19.9.10
13.9.10
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
6.9.10
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
19.7.10
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
15.7.10
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
29.6.10
The Underground RadishLucas 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!
2.6.10
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*
28.5.10
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.
22.5.10
the deletions goes to cockatoo island
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 ...
20.5.10
16.5.10
10.4.10
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
contact Pam Brown.
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 !
8.4.10
New from Jacket Magazine
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
6.4.10
1.4.10
29.3.10
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 radioduransThis 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.
21.3.10
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
26.2.10
Trans Tasman Poetry
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)
21.2.10
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
9.2.10
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
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