![]() ![]() ''I'm lost in the mist,'' he recited, ''and it's worse than being kissed!'' But the last word on kissing is the romantic saga of Joe and Debbie, who meet at the age of nine. One request was for a poem he wrote for five-year-olds. Yesterday he kept up a rapid-fire delivery of poems. He saw the show with an audience, and everyone laughed when the poet was shot. In the past 20 years he's performed in front of a quarter of a million people in Australia, Canada and Croatia and on a television show where some drug addicts who didn't like his poetry shot him. ![]() His poems don't rhyme, because he feels poetry should be about the way we talk. He writes verse novels and has just finished his first young adult prose novel, Slice. Now he makes a living from publishing and performing poetry. ''I thought, 'This is fantastic! I'm going to be a poet.' '' ![]() Herrick, a poet for the past 33 years, said his first poem was titled Love is Like a Gobstopper. ![]() Or not when it's about the sort of subjects that concern teens, such as football, nose hair and kissing. Judging from the reception from his teenage audience at the Melbourne Writers Festival yesterday, poetry isn't a bad thing at all. Plenty of things, Herrick thought: the Taliban, school seven days a week, war, cabbage, your hair falling out and growing back in your ears, Collingwood winning the premiership. STEVEN Herrick was waiting one day to give a school talk about his poems when he overheard one boy say to another: ''Poetry! What could be worse than poetry?'' ![]()
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