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

---

     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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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/)

---

                              Vale Willy de Ville


                    Obituaries :
                          one
                          two
                          three
                          four

---

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 :

criminal daze

Yesterday I went to see Matteo Garrone’s film of Roberto Saviano’s novel about the Camorra syndicate in Naples and Caserta, Italy - Gomorrah. It’s a powerful exposé of corruption and of the brutal methods used to recruit young men who become so entangled in the web of crime that they have no choice but to continue living in a truly violent world. Only a few can even contemplate escape. Mattone deftly mixes and melds five stories into one. An extraordinary film of a cruel and frightening aspect of Italy that tourists only hear, read or see films about.




This afternoon I went to hear Peter Doyle give an illustrated talk on his cultural history of Sydney in the 1920s via records of criminals of the day. He has just published another book Crooks Like Us, after having spent many, many hours delving into the forensic photography archive at Sydney’s Justice & Police Museum.








Peter Doyle curated an exhibition of photos and published an accompanying book City of Shadows in 2005.



                                                Peter Doyle

Many Sydneysiders also know Peter as “Peter ‘Rockin’ Doyle”, the amazing guitarist from the bands Wasted Daze, The Magnetics and The Bopcats that played around the inner western suburbs in the mid-late 1970s.
Since then he has completed a PhD, written a novel, The Devil’s Jump, and finically researched the police archives to write the criminal history books and he is now an academic teaching media at Macquarie University. Of course, he still likes to boogie - the Doyle-Bongers Downhome Quartet – a roots blues jazz funk steel guitar and saxophone combo was getting into the groove as I left the event.


     Click to enlarge -Assembled bands The Bopcats, The Layabouts, Ratbags of Rhythm
      Peter Doyle in white shirt fifth from the right

---

I like this perplexed question from a review of a new blockbuster anthology of Australian literature in today's Sydney Morning Herald.

Rehab for Everyone

hands so cold 
             fingers cold 
tucked under legs
   sitting in insect hiss 
           low white noise
   gas heater undertone 
        no other sound 
                              nothing 

almost asleep, 
       a car pulling up the hill

        a currawong 
  does that shrill thing 
                    into pink air

a huge open yawn 
           almost breaks my jaw

  the pen that makes the marks 
            alters the angles of the letters

a patch 
       of  yesterday’s chocolate 
              stuck to my corduroy sleeve -
a signal 
         imagined and interpreted

we look back 
            at the years in the tops
     waiting to be taken out of time

red brick 
       wall map of Australia 
      grass green carpet
mustard coloured plastic chairs 
          clumpy piling on the mittens

mitts on the keyboard 
         pushing thoughts and jingles
                                                out 
   to Dublin to Seattle, 
            Adelaide, Kane`ohe, 
                       Faversham, Glebe

sadly notating dim trivia 
        me-minus-you 
                    outside community

literary festivals 
           can’t help anyone 
       like a rehab book sale

making mistakes, 
             so different 
      from being morally wrong

in an unsettling world 
              it‘s a rabbit life,
built the walls from Castrol cases 

black tyre ribbons
                  strewn 
       like a giant’s licorice 
under the striated cutting
             siding on the highway, 
say goodbye 
           to the Woodford bends

sometimes the clunky 
             can incandesce 
      but I want to know
how to vitalize gawkiness, 

      sometimes 
I’m in my no-mind     sometimes 
          in a technological mindlessness 
  sometimes nowhere near limber, 
                          although that’s unusual

some people 
          just float along all the time 
     accumulating the placid

       sometimes 
 when you think you’re going down 
                   you’re not,
you’re going straight ahead 
                         to a utopia of modernity.

                     Russolo, Carrà, Boltonioni, Marinetti, Boccioni, Severini

---

This blog seems to have become a kind of 'what's on' space lately. I hope to post some actual ideas, notes, poems, maybe even thoughts here again soon. In the meantime, I am happy to have been invited to read poems at the RhiZomic readings in Newtown, Sydney at 7pm on Wednesday evening, July 29th. Please come along if you're out and about in Newtown.

---

To see some snapshots from the Museum of Contemporary Art event on Sunday July 12th click here and to read about the event's intention scroll down to the previous post

   a roneo is a roneo is a roneo
    (from screenprint & staples to www)

Panel: Ken Bolton   Lucas Ihlein   John Tranter
Chair: Pam Brown

What do you do when transnational publishing companies don’t dig your poetry?
Go underground and diy. Take control of your aesthetic and represent your culture properly! These men have done it and will tell you how and why:

Using pens & pencils, roneo duplicators, staples, and silk screen printing, Ken Bolton and his gang made beautiful books, magazines and posters. Ken was the founder & editor of Magic Sam and Otis Rush magazines. He is a poet and art critic and the publisher of Little Esther Books. He lives in Adelaide and manages Dark Horsey Bookshop (eaf.asn.au/darkhorsey.htm) at the Experimental Art Foundation. Ken was at the hub of the hip, arty resistance of the late 1970s.

Lucas Ihlein is an artist who creates and harnesses social situations through communicative exchange. Since 2005, he has been working on a series of blog-as-art projects about particular locations (lucazoid.com) Lucas was a co-founder of the SquatSpace collective (squatspace.com) which engages in the politics (and pleasures) of space in Sydney. In 2004 he helped establish the Network of UnCollectable Artists (NUCA) (uncollectables.net) He designs and manages websites. He is also involved with Big FAG Press, an offset printing collective in Alexandria (bigfagpress.org)

Editor of the highly acclaimed, very contemporary online poetry magazine 'Jacket'(jacketmagazine.com) John Tranter, vaguely remembers the 70s even though he spent some of them living in Singapore and Brisbane. He was the publisher of Transit books and produced many poetry programs for ABC radio. John is a poet with many titles published both in Australia and overseas. His most recent collection is Urban Myths (UQP). He will talk about what to do now - diy on the www. Distribution? - no problema!

Chair : Pam Brown (once known as Cocabola)

             Ken Bolton, Magic Sam silkscreen cover at MCA 2009

             Magic Sam case at MCA 2009

          John Tranter, silk screen poster, late 70s, at MCA 2009


Avoiding Myth & Message:
Australian Artists & the Literary World

Free entry

Museum of Contemporary Art,
Circular Quay,
Sydney

Sunday July 12, 2.30pm

---

                   Micky Allan, silk screen poster 1978 at MCA 2009


                          presented by


                              thanks to Morgan Smith & Glenn Barkley
                             further info click here

---

                                       Vale Pina Bausch

                                  (Photos by Uli Weiss and Guy Delahaye)

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To see some photos from the MCA talks on Sunday 28th June click here and for information about the event, read on -


today’s young appreciators
(my dream a drink with John,Pam & Vicki)

      Elizabeth Allen    on   Vicki Vidiikas
      Tim Wright         on   Pam Brown
      Keri Glastonbury   on   John Forbes

In this event, three young Australian poets will pay homage to the work and influence of three major poets who were working in the 70s and beyond, and who feature in the exhibition.

Elizabeth Allen is a Sydney bookseller and poet. Her essays and poetry have been widely published in Australian magazines and journals. Her chapbook, Forgetful Hands, was published by Vagabond Press in 2005.

Vicki Vidiikas was a well known poet around Balmain in the late 1960s. Her experiences in the heady world of dope and sex in Sydney and India were the materials of much of her sharp, knowingly sapient poetry. She took chances in both her life and her writing. Vicki's 1974 collection of prose pieces, Wrappings, revealed her as one of the most talented poets of the decade. She died, at the age of 50, in 1998.

Keri Glastonbury is a poet and lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle and is the poetry editor of Overland magazine.

John Forbes was a true original. Although his output was modest it was intense, deft and often funny. His poems probe Australia's cultural and political place in the world, often via art. He founded Surfers Paradise magazine. Forbes' considerable influence and the 'luminous hum' of his brilliant poetry is greatly valued in Australian poetry. He died suddenly, at the age of 47, in 1998.

Tim Wright collaborates on editing When Pressed, an online journal,(whenpressed.net), and writes an occasional blog (swimswam.wordpress.net)

Pam Brown's first poetry book appeared in 1972, her sixteenth, Authentic Local, is due out in 2009. She has been active in publishing, screenprinting, rock music, theatre, film and the web. A stalwart of that disorganised band, the leg-pulling opposition in Australian poetry, Pam was poetry editor of Overland for five years and is now associate editor of Jacket magazine.(jacketmagazine.com)


         Vicki Vidiikas in 1974

         John Forbes, mid-90s



         John Forbes, poem & video art at MCA, 2009

         Pam Brown, four books at MCA, 2009

    Micky Allan : draft print for cover of Pam Brown's
   'Country & Eastern'


Avoiding Myth & Message:
Australian Artists & the Literary World

Free entry

Museum of Contemporary Art
Circular Quay,
Sydney

Sunday June 28, 2.30pm

---

             Scroll down to the previous post for the MCA event on Sunday June 14th                 and to see photos from it click here

---

Hear the curator of this exhibition, Glenn Barkley, in conversation with artist Christopher Dean, on Sunday June 14th at 2.30pm. At the MCA. Plus readings from Rudi Krausmann, Joanne Burns & others. A free event. Further info here.



Later on the same Sunday, June 14th at 6pm
the launch of George Alexander's new book Slow Burn
at upstairs at 49, gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe
further info here

---

ka mate ka ora



k a   m a t e   k a   o r a    # 7

May 2009       www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/kmko

The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) is pleased to announce the seventh issue of Ka Mate Ka Ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics, with a special colloquium feature

*   1,000 Words or a Picture: Could Poetry be a Contemporary Art? A ka mate ka ora colloquium with contributions by Pam Brown; Martin Edmond; Sue Fitchett; Brian Flaherty; Tony Green; Paul Hartigan; David Howard; Lesley Kaiser and John Barnett; Jan Kemp; Richard Killeen; Cilla McQueen; Selina Tusitala Marsh and Tim Page; Ann Poulsen; Jack Ross; Lisa Samuels; Helen Sword; Fredrika van Elburg; Ruth Watson and Albert Wendt

*   Paul Millar, Interviewing Hone Tuwhare at Kaka Point, 3 December 2007. With photographs and audio

*   Ian Wedde, Mahmoud Darwish 1941-2008

kmko is edited by Murray Edmond with assistance from Michele Leggott and Hilary Chung at the University of Auckland, and with the support of a team of consulting and contributing editors. It publishes research essays and readings of New Zealand-related material and welcomes contributions from poets, academics, essayists, teachers and students from within New Zealand and overseas.

for information click here.

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