Meika Loofs Samorzewski is a
poet who lives in Hobart, Tasmania. He is married with two children.
His parents met at the Streets
Ice Cream factory, near, they say, the Heart machine. His mother is of
Sydney Irish-English and Scots-Jewish extraction and his father was
born
in Germany during WW2 to Polish domestic servants. Meika was born in
Sydney in 1965. He spent his
childhood in the Blue Mountains near Sydney and adolescence in
Launceston, Tasmania.
After dropping out of a science
degree at the Australian National University in Canberra, Meika began
writing poetry and helped squat the Cambodian Ambassadorial Residence
while fronting the South African Picket. Poetry was published as A Sonnet of
Unsonnet, 1987, by Pete Spence's Post Neo press. He
spent most of his twenties traveling in Australia and overseas while
occasionally working for a living. This included a stay in the early
nineties on Mizen Head in West Cork, Ireland, until he began talking to
himself as none of the locals would, and so he returned to Tasmania
where much the same thing happened.
In the mid-nineties he helped
set up the Resource Work Co-operative which managed two landfill
salvage and resale Tips Shops in the Greater Hobart Area. At the end of
this involvement he invented a new form of multiple voiced poetry
composed like a musical score. (For some PDF downloads see Compositional Poetry.)
Then Meika helped Mona Loofs
Samorzewski with her Doctorate on Heathland Ecology, driving
and
cooking and getting un-bogged and stuff. Later they went through IVF
and succesfully homebirthed Ulrike, while a couple of years later
Adelynde was homebirthed without the need for test tubes or frozen
nitrogen. Mona and Meika are currently working on a series of novels
the Books of Country (Fall, Birth, Home) which are prequelled
by the seven stories and code poems in .before
Country released in February 2007.
Meika holds a Master of Applied
Science in Social Ecology from the University of Western Sydney
Hawkesbury and has worked a lot in vineyards.