Book Launch - Sydney - Sunday Arvo 14th August
click to enlarge
26.7.11
19.7.11
photo by Elsa DorfmanThe blog 'The Allen Ginsberg Project' has a video interview with Allen Ginsberg made during his trip to Australia in 1972. Jeune Pritchard made the interview, I think for the ABC program, 'GTK.
Visit the blog and watch the video here.
17.7.11
VLAK 2
Litteraria Pragensia's second issue of VLAK magazine is an exciting issue. It includes Ali Alizadeh's essay on contemporary 'experimental' poetry in Australia - 'Avant-Garde in the Antipodes'.
The editors for this issue are Louis Armand, Ali Alizadeh, Edmund Berrigan, Stephan Delbos, Jane Lewty, David Vichnar and Carol Watts.
For information and to buy a copy click here.
click on the itinery to enlarge
13.7.11
Recently, many Australian poets were interviewed by Michael Brennan for Poetry International Web
If you’re wondering what Vladimir Mayakovsky’s book cover and Allen Ginsberg’s signature have to do with Australian poetry,
then click here to read Michael’s interview with me. You’ll find
all the other interviews on the sidebar of the page.
Links to mentioned Mayakovsky poems -
Brooklyn Bridge here
A Cloud In Trousers (part one) here
28.6.11
Poetry and the Contemporary Symposium
7-9 July 2011
Venue: Victorian Trades Hall, Melbourne
Convened by Ann Vickery & Michael Farrell
For further information, the program and details about a reading at the famous poetry bookshop ‘Collected Works’ click here
Over two nights, join us and some of Australia's best poets for papers, panels, roundtables, readings and book launches. 
THURSDAY 7 JULY - 5.15 for a 5.30 start
Pam Brown - Complaints Department: what I've heard - a few gripes about the incorporation of Australian poetry plus some whining about poetic content, or, what's wrong.
Pam Brown is an associate editor of Jacket and, currently, Jacket2 and a past poetry editor of Overland, she is the author of numerous collections including Authentic Local, True Thoughts, Dear Deliria (NSW Premier’s Award for Poetry winner 2004), Text Thing, and 50-50.
Vivienne Plumb - Fact or Fiction: Meditations on Mary Finger.
A performance lecture that comments on the symbiotic relationship between the critic/curator and the writer/artist/creator
Vivienne Plumb writes poetry, drama, and fiction. She was born in Sydney and has lived in New Zealand for some time, and presently lives between Sydney and Auckland.
Grand Parade Book Launches:
* Perrier Fever by Pete Spence, and
* 6am in the Universe by Benjamin Frater
with Alan Wearne, Kris Hemensley, and John Hawke.
There has to be limits to suffering the sheer volume of poetasters and their doggerel (no matter how 'free', no matter how 'well made') that continue to swamp Australian verse. For although all poetries have and have had them, toleration is finite. Come along then to the launch of these two magnificent books.
Five Islands Press Book Launch:
* Vishvarūpa by Michelle Cahill
Launch by Jill Jones
Of ‘Vishvarūpa’ Chris Wallace-Crabbe writes: “Can there be any Australian poet who has entered with such lyrical depth into the intermingling voices of Australia and India? Our literature is immediately changed by ‘Vishvarūpa’?'
SATURDAY 9 JULY - 6.15pm for 6.30pm start
Book Launches:
* One Under Bacchus by Duncan Hose
The second collection of 2010 Newcastle Poetry Prize winner, Duncan Hose. With its title a cunning anagram of the author’s own name, One Under Bacchus will whet the appetite of poetic truffle hunters. A supersaturated cosmic wealth of cornucopiac phrase, it taunts much & invariably delivers a banquet of soft-skun, delicately chewed, and poutingly cured textual delights.
* Career by Liam Ferney
The second collection by Liam Ferney, a past editor of Cordite Poetry Review and associate editor of papertiger. A ‘Daewon Song meets Jackie Chan’ spectacular, Ferney frees cliché from betwixt press releases and promos, snapping apart short-order culture & shuffling sharp critique with an effervescent dodge of the syntactic curb.
Steamer and Rabbit Launch Special
with MCs: Sam Langer and Jessica Wilkinson
and readings by Emily Bitto, Stuart Cooke, Will Druce, Marty Hiatt, Fiona Hile, Sam Langer, Tom Lee, Jal Nicholl, Sharne Vate, Corey Wakeling, Nick Whittock, Jessica Wilkinson, Caroline Williamson, and Tim Wright.
Rabbit - a journal for poetry is a new print-based quarterly journal for poetry, poetry reviews, and interviews with poets, with an emphasis on new and emerging rabbits.
Steamer is the first Australian poetry magazine to employ André Breton's principles (as defined in the first Surrealist Manifesto) of Automatic Editing, in anything like a rigorously systematic manner. Since November 2010 the magazine has been committed to searching out and presenting the most exciting poetry and anti-poetry of its times and places in an affordable, visually attractive, and portable format.
For the Bella Union site click here.
11.6.11
more night art
John Gillies: Parramatta Road Project (no1)
a site specific video installation
ARTICULATE Project Space
247 Parramatta Road
Leichhardt, Sydney
(opposite Cass Bros)
Tues - Mon 17.00 - 09.00
21 - 27th June
view when dark from footpath or vehicle
opening
Tues 21st June (winter solstice)
17.00 - 20.00
You can find out more about John Gillies here & here
10.6.11
VIVID
Sydney Opera House before Lights On
Vivid a festival of light, music and ideas is about to wind up in Sydney this weekend. In 2009 the first Vivid festival was curated by Brian Eno and last year by Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed. Each of the festivals project images and light onto the 'sails' of Jorn Utzon's Sydney Opera House. I missed seeing both preceding light and image shows due to geography (living out of Sydney) and indisposition.
I've been curious to see it and now that I'm living in Sydney again I've visited this event. This year it's curated by Sydney-based Steve Pavlovic a.k.a 'Pav' from Modular Recordings. He invited a young French trio, SUPERBIEN to do the projections and they are super.
There are professional photos on the web site (click on 'Vivid' above) but here are a few of my snapshots (obviously taken with a pocket camera, no flash, no tripod) of the lights.
Sydney Opera House just before…
Some city buildings have projections - including Customs House and the Marriot Hotel. The AMP building is blue and the Circular Quay Railway Station façade turns red and blue, framing the bay for the Opera House projections.
Around the Quay there are light sculptures by local artists. I love the stalactites, by Katharine Fife and Andrew Daly on the ceiling of the walkway under the Circular Quay railway tracks.
Stalactites
When you see a city lit this way you look at other lights and neon signs more keenly. The final snap is the speed limit sign on the railway.
22.5.11
Puncher & Wattmann
invite you to a booklaunch -
Ken Bolton's Sly Mongoose
(launch speechette by Pam Brown)
at
The Fiend in Hand
58 Cowper Street, Glebe
Sunday 5th June 3-5pm
Sly Mongoose deals with the vagaries of the Adelaide
art-scene, the career of Cy Twombly, the Sydney of the 1920s, 40s
and today. A quartet of poems treats a single locale and time-frame
from the point of view of an ‘ordinary punter’, a beaver, a worried
mother and a cyclist; and there is a sequence drawn from a diary of
travel through an imaginary Africa in the 1970s, each entry partly
structured around a buried pun or near-pun; a further pair of poems
deals with after-echoes, among his friends, of the passing of John
Forbes.
Ken Bolton is self-described as a gay, light-hearted bastard, who cuts
a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary landscape,
his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him,
bow-tie askew, lipstick-smeared, grinning cheerfully at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar D-type, El Cid.
Ken Bolton has published a good deal of art criticism, some of it
collected in Art Writing (Contemporary Art Centre of South
Australia). He edited Homage To John Forbes (Brandl & Schlesinger)
and wrote the monograph Michelle Nikou. He edited the magazines 'Magic Sam' and 'Otis Rush' and has published many books of poetry. Wakefield Press published The Circus in 2010 and Vagabond Press A Whistled Bit Of Bop. His earlier titles from Wakefield Press are At The Flash And At The Baci and Untimely Meditations.
16.5.11
The Coalcliff Days exhibition closes next Sunday so there is still some time to visit. Here are a few images from the exhibition and you can find out more about it here.
Coalcliff living room replicated
Movie in the living room
Jane Zemiro watching films at the exhibition.
Laurie Duggan making a crucial choice at the jukebox at Clifton pub. Excerpt from a film by Pam Brown,1980
Space Creatures, Drawing by Micky Allan, 1981
Laurie Duggan, Drawing by Ken Bolton, 1981
5.5.11
1.5.11
26.4.11
Karl #2 - 1999. Photo by Rebecca SwanIssue 3 of Polari Journal, edited by D. J. Baker & Sharon Dunne, has just been published online. Click here to read the articles, poems, features and more of Rebecca Swan's photographs.
24.4.11
Coming up in May
I'll be travelling to Melbourne in May for this not-to-be-missed concert, produced by Elizabeth Drake -
A performance of
Canto Ostinato by Simeon ten Holt
The performers on four concert grand pianos will be
Lisa Moore
Caroline Almonte
Emily Green-Armytage
Elizabeth Drake
(click above on the performers' names for biographical info)
Canto Ostinato was composed by Simeon ten Holt in Amsterdam in 1979.
Simeon ten Holt - “The American influence is undeniable, but the form of minimal music that I created in my work is inconceivable without the arch-typical European tradition. …The feeling of hardly having anything to say was never as strong as with Canto Ostinato. At first, I watched the piece unfold with the utmost suspicion. This was not done, really: tonality, this open, this plain, this explicit.”
Canto Ostinato is known as an early minimalist work based on the continual repetition of different cells or bars within the piece. No two performances are ever alike, the players dictating moment to moment how these cells –the musical DNA – will be played.
No categorisation can ever account for the overwhelming emotional power of the work.
It has been performed at the Perth International Arts Festival, in the Adelaide Railway Station for the Australian Performing Arts Market, and at the Newcastle Conservatorium of Music. This is the first time it has been performed in Melbourne.
We invite you to participate in this one opportunity to experience the power and duration of Canto Ostinato.
Review by Neville Cohn, The West Australian, Perth International Arts Festival:
“I cannot recall so harmonious and golden-toned a Festival curtain-raiser as Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt's Canto Ostinato..
How beautifully this extended essay sounded with its mesmerically repetitive, golden-toned extrapolations..
A major factor that made this so compelling was the knowledge that what we heard was unique, an extemporised performance which would have differed from earlier accounts.”
The performance will take place on
Friday 13th May at 8 pm
at the
IWAKI Auditorium
ABC Southbank Centre
120 Southbank Boulevard
Southbank
Melbourne
The duration of the work is ninety minutes, uninterrupted.
As the work is being recorded no latecomers can be admitted.
Adult $45.00
Concession $30.00
Student $25
Tickets available from M-Tix box office at The C.U.B Malthouse
03 9685 5111 m-tix.com.au General Admission
A booking fee of $1.50 - $3 per ticket will apply depending on booking method.
8.4.11
Opening next week - Coalcliff Days
Click here for details.
A happy avant-garde at Coalcliff. Xmas 1980. Back row L to R: Pam Brown, Erika Callan, Sal Brereton, Micky Allan. Front Row L to R: Kurt Brereton in goose carcass hat, Ken Bolton, Laurie Duggan. Photo- Micky Allan
Xmas Corpses. Silkscreen - Ken Bolton, 1980
And I'll be reading from recent and not-so-recent work in Newtown, Sydney on April 29th - for details click here
13.3.11
Thirty years ago, from 1979 until 1982, writer Sal Brereton and her then-partner poet Ken Bolton lived in a weatherboard house on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea at Coalcliff, north of Wollongong on the Illawarra coast of New South Wales. Many poets, artists, printers and filmmakers visited their house during that time. It was a busy hub producing magazines, books and screen printed posters. In the years following Sal and Ken's time there, the poet Alan Jefferies lived in the house. 'Coalcliff Days' is an exhibition documenting those days and you are all invited to come to the Friday night opening, the Saturday afternoon reading or visit the exhibition and floor talk during its season.
The exhibition will be opened by Nicholas Pounder, sometime poet, one-time editor of 'Polar Bear' magazine, limited-edition publisher, bibliophile and antiquarian bookseller.
Some exhibition participants will read their work at the opening.
Poets, artists, writers and filmmakers represented in the exhibition include Micky Allan, Ken Bolton, Kurt Brereton, Sal Brereton, Barbara Brooks, Pam Brown, Laurie Duggan, Alan Jefferies, Kate Richards and others…
opening - everyone welcome
6 for 6.30pm
Friday 15th April 2011
Wollongong City Gallery
cnr Kembla & Burelli Sts
Wollongong
South Coast Writers Centre is hosting an associated poetry reading at the gallery on Saturday April 16th at 1pm
For further information visit Coalcliff Days and Wollongong City Gallery.
The exhibition runs from 15th April until May 22nd
7.2.11
Here are a few more 'views' of the seriously cramped and unimaginative buildings in downtown Sydney, from the 19th floor above Bathurst Street. Wish I could see Renzo Piano's beautiful 'Aurora Place' from here - now that's a graceful building.
3.2.11
10.1.11
If you happen to be in Sydney next month, you're most welcome to join us for the launch of two new poetry collections from Vagabond Press:
'Letters from Ausland' by Louis Armand
introduced by Pam Brown
'People of Earth' by Chris Edwards
introduced by John Tranter
Bring a friend!
Sunday 6th February at 3.30pm
Gleebooks
49 Glebe Point Rd
Sydney, Australia
For more info, visit please visit the publisher's website
or connect with them on basefook.
Click here for Louis Armand's site
and here for more about Chris Edwards.
1.1.11
loose ends
In August 2010, Bob Arnold’s Vermont-based Longhouse Press published a pamphlet of six of my poems.
As Jacket magazine is now transforming into Jacket2 in Philadelphia, editor John Tranter has published a selection of accolades for the magazine in the final Sydney-based issue here. He has extracted a few paragraphs from a ‘Rolling Column’ I wrote about Jacket for the Australian Book Review a decade or so ago. You can read the complete piece here.
As I say in the column, at that time there were several co-productions planned for Jacket. In April 2001, Jacket entered into co-production with New American Writing. It was published in issue 13.
In March 2002, an overland magazine feature that I edited appeared in Jacket issue 16. Here is my introduction to the feature.
This was the first time that a co-feature appeared both online and in print (as a supplement in overland issue 166 ) and the first and last time that contributors to Jacket magazine were paid for their work, from overland magazine funds.
I have enjoyed the past six busy years working with John on Jacket magazine and, in the future, I will be continuing to contribute material to Jacket2.
Way back in time, in 1982, I was invited to give a talk on self-publishing and small presses at the inaugural Women & Arts Festival at the Seymour Centre in Sydney. On reflection, apart from computing, the use of xerox rather than offset printing, and electronic publishing, I have to ask plus ça change?
You can read the handwritten notes for the talk here.
At the Women & Arts Festival, a publisher, Pat Woolley, and I co-ordinated a hands-on workshop (in a borrowed printery at Silverwater, Sydney) teaching printing and publishing skills to women writers. Over two days we designed, printed, collated and published a large book of writing, photography and drawing. During this workshop the idea of starting a women's press was discussed, resulting, a little later, in the formation of Redress Press which was run collectively, had a huge membership and published many titles in the early 1980s.
At the offset press - publishing workshop 1982 (PB on right)
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