David Gilbey & 'Intercultural Communication'

David Gilbey was the runner up of the Wagga heat and says he is "delighted to be able to strut [his] stuff in Sydney" for the NSW State Final in November (look back through the blog to read more about the Wagga heat and to check out some photos).
We asked David to tell us about his background and relationship with poetry and performance and here's what he had to say:

"My association with poetry and performance is pretty varied and multi-faceted. At one pole is having seen footage of Allen Ginsberg reading the seminal, scatological 'Howl' and at another is hearing T S Eliot's melancholy, enervated reading of 'The Wasteland'. I guess having been involved with Wagga Wagga Writers Writers and Booranga Writers Centre has brought me into direct contact with a wide range of poets who've performed their work memorably, from Kate Llewellyn, John Tranter and Bruce Dawe at the traditional end of a spectrum, to Amanda Stewart, Pi O and Ania Walwicz at another, edgier end.

David Finnigan, writer-in-residence at Booranga earlier this year, said 'you're performing as soon as you open your mouth at the mike', making it clear to me that 'performance' is an umbrella term for a fascinating, multifarious range of styles from Rap/Hip Hop to jazz, from 'dramatic monologue' to satirical/political manifestos, from autobiofictional to multilingual pieces. My current hero(ine) is Sawako Nakayasu, a tri-lingual poet I heard at last weekend's Japan Writers Conference in Tokyo, whose poems have different registers of English and Japanese jostling in often choreographic (think poetry as multicultural hockey), slightly surreal takes, with French and Chinese - she was amazing!"

David came runner up with his poem, 'Intercultural Communication' - have a read of it below - The host of the Wagga heat, Derek Motion said that David's poem "about the humour that can arise when attempting to communicate in a second language was funny but true".

Intercultural Communication

At the end of the year my students, graduating women,
took me to dinner at a fashionable downtown restaurant.
Would not let me pay. Plied me politely with
sashimi, nabe, crab claws, practised their English.

To reciprocate the compliment, I tried
my recently-learned idiom for ‘elegant sufficiency’
when I could manage not another mouthful.
Onaka ippai desu.  But I mixed up the vowels,
uttered an international malapropism:
Inaka oppai desu.

The room was silent after my optimistically delivered words.
What did I say? I asked one of the top girls. She grinned.
They’d all enjoyed the joke. Sensei, she said, you said,
I have the breasts of a country woman.