tonight, I'm all over the place, doing five things at once, just like
Jean Cocteau
24.8.07
22.8.07
If you're concerned, annoyed or angered by the recent changes at Australia's multicultural public broadcasting service, SBS (especially the changes to the tv news, commercials interrupting programs, the risible excuse for a weekly movie review and so on) register your opposition by signing the petition.
10.8.07
Yesterday I put the old hail-dinged 1994 Daihatsu in for a service and oil-and-grease at a country garage with a dark interior and nicely imperfect, handyman-built wooden storage shelves. A few cars were parked in a dusty, ditch-pocked gravel yard under a couple of dried-out trees. The two mechanics, in black overalls, were leaning into the engine of a big truck. I thought of Elizabeth Bishop’s classic poem -
Filling Station
Oh, but it is dirty!
- this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!
Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it's a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.
Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.
Some comic books provide
the only note of color -
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.
Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)
Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO-SO-SO-SO
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.
Elizabeth Bishop
I once lent my copy of Elizabeth Bishop's Geography III to someone and I never saw it again. Borrower, are you out there ?
27.7.07
here comes august
The Material Poem edited by James Stuart
is now available as a free download at
non generic productions.
click on cover image to enlarge
Sydney poet Adam Aitken covers the bookshops
in the first week of August :
Giramondo launches a new poetry collection,
Ardent by Jane Gibian.
To be launched by Adam Aitken.
upstairs at Gleebooks
49 Glebe Point Road
Glebe
at 3.30 for 4 pm
Sunday 5 August
Martin Edmond, author of Waimarino County
will be in conversation with Adam Aitken
Better Read Than Dead Bookstore
265 King Street
Newtown, Sydney
at 6.30pm
Tuesday 7 August
Kate Richards and Ross Gibson
present Bystander
The Performance Space
Carriageworks,
245 Wilson St
Eveleigh (aka Redfern) Sydney
at 5.30pm
Wednesday 8th August
The regular Lee Marvin Readings will continue through August
on Tuesday evenings in the 'Athens Of The South'
Click here for the upcoming
reading schedule.
The Material Poem is a new e-anthology, edited by James Stuart and published by ‘non-generic productions’. It features the work of some 28 Australian poets, artists and critics, all of whom are engaged with poetry, and more broadly language, as a material form. It showcases the vibrancy of experimental writing practices in Australia, demonstrating how writing functions outside the purely literary. The Material Poem will be launched by Katrina Schwarz, editor of Art and Australia with new-media performances and an experimental short film screening.
Contributors :
ALEX SELENITSCH | AMANDA STEWART | CHRIS EDWARDS | ELENA KNOX | FRANZ EHMANN | GARETH JENKINS |HAZEL SMITH | JAMES STUART | JILL JONES & ANNETTE WILLIS | JOHANNA FEATHERSTONE | KLARE LANSON | KOMNINOS ZERVOS | KRISTIN HANNAFORD | LINDA CARROLI | LINDA MARIE WALKER | MICHAEL FARRELL | NATASHA DUSENJKO | NICK KEYS | NORMANA WIGHT & ANNE KIRKER | PATRICK JONES | PETER LYSSIOTIS | PETER O’MARA | RICHARD TIPPING | RUARK LEWIS | WAYZGOOSE PRESS
Performance Space (Room 3.105)
Ground floor, Bon Marche Building
University of Technology
755 Harris Street
Sydney
6 for 6:30pm, until 8pm
Wednesday 1 August
The Material Poem will be freely downloadable after the launch
The Deletions will keep you posted
Also check out more from James Stuart at c-side
25.7.07
Gary Sullivan, self-described poet, cartoonist, loudmouth is the creator of a comic strip called Elsewhere. Three copies of this funny, fascinating, off-beat comic that I’d ordered, arrived in the mail
yesterday and I read them, cover-to-cover straightaway. I highly recommend these amazing light-hearted, funny and witty, intelligibly critical, poetic and personal comic books.
Elsewhere No 2 is a collaboration with poet Nada Gordon. It's 24 pages of multi-cultural images drawn from a walk up Coney Island Avenue, Brooklyn. The comic's text is by Nada Gordon, modelled on Frank O'Hara's Second Avenue and written from notes taken on a bus trip down Coney Island Avenue in the opposite direction. As the song says, it's 'a great big melting pot' and it's wonderful too.
Gary Sullivan also has a nicely-illustrated essay in progress about Joe Brainard’s one-off collaboration with the poet Robert Creeley called Class of ‘47 on his blog, also called Elsewhere.You can order copies of the comics there as well.
Joe Brainard Self Portrait 1972
Robert Creeley strip by Gary Sullivan
Gary Sullivan (foto : Nada Gordon)
Gary is a participant in the Humpo feature edited by Rachel Loden and K.Silem Mohammad in the issue I’ve recently edited of Jacket magazine.
remember, dear visitors to the deletions, that you can simply click on the images, especially ones like the comic strip, to see larger size versions
23.7.07
Martin Edmond was born in Ohakune, New Zealand, the town in the cover photo of his new book Waimarino County & other excursions. The photo of the main street of Ohakune with Mount Ruapehu looming over it was taken by B.V. Davis in 1938. This book is an enthralling collection of discursive essays and short prose works concerned with memory, travelling, imagination and dreaming, identity and ‘other excursions’. To quote from an early part of the book ..when we had moved from Huntly to Heretaunga, and my father suffered his first breakdown and my mother announced herself as a poet, it came to be time for me to leave home and I did so on the Limited Express...A description of that formative train trip follows, and Martin's mother’s recent announcement draws attention to the fact that she was the well-known New Zealand poet Lauris Edmond. After finishing undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in English and anthropology Martin briefly worked as a junior lecturer at Victoria University, in Wellington. Then he joined the avant-garde theatre group Red Mole, touring New Zealand, the US, Mexico, UK and Europe. Martin moved to Sydney in 1981. He currently lives in Summer Hill and works as a writer and a taxi-driver. He keeps several blogs including the taxi-driving one, cleverly named dérives.
I mentioned Martin’s recent book Luca Antara : Passages in Search of Australia here on the deletions in January this year.
You can read a short prose piece by Martin Edmond on nzepc
Martin will be in conversation with Sydney poet Adam Aitken at
Better Read Than Dead Bookstore
265 King Street
Newtown, Sydney
at 6.30pm
Tuesday 7th August
17.7.07
Jacket magazine - new issue
Jacket 33
Guest editor (myself) Pam Brown
: : : : : Features : : : : :
*Gordon Ball: Unknown Collaborators:
photos from the world of Allen Ginsberg
and his many friends among the Beats,
from 1969 to Ginsberg's death in 1997
*Humor in Poetry: The Dangerfield Conundrum:
A Roundtable on Humor in Poetry -
80 pages of discussion from 200 pages of postings
to the HumPo List edited by
Rachel Loden and K. Silem Mohammad,
and featuring:
George Bowering, Maxine Chernoff
Katie Degentesh, Gabriel Gudding
Rachel Loden, Ange Mlinko
K. Silem Mohammad, D. A. Powell
Ron Silliman, Gary Sullivan
The Dangerfield Files, edited by Rachel Loden:
poems from the HumPo List:
Rachel Loden: Introduction
George Bowering, Maxine Chernoff
Gabriel Gudding, Rachel Loden
Ange Mlinko, K. Silem Mohammad
D. A. Powell,Ron Silliman
Gary Sullivan
*Mark Weiss: José Martí: "José Julián Martí y Pérez (1853-1895) may not
be unique as a political poet-martyr (one thinks of Byron and Lorca),
but he must have been one of the most politically involved. The very
model of the committed artist, he was 42 when he died in one of the first
engagements of the second Cuban War of Independence, of which he had
been chief propagandist and one of the principal planners. He had spent
his entire adult life in exile, chiefly in Mexico City and New York."
*Pieces on "Pieces of Air in the Epic", by Brenda Hillman: Barbara
Claire Freeman, Editor.
"The generic convention of the book review is monologic; however
nuanced and subtle, the constraints of the form typically allow the
inclusion of only one perspective. This collection of short texts on
the poems in Brenda Hillman's Pieces of Air in the Epic intends first,
to present a kind of collective 'book review,' that is, a form of writing
about poems that demands a plurality of individual voices; and second, to
provide a forum in which poets respond to and explore a particular poem."
- Barbara Claire Freeman
Introduction, by Barbara Claire Freeman
Marjorie Welish,Graham Foust,Evie Shockley
C.D. Wright,Forrest Gander,Carol Snow
Robert Hass,Michael Davidson,Claudia Keelan
Robert Kaufman,Norma Cole,Marjorie Perloff
Geoffrey G.O'Brien,Juliana Spahr,Calvin Bedient
Reginald Shepherd,Cole Swensen,Elizabeth Robinson
Nathaniel Tarn,Bin Ramke,Donald Revell
Patricia Dienstfrey,Michael Palmer
: : : : : Reviews : : : : :
Adam Aitken: "The Accidental Cage" by Michelle Cahill
Stan Apps: "Folly", by Nada Gordon.
Stan Apps: "My Angie Dickinson", by Michael Magee
Cynthia Arrieu-King: "The Man Suit" by Zachary Schomburg
Bridget Brooklyn: "Passion", by Brane Mozetic, translated by Tamara
Soban
Andrew J. Browne: "Don't Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing
after the New York School", edited by Daniel Kane.
Stephen Cope: "City Eclogue" by Ed Roberson
Penelope Cray: "The Wanton Sublime:A Florilegium of Whethers and
Wonders" by Anna Rabinowitz
Mark Dickinson: "Leaves of Field": with "Open Woods" and "Moving
Woods".by Peter Larkin
Patrick James Dunagan: "Remembering Joel Oppenheimer" by Robert
Bertholf
Martin Duwell: "Sugar Hits" by Philip Hammial
Michael Farrell: "Phosphorescence" by Graeme Miles
Cliff Fell: Eliot Weinberger, "What happened here" (second edition) and
"Muhammad", both published by Verso, 2006.
Norbert Francis: Tosa Motokiyu (edited by Kent Johnson and Javier
Alvarez). "Also, With My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords:
Araki Yasusada's Letters in English"
Noah Eli Gordon and Erik Anderson: Conversational Noise: Some Talk on
"Some Notes on My Programming", by Anselm Berrigan
Anne Heide: "hidde violeth i dde violet", by Kathleen Fraser
Cole Heinowitz: "Exchanges of Earth and Sky", by Jack Collom
Tom Hibbard: "Somebody Blew Up America and Other Poems"
by Amiri Baraka
Ben Hickman: "Remnants of Hannah" by Dara Wier
Carlos Hiraldo: "Unprotected Texts: Selected Poems, 1978-2006" by
Thomas Beckett
Craig Johnson: "Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems" by Noelle
Kocot
Paul Kahn: "I Was Blown Back", by Norman Fischer
Carl Kelleher: "Shake" by Joshua Beckman
Jake Kennedy: "The Men" by Lisa Robertson
Marc Kipniss: "The Bird Hoverer", by Aaron Belz
Louise Landes Levi: "Sunswumthru a Building", by Bob Arnold
Michelle Mahoney: "The Pajamaist", by Matthew Zapruder
Jill M. Neziri: "Forth a Raven", by Christina Davis
Michael Quattrone: "Overnight", by Paul Violi
Dr Mark Seton: "The Kamikaze Mind", by Richard James Allen
Rob Stanton: "A panic that can still come upon me" by Peter Gizzi
Paul Stephens: "The External Combustion Engine" by Michael Ives
James Stuart: "From Now" by Johanna Drucker
Ezra Tessler: "The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry and Social
Class" by Gary Lenhart
Dan Thomas-Glass: "Girly Man" and "World on Fire", both by Charles
Bernstein
Marjorie Welish: "The Totality for Kids", by Joshua Clover
: : : : : Interviews : : : : :
*Kathleen Fraser in conversation with Sarah Rosenthal, 2007:
"SR: Silence has been a central trope in your writing since early on.
It carries a range of meanings, from erasure to grief and loss to the
spaciousness of an open field. Perhaps we could trace some of the ways in
which silence has come up in your work over time."
*George Bowering in conversation with Rachel Loden:
Like a Radio in the Dark: An Email Interview, 2007
*Alison Knowles in conversation with Elizabeth-Jane Burnett,
September 2006. Alison Knowles is a visual artist known for her
soundworks,installations, performances, publications and association
with Fluxus, the experimental avant-garde group formally founded
in 1962.
*Eleni Sikelianos, author of The California Poem,
in conversation with Jesse Morse
*Catherine Wagner in conversation with Nathan Smith, 13 April 2007
: : : : : Articles : : : : :
*James Wallenstein: Ninnies and the Critics: "A Nest of Ninnies" by John
Ashbery and James Schuyler
*Geoffrey Cruickshank- Hagenbuckle with Alexander Nouvel: ZAP!
(Zukofsky, Apollinaire, and the X Men)
*Vernon Frazer and Kirpal Gordon:
Who We Are Now: A Retrospective of Michael Rothenberg
*Aram Saroyan: Contretemps: A Minimalist Parable
: : : : : Poems : : : : :
Mary Jo Bang: Three poems
Ken Bolton: Three poems: An Australian Suburban Garden;
EUROPE; For various movie directors
Michelle Cahill: Three poems: The Accidental Cage; Manhattan; Poppies
Justin Clemens: "The Mundiad", Book IV
Kelvin Corcoran: Three poems from 'Ulysses in the Car'
Alfred Corn: Two poems: Page and Cave; Trunk Show
Wystan Curnow: poem: Max
Norman Fischer: Formal Terms
Robert Gibbons: Two poems: That Internal World; At the End of Writing
Anna Gibbs: Culpable Blindness
John Hennessy: Coney Island Pilgrims
Katia Kapovich: Two poems: To Whom It May Concern; The Seventh String
Burt Kimmelman: Two poems: House, Normandy; Crumbs upon the Table
Rachel Loden: Three poems: Props to the Twentieth Century; Dick of the
Dead; The Pure of Heart, Those Murderers
Rupert Loydell: Two poems: The Secret Life of Mist; The Secret Life of
Light
Norman MacAfee: I Am Astro Place
Mark Mordue: Things That Year
John Muckle: Three Poems: Elizabeth Bishop; Nothing Wrong; Cyclomotors
Marc Nasdor: Five poems
Simon Robb: Excerpt from "Jane Fonda's Temple of Literature"
Sam Sampson: Three poems: The Ship Beautiful; Reel; Diagram
Don Share: On being philosophical
Jaya Savige: Two poems
Mark Schafer translates five poems by David Huerta
Jeffrey Side: Extracts from "Carrier of the Seed"
Stephen Sturgeon: Two poems: Friday; Fired
Paul Violi: Finish These Sentences
Jacket 33
Jacket magazine:
Editor: John Tranter
Associate Editor: Pam Brown
11.7.07
friday 13th
then get ready
Bastille Day
14th July
quatorze juillet
Prise de La Bastille by Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Hoüel
7.7.07
A Question of Fear
Earlier this week I listened to Alexis Wright presenting
a Sydney PEN lecture called A Question of Fear
Alexis Wright (foto : Eddie Jim)
Alexis Wright is a Waanji woman from the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. Her latest book Carpentaria won the 2007 Miles Franklin Award. She has worked extensively in government departments and Aboriginal agencies across four states and territories as a manager, educator, researcher and writer. Alexis was coordinator of the NT Aboriginal Constitutional Convention in 1993 and wrote Aboriginal Self Government for Lands Rights News, later quoted in full in Henry Reynold’s Aboriginal Sovereignty, 1996. She is also the author of Grog War and Plains of Promise
You can listen to this powerful lecture or download the transcript,
courtesy of ABC radio, by clicking here
5.7.07
The riches, the riches
On the train in to Central Station, I’d been reading Cinema Eden - a selection of essays by my favourite novelist Juan Goytisolo. When I say ‘favourite novelist’ I mean it. I don’t read many novels but I adore Juan Goytisolo’s prose. I like his critical writing, his novels, memoir - all of it. Since I first read Landscapes After The Battle in the late 1980s I have read everything he has written that I could find translated into English.
Anyway, after bombing out (or, at any rate, feeling that way) of my late-morning interview at the Arts Ministry, I decided, perhaps inspired by Juan Goytisolo’s small book, to uplift my general engagement and, hoping for cultural enrichment, to walk down to the Art Gallery of NSW to see The Arts of Islam.
But, after leaving my coat and bag at the hat check, I decided to have a look at the current Anselm Kiefer exhibition first. I’ve seen individual pieces by Anselm Kiefer before and when my partner, Jane Zemiro, and I were in Berlin some years ago we visited his ‘library installation’ at the Hamburger Bahnhof.
At the NSW Art Gallery the Kiefer artworks are strewn, Sydney-style, across various locations. As you leave a down-escalator you are sort of thrown onto a wall with a large truncated concrete staircase that was, according to the wall-didact, inspired by an Ingeborg Bachmann poem. This powerful work seems incidental to the traffic of “art-lovers” looking for the toilet or heading to another show, and the same goes for the rest of the installation. It feels, slightly horribly, a bit like an undisciplined circus. Kiefer’s interpretative sculptures of three of classical mythology’s goddesses are placed like decorative objects in a touristic pot-pourri shop right next to the cafeteria - in fact, they seem to be in the cafeteria as the staff clatter around them with food and drinks on trays and are stopped to answer location queries by lost “art-lovers”. The fallen palm-tree that accompanies Kiefer’s analysis or quest of the relationship between a fecund earthy field and its dire heavenly aspirations lies in the busy corridor between his large wall panels and a show on Picasso-et-al and modernism. Perhaps the curator here sees this possibly obstructive representation of Palm Sunday, and Jesus Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem, as belonging somewhere between modernist abstractions and passageway crowd management. Frankly, no matter what you think or feel about Kiefer’s work, the Art Gallery of NSW’s presentation of this sombre and serious artist is risible.
Installation at White Cube Gallery, U.K.
Seeing Anselm Kiefer’s large installation in Berlin was an utterly different experience. There, you could take this artist seriously. And you could surrender to his investigative art, whether bleak or wry, affected or genuine. The space was large enough, quiet enough (no cafeteria or bookshop within cooee of the artworks) to respond in whatever way you wanted.
Library installation (detail), Anselm Kiefer. (Foto - Pierre Joris)
Berlin's Museum for contemporary art opened in the former railway station, Hamburger Bahnhof, in November 1996. This gave the Nationalgalerie (National Gallery) the first permanent home for its collection of contemporary art.
The Hamburger Bahnhof was built 1846/47 in late classicist style. It is the only old terminal station building remaining in Berlin. For forty years it served as the terminal between Hamburg and Berlin until it was closed in 1884. And (already) in 1906 it was found to be too small for a station and was converted into a museum of traffic and building. Located in "no man’s land" between East and West Berlin, the Hamburger Bahnhof remained unused after the Second World War. Successive restoration began only after the GDR handed the building over to the City of Berlin in 1984. The war-torn building was inaccessible after 1945. It stood empty for many decades and
in 1987, the Hamburger Bahnhof was assigned to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Foundation of Prussian Cultural Heritage). In 1989 the competition for the conversion of the building was won by the architect Josef Paul Kleihues, a museum specialist who designed an ideal concept for the multi-functional usage of the new museum. After reconstruction and modernization the museum, as noted above, opened in November 1996. The first major exhibition followed in 1997 with works by Sigmar Polke.
Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
To end more positively on the riches of Wednesday, I'll direct The Deletions' visitors to Peter Campbell's article on these Palm Sunday works by Anselm Kiefer in the LRB earlier this year, and also say that the exhibition of the arts of Islam is excellent in spite of the expected and traditional absence of women (apart from two images - in a Maghrebi and an Afghani miniature) and even if this avid “art lover” had to crick and crane to read the poorly placed labels.
30.6.07
Saturday
Saturday, and I’ve spent today hanging Serengeti blinds on the back windows of the house. I think they must be ‘Serengeti-style’ blinds as they were purchased for a modest price at Spotlight in Penrith and don’t actually come from Serengeti, Tanzania. They’re more likely to have been ‘Made In China’. My hanging is possibly minutely crooked but passing strangers, blind people in a hurry and those with the naked eyes will probably not notice.
While I was going up and down the aluminium ladder I was thinking about the books I’ve been reading recently. I finished Joe Amato’s book Industrial Poetics : Demo Tracks for a Mobile Culture early last week. At first I found that I was resistant to the book. Its notes and bullet-style presentation seemed a bit scrappy to start with but then, as I kept reading, I began to follow Joe Amato's thinking on ‘how to tell the difference between life and art’ more receptively and I started to enjoy and empathise with segments recounting board meetings and job interviews from a poet’s viewpoint. I was always almost instantaneously sceptical of the first whiff of managerial language in my old job in a university library and in my previous careers. Joe Amato analyses the places ‘art’ is given by the ‘real world’ very convincingly and he firmly upholds a belief in whatever it is that makes poetry a ‘mysterious’ artform. This book crept up on me - my persistence was rewarded.
From the end of Industrial Poetics - “I have nothing at all to say. But I wanted to say it anyway.” Fellini’s sublimely absurd gesture in 8½ reminds us that most art haunts the peripheries of the orthodox, the administrative, the organizationally competent. If this has nothing to do with an aversion to thought or theory or intellectual work or even technique, neither does it suggest a reluctance to say what needs saying that “nothing” need be said. Industrial mojo bids us stay tuned and attuned to the present moment…Communities of poets and artists do what they can with the storehouse, the library, the archive, the authorized versions - this much they must do - but their overriding aim is to contribute…'
I’ve also been reading innovative women poets : an anthology of contemporary poetry and interviews. It’s edited by Elisabeth A. Frost and Cynthia Hogue. It is a collection of fourteen in-depth interviews with experimental women poets of the last forty years and includes lengthy selections of their poems and good brief introductions to each poet. It’s a fascinating and enriching book. The poets are the late Gloria Evangelina Anzaldua, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Jayne Cortez, Rachel Blau du Plessis, Alice Fulton, Susan Howe, Harryette Mullen, Alice Notley, Alicia Ostriker, Sonia Sanchez, Leslie Scalapino, C.D. Wright and (the late) Barbara Guest and Kathleen Fraser.
For Australians reading The Deletions, I bought my copy of both Industrial Poetics and innovative women poets via mail order from Dark Horsey Bookshop
The Eighteen Nineties is a Pelican book first published in 1913 and reprinted eight times until the edition I’ve been reading was published in 1939. I found it in a second-hand bookshop in Blackheath. When I expressed an interest in the book the co-proprietor of the shop, a lover of art, architecture and culture in general, Dorothy Quin, gave it to me. It’s a collection of essays about the fin de siècle but no, it’s not about or by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, it’s by Holbrook Jackson.
It is series of essays that review the art and ideas at the close of the Nineteenth Century and covers figures of the times like Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, the poet John Davidson, the playwright making an entrance - George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, and topics like 'Decadence', 'The Minor Poet', 'The New Dandyism', 'The New Fiction', 'The Revival of Printing', 'Black and White' and 'British Impressionism' among others. I've been interested to read the take on Francis Thompson who was, infamously, a god-possessed and fraught young druggie (opium) - a poet whose visions remind me of Cocteau, Blake, Ginsberg, and Michael Dransfield all together. One of the fascinating facts about Francis Thompson is that like the earlier poet, John Clare, he walked to find his fate. As a teenager (from the age of seventeen) Francis Thompson studied medicine in Manchester but abandoned repeated attempts to take a degree and decided he wanted to live by writing. He tried earning a living in various jobs but eventually, in 1885, hurt by his father's disapproval, he left Preston and walked to London. Actually walking into years of poverty, laudanum addiction and destitution.
I found a copy of a pocket-sized pamphlet of Francis Thompson's The Hound of Heaven at another very good (meaning 'kind-of-irresistible') second-hand bookshop,Lamdha, in Wentworth Falls last summer.
26.6.07
What to say ?
As every Australian resident knows, there is currently, and suddenly, a national political emphasis posed on past and ongoing crises concerning the Indigenous peoples of this country.
I’ve been a member of ANTaR, Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation, for some years and I will leave it to that organisation to speak, but I do want to draw attention to the extraordinary political stress that has been imposed upon Australian Indigenous people in the last week.
Check Living Black and Message Stick for commentary, information and for events for the upcoming NAIDOC (National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) Week from July 8th until July 15th.
17.6.07
In Blackheath
What to do on a rainy Saturday night in Blackheath? Stroll across to one of the pubs on the highway and meet up with friends. Some fresh from a rivetting, brain-stretching couple of hours at the Blackheath Philosophy Forum and a poet, Tim Thorne, visiting from Launceston, Tasmania. All anyway ready for a glass of wine, a quick dinner and all flush with tickets to a concert in the Blackheath Community Centre, the veritable hub of the town.
The Spooky Men’s Chorale is an amazingly ‘different’ kind of acappella singing group. No dinner suits here, no kitschy chintz and no spiritual agenda. It is a group of sixteen very talented modern Mountain Men who perform with wit, aplomb and in great voice. From their own blurb they are a ruthless bunch of larrikins based in the Blue Mountains. The Spooky Men strike while the irony is hot.
The Spooky Men's Chorale, Blackheath, 16th June 07 (fotos: Trish Davies)
Spooky Men in Canberra (foto: Andy Cranston)
The Kazakhstan Kowgerls from Tasmania, were in Blackheath as part of their Hit the Rode Yak tour of the Blue Mountains. Their music is a mixture of open-throat singing, country and western (but no yodelling) and as someone remarked, they’re kind of like The-Kransky-Sisters-Meet-The-Leningrad-Cowboys. Very satirical.
Kazakhstan Kowgerls, Blackheath, 16th June 07 (fotos: Trish Davies)
Together in Tassie 2006 (foto: Sarah Delaney)
And on Sunday morning call in at the recently opened (only three months ago) Hat Hill Gallery to see the current show of paintings by Christine Townend and a wonderful collection of photos of 1920s Australian theatre, recently acquired by gallery co-director, Viken Minassian.
12.6.07
Red Room Company
Johanna Featherstone has put the poems and the miniature essay/lecture from Occasional Poetry up on the web at the Red Room Company web site
6.6.07
Poetics from the end of the century
From 1992 to 2000 in the U.S., Los Angeles writer and film maker Christopher Reiner edited WITZ: A Journal of Contemporary Poetics. He says “ It's no longer as contemporary as it was back then, but I'm putting PDF files of the original issues up on my web site, for anyone who's interested.”
So far, there are seven issues available for download, with more on the way. Visit the WITZ Archives
Stephen Ratcliffe :Interoptions, Nick Piombino on Writing and Persevering,Edward Foster on Alice Notley and Douglas Oliver, Michelle Murphy on John High, Stephen-Paul Martin on Jacques Servin, Keith Waldrop on Cole Swensen, Susan Smith Nash on Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Bruce Campbell on Walter Abish, and ‘Witz End’ by David Bromige.
John High’s ‘Working Notes from Moscow’, Clint Burnham interviews Steve McCaffery, Raffael de Gruttola on Steve McCaffery,Karl Young on Anne Tardos, Susan Smith Nash on Barry Silesky, John Tritica on Stephen-Paul Martin, Thomas Taylor on Rochelle Owens, Alan Davis on Harryette Mullen. Susan Smith Nash on John Perlman, Serge Gavronsky interviews Raquel Levy, Johanna Drucker on Chris Tish, Clint Burnham on Karen MacCormak, John Tritica on Sheila E. Murphy, Charles Plymell on Jim McCrary.
David Bromige / Robert Grenier : A Conversation, Susan Smith Nash on Kathleen Fraser and Janet Grey.
Charles Bernstein on ‘Community and the Individual Talent’, Daniel Barbiero on subjectivity, Dan Featherston on political poetry, Chris Stroffolino on Cole Swensen, Clint Burnham on Pam Rehm.
Mark Wallace On the Lyric As Experimental Possibility,94 Karl Young on ‘Roman Reading’, Robert Grenier and Chris Stroffolino on Don Byrd, Daniel Barbiero on The Art of Practice, and Harry Polkinhorn on Left Hand Books.
Susan Smith Nash on Leslie Scalapino, Mark DuCharme on ‘Poem’s Tensity’, Stephen Ellis on Edward Foster and Susan Smith Nash, David Giannini on John Perlman.
For those who might have been turned away due to the venue having reached its capacity, Johanna Featherstone’s Red Room Company blog carries a description of the Occasional Poetry event at the Sydney Writers Festival last Sunday evening. I’ll link the final documentation, including the poems and the ‘mineslec’ (miniature essay/lecture) once Johanna has put it up on the web
29.5.07
Three photos
Unpacking my photos I find lots from France but I especially like these three.
Resnais dreaming
In Brittany
dark grey granite houses
tuck low into the landscape
like rocks
darker hedgerows protect them
from the winds we walk into
along the coast
small red tractors
plough patches of pink soil,
across the narrow road
eschallots burst
from black plastic groundstrips
this is the kind of place
you’d locate a film
but not live in,
Godard made one here
but none of us
remembers it
bleached & tufted grasses conceal
the purple thistle
on the windswept bank
above a glinting choppy bay
a group of hikers
singing loudly
strides by
just outside the house
& here comes Daniel,
with a wicker basket
of saltwater prawns -
back from fishing in the rocks
some of the last beret-wearers
of the 21st century
are on their knees
weeding their fields
at sunset
the rye field blurs
like double vision
Godard dreaming
(click to enlarge images)
25.5.07
22.5.07
awake and refreshed
tho with nothing on the page
Derek Motion reviews Peel me a zibibbo in the latest issue of galatea resurrects and ends with two lines from
Ken Bolton, quoted from the title poem.
Peel Me A Zibibbo is a group of recent poems - five poems written for friends. It's a 14 page C5 sized chapbook. Here's the title poem -
Peel me a zibibbo
I could go
in any direction
but it's best that here and now
I remain lesbian,
keep my vanishing cream
sealed.
I'll go south
eventually
to follow the sheen
of your signals,
in the meantime
my problem's like how to
design a wall didact -
serif or not's
a big decision
*
it's October so
the bogong moths
are back
and the koels - the October
crack of dawn racket -
are back again too,
mauve jacaranda petals
are stuck
on the windscreen wipers rubber
*
by now the wall text task
is impossible -
application decreasing,
attention span diminishing -
transparency an aim,
how coded the coding
*
imperfection in kindness
comes with the void,
you need to
choose
the 'I'm feeling lucky' google option
*
drinking in the cemetery
sounds like an early
Nick Cave song
but it's
something-to-do,
it's also the subject
of Paddy Fordham's
drawing
*
should I start carrying
my books
in clear plastic bags
inside
my polyester document bag,
is this a solution ?
16° centigrade
95% humidity
what a precipitate place
*
shouting Shakespeare aloud
to the sea
in Surfers' Paradise
in 1964
after hurling your body down
fine off-white sand dunes.
now it's 2006
you're experiencing thanatos
high up on a Seidler balcony.
if you are in doubt
(slurp over drinks)
what gives the false poet
such confidence ?
*
awake and refreshed
tho with nothing on the page
*
John T phones -
this cloudy gloomy
early summer day
is 'like the fifties' he says.
every day ?
miserable childhood ?
photographic weather memory
à la recherche du temps inclément
*
I was reading
about the sweet potato farmers
of Osaka
living such long lives -
nonogenarians, centogenarians -
when Kurt called in with his new book
Hyper Taiwan
Taiwan - it's 'sweet potato island'
hi Kurt, hi John T,
hi Nick, Paddy, hi Shakespeare,
peel me a zibibbo
would you,
one of you guys ?
Ivy Alvarez writes a short review of My Lightweight Intentions
Never-Never Books * 157 Wentworth Street *
Blackheath * NSW 2785 * Australia
13.5.07
Meshings
NEW AT MESHWORKS :
Cambridge Experimental Women's Poetry Festival
Cambridge University, UK - October 2006
Organizer: Emily Critchley
The CEWPF feature brings you video documentation of readings and talks by:
Andrea Brady, Lisa Samuels, Kathleen Fraser, Susan M. Schultz, Rod Mengham,Susana Gardner, Geraldine Monk, Peter Middleton, Redell Olsen, Carol Mirakove, Keith Tuma & Justin Katko, Marianne Morris, Tom Raworth, Catherine Wagner, Coupons+Coupons, Camille PB, Kai Fierle-Hedrick, Kristen Kreider,Tim Atkins, Ken Edwards, Wendy Mulford, Peter Manson, Maggie O'Sullivan,Caroline Bergvall, Leslie Scalapino and Lucy Sheerman.
For more further documentation of the Festival, please visit the Archive of the Now and HOW2
Unpacking my posters I found this one screenprinted by
Ken Bolton in 1979 or 1980 for the Wollongong Poets’ Union reading series. It was printed at Coalcliff, on recycled matrix computer paper provided by Leigh Stokes (then of
Wollongong uni). It’s a beauty.
click on image to enlarge
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