This coming Saturday:

JOHN FORBES
Ars Poetica




















John Forbes scrutinizes the latest issue
of New Zealand literary magazine 'Landfall'
at 'a-little-loungeroom-reading' poetry party
at our home in Ultimo, Sydney
in Summer 1996



On January 23rd, 2008 it became 10 years since the terrific Australian poet, John Forbes died suddenly, at the age of 47. To mark the anniversary of his death, John’s fellow poets, his family, friends, fans and poetry-lovers in general, are invited to come and remember his life and work.

Readers include: Jaya Savige on the influence of John Forbes’ work on a younger generation of poets, Pam Brown on knowing John in the 1980s in ‘Petersham Days’ and John Tranter, Alan Wearne, Steve Kelen, Rae Desmond Jones and Gig Ryan.

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Raving against the space
where the poem sounds
like a revolving door that
makes the noise a car makes
bumping into the dole –
that’s the target.
                 John Forbes, ‘Ars Poetica’

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free event
3.30pm for 4pm
Venue: gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe
RSVP: gleebooks - 9660 2333
Info: Click here

Books available at Gleebooks:
John Forbes Damaged Glamour
John Forbes Collected Poems
Ken Bolton (editor) Homage To John Forbes
published by (Brandl & Schlesinger)

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Ngapartji Ngapartji is the title of a theatre piece currently in performance in Sydney. It is ambitious, unwieldy, sometimes rough-edged, sometimes perfect. As a theatre experience, it is very powerful. It tells the story, in Pitjanjatjara and English, of the dispossession of Indigenous people by British nuclear tests at Maralinga in the South Australian desert in the late 1950s/early 1960s. But it has a global reach that encompasses Afghani, Japanese and Australian soldiers’ perspectives on atomic testing. It is told through dance, story, song and film. Hearing Talking Heads' Once In A Lifetime and Bob Dylan's The Weight and other songs in Pitjanjatjara is a unique pleasure.

ngapartji ngapartji :
I give you something - You give me something



Produced by Big hART, a group of professional artists, arts workers and producers who have been making work together for 15 years – creating theatre, film, television, painting, photography, dance, new media and radio.

Big hART most often works in small communities around the country, with people experiencing the effects of marginalisation in regional, rural, and geographically or socially isolated communities. Big hART experiments with the process of making art with such groups over three-year periods, honing the quality of their work, which is showcased in national and international festivals and media. This often creates new opportunities for participants, helps build skills in communities, assists regional development and helps foster a more inclusive Australian culture.

In addition to Ngapartji Ngapartji, Big hART is currently running a number of other projects around Australia, including Gold (Griffith and the wheatbelt, NSW); Lucky and No Comply (Tasmania’s north-west coast); Street Survivor (Melbourne); and Radio Holiday/Drive-In Holiday (north-west coast, Tasmania) and has recently completed the Northcott Project (Surry Hills, NSW) and Junk Theory (Cronulla, NSW).

Performance Information : click here
On now - Season Ends: 10 February 2008
Belvoir St Theatre
25 Belvoir St,
Surry Hills
Sydney

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Peter McGregor
anarchist, hedonist, academic, writer, activist, friend
1947 - 2008



Obituaries :

one
two
three

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This is the film, Rock My Religion, that was a component of the retrospective exhibition of Dan Graham’s work that, when I saw it some years ago in Paris, provided the impetus for my poem
Patti Smith Was Right

Patti Smith was right

these cold, known objects
                            are not very likeable –
      aluminium frames
         & curved glass with optical tricks –
but I am ‘at ease’
     at this show,
there are some nice little-grin ideas –
        like television 
              screening outside
          on the suburban home’s front lawn,
& time-delay verité videos
  to amuse the usually uncrackable
                                   hardened gallery-goer

  ∇

have I flipped ?       into a strangely placid
           political zone         a lack of clutter
  and environmental concern -
these things are so simple,
                   two hours here & I begin to enjoy
                                             Dan Graham
more than Soutine, Braque, Delaunay,
     Bourgeois, Basquiat, Sherrie Levine,
         Agnes Martin -               although
I can not deny my memory 
         of her beautiful mid-1960’s picture -
                        ‘Milk River’ -
nor her small collection
             of pick-up trucks -     the green Chevie
     glinting with polish – the very driveable
  Dodge parked
outside her desert home.

  ∇

I spend over an hour watching,
    surrendering to
          Dan Graham’s big “Rock/God” video
that makes a simple
           anthropological connection 
              between US tribal & religious ritual -
 group dancing, shaking, speaking in tongues-
                                      and mosh pits and rock music -
          so when Patti Smith sings
“Jesus died for somebody’s sins
                               but not mine”
                                                   I am converted.

  ∇

Patti Smith was right,
                     twenty-five years ago,
to say that rock music,
              meaning, then, for her, punk-rock,
would replace          painting
                                           & sculpture
     as representative of untranscended
                                                    life itself.

You can find brief notes on Agnes Martin here

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the NOW now 2008
is on this coming weekend
18 - 20 January
at Wentworth Falls

for program and tickets click here

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Went to the cinema today. What a truly great film - I'm Not There. (Me neither, maybe.) Todd Haynes is a brilliant film-maker. The musicians include Tom Verlaine, Jeff Tweedy, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Cat Power with a fabulous rolling organ just like The Band's, Sonic Youth, Richie Havens, Antony and the Johnsons and, and, and just listen to Stephen Malkmus singing 'Ballad of a Thin Man' and the gorgeous, bright kid, Marcus Carl Franklin, the only actor who actually sings in the film - 'When The Ship Comes In' - and Cate Blanchett and the other actors' perfect lip synchs. Lateral timing, layering, representation of how identity is never fixed, how anyone is a different person every five/ten/whatever years and Bob Dylan is an imaginative imagination. Post-modern, beautiful and terrific.





of course you can click on it to see this retro 70s poster in larger format


http://www.IMNOTTHERE-movie.com

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John Forbes
Ars Poetica




Raving against the space
where the poem sounds
like a revolving door that
makes the noise a car makes
bumping into the dole –
that’s the target.
                 John Forbes, ‘Ars Poetica’

On January 23rd, 2008, it will be 10 years since the death of the Australian poet, John Forbes, at the age of 47. To mark the anniversary, John’s fellow poets, his family, friends, fans and poetry-lovers in general, are invited to come and celebrate his
life and work.

Speakers include: Jaya Savige on the influence of John Forbes’ work on the younger generation of poets and Pam Brown’s memoir, Petersham Days.

Readers include: Pam Brown, John Tranter, Alan Wearne,
Morgan Smith, Steve Kelen.

John Forbes' …insistences are always exciting, both intellectually and viscerally. He marries The Vulgar and the Elevated in a fashion no one else does, demonstrating the true function of Popular Culture and Cultural Studies is as subject matter for poetry. His vision is constantly making the ordinary extraordinary. His always brilliant similes renew the world, and the word…
                 Don Anderson, cover note to 'Damaged Glamour' (1998)

Saturday, February 02, 2008
3.30 for 4pm Free Event

Venue: gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe
RSVP: gleebooks - 9660 2333
Info: Click here

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                Ken Searle


                INTROSPECTION : New Drawings

              Opens: 6-8pm Wednesday 16 January 2008
              Closes: 5pm Saturday 2 February 2008

              Watters Gallery
              109 Riley St.
              East Sydney

              Tel: 61 2 9331 2556
              info@wattersgallery.com
              www.wattersgallery.com

              Hours: Tues and Sat: 10am - 5pm
              Wed, Thurs, Fri: 10am -7pm


                 click on image to enlarge

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                               Jan McKemmish, writer and academic                                           1950 - 2007

Only four weeks after becoming ill with cancer, my friend of thirty-one years and my co-writer of various performance texts,
Jan McKemmish, died at the Freemasons' Hospital in East Melbourne on the evening of Xmas Eve. My partner Jane and
I deeply mourn her death.



(poster by jan mackay)



Rumi
A Community of the Spirit

There is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street,
and being the noise.

Drink all your passion,
And be a disgrace.

Close both eyes
To see with the other eye.

Open your hands,
If you want to be held.

Sit down in this circle.

Quit acting like a wolf, and feel
the shepherd’s love filling you.

At night your beloved wanders.
Don’t accept consolations.

Close your mouth against food.
Taste the lover’s mouth in yours.

*

Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought!

Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.

Flow down and down in always
widening rings of being.

Michael Hurley read these selections from Rumi’s poems at Jan’s funeral
in Richmond, Melbourne on Saturday 29th December.

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Jan McKemmish, Redfern, Sydney in the mid 1980s
(fotos by Margot Nash)

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    That's the spirit !

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This snap of an oniomaniac, (that is the word, isn't it Melissa?) shopaholic, (well, the trolleys must have been full once), alcoholic, kinda bleak-yet-arty Australian xmas tree arrived in my inbox today, via the University of Technology Sydney academic staff's xmas-greeting emails. I hope visitors to the deletions can appreciate it and meanwhile, I'll wish you, my three or four (five or six?) friendly, faithful readers, all the best for the silly season and for 2008

Santa says 'remember, click on pic to enlarge'

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  I heart UbuWeb
  http://www.ubu.com

There is so much on UbuWeb and it's entirely free.
You just need to make the time.
Factor it in, if you're planning a festive season break.


(does that read like a commercial?)

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wonderama fluoroama diorama

A museum in a town called Mount Victoria - it's kind of Victorian




Stuffed, embarrassed or bashful, fauna


click on the images to enlarge them, if you're game

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Adelaide, the Athens of the South, has been hosting an international guitar festival that wraps up this weekend. If you stay on in town until Tuesday night you can catch the final in the Lee Marvin Readings - for details CLICK HERE

                        'I'm looking forward to Tuesday night'- Lee Marvin

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Also - just published -
The last issue of Jacket magazine for 2007
(special stocking-stuffer issue!)

Click Here To Read Jacket 34

Editor: John Tranter | Associate Editor: Pam Brown

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Steve Evans has published the 2007 Attention Span - responses to his annual invitation for listings of what poets are reading. To visit this year's list CLICK HERE
For my contribution to Attention Span CLICK HERE










Steve Evans and Rrose Selavy, 2005

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GALATEA RESURRECTS (A POETRY ENGAGEMENT)
November 30, 2007
Edited by By Eileen Tabios

Galatea Resurrects (A Poetry Engagement) is pleased to release its Eighth Issue with 64 new reviews/engagements including Pam Brown on John Tranter’s Urban Myths : 210 Poems, Peter Minter’s blue grass and Philip Hammial’s Voodoo Realities

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Red Room Radio, the audio branch of The Red Room Company, profiles contemporary Australian poetry and poets through interviews, readings and spoken adventures.
In December 2007, a New and Selected Summer Series will be broadcast over the Community Radio Network. Individual shows will include an interview between Johanna Featherstone and the poet, plus poets’ readings. The profiled poets include Pam Brown, Adam Aitken, Claire Potter, Ella Holcombe, JS Harry, Emily Ballou, Jane Gibian and Jaya Savige.

Beginning 4th December 2007 from 6.04 pm (EST) Red Room Radio will be broadcast via the Community Radio Network on Tuesdays. Phone 02 9310 2999 for more information on how to receive this broadcast.

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What she say?
The lying rodent is cactus ?
Really ? Great !

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 Bert Flugelman's Pyramid Tower a.k.a. The Silver Shish Kebab
  (from 'Sydney' magazine)

Yes, that’s right - that’s Bert Flugelman’s silver sculpture in a more yellowy-green light than usual, in this glamorous photograph from the monthly glossy supplement to Sydney’s daily morning newspaper.

In the 1990’s the sculpture was, without consultation, removed from Martin Place ( by then re-named, without consultation, ‘Martin Plaza’) and placed (or 'dumped') in a city council depot yard in Ultimo, just around the corner from where I lived. It lay there, on its side, for years, until its reinstatement, without consultation, in a small space in the city near the revamped York Street.

Here are my old poems that mention these events and others about My City Of Sydney (and Tommy Leonetti's too) from a decade ago and then later, around 2000.

In Surry Hills

faintly scribbled in sky-blue pencil
  on the front wall of my house
 in Surry Hills in 1971 -
“is this the hostel where the lazy & fun-loving
                                    start up the mountain”
I don’t think anyone entering the house
   had heard of F. O’Hara,
their T-Rex records under their arms,
               sauntering
      out to the kitchen to lean against
 the fur-lined door I’d made
    to honour  Meret Oppenheim
& for a sensual lean
                         as well

At the Ian Burn show
 MCA 1997

at the Ian Burn show
  there’s a badly recorded
b&w video of Ian Burn
      & colleagues       performing
anti-authoritarian art spiels -
drumkit, keyboards, guitar, voice -
   it’s the ‘Art & Language’ days,
the mid-seventies -         recorded,
   most likely,    on a Sony portapak
        (I set one up -     a tripod
     in the lounge room
       of our communal house
 & let it run     full twenty-minute
       brackets   to film   quotidian comings
   & goings).
ah -       here’s Terry Smith
   with plenty of hair - a stringy beard
&, possibly, an Afro -   singing along
            in the refrain -
“...ee...gal - it - tar - i - an...ism...!”
       gustily.
I’m chuckling now -      this is
   amazingly cheering -       I feel
      it’s my culture - or was - &, easily,
  could become
                   karaoke !
as it contains,       for me,
    equivalent nostalgia.
ingenuous, idealistic
                         and schismatic !
 direct-action practising populist artists
    (anti-institutional-intellectual-academy)
vs
 theoretical conceptual post-object artists
    (yet not always nor certainly pro-academic)
it was my schism too,      our exegesis,
      “artists think” ?      well, maybe -
they did,           for a decade
all under the same
                         tin roof


In Ultimo in ‘98

I maximize my traipsing
              round the district -

at the end of Bay Street
  Bert Flugelman’s silver shish-kebab
                 lies abandoned
in the Sydney City Council yard
   behind the garbage trucks garage
      (“Living City”
           say the
               t-shirts)

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Another think coming

on time,
speeding into the cold shade
in the mica-blue daihatsu,
hailstone dings patched 
with felt-tipped pens
and nail polish,
towards York Street,
the only street
left standing 
after two centuries
of demolition –   
its sandstone Victoriana
like a row 
of determined invalids
suddenly brought into daylight,
stunned in a gone world.

cement-dusted street corners
draped with orange vinyl netting -
framing the unannounced return
of Bert Flugelman’s
silver shish-kebab. 

an un-hoped-for cityscape -
two clocks
on the same building
displaying different times

having,         so far, 
dodged all civics conferences -
now, punctually, I attend
stressed-finished
seminar rooms -
a beautifully literal
painted-on patinae
of grime and cracks.

buoyed by 
off-to-the-second-
day-of-a-conference-
eagerness,
this flâneur 
drives everywhere,
imaginary ram-raider
skittling that bricoleur
clutching a fascinating
collection of spoils
in a palm organiser.


attention,      attention ,
    may I have your 
              attention

sorry                no -
I’m reviewing a few
windows of opportunity
from my workstation desktop,
on the actual desk –
the pale golden colour 
of white ginseng
steaming in a china cup
perched on a silvery 
compact-disc coaster,
screwed-up pages, red ball-point,
small black radio emitting news -
political party supporters’ dreams 
weakened by boom time fluctuations
like comets in a spin 


were ‘we’ 
not to apply
serious scholarship
to metro profit margins’
most pressing questions -
‘we’ might find ‘we’
 have
another think coming.

money now 
determines class,
focus, promise, function 
& an era
of boredom
tolerated by 
the middle classes 
ends

mistaking the ruins
for decoration
the dig reveals
bits of polyvinyl chloride,
ribbons of audio tape,
the usual aluminia –
the site becomes a museum,
the souvenir shop’s
elegant glass counters
house miniature replications
of christianity’s clean spires
carefully erected by
gigantic Russian helicopters
in time for the international
sports event
some time back
in the year 2000

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Interesting articles and discussions of the marginalisation of women poets can be found in the latest issue of the US-based magazine Chicago Review including links to further discourse on various blogs. And there’s a forum on the perceived exclusion of womens’ experimental poetry by patriarchal poets in the UK in the upcoming issue of Jacket magazine.
I think this discussion needs to be raised again in Australia. Are there any younger women poets out there with the time and dedication to construct a survey and write it up ?

dear readers, remember, if you click on the bolder, darker grey words in the text they will link you to web sites

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To view more of Trish Davies' photos of Kurt Brereton's exhibition opening at Hat Hill Gallery on November 3rd click here

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art opening this coming saturday 3rd november

Rise: Kurt Brereton

Hat Hill Gallery
3 Hat Hill Road
Blackheath

Opening talk by Pam Brown
6pm Saturday 3rd November

Exhibition continues until 25th November
More info click here

From the catalogue notes : “The title of the show RISE alludes to a host of connotations – of climatic increasing in sealevels, air temperatures and greenhouse gases. There is also a play on the risible; humorous play acting - taking the piss out of the deathly serious - as an antidote to the morbidity that surrounds us at every media news corner.”

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Snorkel Issue 6 is now available for perusal. Edited by Cath Vidler with assistance from associate editor Nick Reimer. Poems by Michael Hall : Pam Brown : David Prater : Kerrin P. Sharpe : Changming Yuan : Harry Ricketts : Nirmala l. Vasikaran : Sarah Jane Barnett : Todd Swift : Ruth Arnison : Martha Hardy-Ward : Mary Cresswell : Greg McLaren : Chris Price : Carol Jenkins : Sue Fitchett

meanwhile, more from the manicured, topiaried town of leura - just a day or two ago

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