grows on you.; November 22, 2007 at 12:28 PM

Taking my pulse...

Book - "The Unknown University" by Roberto Bolano and "The Ballad of Dexi Lee" by Lisa Nicol and Lucy Culliton
Art - "Renaissance to Goya - prints and drawings from Spain" at the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney
Music - "Third/Sister Lovers" by Big Star and "Another Self Portrait (1969-71)" by Bob Dylan
Television - "Adventure Time (with Finn and Jake)"
DVD - The Beatles documentary "Let It Be"
Film - Gee it's been a while since I went to the movies!
Miscellaneous - the sound of words rather than just their meaning and how that music lets you through rabbit holes into the past; hospitals; park rotundas; Skip James' blues; ghosts from my 20s; watching my children play.

Winner 2014 Peter Blazey Fellowship

I am very happy to announce I am winner of 2014 Peter Blazey Fellowship, which recognizes an outstanding manuscript in the fields of biography, autobiography or life writing. The purpose of the Fellowship is to assist in the further development. It is facilitated by the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne. I tied for the $15,000 prize with Michael Farrell, so we share the prize money and other resources on offer. Here’s a quote from the judges' report in response to a draft chapter I submitted on Nick Cave's youth in Wangaratta:

“Mordue’s work carefully probes the life and times of this seminal Australian figure, giving a vivid account of his early life as a child growing up in Wangaratta in the 1960s. A wide range of local sources add depth and perspective – and new information – about Cave that readers will very much enjoy. This is a lively, evocative biography that expertly situates this influential musician in a framework of country living, family networks and local institutions.”

PASCALL PRIZE 2010

On 22nd May 2010 it was announced at the Sydney Writers' Festival that Mark Mordue was the winner of the Pascall Prize: Australian Critic of the Year. It is the country's most prestigious award for critical writing and reflections on the arts, and carries with it a $15,000 prize. In coming to their decision the judging panel released a statement:

"Mark Mordue is the judges’ unanimous choice for winner of the 2010 Pascall Prize. In a very strong field of contenders, Mordue’s writing stood out both for its style and for its passionate commitment to its subject matter. His beautifully written and moving review of the film The Road (entitled ‘Towards Love’) exemplified the characteristics of his writing that most impressed us. Mordue brings to his arts journalism his own personal experiences and insights as well as an impressively broad-ranging knowledge of literature, film and music. His sensitive engagement with his subject matter, his lively mind and his delicious turns of phrase are a gift and a delight for the reader.

"Mordue’s reviews, interviews and essays never come across as token efforts or intellectual exercises but always as opportunities the writer has taken to explore deeper issues of the mind’s intellectual and emotional life. His own personal experiences and reflections illuminate his subject matter, drawing the reader into an expansive conversation that is intellectually and emotionally engaging and thought-provoking. As one judge put it, his writing has ‘a certain intellectual freedom, an unembarrassed insistence on feeling in the life of the mind’ that is ‘utterly engaging’. Another judge commented on the ‘impression of a keen mind, refusing to look away from what’s striking, confronting’. Mordue’s writing is writing that enriches the heart as well as the mind."

'HIGHLY COMMENDED' FOR THE PETER BLAZEY FELLOWSHIP 2011

Mark Mordue was runner-up for The Peter Blazey Fellowship 2011, an award for innovative life writing, biography and autobiography. All submissions to the Fellowship required an outline of your vision and a 5,000 word preview of your manuscript. Judges comments:

"Mark Mordue is one of the most exciting commentators of contemporary Australian culture. His highly commended manuscript offers an immediacy and vibrancy which draws musician and writer Nick Cave into the spotlight. Mordue’s writing is poetic and taut, and this biography will engage the reader not only with Cave’s life but also with the surrounding social and cultural context of recent decades."

Pinups

Roberto Bolano, Chilean born refugee of the Pinochet regime, Mexico inspired joker and dark-eyed dreamer, novelist and short story writer extraordinaire. Wild and original (and that don't happen nearly as often as it is claimed), with a pattern grabbing recklessness like no other. Check out Last Evenings on Earth first and keep diving in. I've never read anyone who can map your head so well, those perceptual shifts and intuitions and obsessions that are so much a part of living with other people and yourself. He's also pretty funny when he wants to be. If you don't mind sloppy generalisations, I'd describe him as a South American Jack Kerouac, a free genius at the hub of a whole cultural shift in the language and what it can do, and perhaps more importantly, what it's feeling. Though as soon as I write that I think, No, that's not right, he's more like a politicised, ghetto-dwelling F. Scott Fitzgerald yearning for his own green light, or a Jorge Luis Borges caught in a hippie Charles Bukowki's life, or.... what is he? Someone looking for a home? Some peace of mind? The guy is a planet all to himself, a singer for lost souls.