the deletions

2012-01-26T08:40:00.001+11:00

thankyou for your patience. the deletions will resume blogging shortly ...

2012-01-22T14:49:00.001+11:00

In Chinatown this morning the racket of acrobatic Dragon Dancers and drums was rowdy and rousing. The stalls covered in red and gold decorations were buzzing - it seems many facsimiles of many things can bring luck - including a pineapple! Red lanterns were everywhere. Long paper Dragons with slightly fearsome faces 'snaked' around the arcades. A calligrapher painted a small new year banner for us to pin on our front door. She said it was for health and wealth in the coming year. So, here it is - may the Year of the Dragon be an auspicious one for my friends.

2012-01-14T15:07:00.003+11:00

I was invited by Jessica Lowenthal to revisit the original Jacket magazine over a few months by writing occasional commentaries for Jacket2. I have begun my stint. To read the first one,'Two poets who write about art', follow this link.

2012-01-10T21:27:00.001+11:00

Step Into The Past

Last week I drove down to Melbourne with my partner and her daughter. We stayed one night in a town called Holbrook, on the Hume Highway, halfway between Sydney and Melbourne.We stayed at the motel that advertised biggish screen tv.

There is a second world war submarine in Holbrook. That seemed really strange but I didn't find out why it was there. There is no ocean, nor river, nearby. Just a stranded submarine and its museum - closed in the evening.
I souvenired a coaster from the Returned Servicemans League where we had dinner.

Walking back to the motel into a daylight-saving sunset we passed a house flying a revolutionary flag.

Holbrook seemed like a peaceful, historic old wool town, cut through by the highway and a ceaseless traffic of trucks. The locals are anticipating an imminent highway bypass with enthusiasm.

Three Reviews

2011-12-24T09:45:00.011+11:00

My recent and last reviews for 2011 - three Australian poetry titles -

Sly Mongoose by Ken Bolton, on the web in Galatea Resurrects here.

Perrier Fever by Pete Spence, also in Galatea Resurrects here.

New Poets 1 - Emma Rooksby, Scott-Patrick Mitchell, J.P. Quinton - edited by Tracy Ryan on the web in Heat Poetry Online here.

2011-12-15T08:59:00.005+11:00

2011-12-02T09:49:00.010+11:00

Three Australian online poetry features published at once -

The Australian independent and small press network, Small Press Underground Networking Community SPUNC has published its Summer Poetry Feature in four parts. Work from twenty-six poets' books published by independent small presses represented by SPUNC, edited by Kent MacCarter.

Issue 36 of Cordite Poetry Review guest edited by Jill Jones. Visual poetry, poetry and audio files (audio & spoken word editor Emilie Zoey Baker).
This issue of Cordite makes a bow to music and the ways musicians in various modes and guises have used electric technologies to generate sound.

The first instalment of a presentation of fifty-one contemporary Australian poets in Jacket2, edited by myself.

Please visit Jacket2's gallery to view the accompanying art.

Paul Sloan, gouache on paper, 2011

Forty-one further poets and many more artworks to come in the J2 Australian poetry feature.
Stay posted.

2011-11-28T16:54:00.011+11:00

Launched at lunch on Sunday 27th November, More is Plenty is a limited edition monograph on multimedia artist Kurt Brereton's work since the mid-1970's, edited by Adelaide art critic and poet Ken Bolton. Contributions include an introductory essay by the editor and essays by George Alexander, Anne Howell, Arnie Goldman, Diana Wood-Conroy, Edward Dore and other art writers.

The book is beautifully produced (in square format) with many full colour images of the work and photographs of performances, installations, works in progress and the artist's family.

It publishes the brilliant Pathetic Manifesto compiled between the years 1997 to 2000, and culminating in 2006 in an artist's talk at Project Contemporary Artspace in Wollongong - Patheticism - A Report from the Illawarra Frontline. Consisting of 46 short statements this discursive talk/manifesto outlines the concerns of contemporary artists who celebrate failure, immorality, style-free art and who have no interest in the romantic abject or sublime.

Kurt Brereton's notes on Patheticism -
• attempts to synthesize disparate accounts of pathos and the pathetic.
• indicates a desire to move beyond the bounds of irony via an unapologetic occupancy of a position which is from the outset acknowledged to be untenable in any heroic sense yet very human.
•ethos of empathy, the democracy of failure, and any other excesses of hyper-individual introspection (from any era).

Some of the reproductions of the paintings -

Dreamhome, No 6, 2007

Tagging the Escarpment, 2007

For more on this diverse work and info on how to buy More Is Plenty visit Kurt's web site here

2011-11-21T14:47:00.006+11:00

from Big Bridge #14:
Before drifting away from his involvement in poetry in the earliest years of this century, Vincent Farnsworth was involved in poetry milieus in the San Francisco Bay Area, New Orleans and Prague, featured in international festivals in Prague and Bratislava, managing a journal JEJUNE: a.e.i.y., author of Immortal Whistleblower (Lavender Ink, New Orleans) and published in many little magazines and online poetry sites. A graduate in Creative Arts from San Jose State University, Farnsworth studied under the late Naomi Clark as well as Lucille Clifton and was influenced by Tom Clark and Peter Dale Scott. He was featured in the Micro-Festival Poetry Series in Prague, Czech Republic in April 2009, marking a return to his work in the concept of "deep poetics", trying to fuse the contemporarily relevant and political with perennial truths. Farnsworth also performs as "Reverend Feedback" in the music group Blaq Mummy and solo as Pazvuky in Prague, Czech Republic, where he lives and works as a teacher. He has been active in anti-war and human rights activities in Central and Eastern Europe.

Further information and publisher, Litteraria Pragensia.

There is an essay by Louis Armand, the resistance of medium [On the Poetry of Vincent Farnsworth], in VLAK 2.

2011-11-14T18:16:00.004+11:00

With not a word out of place, Laurie Duggan's minimalism is exceptionally distinctive - conceptual, clear, sometimes droll, the mood sustained throughout. This chapbook is an artwork. These twenty nine 'Allotments' compile traces of walks and bus and train trips around Canterbury, to London, to poetry readings, to the back garden of his 'improbable' house and to various pubs. Thinking about music, friends, politics (briefly), poets like Susan Howe, Charles Olson, Paul Blackburn and others as he walks, travels or sits with an ale or lager.

Published by Fewer & Further Press, in Massachusetts, it's an attractive chapbook with a drawing by Basil King on the covers. There are only 200 of them so if you'd like a copy you should visit Fewer & Further pretty much straightaway.

Visit Laurie's blog Graveney Marsh.

2011-11-09T16:27:00.008+11:00

Astrid Lorange is fossicking in Sydney for Jacket2.
Click here to see her findings, so far.

2011-10-31T15:00:00.007+11:00

Steve Evans' Third Factory's annual 'collectively-drawn map of the field' - lists & commentaries charting invited poets'current interests in poetry and related books is now complete.
Visit Attention Span 2011
My contribution can be found on the list and here.

Alexandria footpath

2011-10-19T15:31:00.004+11:00

Wow Wow Wow Receiver

2011-10-09T22:48:00.011+11:00

This week, from 11th October, I'm participating in a project called 'Poetic Intervention' at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany, without travelling to Frankfurt. Four poets from different countries or locations will be writing live online at certain times each day. We'll also contribute images. The texts and images will then be compiled and published as Wow Wow Wow Receiver on Friday. It's an experiment in digital writing and publishing. Should be fun.
The project was conceived by Duncan White, from the University of the Arts, London. You can read more about it here.

2011-10-05T09:01:00.020+11:00

Last night in Glebe, Sydney - a wonderful reading, hosted by Toby Fitch at Sappho's Books. The poets were Tom Lee, Astrid Lorange, Ella O'Keefe, Tim Wright & Nick Whittock, Oscar Schwartz, Michael Farrell and Duncan Hose. Here are some photos of the readers and a few of the audience.

                           Ella O'Keefe

                           Mim Chat, Astrid Lorange & Johanna Featherstone

                           Adam Lippman,Toby Fitch & Tom Lee

                           Oscar Schwartz

                           Astrid Lorange & Johanna Featherstone

                           Chris Edwards & Amanda Stewart

                     Michael Farrell, Tim Wright, Oscar Schwartz, Nick Whittock & Ella O'Keefe

                                Duncan Hose by James Abbott McNeill Whistler

                                Duncan Hose by Henri Fantin-Latour

                           Chair by Giorgio Morandi

2011-09-25T18:42:00.007+10:00

A truly impressive and stimulating poem that I’ve read recently is ‘Evental’ by Ali Alizadeh.

Ali Alizadeh says in the frontispiece that this poem is an attempt at versifying the tenets of the work of Alain Badiou and draws on a number of his key texts - Being and Event, Conditions, Ethics, and Metapolitics.

Using his customary couplets, Ali condenses to an intelligent précis a history of revolutionary France, canvasses troubled war times in Iran, tries mathematical formula that might contain the vocation of poetry and so on. The long poem ‘Evental’ is followed by a personal coda - another poem, ‘Evening Star’.

Published as a Vagabond Press Rare Object chapbook, this is another of their extensive list of affordable poetry publications. Visit Vagabond Press here. (The site is currently being rebuilt but you can email direct to salesATvagabondpressDOTnet.)

2011-09-16T15:15:00.004+10:00

Justine Poon from Something Else on Eastside Radio (89.7FM) sent me some of the questions that there wasn't time to talk about in the conversation in August. She has posted it as a follow up on the blog here.

2011-09-07T12:33:00.011+10:00

In 1984, Colin McCahon went missing for 24 hours in Sydney. Found the next morning, kilometres from where he started, he had no memory of who he was or where he had been. In Dark Night: Walking with McCahon, Martin Edmond traces McCahon’s possible footsteps, past pubs and monuments, art galleries and churches, barracks and parks: to accompany him some way into the darkness of his end. Edmond’s record of the journey is a brilliant exploration of a city and its denizens; of the nature of art and the foundations of faith; and of the shadowy crossroads where they intersect.

Read about Colin McCahon here.

And for Martin Edmond, click here.

2011-08-19T17:42:00.008+10:00

I’ve added a link to Blogs & beauty spots on the deletions sidebar to the Sydney Eastside Radio (89.7 FM) program ‘Something Else’ podcasts.

I was invited to their studio in Paddington Town Hall last night to read poems and converse with Justine Poon. Here’s the link. The podcast should be on the web soon. You can listen to earlier poetry readings and talks by visiting the podcasts link above. There's also a blog.

If you go to Blogs & beauty spots on the sidebar you’ll also find a link to Cath Kenneally’s program from Adelaide, Writers Radio, which has extensive podcasts of poets and novelists readings and interviews. Just scroll down to Television & Radio.

2011-08-05T08:54:00.018+10:00

An incredibly various, eclectic group of Australian poets who might often differ in practice and thinking are here translated into Mandarin by Song Jijiang, Debby Sou Vai Keng and Iris Fan Xing. Edited into an anthology by Australian expatriate poet, editor, and academic in Macao, Kit Kelen, who was ably assisted by Song Zijiang. Cover drawing by Carol Archer. Published by ASM Poetry, Macao.

Adam Aitken : John Bennett : Pam Brown : Anna Couani Rae Desmond Jones : Carol Jenkins : Kit Kelen : S. K. Kelen : Andy Kissane : Martin Langford : Myron Lysenko : Chris Mansell : John Mateer : Ron Pretty : Clive Ralfe : Philip Salom : Beth Spencer : James Stuart : John Tranter : Chris Wallace-Crabbe : Les Wicks : Song Zijiang

A pocket size (10 x 13cm) book of poems by Rae Jones, published by Cerberus and ASM Poetry, Macao

Rae Desmond Jones was born in the mining town of Broken Hill, in western New South Wales. He migrated to Sydney at the age of 17, but still maintains contact with his origins. He published number of books of poetry through the 1970s, and several novels in the 1990s. After becoming Mayor of the inner Sydney Council of Ashfield (& retiring in 2007), he published ‘Blow Out’, a further book of poems in 2009. He has a family of two sons and a daughter. Barring a resurgence of irritation with the holders of municipal power, he wants to devote the rest of his life to literature, so long as literature is as keen on him as he is on her.

Kit Kelen’s new and selected collection ‘China Years’ also published by ASM Poetry, Macao

Christopher (Kit) Kelen

2011-08-01T16:36:00.008+10:00

Corey Wakeling has written a summary of the recent Poetry & the Contemporary Symposium in Melbourne. It's published in Cordite online magazine here.

and here's Corey (in the cap) at the Bella Union bar during the conference -

2011-07-26T08:44:00.009+10:00

Book Launch - Sydney - Sunday Arvo 14th August

click to enlarge

Laurie Duggan has some notes on Perrier Fever here

2011-07-19T16:28:00.007+10:00

photo by Elsa Dorfman

The blog 'The Allen Ginsberg Project' has a video interview with Allen Ginsberg made during his trip to Australia in 1972. Jeune Pritchard made the interview, I think for the ABC program, 'GTK.
Visit the blog and watch the video here.

VLAK 2

2011-07-17T14:06:00.005+10:00

Litteraria Pragensia's second issue of VLAK magazine is an exciting issue. It includes Ali Alizadeh's essay on contemporary 'experimental' poetry in Australia - 'Avant-Garde in the Antipodes'.

The editors for this issue are Louis Armand, Ali Alizadeh, Edmund Berrigan, Stephan Delbos, Jane Lewty, David Vichnar and Carol Watts.

For information and to buy a copy click here.

click on the itinery to enlarge

2011-07-13T11:05:00.011+10:00

Recently, many Australian poets were interviewed by Michael Brennan for Poetry International Web

If you’re wondering what Vladimir Mayakovsky’s book cover and Allen Ginsberg’s signature have to do with Australian poetry,
then click here to read Michael’s interview with me. You’ll find
all the other interviews on the sidebar of the page.

Links to mentioned Mayakovsky poems -
Brooklyn Bridge here
A Cloud In Trousers (part one) here

2011-06-28T16:21:00.013+10:00

Poetry and the Contemporary Symposium
7-9 July 2011
Venue: Victorian Trades Hall, Melbourne

Convened by Ann Vickery & Michael Farrell

For further information, the program and details about a reading at the famous poetry bookshop ‘Collected Works’ click here

Over two nights, join us and some of Australia's best poets for papers, panels, roundtables, readings and book launches.

THURSDAY 7 JULY - 5.15 for a 5.30 start

Pam Brown - Complaints Department: what I've heard - a few gripes about the incorporation of Australian poetry plus some whining about poetic content, or, what's wrong.

Pam Brown is an associate editor of Jacket and, currently, Jacket2 and a past poetry editor of Overland, she is the author of numerous collections including Authentic Local, True Thoughts, Dear Deliria (NSW Premier’s Award for Poetry winner 2004), Text Thing, and 50-50.

Vivienne Plumb - Fact or Fiction: Meditations on Mary Finger.
A performance lecture that comments on the symbiotic relationship between the critic/curator and the writer/artist/creator

Vivienne Plumb writes poetry, drama, and fiction. She was born in Sydney and has lived in New Zealand for some time, and presently lives between Sydney and Auckland.

Grand Parade Book Launches:
* Perrier Fever by Pete Spence, and
* 6am in the Universe by Benjamin Frater
with Alan Wearne, Kris Hemensley, and John Hawke.

There has to be limits to suffering the sheer volume of poetasters and their doggerel (no matter how 'free', no matter how 'well made') that continue to swamp Australian verse. For although all poetries have and have had them, toleration is finite. Come along then to the launch of these two magnificent books.

Five Islands Press Book Launch:
* Vishvarūpa by Michelle Cahill
Launch by Jill Jones
Of ‘Vishvarūpa’ Chris Wallace-Crabbe writes: “Can there be any Australian poet who has entered with such lyrical depth into the intermingling voices of Australia and India? Our literature is immediately changed by ‘Vishvarūpa’?'

SATURDAY 9 JULY - 6.15pm for 6.30pm start
Book Launches:

* One Under Bacchus by Duncan Hose
The second collection of 2010 Newcastle Poetry Prize winner, Duncan Hose. With its title a cunning anagram of the author’s own name, One Under Bacchus will whet the appetite of poetic truffle hunters. A supersaturated cosmic wealth of cornucopiac phrase, it taunts much & invariably delivers a banquet of soft-skun, delicately chewed, and poutingly cured textual delights.

* Career by Liam Ferney
The second collection by Liam Ferney, a past editor of Cordite Poetry Review and associate editor of papertiger. A ‘Daewon Song meets Jackie Chan’ spectacular, Ferney frees cliché from betwixt press releases and promos, snapping apart short-order culture & shuffling sharp critique with an effervescent dodge of the syntactic curb.

Steamer and Rabbit Launch Special
with MCs: Sam Langer and Jessica Wilkinson
and readings by Emily Bitto, Stuart Cooke, Will Druce, Marty Hiatt, Fiona Hile, Sam Langer, Tom Lee, Jal Nicholl, Sharne Vate, Corey Wakeling, Nick Whittock, Jessica Wilkinson, Caroline Williamson, and Tim Wright.

Rabbit - a journal for poetry is a new print-based quarterly journal for poetry, poetry reviews, and interviews with poets, with an emphasis on new and emerging rabbits.

Steamer is the first Australian poetry magazine to employ André Breton's principles (as defined in the first Surrealist Manifesto) of Automatic Editing, in anything like a rigorously systematic manner. Since November 2010 the magazine has been committed to searching out and presenting the most exciting poetry and anti-poetry of its times and places in an affordable, visually attractive, and portable format.

For the Bella Union site click here.

more night art

2011-06-11T09:19:00.004+10:00

John Gillies: Parramatta Road Project (no1)

a site specific video installation

ARTICULATE Project Space
247 Parramatta Road
Leichhardt, Sydney
(opposite Cass Bros)

Tues - Mon 17.00 - 09.00
21 - 27th June

view when dark from footpath or vehicle

opening

Tues 21st June (winter solstice)
17.00 - 20.00

You can find out more about John Gillies here & here

VIVID

2011-06-10T10:03:00.015+10:00

          Sydney Opera House before Lights On

Vivid a festival of light, music and ideas is about to wind up in Sydney this weekend. In 2009 the first Vivid festival was curated by Brian Eno and last year by Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed. Each of the festivals project images and light onto the 'sails' of Jorn Utzon's Sydney Opera House. I missed seeing both preceding light and image shows due to geography (living out of Sydney) and indisposition.

I've been curious to see it and now that I'm living in Sydney again I've visited this event. This year it's curated by Sydney-based Steve Pavlovic a.k.a 'Pav' from Modular Recordings. He invited a young French trio, SUPERBIEN to do the projections and they are super.

There are professional photos on the web site (click on 'Vivid' above) but here are a few of my snapshots (obviously taken with a pocket camera, no flash, no tripod) of the lights.

          Sydney Opera House just before…

Some city buildings have projections - including Customs House and the Marriot Hotel. The AMP building is blue and the Circular Quay Railway Station façade turns red and blue, framing the bay for the Opera House projections.
Around the Quay there are light sculptures by local artists. I love the stalactites, by Katharine Fife and Andrew Daly on the ceiling of the walkway under the Circular Quay railway tracks.

          Stalactites

When you see a city lit this way you look at other lights and neon signs more keenly. The final snap is the speed limit sign on the railway.

2011-05-22T09:47:00.014+10:00

Puncher & Wattmann
invite you to a booklaunch -

Ken Bolton's Sly Mongoose
(launch speechette by Pam Brown)

at
The Fiend in Hand
58 Cowper Street, Glebe
Sunday 5th June 3-5pm

Sly Mongoose deals with the vagaries of the Adelaide
art-scene, the career of Cy Twombly, the Sydney of the 1920s, 40s
and today. A quartet of poems treats a single locale and time-frame
from the point of view of an ‘ordinary punter’, a beaver, a worried
mother and a cyclist; and there is a sequence drawn from a diary of
travel through an imaginary Africa in the 1970s, each entry partly
structured around a buried pun or near-pun; a further pair of poems
deals with after-echoes, among his friends, of the passing of John
Forbes.

Ken Bolton is self-described as a gay, light-hearted bastard, who cuts
a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary landscape,
his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him,
bow-tie askew, lipstick-smeared, grinning cheerfully at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar D-type, El Cid.

Ken Bolton has published a good deal of art criticism, some of it
collected in Art Writing (Contemporary Art Centre of South
Australia). He edited Homage To John Forbes (Brandl & Schlesinger)
and wrote the monograph Michelle Nikou. He edited the magazines 'Magic Sam' and 'Otis Rush' and has published many books of poetry. Wakefield Press published The Circus in 2010 and Vagabond Press A Whistled Bit Of Bop. His earlier titles from Wakefield Press are At The Flash And At The Baci and Untimely Meditations.

2011-05-16T10:31:00.012+10:00

The Coalcliff Days exhibition closes next Sunday so there is still some time to visit. Here are a few images from the exhibition and you can find out more about it here.

     Coalcliff living room replicated

     Movie in the living room

     Jane Zemiro watching films at the exhibition.

     Laurie Duggan making a crucial choice at the jukebox at Clifton pub.
     Excerpt from a film by Pam Brown,1980

     Space Creatures, Drawing by Micky Allan, 1981

     Laurie Duggan, Drawing by Ken Bolton, 1981

2011-05-05T18:03:00.018+10:00

Vale Kerry Leves
1948 - 2011

Kerry Leves (foreground), Merv Lilley, Ian Syson (in background) at Bobbin Up launch,
Sydney 1999

2011-05-05T13:53:00.001+10:00

The indefatigable Vagabond Press
is launching two new chapbooks by Brisbane poets.

Seastrands by Felicity Plunkett
and
Career by Liam Ferney

on Sunday 8th May at 3.30pm
at Gleebooks Upstairs
49 Glebe Point Road,
Glebe, Sydney

Click here for details of the launch
and here for more about Vagabond Press.

2011-05-01T16:37:00.002+10:00

Happy fifth birthday to Mark Young's Otoliths magazine. Read the issue here

2011-04-26T15:52:00.006+10:00

Karl #2 - 1999. Photo by Rebecca Swan

Issue 3 of Polari Journal, edited by D. J. Baker & Sharon Dunne, has just been published online. Click here to read the articles, poems, features and more of Rebecca Swan's photographs.

Coming up in May

2011-04-24T16:53:00.012+10:00

I'll be travelling to Melbourne in May for this not-to-be-missed concert, produced by Elizabeth Drake -

A performance of

Canto Ostinato by Simeon ten Holt

The performers on four concert grand pianos will be

Lisa Moore
Caroline Almonte
Emily Green-Armytage
Elizabeth Drake
(click above on the performers' names for biographical info)

Canto Ostinato was composed by Simeon ten Holt in Amsterdam in 1979.

Simeon ten Holt - “The American influence is undeniable, but the form of minimal music that I created in my work is inconceivable without the arch-typical European tradition.  …The feeling of hardly having anything to say was never as strong as with Canto Ostinato. At first, I watched the piece unfold with the utmost suspicion. This was not done, really: tonality, this open, this plain, this explicit.”
Canto Ostinato is known as an early minimalist work based on the continual repetition of different cells or bars within the piece. No two performances are ever alike, the players dictating moment to moment how these cells –the musical DNA – will be played.
No categorisation can ever account for the overwhelming emotional power of the work.
It has been performed at the Perth International Arts Festival, in the Adelaide Railway Station for the Australian Performing Arts Market, and at the Newcastle Conservatorium of Music. This is the first time it has been performed in Melbourne.
We invite you to participate in this one opportunity to experience the power and duration of Canto Ostinato.

Review by Neville Cohn, The West Australian, Perth International Arts Festival:
“I cannot recall so harmonious and golden-toned a Festival curtain-raiser as Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt's Canto Ostinato..
How beautifully this extended essay sounded with its mesmerically repetitive, golden-toned extrapolations..

A major factor that made this so compelling was the knowledge that what we heard was unique, an extemporised performance which would have differed from earlier accounts.”

The performance will take place on

Friday 13th May at 8 pm

at the

IWAKI Auditorium
ABC Southbank Centre
120 Southbank Boulevard
Southbank
Melbourne

The duration of the work is ninety minutes, uninterrupted.
As the work is being recorded no latecomers can be admitted.

Adult $45.00
Concession $30.00
Student $25

Tickets available from M-Tix box office at The C.U.B Malthouse
03 9685 5111 m-tix.com.au General Admission
A booking fee of $1.50 - $3 per ticket will apply depending on booking method.

2011-04-08T08:43:00.008+10:00

Opening next week - Coalcliff Days
Click here for details.

A happy avant-garde at Coalcliff. Xmas 1980. Back row L to R: Pam Brown, Erika Callan, Sal Brereton, Micky Allan. Front Row L to R: Kurt Brereton in goose carcass hat, Ken Bolton, Laurie Duggan. Photo- Micky Allan

Xmas Corpses. Silkscreen - Ken Bolton, 1980

And I'll be reading from recent and not-so-recent work in Newtown, Sydney on April 29th - for details click here

2011-03-23T18:13:00.006+11:00

U.K-based Australian poet, Laurie Duggan has edited the latest issue of foam:e
Click here for his editorial and here to read the magazine.

In early 2010, Ottawa, Canada-based poet and publisher, Rob McLennan included Pam Brown in his second series of 12 or 20 questions. He published the piece recently. Click here to read the answers.

2011-03-13T11:23:00.008+11:00

Thirty years ago, from 1979 until 1982, writer Sal Brereton and her then-partner poet Ken Bolton lived in a weatherboard house on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea at Coalcliff, north of Wollongong on the Illawarra coast of New South Wales. Many poets, artists, printers and filmmakers visited their house during that time. It was a busy hub producing magazines, books and screen printed posters. In the years following Sal and Ken's time there, the poet Alan Jefferies lived in the house. 'Coalcliff Days' is an exhibition documenting those days and you are all invited to come to the Friday night opening, the Saturday afternoon reading or visit the exhibition and floor talk during its season.

The exhibition will be opened by Nicholas Pounder, sometime poet, one-time editor of 'Polar Bear' magazine, limited-edition publisher, bibliophile and antiquarian bookseller.

Some exhibition participants will read their work at the opening.

Poets, artists, writers and filmmakers represented in the exhibition include Micky Allan, Ken Bolton, Kurt Brereton, Sal Brereton, Barbara Brooks, Pam Brown, Laurie Duggan, Alan Jefferies, Kate Richards and others…

opening - everyone welcome
6 for 6.30pm
Friday 15th April 2011
Wollongong City Gallery
cnr Kembla & Burelli Sts
Wollongong

South Coast Writers Centre is hosting an associated poetry reading at the gallery on Saturday April 16th at 1pm

For further information visit Coalcliff Days and Wollongong City Gallery.

The exhibition runs from 15th April until May 22nd

2011-02-07T17:28:00.011+11:00

Here are a few more 'views' of the seriously cramped and unimaginative buildings in downtown Sydney, from the 19th floor above Bathurst Street. Wish I could see Renzo Piano's beautiful 'Aurora Place' from here - now that's a graceful building.

2011-02-03T09:21:00.002+11:00

Living in the city with views of some of Sydney's worst architecture, looking for a place to land in the nearby suburbs. That's a brave little palm in a pot.

2011-01-10T11:06:00.013+11:00

If you happen to be in Sydney next month, you're most welcome to join us for the launch of two new poetry collections from Vagabond Press:

'Letters from Ausland' by Louis Armand
introduced by Pam Brown

'People of Earth' by Chris Edwards
introduced by John Tranter

Bring a friend!

Sunday 6th February at 3.30pm

Gleebooks
49 Glebe Point Rd
Sydney, Australia

For more info, visit please visit the publisher's website
or connect with them on basefook.
Click here for Louis Armand's site
and here for more about Chris Edwards.

loose ends

2011-01-01T17:29:00.014+11:00

In August 2010, Bob Arnold’s Vermont-based Longhouse Press published a pamphlet of six of my poems.

As Jacket magazine is now transforming into Jacket2 in Philadelphia, editor John Tranter has published a selection of accolades for the magazine in the final Sydney-based issue here. He has extracted a few paragraphs from a ‘Rolling Column’ I wrote about Jacket for the Australian Book Review a decade or so ago. You can read the complete piece here.

As I say in the column, at that time there were several co-productions planned for Jacket. In April 2001, Jacket entered into co-production with New American Writing. It was published in issue 13.

In March 2002, an overland magazine feature that I edited appeared in Jacket issue 16. Here is my introduction to the feature.
This was the first time that a co-feature appeared both online and in print (as a supplement in overland issue 166 ) and the first and last time that contributors to Jacket magazine were paid for their work, from overland magazine funds.

I have enjoyed the past six busy years working with John on Jacket magazine and, in the future, I will be continuing to contribute material to Jacket2.

Way back in time, in 1982, I was invited to give a talk on self-publishing and small presses at the inaugural Women & Arts Festival at the Seymour Centre in Sydney. On reflection, apart from computing, the use of xerox rather than offset printing, and electronic publishing, I have to ask plus ça change?

You can read the handwritten notes for the talk here.

At the Women & Arts Festival, a publisher, Pat Woolley, and I co-ordinated a hands-on workshop (in a borrowed printery at Silverwater, Sydney) teaching printing and publishing skills to women writers. Over two days we designed, printed, collated and published a large book of writing, photography and drawing. During this workshop the idea of starting a women's press was discussed, resulting, a little later, in the formation of Redress Press which was run collectively, had a huge membership and published many titles in the early 1980s.

At the offset press - publishing workshop 1982 (PB on right)

2010-12-15T08:52:00.006+11:00

farewell reflections and shadows of blackheath
view a selection here

poetry franchise

2010-12-08T09:58:00.009+11:00

How can we join this branch? Perhaps Australian Poetry Ltd can provide contacts with the two poets 'running' it or with the estate of Frank O'Hara (who is currently pissing himself with laughter in his grave).

Update - John Tranter has sent a note to the deletions and an evidential photo:

Actually, it's Frank O'Hara's ghost who runs the Ken Bolton Franchise, in New York:

(Quote from a review of John Tranter's poetry in the Sydney Morning Herald, December 2010)

2010-12-02T11:25:00.020+11:00

In May 2010 I was invited to write a review of a collection of Vicki Viidikas’s writing for Australian Book Review. It has yet to be published and, as far as I know, may never appear in the magazine.
So here it is -

Vicki Viidikas New and Rediscovered, edited by Barry Scott (Transit Lounge 2010)

In 1967 the British pop group The Beatles dressed up in embroidered mirror-cloth and tinted shades and set off on a spiritual quest for peace and love to an ashram in India. The US and Australia (whose military force consisted mainly of young conscripts) were engaged in an unpopular war against communism in Vietnam. In Sydney, a poem, ‘At East Balmain’, by former high school dropout Vicki Viidikas, marked her first publication in a moderate magazine, Poetry Australia.

‘At East Balmain’, set around Mort Bay, is about the timelessness of life on a working harbour. It introduced an exceptionally competent nineteen year old poet with an aptitude for sharp observation and description –
    This day will be submerged in a thousand other days,
    yet I know distinctly I felt the glance of a figure
    in a singlet, rolling cigarettes as his barge went
    upstream.

The 1970s in Sydney was a time of great social change driven by youth culture. It was an era, evolving from the protest movement against conscription and the Vietnam war, of long-haired pacifist hippies and the widespread use of marijuana and other ‘mind-expanding’ drugs that engendered a profusion of rebellious and high-spirited creativity. Counter cultural happenings like Jumping Sunday, a weekly celebratory afternoon in Centennial Park, Martin Sharp’s Yellow House, and PACT theatre flourished. There was the advent of underground printing presses, the UBU group’s experimental films, psychedelic music and light shows, of sexual freedom, and women’s liberation. Vicki Viidikas was publishing and reading her poems and becoming a well-known figure in the lively, male-dominated literary scene around Balmain. Just a few suburbs away in Glebe, in December 1969 Helen Jarvis had founded Sydney Women’s Liberation House, a hub for discussion and women’s activism that would thrive into the new decade.

Viidikas might have been a candidate for women’s lib, given that she wrote experientially of a darker side of female life –
    I should have been selfish
    not a woman, but learnt
    to violate myself too, so I could fit the boat,
    twentieth century and rock …
   ’White Poem’

Her poetry is almost always tinged with pain and her prose pieces are often about the extreme edge of relationship. ‘Punishments and cures’, a dark poem about being raped by an ex-prisoner with venereal disease, seeks, in a tentative, exploratory way, moral elucidation –
    Perhaps it’s true what he said,
    that all women are ugly …

    One feels that
    when you become a four-letter word,
    and afterwards, there’s some private festering
    not always cured by a doctor …

In her life, Viidikas took risks. Her friend the poet Kerry Leves says, in this book’s introduction, ‘… she embraced experience, even flung herself into or out of experiences, …’. She entered chance encounters or ‘pickups’, as she called them, and wrote about them. In ‘The Snowman in the Dutch Masterpiece’ an impoverished young woman writer drifts into a brief, whisky and cocaine drenched liaison with a cashed-up drug dealer who drives a flashy Mercedes Benz. Their few hedonistic days together are described with some detachment. Viidikas’s writing was a precursor to the coming eruption of confessional women writers but hers was an instinctive response to the condition of womanhood, not informed by a political consciousness. Many of Viidikas’s characters were ‘fucked up’. And many of them were in her second (and I’d say ‘best’) book, Wrappings (1974), a third of which is included here.

In 1975, in an interview with Hazel de Berg,Viidikas said about her writing :
What I was writing was really confessional, it was just – I’d go out to a party or something and if anything upset me or I was depressed, I’d go home and scribble things down on bits of paper, really just what my inner feelings were at the time.
Viidikas’s work is all about subjective experience. She records persistent unhappiness and trouble. The intensity of sadness builds incrementally in this collection, so that it’s a huge relief, about a third of the way in, to read the exuberantly sensuous ‘Mad Hats of Desire’ –
    OK romantic
    I wanted to wade your body …

    … I wanted to rip suck bite kick
    growl laugh nuzzle your self
    madness
    black mad hats
    put on put off

    Now I don’t know what to ask
    can’t promise
    log cabins apple pie
    raccoon boots for winter

And later, there is a surprisingly loving poem about her Estonian father.

Maybe for Viidikas it was more about ‘writing’ than about ‘what she was writing’. She worked from a compulsion to write things down. In 1977, in Australian Literary Studies she wrote ‘… I first started writing my problems on scraps of paper when I was 15 and living away from home, and later found these ‘problems’ were actually poems.’ Description was easy for her but she was rarely analytical. She delivered her stories and poems without investigating the process. She doesn’t seem to have laboured for long over technique or form. She wasn’t interested in showing off. These are straight up confessional or descriptive pieces. Vicki Viidikas was interested in telling.

Her poetry is more playful than the prose. Sometimes her deft, free verse reads like automatic writing. She said that she wrote poetry ‘off the top of my head, straight off, in one go. … My writing is done at any time of the day or night, it’s quite a spontaneous thing… .’ Emotions were what she was trying to express. Perhaps Viidikas found solace in the ritual of writing.

Viidikas’s work often tells us that she preferred India to Australia. (‘It was Calcutta not Canberra, that honeycomb of barren souls.’ ‘The Silk Trousers’). She lived in India for more than a decade. An early story is about an Indiaphile living amongst shrines and incense in a poky Darlinghurst flat. Her last book India Ink (1984), was immersed in Indian culture and Hinduism.

Having not visited India, nor studied its religions, I found the comprehensive glossary in India Ink invaluable. Ten of those poems are republished here without aid for readers who know little about India. However, as the writing is mostly descriptive, like all good poems about place, these do make a vivid, yet never too-sensational impression.
    You waited, black
    stone goddess
    in a scarlet sarong,
    Your shoulders packed
    with yellow powder,
    feet dusted with red,
    one hand in a blessing,
    palm upright, take it easy
   ‘Durga Devi’

Australian poetry presses supported Vicki Viidikas, publishing four of her books in a decade. Her last title appeared in 1984. She lived a further fourteen years without a new collection and with her writing appearing only scantily in a period when women’s writing was booming. Sadly, as Viidikas’s heroin addiction increasingly formed the basis of her modus operandi, she became marginalized and publishing and performing opportunities vanished.

In 1975 she had written ‘A View of the Map’; a speculative, time-shifting prose piece. It ended – ‘My Iceland is at the centre of this map. Knowing you have visited it and gone. That I am the only permanent resident.’ In 1988 she added a new final line, ‘There is no compass.’

Melbourne publisher Barry Scott has made a respectable selection to introduce Viidikas to contemporary readers. There is though an odd inclusion of eight childish drawings that add nothing to the project (signed, copyrighted and dated by Viidikas, possibly indicating that she took them seriously). The cover portraits show Viidikas with long blonde hair parted in the middle, kohl-lined eyes, appliqued peasant blouse, a cigarette – like an icon of the 1970s.

Vicki Viidikas New and Rediscovered offers a kind of restitution. There are around twenty uncollected pieces, an extract from an unpublished manuscript, Kali and the Dung-Beetle, and a few later poems, including ‘Lust’, written only two months before her death at fifty, in 1998.

Read an interview with the publisher here
Visit Transit Lounge press here

2010-12-01T15:18:00.014+11:00

ALL TOGETHER NOW
A Digital Bridge for Auckland and Sydney, 2010

The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) is pleased to
announce the completion of its trans Tasman digital bridge project.

We invited contributions to build a digital bridge between Auckland
and Sydney as poetry symposiums took place in each city March and
September 2010. In June the first part of the bridge was launched:
50-plus creative contributions, a collaborative digital poem, audio
talks and photos from the Auckland symposium.
Now the Sydney sidelaunches with 60 creative contributions, a complementary digital collaboration, more audio talks, video readings, photos, and texts of papers and commentary. We present here the multiple traces (text, audio, visuals, poetry, prose) of the year’s trans Tasman exchanges, noting how often the roles of host and guest have flip-flopped, and hoping that they will go on doing so as we move between each other’s reading and writing spaces.

Click here

Pam Brown, Martin Edmond, Brian Flaherty and Michele Leggott
Editors, ALL TOGETHER NOW

The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) at the University of
Auckland is an electronic gateway to poetry resources in New Zealand
and the Pacific region. It is coordinated by Michele Leggott and Brian
Flaherty with the support of representatives from the University of
Auckland Library, Auckland University Press and the Faculty of Arts.
Information: m.leggott@auckland.ac.nz

2010-11-14T14:43:00.045+11:00

In August this year, I gave a poetry reading at a seminar with
post-graduate students and some interested poets at Monash University in Melbourne. In the discussion following the reading John Hawke asked me what I might suggest as a topic or an area that’s been overlooked or neglected, to someone wanting to research Australian poetry. I went into a kind of awkward mental paroxysm because I don’t really trust the kinds of historicisations that have been produced here. With scant exception they’re usually traditional masculinist studies and the few anecdotal biographical books produced by poets are also usually kind of glossed-up male memoir. So I said a few things like that and then made a regrettably unthinking (stupid even?) statement about not being interested in memoir or biography much anyway. Hmmm … not quite true. Although I have been reluctant to historicise my own life-in-poetry on paper, so far.

Recently though, I read a memoir, well, actually the author doesn't like or use the term 'memoir', I read a non-fiction novel,
INFERNO (A POET’S NOVEL), by one of my favourite US contemporaries, the inimical Eileen Myles.

Eileen has written many books of poetry and has also written tons of
art criticism (see Ken Bolton on her recent collection The
Importance of Being Iceland here).
Eileen’s prose is almost always a memoir of some kind - the stories in
Chelsea Girls, a short memoir called On My Way, and a
‘non-fiction novel’ Cool For You. Inferno is about a
working class girl from Boston who has written some high school
poetry, moving to New York City and beginning a life-in-poetry through the social upheavals, drinking, drugs (speed) and sexual experimentation of the 1970s. She is figuring out her own sexuality and her place in the poetry scene and the world at large. She’s interested in things other than a simple history of herself. She connects in her encounters with a whole lot of different people, including, of course, older poets living in NYC. Eileen ran as a candidate for the US Presidency in the 1980s. She was for a time the co-ordinator or director (?) of St Mark’s Poetry Project. In Inferno she goes on a reading tour to Berlin with some punky companions (Kathy Acker et al), unexpectedly spends a year or so writing in a big country house owned by NYC art scene patrons, talks about her dad the alcoholic mailman and her mother the loving yet staunch Catholic. It is written in her usual frank, funny, sad, droll, minimal style - it’s as if Eileen is talking to you, (and to herself and to her dog, Rosie) as you read. She makes some terrific descriptions of her lovers’ labia and clitorises (once she becomes a lesbian). It’s a clever book. Here are some excerpts from Inferno :

I was preparing for my new life. La Vita Nuova, La Vita Nuova I
reported cryptically to my friends at Grassroots. I knew the ball had
fallen so I went to Oscar Wilde and bought some books. I was reading about Renée Vivien who had died for love. She sort of looked like Rose. And she wrote about someone - that I think she was jealous of - maybe Natalie Barney- that she was nothing but a cunt with a pen. This was quoted as an example of Renée Vivien’s deterioration, her slow sink into mental illness but I didn’t see what was wrong with this at all. Is it so bad to talk about a woman and her writing in the same sentence, especially to insult her? Are we supposed to be fake?

Eileen then, photo by Robert Mapplethorpe

And, these are outside a context here, but great anyway -

Poets hated anyone outwardly courting success - particularly
anyone seen courting it in our world - as if there actually were “a
poetry field.”

… No one asked me to have a life like this, to be a poet. It was my
idea. I mean and I would definitely say poetry is a very roundabout
way to unite both work and time. A poet is a person with a very short
attention span who actually decides to study it. To look. To draw that
short thing out… … Like Jimmy Schuyler once said, the writing the poem part is easy, it’s the rest of the time that’s the problem.

Eileen now, photo by Leopoldine Core

When I think about it, I do like 'memoir'. Some kinds of memoir. Take some recent, not so conventional books - Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Tony Towle's MEMOIR, John Kinsella's Genre(a wildly abstracted memoir), Bob Dylan’s mid-60s ‘novel’ Tarantula and Chronicles:Volume One, Prosper Mérimée’s short recollection of Stendhal in Simon Leys’ With Stendhal - I loved all these books. And looking at the bookshelves in-need-of-culling in this room where I stare into space, scribble notes for poems, and have corresponded with zillions of Jacket magazine contributors (some of whom have written northern hemisphere memoirs) and from where I sometimes push tiny ideas out into the ether of the internet, there are biographies, autobiographies and memoir sitting close by - Samuel Beckett, Juan Goytisolo, Mina Loy, Georges Perec, Chester & Wystan, Bernard Smith, Michel Foucault, Harpo Marx, Marjorie Perloff, Arthur Rimbaud, Jim Sharman, Mary Wollstonecraft, Edward Said, Jean Genet, Gwendolyn MacEwen, George Sand, Dorothy Hewett, Frank O'Hara, Wayne King, Tennessee Williams, Eric Michaels, Luis Bunuel, Slim Dusty (Walk A Country Mile) and more …

Maybe I could start my anecdotal narrative on the Enoggera Army Base, Brisbane in 1963, or in Crown Street, Surry Hills, Sydney in my flat above the original Maltese pastizzi booth in 1970, or.. or..

some sonnets

2010-10-29T16:49:00.023+11:00

Sonnets are all the go, as they have been since the Italian sonnet (sonetto - ‘little song’) was introduced to English poets in the early sixteenth century and was to become gradually ‘anglicised' and altered and eventually known as ‘Shakespearean’. As poetry-reading visitors to the deletions already know (and so may wish now to skip straight to the poems and books I'm going to mention), sonnets used to be a neat lyrical form that used various rhyme schemes. (Italian sonnets had some repeated rhymes and used iambic pentameter). The final couplet usually functioned as an epigram, summarising the moral drift or giving some kind of twist to the poem. Rhyming has been ditched by many contemporary sonneteers, as has the epigram, and formal traditional rhythm. Now, with the sonnet form in mind, you can write a poem that turns out to be fourteen lines or two stanzas of seven lines and you can fracture and indent eccentrically and it can be a ‘sonnet’.

Two sonnets by Canadian poet Anne Carson in a recent edition of the London Review of Books stretches the form beyond the form. They seem clever but perhaps they’re over-clever, intense examples of dry dedicated experimentation? Then I guess if mainstream international journals like the LRB publish sonnets like this, then poetry readers might have caught up with poetry writers …



       Sonnet of Addressing Gertrude Stein



         Here is a pronoun to

              address

             Gertrude

               Stein

               with

                 :

                 a

               dog



             you’ve

              never

               had

              before

               has

              died.



                (click on 'Drop't Sonnet' to enlarge for clearer reading)                                                                           

                    cover art by Tallulah Knox



Some Sonnets was edited and published by Tim Wright in Melbourne 

in Winter 2010 in an offset(?) or photocopied, hand-collated, 

limited edition of 100.



It’s an unpaginated assortment of thirty six sonnets by a variety of

innovative Australian poets. The poems are ‘ordered by shuffling’ and

there are no author designations accompanying them. If you like, you

can figure out who wrote what by referring back to the contents page

and that’s random too, not following the order the poems appear in the

book. It’s interesting to read poetry without knowing or thinking

about the ‘poet’. Whether the sonnets work or not relies on your

particular tastes or poetic interests.



Not many of these  twenty-first century sonneteers attempt high form -

embellished, lyrical sonnets - in earnest. Mostly, they fulfil Louis

Zukofsky’s desire, eighty years ago now, for innovation. In 1930 he

wrote “It is time someone resurrected the sonnet from a form that has

become an exercise.” Though some, like Claire Gaskin’s ‘looking into

the eye of my addiction’, Jill Jones’ ‘What Is Due’ and Ryan Scott’s

“The Suddenness of Spring” do look like traditional sonnets and are

lyrical. Cory Wakeling’s ‘Barrett’s Song For Hattie’s Detour’ also

looks conventional but it’s his sonnet’s curious ‘Australianness’ that

gives it a comic spark - 



I look left, you look right, I look Nullarbor

you rush Bendigo. Decide: …



Duncan Hose contributes two complex (yet clearly written), kind of

metaphysical love sonnets - one in German,’O ein Liebes-Sonett’, that

introduces the wonderful word ‘Tweetyvögel’, and the other in English,

‘o a love sonnet’, that translates the earlier German poem where we

found the ‘tweety-birds’.



Some Sonnets also includes sonnets from Kate Fagan, Marc Jones,

Patrick Jones, Sam Langer, Caroline Williamson, Nick Whittock, Joel

Scott, the wildly varying innovator Peter Minter, Michael Farrell’s

ineluctably cryptic minimalisms include a nine line sonnet, Derek

Motion, the collection's editor Tim Wright, Jal Nicholl, Ella O’Keefe,

Tom Lee, the linguistically playful Chris Edwards presenting his own

renditions of Rilke, Brett Dionysius, Jessica L. Wilkinson, Peter

O’Mara (more conceptual minimalism), Stu Hatton, Astrid Lorange,

Stuart Cooke and Ted Nielsen.



Ted Nielsen has been writing a sonnet every week for a few years. He

publishes them on his blog magic dog vs tokyo as ‘Friday sonnet’. 

Ted’s poems carry a tone and lightness of touch engaging with the everyday 

that remind me of John Forbes and the 1960s sonnets of Ted Berrigan. 



friday sonnet (#124: tedpapa pig)



old man getting older & weary today it’s

already tomorrow you’re still tired the

bags under your eyes have bags under

them & she says that’s a pig because you

like pigs & he says dad, you’re an idiot &

this is all in japanese & one dad is dead &

another dead drunk & if you were any

more sentimental it’d be an epidemic like

travel sickness so we joke around in the

bath singing some kind of monkey song &

stay up for hours past bedtime it’s all

good then for the next few days there are

pigs drawn on everything, that is, pigs,

hearts, tulips, occasionally a spiral pattern



Richard Lopez reviews 'Some Sonnets' in Galatea Resurrects here





Pete Spence's Sonnets, co-published by Karl-Friedrich Hacker's

Footura Black Edition, Germany & New South Press, Kyneton, Australia

in a limited edition of 50, in 2009, is a hand-made book of ten

sonnets, with an afterword, also a sonnet.



These light-hearted sonnets are like a mix of Shakespearean sonnets,

French modernist/cubist poetry and 60s New York School dailiness. Pete

Spence has Cendrarsian 'squares of green light' being thrown about,

Frank O’Hara's room for roaming variously, the Forbesian ‘stunned

mullet’ and other modern classic influences.



Sonnet 8



in the millenium of the pushbike

everyone must know of the worsening

weather? my shadow stretched forever

no Badoit? no money! it’s a day

of Perrier fever! this is all we need

another set of sonnets? deciduous

as a plum    you eat it & it leaves

is there more roughage in eating books?

the wind jogs through the rainforest

squares of green light are thrown about

is there more air in daylight? I’m

a couple of steps from everywhere

somewhere in the shadows evening waits

is yesterday the subject of these poems?



Sonnet 9



walking Planck's constant in a red shift!

great day! upwind the day winds down

squares of light are thrown about

should i feel ok now that yesterday

is the subject of these poems? better

to be quick about it like a shadow

taking shade from today's sun! when

will i have room where there's room

where i can roam variously & hang

my tantrums & other guests?

the pushbike's 15 minutes in the frame!

its the end of the terror of Perrier fever!

a mullet sidles through the air

& i'm stunned by its flight!

hearts, tulips, occasionally a spiral pattern



                    (click to enlarge)



Jeff Hilson edited The Reality Street Book of Sonnets in 2008. This anthology 

contains my own failure at writing sonnets which would only ever get 

themselves to twelve rather than fourteen lines, called Eyes on potatoes.







This year Jeff Hilson has published an attractively designed square

book In the Assarts that, on first look, seems to be a book of

sonnets, but doesn’t always adhere to form. Yet, there are

sixty-eight, fourteen line poems. Apparently Jeff was given the notion

of sampling Sir Thomas Wyatt (who introduced the sonnet form to

England) from the Reality Street publisher Ken Edwards.

These sonnets are often very funny, riffing from the probably

to-be-expected Ted Berrigan, and from Petrarch (‘No one listens to

Petrarch’), Sonny & Cher, Donovan, Michael Jackson, the Bee Gees,

Tubular Bells (Mike Oldfield!),Thomas Wyatt (of course), Veronica

Forrest-Thomson, Oliver Cromwell and others. It’s great fun and

technically smart to boot. It looks great too - the square format is

pleasing, the cover drawing, clever and the typeface apt. In the

Assarts publisher, Veer Books, definitely looks like an

adventurous UK independent small press. 



                    (click to enlarge)

2010-10-03T15:45:00.014+11:00

Jim Goar very generously sent me a copy of Seoul Bus Poems and, staying indoors on this misty, rainy Sunday afternoon I found a lot of pleasure in reading Jim’s poetry. Here are a couple of poems from the book and you can read some others in the current Jacket.

        There is a list of names
        outside my window.

        In Changsa my name.
        By noon the wall was
        white again.

        Nouns hang
        from globes outside

        my window. a list
        of names outside
        my window.

        my name. the wall was
        white again.

        Nouns hang
        from globes outside
        my window.

        the wall. a name
        was white again.

       sheets all filled with lemon
       snow and everything is children
       from the plant we tend music
       of statues drip home open window
       sleds of glass bird whose name
       we do not know melt back and
       forth in the tub a ducky quackady
       quack on the bed you need another
       shower of snow blue flower parted
       this music is closest to German

2010-09-19T11:31:00.009+10:00

          CAPTCHA

          gannet been
          been sarcomas
          top surmount
          matching count
          U.N. tree
          state neutered

Steve Evans' annual constellation of what poets are reading, Attention Span, is in process. Read my list here

2010-09-13T09:18:00.010+10:00

New issue of Ekleksographia (Wave Two)
guest edited by Pam Brown.
Audio files, photos, poetry and prose.

Contributors :
Chris Andrews - Anny Ballardini - Bird Lane Nettle- Ken Bolton
Pam Brown - Kurt Brereton - Kieran Carroll - Justin Clemens
CAConrad - Peter Davis - Roger Dean & Hazel Smith
Laurie Duggan - Martin Edmond - Kate Fagan - Michael Farrell
Jill Jones - Kit Kelen - Rachel Loden - Conor Madigan
Peter Minter - Jane Joritz–Nakagawa - David Prater
Maurice Scully - Amanda Stewart - Tim Wright

Thanks to AhaDada's Ekleksographia general editor Jesse Glass
and Matthew Teutsch and Daniel Sendecki, techno editors.

Visit the issue here

2010-09-06T17:03:00.015+10:00

IN THE BALANCE: ART FOR A CHANGING WORLD

Raquel Ormella, Poster Reduction, 2005 (electronic whiteboard, temporary & permanent texta markers, thermal paper print outs, photocopied enlargements
dimensions variable)

In the Balance: Art for a Changing World features works by Australian and international contemporary artists that respond to ecological concerns. The exhibition reflects the diversity of environmental debates and concerns within and beyond Australia today, and features works that address a spectrum of issues including sustainability and recycling.

The exhibition encompasses photography, film, installation and architecture, drawing on the MCA Collection and loans from across the country. It presents a number of site-specific and commissioned works, performances, and projects taking place both within and outside the museum. In addition, the exhibition explores the role of community engagement and participation.

Visit these blogs about their work by artists in the exhibition:
Environmental Audit by Lucas Ihlein
Food Forest by the Artist as Family
weedy connection by Diego Bonetto
Urban Wildlife Safari by Joni Taylor

Participating artists:
Badger Bates, Lauren Berkowitz, Diego Bonetto, Andrea Bowers, Dadang Christanto, Bob Connolly, Lorraine Connelly-Northey, Nici Cumpston, Peter Dombrovskis, Bonita Ely, Emily Floyd, Euraba Artists and Papermakers, Amy Franceschini and Futurefarmers, Jeanne Van Heeswijjk and Paul Sixta, Lucas Ihlein, Lyndal Jones, Yvonne Koolmatrie, Janet Laurence, Makeshift (Tessa Zettel and Karl Khoe), James Newitt, Mavis Ngallametta, Susan Norrie and David Mackenzie, Raquel Ormella, Cecilia Peter, Frank Petero, Catherine Rogers, David Stephenson, Joni Taylor, The Artist as Family (Patrick Jones, Meg Ulman and Zephyr Ogden Jones), theweathergroup_U, Angela Torenbeek and Olegas Truchanas.

At the MCA,
Museum of Contemporary Art,
Circular Quay
Sydney

21st August - 31st October 2010

for further info, locations, talks, visiting times, click here

Lauren Berkowitz, ‘Manna’, 2009

2010-07-19T15:58:00.026+10:00

Home & Away
A Trans-Tasman Poetry Symposium

In Sydney at
University of Technology & University of Sydney
1-3 September 2010

Participating poets and thinkers:
Miro Bilbrough, Ken Bolton, Pam Brown, Michelle Cahill, Janet Charman, Jen Crawford, Martin Edmond, Michael Farrell, Brian Flaherty, Martin Harrison, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, David Howard, Cath Kenneally, Jill Jones, Michele Leggott, Kate Lilley, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Peter Minter, John Newton, Vivienne Plumb, Chris Price, Nigel Roberts, Jack Ross, Lisa Samuels, Amanda Stewart, Helen Sword, John Tranter, Ann Vickery, Adrian Wiggins,
Mark Young

For further information, locations and the program
click here

Everyone Welcome Free Entry

2010-07-15T17:11:00.004+10:00

Opportunities

Sitting duck
          in Toodyay

add to cart

Lost toy panda
      by the roadside 

add to cart

Digital creature,
       crowd-sourced

add to cart

Hearts and minds
            in Oruzgan
                             
add to cart

You’re the same age
          as the ugg boot

add to cart

What will tomorrow 
                be like

add to cart
               
If that isn’t DADA
           it’ll have to do

no further credit

2010-06-29T10:26:00.012+10:00

The Underground Radish

Lucas Ihlein has guest-edited an edition of Artlink Magazine.
You can read more about it here

The issue features great essays and artwork, interviews and comics, by and about Ian Milliss, Chris Fleming, Vanessa Berry, Leigh Rigozzi, Pat Grant, Rick Smith, Alison Bechdel, Margie Borschke, Ianto Ware, Geert Lovinck, Shane McGrath, Breakdown Press + Ian McIntyre, Glenn Barkley, Jessie Lymn, Danni Zuvela, Teri Hoskin, Ali Russell, Tony Birch, Caren Florance, Peter Drew, Melinda Rackham, Kirsten Bradley, Eve Vincent, and Donald Brook.

Launch Celebration :
3pm Sunday 4 July 2010
at Bill and George
10-16 William Street
Redfern, Sydney.

Free, all welcome! Magazine available at a discount price!

Bill and George will also be launching their LIBRARIUM project-
“a slow-growth free-range artisan’s library of small press publications"

PLUS! Hot off the Big Fag Press
a limited edition print of cover to this edition of Artlink.
Get ‘em while they’re hot!

2010-06-02T08:36:00.016+10:00

The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc)
has completed phase one of its multimedia anthology
All Together Now: A Digital Bridge for Auckland and Sydney.
Thanks to all contributors
We hope everyone will enjoy exploring the upload

*poets from NZ, Australia & the digital neighbourhood
*collaborative digital poem & video Archipelago
*audio talks from nzepc’s HOME & AWAY 2010:
A Trans Tasman Poetry Symposium, University of Auckland
30-31 March 2010
*photo gallery from March symposium

http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/features/home&away/bridge.asp

editors:
Pam Brown, Martin Edmond, Brian Flaherty and Michele Leggott

*All Together Now: A Digital Bridge for Auckland and Sydney

Kia Kotahi Rā: He Arawhata Ipurangi mō Tamaki Makau Rau me Poihākena

March-September 2010*

2010-05-28T11:50:00.001+10:00

I don’t usually post announcements of reviews of my own work on ‘the deletions’ but, excuse my indulgence, unusually, here’s Drinking Water in a Suburb Called Zetland: Notes on Memory and the City in Some Poems by Pam Brown by Tim Wright. Read it here in Mascara Literary Review.

the deletions goes to cockatoo island

2010-05-22T15:54:00.058+10:00

                  Richard Grayson’s 2004 piece Messiah is somewhere inside that cliff -                    here’s the entrance
                 It's The Midnight Amblers singing a country song about Jesus on dvd.
                      Yellow singalong text obscured.
                      Are they mocking The Messiah? Yes they are.
                    ha! that was funny     sort of
                    through to more art ...

                    Stay tuned - deflated inflatable still to come -

                 it was going to be ‘a must see’-
                 Brook Andrew’s Jumping Castle War Memorial

                 after only one week (& 2 months still to go) - collapso.
                      no bouncies - under a forlorn tarpaulin

              Dale Frank’s resin paintings look comfy in this messy old turbine hall
                 (note to designers - replicate for Darling Point living room walls)

                  lights powered by…

              Cai Guo-Qiang hangs up and illuminates real cars, but it doesn’t matter

              There was much more to experience (and wonder why) on Cockatoo Island,
                  a small selection of almost perfunctory 'Asian' pieces in the main foyer
                  at the Art Gallery of NSW,
                  but, so far, the best of the Sydney Biennale art is at the MCA
                  with Art Space and the Botanic Gardens to come ...

2010-05-20T16:11:00.005+10:00

If you're going to Darwin for the festival in August, this show will be worth visiting -

2010-05-16T08:06:00.000+10:00

2010-04-10T14:43:00.016+10:00

soi 3 modern poets,
an imprint of Papertiger Media, presents -

AUTHENTIC LOCAL
a new collection of poetry by Pam Brown

Pam Brown’s poetry attends to the soundbites and transitoriness of contemporary Australian life. Her dazzling wordplay gives us glistening souvenirs of overblown politik-speak, uncontrolled Western consumption, and the daze of the habitual and housetrained. Rather than timeshare the modernist experiment, Brown moves beyond its heroics and fashions a commentary that is understated, down to earth, and unsettling. While questioning its own title, what remains marvelled at in ‘Authentic Local’ is the colloquial and its uncanniness, the utopic harbour glimpse of a home language. - Ann Vickery

This book complements the collection True Thoughts, published by Salt Modern Poets in 2008. Authentic Local collects around fifty poems written in the years between 2002 and 2005, most of which were put aside whilst compiling the selection for True Thoughts. To read Ken Bolton and Carl Harrison-Ford on True Thoughts click here. Read Tim Wright on the same collection here. A number of recent poems are included in Authentic Local alongside the earlier material.

The title reflects a consistent irony that is threaded throughout the poems. An ‘authentic local’, like a Benjaminesque restless cosmopolitan, can inhabit any place at any time and for any period of time. So these poems are variously located.

These deceptively minimalist poems are layered in a kind of eclectic tumble. They are only seemingly autobiographical as they cruise through sharply delineated street-scapes, food courts, imagined havens, distant places, through encounters with friends, through lost and ordinary cities, through wit, boredom, disillusion, nostalgia, paranoia, irony. Always irony, and perhaps also a sense of the ludicrous, as they attempt to fathom the question ‘how to live?’ alongside the larger one ‘how to live now?’

The pastiche of this group of poems addresses (among other things) the concept that the ‘self’ is never fixed, that it is a slippery notion and that it is perhaps nothing much more than a daily work of bricolage. The poems are energised by dualities : self-deprecating wit coupled with associated knowledge and depth, the mundane and the illuminated morphing together textually, the local (Australian) and the international quizzically extemporized via things and moods, and via moments of brief existential measuring. The energy in the use of dualities together with an avoidance of placing judgement enables a discovery of beauty in the various contrasting ideas in this manuscript. Encompassing opposing ideals of academic and domestic, foreign and familiar, the poems are always at odds with the ‘lyrical’ and yet they are lyrically engaged.

What else can you do in the face of dark times (permanent war, floundering science, haywire climate), and your experience of this as unspectacular, utilitarian and silencing, but disrupt that silence and search for and imagine a role. One thing you can do as a poet is turn irony back on yourself and write poems made as if from particles that offer a range of trajectories arcing off into open space, that might evoke in a reader action and reaction.
These poems hope to never fail to give – and to give generously with humour and acuity from a tempered, critical and ultimately optimistic delight in the oddness of the world.

For more information, or to buy a copy of the book, visit soi3 modern poets here.

Three poems from Authentic Local -

NEWS & SPORTS

by the radio:
I mishear the news and sports presenter 
say ‘the latest in nuisance sports’,
outside the light is green,
the lightning frightening      stay away
from windows       but the storm
takes no notice of me and my black Bic biro
here at the kitchen table
with a new biography of Dante – ‘Dante;
The Poet, The Political Thinker, The Man’ –
I’d just begun reading twenty minutes ago, 
the cover image, a detail from a portrait of him,
one book open as he turns
to consult another, open and propped
up against two others, leather-bound,
he has the poet’s leafy laurel twig
tucked into his familiar red headscarf.
poetry is like
tv’s live coverage and if you change
a particle you can arrive at an elegant result
via electronic properties and, probably,
high conductivity in an electrical storm,
but the computer is down and so am I – 
my bad handwriting taxes my energy,
how does my brain put up with it ?
(who am I to ask?)
this almost illegible notation driven into
the empty moments between a book
and a book, a poem ‘made in situ’,
the phrase imagined 
as a t-shirt slogan or a label
but handwritten

SISTER MORPHEME

excipient ties, like ell oh vee ee, 
   leaving
       nothing to chance

I always 
        wanted
to plagiarise you

sleeping, you were ill, 
       and smelt like a mineral, 
                 but different

at the start
       your subwoofer
   shook me to my microbes,
emergency exits
         opened in my night

 I loved to you a woman 
     as I returned your sounds
          from phone to morph

slippery gleams
      slithered into darkness, 
your fermented prosody
                 ripe for traffic

SELF DENIAL NEVER LASTS LONG

very busy here
finishing up a 900 page epic poem I've been working on off 
& on for 
25 years!

telereal

I am
kind of continental

I want to come back as
a false witness

your gifts of cheap software
cannot compensate

what is
mazarine
what is
teazle

frowsty hairdo

it worked for the chimp

good to be young, indiscriminate, finding out,
with time to
BROWSE

then,
after the libidinal,
twenty years of scooping

locate
a happy go lucky cunt, a lookalike

now, there’s
your fillip

this is the stich
section

picking at the price sticker,
everything must go !

New from Jacket Magazine

2010-04-08T09:37:00.008+10:00

Visit the new 900-page issue - Jacket 39
Click here

Feature: Ron Silliman
Feature: Nathaniel Tarn
Feature: Bob Perelman
Feature: Douglas Barbour
Sister Sites: Vincent Katz on 'Vanitas' magazine
Interview: James Sherry
Interview and poems: Bob Arnold
Mark Silverberg:
The New York School Poets and the Neo-avant-garde:
Introduction: “A Lot of Guys Who Know All About Bricks”
Feature: Rewriting Canonical Australian Poems
Poems: Bob Arnold, Aaron Belz, Vincent Katz, Robert VanderMolen

Reviews of books by Rae Armantrout, Eric Baus, Miles Champion, Kevin Davies, Carla Harryman, Larry Price, Susan Howe and Simon Pettet

And for news about Jacket's exciting future, see the homepage here

Editors: John Tranter, Pam Brown

2010-04-06T17:54:00.004+10:00

Jill Jones' Dark Bright Doors
published by Wakefield Press.

Booklaunch this coming Saturday 10th April
3.30 for 4pm
Gleebooks
49 Glebe Point Road, Glebe
Sydney

2010-04-01T11:56:00.002+11:00

2010-03-29T15:39:00.012+11:00

I heard the Canadian poet Christian Bök talking about his latest inspirational art-science project in an extensive radio interview with Joe Milford recently. Here’s the link to that conversation.

Deinococcus radiodurans

This article about the project is from the io9 website -

The Roman poet Horace once said of his works that "I have created a monument more lasting than bronze." Well, Canadian poet Christian Bök has pretty much blown Horace away with his plan to encode a poem into bacterial DNA.

The plan is simple enough, if completely insane. Bök hopes to inject a series of nucleotides into the DNA of the bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans that form an intelligible poem, and then, in case that was too easy, he wants the protein the bacteria manufactures to also form a meaningful poem.

Since he only has four characters to work with - the nucleotides adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine - he first needs to create an alphabet that substitutes various triplets of nucleotides in the place of the twenty-six letters. In other words, AGT might correspond to "a", while CTG could mean "b", and so on. However, Bök can't just choose the triplets at random, because for all the trillions of possible combinations, only a minuscule fraction will produce amino acids that also yields a workable vocabulary.

Bök is currently using specially designed software to find the optimal arrangement, and only once he's figured that out will he actually write the poem. He has said that he will be somewhat limited in what sort of poetry he can write, and that most likely he will compose something with a "repetitive, incantatory quality."
Once all that's done, it's up to lab technicians to string together the right nucleotides and inject them into Deinococcus radiodurans. It won't be easy and may take several attempts, but the potential legacy of such a project is almost incomprehensible. If Bök's poem nucleotides take hold in Deinococcus radiodurans, there's no reason to think they won't hang around for the lifespan of the species.

And considering there's also no reason to think this strain of bacteria will ever go extinct (or at least last until the Sun destroys the Earth five billion years from now)...well, there's an excellent chance that Bök's poem will eventually be the last evidence of humanity's existence left on planet Earth. I imagine Horace would approve.

2010-03-21T11:39:00.011+11:00

Vagabond Press
celebrates the release of two exciting new poetry titles:

A Whistled Bit of Bop - new collection by Ken Bolton
&
Bonny Cassidy’s first chapbook Said To Be Standing

Sunday 18th April
2 for 2:30pm

Upstairs at The Rose Hotel,
Corner Cleveland & Shepherd Sts
Chippendale
Sydney

drinks, pizza, poetry
everyone welcome

Trans Tasman Poetry

2010-02-26T14:19:00.029+11:00

HOME & AWAY 2010

The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre - nzepc - is planning a two-part symposium in Auckland and Sydney. The first part of HOME & AWAY 2010 will feature readings, launches and forum-style talks with trans Tasman colleagues at the University of Auckland 30-31 March. For details of the program visit this site

We will also establish a digital bridge and invite poets and others to contribute text, images, audio or video that reflects or extends the symposium's trans Tasman focus. Another round of contributions to the bridge will be uploaded as HOME & AWAY convenes in Sydney 1-2 September. In this way we hope to create two-way traffic between points in time and places where poets connect.

Anyone interested in poetry and its current conversations can send a submission to the digital bridge. Submissions will be considered by an editorial team and you will be notified when your contribution has been accepted or declined. For further information on the digital component click here.

Poems and prose (prose no longer than 2000 words please) should be sent to nzepc@auckland.ac.nz as attached files. If you are sending images, audio or video check with us about suitable formats for upload. Submissions should reach us by 15 April for inclusion in the first upload, and by 15 August for the second. You should be the copyright holder of the material you are submitting.

The bridge will go live 30 March 2010.

Michele Leggott and Brian Flaherty, Pam Brown and Martin Edmond,
editors for NZ Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc)

2010-02-21T10:00:00.015+11:00

Patti Smith. What can I say? ‘Pissing in A River’ was my theme song in the mid 70s. I scrawled the song title in big black texta letters on the interior roof panel of my VW station wagon. The album ‘Horses’ had the same inspirational effect on me when I first heard it as Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ had when I was at high school in 1964. That is, I was, in the vernacular of the times, blown away. I still own my copy of Patti’s first single - ‘Piss Factory’/’Hey Joe’ - a rare item now, that she and Lenny Kaye made with Tom Verlaine and then, as Mer records, had it pressed in a limited edition of 1500 in Philadelphia in 1974.

I had read her poetry books, ‘Witt’, ‘Seventh Heaven’, ‘Ha Ha Houdini’ before I heard the music. I loved her books for their New York feel, for their look and style more than the actual poems. Patti Smith always tended towards the just-post-beat mystical and I was becoming interested then in a more hard-edged scepticism, and anyway, in Australia the mystical was for hippies in Nimbin communes. I had been fascinated, as many kids in their late teens/early twenties were, by the experimentation and seeming rebellion and freedom of the underground punk & poetry scene that followed on from the Beats in New York in the late 60s/early 70s.

Patti Smith, cover photo for Horses by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1975

Just Kids is a memoir of Patti Smith’s early days with her lover and close friend Robert Mapplethorpe as they survive on part-time jobs in bookshops and hustle for dinner and rent and a room at the Chelsea as they gradually figure out how to become artists in New York City. Although she slips into occasional purple patches her generosity and openness here make this an honest and totally engaging memoir. It’s her gift to her soul mate, Robert Mapplethorpe, the visual artist and photographer who died of AIDS at the age of 42 in 1989.

I know I am totally unobjective about Patti Smith. When I saw her perform at the Enmore Theatre in 1997 during her first visit to Sydney, her raw power was extraordinary - her work had definitely deepened and strengthened as she had aged. On that tour, she read poems to a small audience one Sunday morning at the Museum of Contemporary Art. No celebrity artifice, just the poet and the work - it was brilliant.

Here’s Edmund White’s review of Just Kids

2010-02-09T18:29:00.019+11:00

Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets
edited by Michael Farrell & Jill Jones
published by Puncher & Wattmann

Book launch with talks by
Michael Kirby & Anna Gibbs

Poetry readings by Kate Lilley, Martin Harrison, Chris Edwards, Andy Quan, Kerry Leves, Tricia Dearborn, Keri Glastonbury, Tim Denoon, Joanne Burns, Jenni Nixon, Dennis Gallagher, Paul Knobel, Louise Wakeling, Carolyn Gerrish, Jill Jones and Michael Farrell.

Other poets in the anthology include David Malouf, Dorothy Porter, Pam Brown, Lee Cataldi, Wendy Jenkins, Peter Rose, Angela Gardner, Miriel Lenore, Bel Schenk, Dipti Saravanamuttu, Scott-Patrick Mitchell, and others.

Friday 26th Feb, 6pm
Foyer, York Theatre
The Seymour Centre
Cnr Cleveland St & City Road,
Chippendale, Sydney

2010-02-05T14:23:00.011+11:00

Jacket magazine to move in January 2011

An Announcement from John Tranter and Al Filreis

Dear friends:

We are writing with news of a transition we both deem very exciting.

By the end of 2010, John Tranter and Pam Brown will have put out 40 issues of Jacket (jacketmagazine.com). It began in what John recalls as "a rash moment" in 1997 - an early all-online magazine, one of the earliest in the world of poetry and poetics, and quite rare for its consistency over the years. "The design is beautiful, the contents awesomely voluminous, the slant international modernist and experimental." (So said The Guardian.)

After issue 40, John will retire from thirteen years of intense every-single-day involvement with Jacket, and the entire archive of thousands of web pages will move intact to servers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where it will of course be available on the internet to everyone, for free, as always. But the magazine is not ceasing publication: quite the opposite.

Starting with the first issue in 2011, Jacket will have a new home, extra staff and a vigorous future as Jacket2. Jacket and its continuation, Jacket2, will be hosted by the Kelly Writers House and PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania.

The connection with PennSound, a vast and growing archive of audio recordings of poetry performance, discussion and criticism, is seen as a valuable additional facet of the new magazine, as is the relationship with busy Kelly Writers House, a lively venue for day-to-day poetic interchange of all kinds. The synergy in this three-way relationship has great potential.

Al will become Publisher and Jessica Lowenthal, Director of the Writers House, will be Associate Publisher. The new Editor will be Michael S. Hennessey (currently Managing Editor of PennSound) and the new Managing Editor will be Julia Bloch. John will be available as Founding Editor, and Pam will continue as Associate Editor.

More news about Jacket2 in the weeks and months to come. Meantime, the Jacket2 folks extend gratitude -- as many in the world of poetics do -- to John and to Pam Brown for the extraordinary work they've done. And John, for his part, is mightily pleased that Jacket will be preserved and will continue and grow in a somewhat new mode but with a continuous mission and approach.

- John Tranter & Al Filreis
Jacket Magazine

click on the names for links:

Al Filreis
Kelly Writers House
Jessica Lowenthal, Kelly Writers House Director
Michael S. Hennessey
Julia Bloch
Pam Brown
John Tranter

Note from Pam Brown, Associate Editor : - I welcome this move to the University of Pennsylvania and its many attendant connections with contemporary poetry. I feel enthused by the upcoming changes. I'll be staying on with 'Jacket2' and plan to edit Australian/NZ/AsianAustn/Southern Pacific material as a sweep of whatever has poetic currency in this region at the time.

2010-01-22T11:27:00.008+11:00

Wakefield Press invites you to the launch of

The Circus
by Ken Bolton, illustrated by Michael Fitzjames

to be launched by Deborah Welch,
General Manager of Radio Adelaide

A small circus arrives near Trieste - Strong Man, lion, ballerina - from these elements is constructed a contemporary idyll of troubled beauty and humour. What is life about? Was that man shot from a cannon? Should one visit The Tent of Curiosities? Crucially, 'Have you got your ticket?' With a nod to Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy and to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and yet another to A Bad Day for The Sung Dynasty, The Circus succeeds in being entirely original.

Thursday 4 February, 6.00 pm for 6.30 pm
Australian Experimental Art Foundation Bookshop,
Lion Arts Centre,
between Mercury Cinema and Jam Factory,
cnr North Tce and Morphett St, Adelaide.
Books will be on sale and wines served courtesy of Fox Creek Wines

2010-01-15T13:57:00.019+11:00

Yesterday at the cinema I was transported back to almost thirty years ago to when I worked at the experimental art foundation in Adelaide, South Australia where I met and worked with a remarkable group of people from Broome, Western Australia. I had gone to see the film Bran Nue Dae.

                 Ernie Dingo as Uncle Tadpole

The official web site tells the story - “Bran Nue Dae has a long and influential history in Australia: first as a collection of iconic songs, then as a stage musical that toured Australia in the early 1990’s charming audiences wherever it played.
Set in the summer of 1969, the story of Bran Nue Dae was inspired by the teenage experiences of writer and musician Jimmy Chi and the members of the band kuckles - Patrick Duttoo Bin Amat, Garry Gower, Michael Manolis Mavromatis and Stephen Pigram - who grew up in the tropical seaside port of Broome on Australia’s west coast….”

I was privileged to meet and work closely the Broome Aboriginal Arts Group and Jimmy Chi when they were artists-in-residence at the E.A.F. in 1981. Members of the band ‘kuckles’ were concurrently studying at the Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music in Adelaide. Here, Jimmy and the band made the first recordings of the songs that have continued to be sung and performed for three decades now.

For me, the experience of working with the Broome people was a very positive one. And yesterday I felt happily moved by the film so I began looking around in my cupboards for remnants of those days. If you’re interested, you’ll have to click on the scans of articles here in order to read them. My apologies for the low tech..

  note by David Kerr, eaf Director, in 'A Decade at the E.A.F. 1974-1984', edited by   Stephanie Britton

            my article in 'Art Network', issue 3/4, 1981, edited by Ross Wolfe

Here's to Jimmy Chi, Kuckles, The Pigram Brothers, Geoff Buchan, Jane Sindel, the EAF and the film director Rachel Perkins and the cast and crew of Bran Nue Dae!

2010-01-15T09:43:00.010+11:00

Jesse Glass of Ahadada Books is pleased to present
the meh of z z z z by Pam Brown.

Further information and free download HERE
Author info HERE

The cover art (click the image above to enlarge) is by Margaret Schnipper, a New York based photographer, film writer/director and visual artist.
See more of her work HERE

2010-01-09T21:48:00.006+11:00

NEW BIG BRIDGE
click here

New Year Poetry Mash Up

2010-01-04T12:46:00.045+11:00

Here it is again -

the book I recommended on this blog in October 2009 as an instance of lyrical poetic writing that might be of some reflective and stimulating use to Australian poets interested in lyrical writing. I've since removed that blog. Even though some contributors did actually address the topic of current lyric poetry in Australia in what became a mostly dire, befuddled mish mash of comments, I’m pretty certain that no one who participated has bothered to read this book.

Here is a very recent post about the book from Tinfish editor, poet, critic and academic Susan Schultz’s blog :

The other book that launches me from one "low, dishonest decade" into this next (if you think the decade has, in fact, ended) is Claudia Rankine's DON'T LET ME BE LONELY. While the book was published in 2004 (by Graywolf), it reads as an elegy to the aughts, whose tone was set early. Y2K was the false, comedic crisis that 9/11 became, and 9/11 has stayed with us for a long decade. Rankine's "lyric" is, in fact, a book of prose. The back cover calls it "lyric essay/poetry," which reminds me how much I prefer the term "meditation." "Lyric essay" seems another marker of the selling of genres as teachable units; it's a subset of "creative non-fiction," after all. But that's enough complaining. Rankine's work is forensic, getting at our most public moments by way of her most private ones. Not only does she share family stories with her reader, some of them tragic, but she also examines the effects of American life on the inner organs--the brain, the breast, the liver. Medicine is part of this narrative, though any link between medicine and healing is not as neat as one might hope (against hope). The link between human value and that assigned by the insurance industry is even more troubling. The book is held together by the ever-symbolic television screen, that place where our private and public lives most often meet, as we sit (mostly) passively to receive them. Our passivity is what makes us most ill. To meditate upon the public event and the poet's private (very physical) reponses to it is to re-take some notion of agency (though that word loses agency as I type).

DON'T LET ME BE LONELY appears as a billboard in a field of sunflowers on the cover of Rankine's book. It's an unlikely billboard, this private call of anguish set beside a main road (which is empty, save for a thicket of signs.) There's a sense of public obscurity about the clear, private anguish that is the book's subject. While Rankine quotes Levinas on "being for the other," she frames that quotation with assertions of loneliness. And so, on page 120, she begins, "Then all life is a form of waiting, but it is the waiting of loneliness. One waits to recognize the other, to see the other as one sees the self." Then, she quotes the other, Levinas:

"The subject who speaks is situated in relation to the other. This privilege of the other ceases to be incomprehensible once we admit that the first fact of existence is neither being in itself nor being for itself but being for the other, in other words, that human existence is a creature. By offering a word, the subject putting himself forward lays himself open and, in a sense, prays." (120)

I am reminded just now of the hilltops of Rwanda in the mid-90s, during the genocide, when thousands of people milled about, stunned, hungry, and the eye of the media turned itself on them. There was a correspondent for ABC news whose face was narrow, hair gray, voice melancholy. I sat and cried at the images as he spoke into the camera's eye, which mediated between me and him, him and the story he was paid to tell us. Over the course of days, weeks, the correspondent's face fell, his voice began to quiver. I don't remember which gave way first, the correspondent's psyche or the short attention span of the media. But one day they were both gone from my screen. I was alone again, without him, without them. Levinas is surely right about self and other, the word, the prayer that links us. But what if we are all behind television (or computer) screens and our words are spoken only to ourselves? That kind of privacy is hellish. [I google Rwanda and eventually come up with the name of that correspondent, Jim Wooten.]

But Rankine turns away from the screen to face an audience of readers. That act of turning towards us, whoever we may be, does not close the loop that makes her body suffer, but it does invite in the "impossible community" of readers and writers. Our relation may not be "lyrical," but it can be close-knit, our own secret incantatory (from "cant," surely) calling out. That, in any case, is how I want to begin the 2010s, with that hope. And then action?

Book Info Here

shuffle shuffle shuffle shuffle shuffle

A new collection of beautiful, playful, contemplative poems that follow the lines of flight of poetic possibilities as they crop up. Poems that sometimes trace the colour and ephemerality of flowers like bees trace pollen. Poems that happily accept foibles and failures as rich aspects of how we live. Also clever. Also intelligent. Humming from Dubliner Maurice Scully. Lightly elegiac, the collection is dedicated to the poet’s late brother.

Further information about the book HERE

shuffle shuffle shuffle shuffle shuffle

Why do nice, quiet Australian poets have to push an extraneous agenda rather than write straightforward reviews of foreign poetry books?

The metre man : A review of Rain By Don Paterson (Faber And Faber) by Robert Gray (from The Australian Newspaper January 02, 2010)

(caps below are mine - reviewer's text coloured green for emphasis - PB)

DON Paterson is the most accomplished mid-career poet in Britain. He has published three books of poetry previously and twice won the T. S. Eliot Award, the highest recognition for this medium in Britain. It is no diminishment of him to say that he has not much competition at present. [THERE ARE HUNDREDS OF POETS IN THE UK WHO MIGHT NOT AGREE, NOR HOLD THE TS ELIOT AWARD AS MUCH OF A CRITERION.]
Paterson is a Scot who lives and teaches at St Andrews. As well as being a writer and anthologist, he is well-known in his country as a musician with a jazz-folk group. His career is unusual, in that he avoided a university education to play music, and his position as an academic - he teaches writing - is based entirely on recognition of his poetic gift, not on formal qualifications.
[ARBITRARY DIG - AN AGENDA? :
This wafer of a book is almost entirely in metre and rhyme, which would be a scandalous situation, for many, in a poet of his prominence in the US. There, with the programmatically avant-gardist poet John Ashbery embodying in himself the poetry establishment, there is a sense that now nothing is too experimental to be accepted; there is nothing any longer that one can't do as a writer ... except write like Paterson.

Paterson shows a Scottish attraction to philosophy in poetry; although that is an ancient and worthy relationship, long predating Scottish culture. I call it a Scottish proclivity because two of the most extreme exemplars of the mode are from the Scots tradition: John Davidson and Hugh MacDiarmid have had a wide influence there.
In the introduction to his translations of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, a book called simply Orpheus, published in 2006, Paterson describes himself as a scientific materialist. He opens his mind and work further to the reverberations of that attitude in this book. He proposes there is an impetus, a drive, within the material world, that comes to self-consciousness through us; a decidedly German romantic and Rilkean philosophy. This finds its best expression in the major poem of the book, "Phantom", about the suicide of a friend. In section V, particularly, he produces some fine, blank verse rhetoric:
We come from nothing and return to it.
It lends us out to time, and when we lie
in silent contemplation of the void
they say we feel it contemplating us.
This is wrong, but who could bear the truth.
We are ourselves the void in contemplation.
We are its only nerve and hand and eye.
There is something vast and distant and enthroned
with which you are one and continuous,
staring through your mind, staring and staring
like a black sun, constant, silent, radiant
with neither love nor hate nor apathy
as we have no human name for its regard

Elsewhere in this collection, Paterson writes:
Something hurries on its course
outside every human head
and no one knows its shape or force
but the unborn and the dead
[CLICHED & COMICAL, in my opinion]
Again contentiously; seemingly led by his music into saying something philosophically irresponsible, that is not logical within the terms of his own position. Paterson has published books of aphorisms; the lyric poet turns to aphorism when he feels his lyricism restricts the intellectual content of his work.

W.H. Auden is an exemplar: he was able to deal with ideas directly in the series of poems he called "Shorts", while maintaining concision and lapidary finish. In this book, Paterson has poems in a haiku-like form, rhymed, mainly to do with mortality:

It wasn't death
fogging the window;
it was my breath.

In a poem referring to Basho's famous haiku, about the sound of a frog leaping into a dark pond, usually taken to be his
enlightenment poem, Paterson writes:
Nothing stirs the old millpond.
The frog slips in without a sound.
One other, from this impressive group:
Repeat, now: nought plus one is all;
but all less one, nothing at all.

[CONTRADICTION : PO-MO CREEPS : SOUNDS LIKE ... a little like ... John Ashbery ?
There is a marvellous poem in free verse in this book, "Song for Natalie 'Tusja' Beridze", which is bound to become an anthology piece, about the underworld of avant-garde electronic music, found on the Web, with its weird acronyms and manipulated software. It is also about a beautiful princess of this region, with whom the poet falls in love. It is worth owning the book, for this alone.
. . . Though I should confess that at times I find your habit of maxxing
the range with those bat-scaring ring-modulated
sine-bursts and the more distressing psychoacoustic properties of phase-inversion in the sub-base frequencies somewhat
taxing . . .

Other poems, such as the tender pieces to his sons, and the title poem, also add to his achievements, and to our reward. Every poem here is whittled to the core, and that core polished; [HERE'S THAT GNARLY OL’ 'CRAFT VS AVANT GARDE' AGENDA AGAIN] the craftsmanship is admirable, a great satisfaction which avant-gardism seldom provides. . (The painter John Olsen, who is not unadventurous, once told me that the more interested in craft one becomes, the more interested in tradition.)
For poems in pre-ordained forms on often extreme and subtle experiences, there is very little obscurity. "The Rain at Sea" seems an interesting poem, perhaps on Paterson's intuitions about an atheistic mysticism; perhaps about a relationship: it is unnecessarily elusive. Still, this is small complaint.

My major dissatisfaction is that there just isn't enough of the book. Seven of its pages are given over to translations, or versions; others are taken up with slight epigrams. [ARBITRARY DIG : AGENDA ROMANTIC : TEACHING IS NO WAY FOR POETS TO EARN A LIVING] It is a pity that Paterson, a person of such gifts, should be caught in the teaching mill: which has become a cliche, restrictive of experience, that a poet should try, as much as any of those on his page, to avoid.
However, the teacher that Paterson must be is indicated by the notes to his 1999 anthology, 101 Sonnets. While regretting the poems he perhaps hasn't had time to write, one has to envy his students. [HUH?]

Is Robert Gray trying to revive some old poetry war? Any contention here? Maybe a few Scots will be RILED UP? (hang on - I'm a Scot myself - och aye! THAT explains all that philosophising then, nae doot)

For further reading - See Laurie Duggan’s 2009 blog note from the UK on Official Verse Culture HERE and a remark on Faber & Faber HERE

shuffle shuffle shuffle shuffle shuffle

New Project scheduled for The NSW South Coast's Wollongong City Art Gallery for 2011 - 'Coalcliff Days'
Visit the blog about the project HERE

shuffle shuffle shuffle shuffle shuffle

Since when did one-off workshops in poetry writing at regional poetry festivals become Masterclasses? Since now, that's when. One of these 'Masters' has only recently published a first book of poems. Misleading? False advertising? Or just good old-fashioned pretentiousness?

Here are the Masters and their Topics :
Poetry and the Importance of the Local with Robert Minhinnick (Wales) : Put Yourself Out There with Arianna Pozzuoli (Canada via Singapore) : The Irrational Image with Emma Jones (Australia via England) : What the hell would he know, anyway? with Glenn Colquhoun (New Zealand) : Writing Poems from Nature with Elizabeth Smither (New Zealand)

2009-12-14T16:30:00.001+11:00

2009-12-08T16:00:00.004+11:00

Reko Rennie-Gwaybilla goes to Paris

2009-12-07T17:45:00.009+11:00

NEW ISSUE OF HOW2

Click HERE to read this,
as usual, incredibly various issue.

Long list of contents following:

Strictly Speaking on Caroline Bergvall
Featuring papers from:
Caroline Bergvall
Sophie Robinson
Nathan Brown
cris cheek
Laura Goldstein
Majene Mafe

Reading Carla Harryman
Featuring papers from:
Carla Harryman
Laura Hinton
Christine Hume
J. Darling
Carla Billitteri
Renee Gladman
Austin Publicover

Poetic Economies of Performance: Part 2
Featuring poems & papers from:
Elizabeth-Jane Burnett
Emily Carr
Christina Continelli
David Emanuel
Jennifer Karmin
Shannon Maguire
Julia Lee Barclay
Amy Sara Carroll
Laylage Courie
Bonnie Emerick

new media
Featuring:
Aya Karpińska
Katie Clapham
Becky Cremin
Simone Gilson

New Writing
Featuring poems by:
Jessica Wilkinson
Emily Critchley
Karen Sandhu

Review
Featuring:
Jessica Wilkinson on Susan Howe’s
Souls of the Labadie Tract
Emily Critchley: on Lisa Robertson's
Magenta Soul Whip

In Conference
Arpine Konyalian Grenier:
Reflections on the First International Poetic Ecologies Conference,
Université Libre de Bruxelles, May 2008

Editor: Redell Olsen (London)
Managing Editor: Kai Fierle Hedrick (New York)
Designer / Programmer: John Sparrow (London)
Publisher: Kathleen Fraser

2009-12-02T18:07:00.005+11:00

George Schneeman

2009-12-01T11:03:00.002+11:00

World AIDS Day 1 Dec 09

2009-11-28T13:23:00.010+11:00

       more favourites, BENJAMIN ARMSTRONG, currently on show at the       MCA, Sydney -

        Old Friends (blown-glass, pigment, plaster & wax - 104x36x17 cm)
        Prints, drawings (ink on paper 41x24cm)

        Detail

2009-11-24T14:29:00.004+11:00

Ed Ruscha, a favourite

2009-11-19T17:25:00.008+11:00

An Obituary for Sue Ford

2009-11-09T15:20:00.006+11:00

FEMINAISSANCE
Edited by Christine Wertheim
Poetry | Prose | Essays |

Identity is dead. The 21st-century subject is an unstable fiction with no identifiable features or group affiliations. He’s a man without inherent qualities, a post-human ideal. But those who have long been hailed as Other exist in a different relation to this ideal. Unlike those traditionally self-possessed |s, these Others may find themselves split between a yearning to be contemporary and unqualified, and longing for a continued allegiance to their qualitative, albeit constructed, group identity.

It is with an awareness of this more ambiguous and refined notion of self that 'Feminaissance' approaches questions of femininity and its relation to writing. Topics include: collectivity; feminine écriture; the politics of writing; text and voice; the body as a site of contestation, insurgence and pleasure; race and writing; gender as performance; writing about other women writers; economic inequities; Hélène Cixous; monstrosity; madness; and aesthetics.

If the fact that “women do not say ‘We’” was one of the constitutive problems for 20th century feminism, the fact that women do and still clearly feel the need to say “We” is just as rich and interesting a topic for feminism today. The writings gathered here prove feminism to be alive and more relevant to all genders than ever: not just because feminist discourse remains a political necessity, but because of its artistic and intellectual pleasures. –Sianne Ngai

Contributors: Dodie Bellamy, Caroline Bergvall, Meiling Cheng,Wanda Coleman, Bhanu Kapil, Chris Kraus, Susan McCabe, Tracie Morris, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, Juliana Spahr, Vanessa Place, Christine Wertheim, Stephanie Young, Lidia Yuknavitch

Published by Les Figues Press - further info here

2009-11-07T18:16:00.016+11:00

Vale Sue Ford, 1943 - 2009
artist and film maker

Here are a few of my snapshots of Sue, from some time ago: Sue Ford with Laurie Duggan at Micky Allan's exhibition opening at Watters Gallery, Sydney in 1978; sitting under one of her own photos at my house in Petersham in October 1982 and with Sasha Soldatow and Jeune Pritchard at the Art Gallery of NSW in October 82.

2009-11-05T15:09:00.003+11:00

the latest issue of ka mate ka ora is up on the web.

If you like some of the kinds of lyric poetry that I like you'll like Michele Leggott's peri poietikes / about poetry and if you don't know what I like or what kind of lyric you like why not try this kind of lyric -

Click HERE

2009-10-27T11:22:00.015+11:00

NEW ISSUES

extempore 3 - edited by Miriam Zolin
includes a bonus cd of great contemporary Australian jazz players.

For futher information - click here

When Pressed - Movement in Language is up on the web.
Click here

Divan 7 - Click here

2009-10-18T18:13:00.017+11:00

Rudi Krausmann, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney June 2009

Rudi Krausmann will be launching his new book
on Wednesday November 11th
at 6pm
Berkelouw Bookshop
70 Norton Street
Leichhardt, Sydney

2009-10-17T15:53:00.018+11:00

new journals, online and in print and other news :

ecopetics nos 6 & 7 2006 - 2009
edited by Jonathan Skinner
Includes an Australian poetry feature edited by michael farrell.
Further info here

Kaurab no 108 2009
edited by Aryanil Mukherjee
Bilingual - Bengali & English
Includes an English language feature on collaboration
Further info here

Ekleksographia - Wave 2 2009
edited by Anny Ballardini
Translation Special
Visit the issue here

Attention Span 2009
Steve Evans’ annual list of invited poets’ current reading
Visit Attention Span here

Cordite October 2009
Prague Micro Festival Poetry Series with sound files
Australian poets Jill Jones, Philip Hammial, Michael Farrell,
Pam Brown and Louis Armand
at the Globe Bookstore, Prague on 15 April 2009.
Visit Cordite here

2009-10-14T11:58:00.011+11:00

Just published by Pressed Wafer, Maged Zaher’s
Portrait of the Poet as an Engineer.

When I read Maged Zaher’s poetry I am always intrigued by the questions he asks and amazed by the unexpected layers and turns. Practically every line leads elsewhere. Saints, sex, pop culture, dreams, romance, information technology, religion, corporate life - Dante Alighieri and Barry White in the same poem - Karl Marx, Paris Hilton, Chairman Mao, Arthur Rimbaud and other suspects are all components of the volatile constellation that comprises these sharp and often funny poems.
As a relatively recent-arrival in USA, Maged Zaher analyses a contemporary America kind-of-with-a-’k’, applying a bright intelligence and tempering his sometimes irreverent enquiry with some subtle philosophising.

Maged Zaher

2009-10-08T09:14:00.030+11:00

Ray Young 1951-2009

Not long after I had screened an extract from a super 8 film at an afternoon talk in July at the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art
of myself and Micky Allan silk screen printing covers for a poetry book at the Tin Sheds in 1979, I read in a note in Art Monthly that Ray Young had died. In the film, Ray is the young man glimpsed working at the light box, answering the phone and passing a joint.

Two of Ray's friends, Michael Callaghan and Marie McMahon,
have written an obituary. You can read it here.

2009-09-27T14:56:00.021+10:00

Praha

no customs checks 
   no cell signal

*

driven there downhill -
     AAA taxi driver on alcohol

*

from his messy suitcase
    Michael reads
          an early novel
by the sad king of Czech literature

*
              
Louis asks
 ‘why not 
      describe everything backwards’
           & answers 
        ‘because it’s impossible’

*

  to dream the impossible 
                              palindrome

*

no souvenir cockroach
    in the Franz Kafka boutique


*

five large Bubo owls 
               caged
       at the national senate

*

skinheads on the 18 tram
                to Petřiny

*

Plastic People of the Universe,
              proto punk 1969

*

cháo khi gãp,
    Vietnamese 
        at the local Trafika

*

at varying intervals
   homeless people with grimy skin
            rat through the same bin
   in Wenceslas Square

*

I buy a book
  about
       Bohumil Hrabal

2009-09-22T11:11:00.003+10:00

     Clouds of Reactionary Populism

     I Ain't Got Nobody sung backwards in cement. Whisper
     next chorus, remove make-up, fall into leaves. All was
     shimmering (by default). Step up to the platform of
     full self-consciousness, rise perfectly to zero.

I'm re-reading Sadly by William Fuller

2009-09-16T14:43:00.011+10:00

Visit The Argotist Online in which I ask Anne Waldman six questions about her recent CD Matching Half. Click HERE.

You can also read four of my poems in this issue HERE

Thanks to the editor, Jeffrey Side

2009-09-13T17:58:00.035+10:00

I've recently read two terrific art books :
Ken Bolton, cover photo by William Yang, 1986

ART WRITING: Art In Adelaide In The 1990's And 2000's by KEN BOLTON

The anthology Art Writing: Art in Adelaide in the 1990s and 2000s, presents twenty-five years of writing by Adelaide-based art critic (and well-known poet) Ken Bolton. Alan Cruickshank, CACSA Director and publications commissioner, says in his Foreword:

Ken Bolton is rare if not peerless, in that residing in Adelaide for more than twenty-five years and observing and writing about art, he has been witness to successive generations of South Australian artists and their waxing/enduring/waning careers... He has been and remains one of the very few long-term, one-city domiciled art critics in Australia, his analytical evaluations over this period being more than a valuable resource in a national landscape that has seen Art's epicentre of activity and importance easterly determined and historicised. Ken explains in his Introduction,

All of it I have written because I like thinking about art, or because I sometimes find it impossible not to. Trying to get it right, to formulate one's thinking precisely... I have always been interested in pinning down the aesthetic issue... It is a habit of thought and appreciation that seems to me philosophical (in that it seeks to generalise and abstract aesthetic rules, goals, categories, 'moves') but also idealistic (in that it is continuous with one's earliest discussions of, say, pop music-then, later, of novels, poems, art and philosophy and criticism...

Ken Bolton is a poet, art critic, editor and publisher. After studying Fine Arts at University of Sydney, he relocated to Adelaide in 1982 where he has since lived and worked. He won University of Melbourne's Michel Wesley Wright Poetry Prize for 1990. More usually he is short-listed-'Two Poems: A Drawing of the Sky' for the 1991 Victorian Premier's Award, and 'Untimely Meditations' for the NSW Premier's Award in 1999. In 2000 he spent six months in Rome courtesy of the Literature Board of the Australia Council. Associated with the Dark Horsey Bookshop at the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide, Bolton has published his art criticism in Broadsheet, Artlink, Otis Rush, The Advertiser, Photofile, Art and Text, Art Monthly, Meanjin, Agenda, Like and Eyeline. His major literary collections to date are a Selected Poems (Penguin/ETT, 1992), and Untimely Meditations and At The Flash & At The Baci (Wakefield Press, 1997 and 2006).

Artists featured include: Ian Abdulla; Mehmet Adil; Akira Akira; Micky Allan; Craige Andrae; John Barbour; Bianca Barling; Lynne Barwick; Andrew Best; Annette Bezor; Olive Bishop; Tony Bishop; Matthew Bradley; Katherine Brennan; Kristian Burford; Antonio Colangelo; Sarah Crowest; Alan Cruickshank; Bridget Currie; Jonathan Dady; James Dodd; Sonia Donnellan; Nicholas Folland; John Foubister; Kerry Giles; Simryn Gill; Agnieszka Golda; Richard Grayson; Kim Guthrie; Fiona Hall; Anton Hart; Louise Haselton; Paul Hewson; Hewson/Walker; Paul Hoban; Simone Hockley; Sunday Hopkins; Teri Hoskin; Larissa Hjorth; Aldo Iacobelli; Bronia Iwanczak; Kab-101; Yoko Kajio; Mimi Kelly; Simone Kennedy; Shaun Kirby; Macin Kobylecki; Yvonne Koolmatrie; Michael Kutschbach; Michelle Luke; Max Lyle; Peter McKay; Malcom McKinnon; Monte Masi; Vivienne Miller; Kelly Milton; Katie Moore; Kerin Murray; Michael Newall; Michelle Nikou; Roger Noakes; Bridget Noone; Ian North; David O'Halloran; Anna Platten; George Popperwell; Deborah Paauwe; Geoffrey Parslow; Andrew Petrusevics; Sonia Porcaro; Anne Robertson; Mark Rogers; Manne Schulze; Mark Siebert; Paul Sloan; Samantha Small; Jyanni Steffensen; Tim Sterling; Suzanne Treister; James Strickland; Jim Thalassoudis; Angela Valamanesh; Hossein Valamanesh; Irma Van Niele; Warren Vance; Linda Marie Walker; David Watt; Gerry Wedd; Steve Wigg; Laura Wills; Clint Woodger; Lisa E. Young; Zafari Art

ISBN 978-1-875751-34-1
RRP: $25 Paperback
Published by The Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia

Ken Bolton, July 2009

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ICELAND
Travel Essays In Art by EILEEN MYLES

Poet and post-punk heroine Eileen Myles has always operated in the art, writing, and queer performance scenes as a kind of observant flaneur. Like Baudelaire's gentleman stroller, Myles travels the city—wandering on garbage-strewn New York streets in the heat of summer, drifting though the antiseptic malls of La Jolla, and riding in the van with Sister Spit—seeing it with a poet's eye for detail and with the consciousness that writing about art and culture has always been a social gesture. Culled by the poet from twenty years of art writing, the essays in The Importance of Being Iceland make a lush document of her—and our—lives in these contemporary crowds.

Framed by Myles's account of her travels in Iceland, these essays posit inbetweenness as the most vital position from which to perceive culture as a whole, and a fluidity in national identity as the best model for writing and thinking about art and culture. The essays include fresh takes on Thoreau's Cape Cod walk, working class speech, James Schulyer and Björk, queer Russia and Robert Smithson; how-tos on writing an avant-garde poem and driving a battered Japanese car that resembles a menopausal body; and opinions on such widely ranging subjects as filmmaker Sadie Benning, actor Daniel Day-Lewis, Ted Berrigan's Sonnets, and flossing.

Eileen Myles, named by BUST magazine "the rock star of modern poetry," is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including Chelsea Girls, Cool for You, Sorry, Tree, and Not Me (Semiotext(e), 1991), and is the coeditor of The New Fuck You (Semiotext(e), 1995). Eileen Myles was head of the writing program at University of California, San Diego, from 2002 to 2007, and she has written extensively on art and writing and the cultural scene. Most recently, she received a fellowship from the Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Foundation.

Published by Semiotext(e)

Eileen Myles, 2009

2009-09-07T17:10:00.014+10:00

Shimmy and shake back to the 1980s.
Women’s band, Stray Dags perform live at the funk-a-licious
Red Rattler Theatre
6 Faversham Street
Marrickville
Saturday November 28th at 8pm.

Your hostess for the evening will be
ABC breakfast radio presenter Fran Kelly.

This is a fundraiser for filmmaker Kathy Sport's
documentary-in-progress on Australian women's music
See an exclusive sneak preview on the night.

Archival footage of my own band, CLITORIS BAND, will cost between $7,000 and $10,000.The National Film & Sound Archive holds footage of Clitoris Band shot by Jon Rhodes in 1975. Before it can be used, a “copy” must be made of the original 16mm picture negative. Negotiations with the NFSA for permission to use the film were unsuccessful.

Support this project by going along to the Dag-A-Rama.
Win a prize for the most original 1980s outfit.
View rare photographs and song clips.
Also rockin’ the Rattler roof with eighties classics,
Baby Machine & guests.
Raffle at the door.
Tickets available at moshtix
1300 438 849, and all moshtix outlets.

Tickets are limited and likely to sell out.

You can visit the website for info about the event and the film.
Click here

2009-08-28T22:23:00.001+10:00

2009-08-19T09:08:00.016+10:00

JON CATTAPAN
Night Visions
21 August - 19 September 2009
Preview: Friday 21 August, 6-pm
Kaliman Gallery
56 Sutherland St, Paddington, Sydney

This latest body of work relates to Jon Cattapan’s recent visit to East Timor where he was researching an Australian War Memorial commission. The night vision equipment used by the Australian soldiers became a focus of his research. The result is a series of blue and green toned works, reminiscent of the visual perspective and representation night vision equipment employs. Soldiers in combat gear, army vehicles and army equipment populate the surfaces of the paintings. Jon Cattapan submerges these figurative elements in the patterns of weather maps and night vision data so that they are woven together as part of a brilliantly coloured nocturnal fabric.

(cover detail, but the red is wrong, too orange here, my old scanner)

Chris McAuliffe’s monograph on Jon Cattapan, Possible Histories, reviewed by Ian North in Artlink.

ABC1 TV Artscape: Artists At Work: Jon Cattapan
10:00pm - Tuesday, August 25
Over the last 30 years, Jon Cattapan has established a reputation as one of Australia's most significant and prolific painters. Often described as 'the poet of the floating metropolis', much of Cattapan's work responds to the notion of what it means to be a human being in the 21st century urban environment.
He is best known for his large cityscape paintings which reveal the shifting dynamics of the metropolis - charting the endless flow of information and mapping the psychological trajectory of its inhabitants.
In July 2008, Cattapan decided to take a risk and step outside of his urban milieu. After years of deliberation he finally agreed to become an official war artist for the Australian War Memorial (AWM) and was deployed to Timor Leste. To his surprise what followed was an experience he describes as "one of my luckiest breaks in my life".
Artscape: Artists At Work follows Cattapan's journey to Timor Leste and then back to his studio, in an outer suburb of Melbourne, where he creates a series of art works for the AWM, based on his unique experiences as a war artist.
(Artscape: Artists At Work: Jon Cattapan will be repeated on ABC2
Sunday, August 30 at 7pm http://abc.net.au/iview/)

2009-08-13T17:25:00.012+10:00

                              Vale Willy de Ville

                    Obituaries :
                          one
                          two
                          three
                          four

2009-08-11T16:07:00.004+10:00

The reviewer I mentioned last weekend might be able to answer his perplexed question regarding Les Murray and Lionel Fogarty by reading Lyn McCredden’s The Locatedness of Poetry in the latest issue of JASAL (Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature)

Here’s the abstract :
This essay argues that understanding the locatedness of poetry is crucial as a measure by which to sift the high rhetorics of national, cosmopolitan, globalising discourses. In an analysis of the poetry of Indigenous writers Tony Birch, Sam Wagan Watson and Lionel Fogarty, and of the Federal Government's Apology to the Stolen Generations, we can see more clearly the role of literature, and particularly poetry, in debates between the local and the global.

Click HERE for the index and scroll down to the article.
It’s there as a pdf.

Here's the question :