Exhibition in the Shoalhaven
The artist tangled up in blue and other colours in the photo, Kurt Brereton, will be having an exhibition of recent work at the Shoalhaven City Arts Centre in Nowra from June 6th until July 4th. Click on the invitation for the opening and gallery location.
For more information about Kurt Brereton's work visit his website here.
And for his recent series of paintings and accompanying monograph click here.
Toward. Some. Air.
The publisher's website describes the contents:
Edited by Amy De’Ath and Fred Wah
Toward. Some. Air. is a landmark collection of profiles of contemporary poets, statements, essays, conversations about contemporary poetry and poetic practice, and a few exemplary poems selected by up-and-coming poet and scholar Amy De’Ath and Governor General’s Award-winning, former Parliamentary Poet Laureate Fred Wah. The over 40 contributors to this anthology are renowned poets and academics from Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
Toward. Some. Air. is an open invitation to consider the various contours and meanings of Anglophone poetic practice, as a way of interpreting the world around us. An invaluable critical resource with unprecedented scope, this is a book that speaks to the future of contemporary poetics and writing poetry.
Contributors: Caroline Bergvall, Anne Boyer, Sean Bonney & Steve Collis, Andrea Brady, Dionne Brand, Nicole Brossard, Louis Cabri, JR Carpenter, cris cheek, CA Conrad, Maria Damon, Amy De'Ath, Jeff Derksen, Liz Howard, Peter Jaeger, Reg Johanson, Justin Katko & Jow Lindsay, Larissa Lai, Peter Manson, Roy Miki, Nicole Markotic & Michael Davidson, Daphne Marlatt, Fred Moten, Eileen Myles, Hoa Nguyen, Sina Queyras, Lisa Robertson, Steven Ross Smith, Kaia Sand, Dale Smith, Christine Stewart, Keston Sutherland, Keith Tuma, Catherine Wagner, Fred Wah, Darren Wershler, Rita Wong & Kateri Akiwenxie-Damm, Rachel Zolf, David Jhave Johnston, Rita Wong.
About the editors:
Fred Wah is from the Kootenay region of southeast British Columbia. He is best known for his biofiction, Diamond Grill (1966). Recent collections of poetry are Sentenced to Light, is a door, and The False Laws of Narrative. He was Canada’s fifth Parliamentary Poet Laureate and lives in Vancouver.
Published by Banff Centre Press - information here
If you're in need of a remedy for any kinds of disaffection or disappointments relating to paranoid and probably true perceptions of a stealthy anomie that could be creeping up on the Australian poetry 'scene' then Toward. Some. Air. could be for you. The title of the book is taken from US poet Carla Harryman's 2005 prose text Baby - connoting heading towards a breath of fresh air. Even though concerned with Anglo-American-Canadian poetries (including indigenalities) I think this collection of writings has parallels that are useful to contemporary Australian poetry in general. Rather than promoting solutions the book offers serious consideration of contemporary poetry as a relevant force in the world-at-large.
Remarks on Poetics of Mad Affect, Militancy, Feminism, De/motic Rhythms, Emptying, Intervention, Reluctance, Indigeneity, Immediacy, Lyric Conceptualism, Commons, Pastoral Margins, Desire, Ambivalence, Disability, The Digital, and Other Practices
Amy De’Ath, born in Suffolk, UK, is a PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University, where she researches Marxist Feminist poetics. She was previously based in London, UK and in 2011 was Poet in Residence at the University of Surrey. Her poetry books include Erec & Enide, Caribou, and Lower Parallel. She now lives in Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories.
thanks Eva-Lynn Jagoe for the book cover photo
Michael Farrell is an agile performer.
You feel there's a language being created here
and yet it's your own language.
LAURIE DUGGAN
Michael Farrell looking for his pocket notebook at the launch of 'Cocky's Joy'
with Astrid Lorange, Aden Rolfe, Sam Moginie at First Draft, Wooloomooloo, Sydney
photo by Melissa Hardie 15.4.15
Michael Farrell has so much to say about Australian history, popular culture and the field of poetics in this often hilarious yet totally indubitable collection that you'll need to take a few days off work to read and ingest what's going on. It's a kinetic tour de force. US poet Forrest Gander says that Michael is "A pentathlete of innovative form" and that's spot on.
In her launch talk, amongst many other astute comments, Astrid Lorange said "I joke with Michael about the fact that he’s often described as the ‘premier’ experimental poet in Australia. We joke about the word premier, its bucreaucratised whiff of the avant-garde. We joke about the word experimental, here imagined as an aesthetics of ratbaggery or tomfoolery. We joke about the insistence of dominant modes of literary criticism to read contemporary innovations in poetry as difficult, obtuse, wilfully obscure, inaccessible, ‘academic’, or coded. We joke about this stuff because it is almost entirely irrelevant to the actuality of Michael’s work. As anyone who reads Michael will know, his poetry is – far from an attempt to lead as though into battle or office a pack of specialist-poets – an enormously generous contribution to the diverse and intersecting communities of practice that coalesce around questions, propositions, readerships, textualities, affections, socialities, and so on. Michael’s work, which in its spirit and discipline is a constant and intense gift, is ever-labouring towards a poetry that might continue, despite it all, as a liveable form of loving."
Published by Giramondo.
Looking west
Writer, poet & curator, John Mateer will be visiting Canberra and Sydney in April with a new book, The Quiet Slave. The book is the outcome of a two year long research project conducted as part of future recall at spaced2.
The Quiet Slave is an historical fiction set in the early 19th Century that describes the first years of settlement on the Cocos-Keeling Islands, an atoll – now an Australian Indian Ocean Territory – midway between Perth and Sri Lanka. The events are seen through the eyes of Rosie, a female Malay slave belonging to the controversial English colonial Alexander Hare. Hare employed John Clunies-Ross until conflict between them ultimately led to the abandonment of the Malays on the island for the next 140 years, during which period the islands belonged to the Clunies-Ross dynasty. Beyond simply describing the process of settlement of the uninhabited atoll, Rosie's story is an insight into the origin and lives of the slaves who, like her, were brought from various parts of the 'Malay Archipelago' and into the complex circumstances of the last days of Western slavery.
Conceived over a two-year period in the rural Western Australian town of Katanning and on the Cocos-Keeling Islands, the book is published in John Mateer's original English and the Malay translation of the Singaporean Nur-El-Hudda Jaffar. It is illustrated with a selection of photographs taken during one of the United Nations' decolonization mission to the islands in the 1980s.
A brief interview with John Mateer about the project -
For details of the book launch in Canberra
For a seminar on the project at the Centre for Writing and Society
John Mateer has published several books of poetry & prose. He convened the 2013 symposium The Ambiguity of our Geography at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, as part In Confidence: Reorientations in Recent Art, the Indian Ocean-focused exhibition he curated for that institution. Currently he is an honorary research fellow at the University of Western Australia, researching traces of the explorer William Dampier's voyages in Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels.
on Monday 13th April click here
at University of Western Sydney
on Friday morning, April 17th click here
From the "condensery":
Lorine Niedecker's xmas gift to a friend, Maude Hartel, in 1964, A Cooking Book is a warmhearted humorous book of short (and typically 'whittled down') poems about the uses and preparation of certain foods, especially rutabaga (known in Australia as 'swedes') and sauerkraut. With plenty of advice and anecdotes from 'Al' and various asides from the poet this is a booklet to cherish.
But Al seems to know
It's published by Bob and Susan Arnold's Longhouse in Vermont.
Liquor in food - sure,
about cooking - he grew up in
the north woods near Paul
Bunyan and ate close to
the soil. He reads while he eats.
Away from the table: I eat
books.
Visit the site here
pour wine over cabbage and
over almost anything.
Test Results : Book Launch, Talk and Gallery Viewing
Saturday 21st March at 11 a.m.
Shoalhaven Regional Gallery
12 Berry St, Nowra
Street map - click here
Kurt Brereton has produced a series of paintings on the topic of virality i.e. the role of different kinds of viruses in culture and specifically art as a virus. The book, Test Results, is available now in limited edition. Preface by George Alexander. For further information contact the artist via his website - Kurt Brereton
A short talk by Chris Edwards, poet, designer, typesetter and collagist, on designing Vagabond Press' deciBels poetry books - delivered at the launch on Sunday afternoon, November 30th, 2014 :
deciBels / design
I’ve been asked to say a few words about designing the deciBels series, and specifically to talk about fonts. So I ask myself, what is a font? Keith Chi-hang Tam, in Digital typography: a primer, explains that “a digital font … is a piece of computer software that contains a collection of vector ‘drawings’ along with spacing and kerning data that can be accessed through the keyboard.” As he points out, “these ‘drawings’ are often letters which, when combined sensibly, form meaningful words.”
Now, there are two fonts — two “collection[s] of … drawings” — used to form meaningful words in these books. The body typeface — the font used for the poems themselves — is Adobe Minion Pro. Minion was designed and drawn by Robert Slimbach for Adobe Systems in 1990. It’s a serifed typeface in the “classical tradition” — which, according to Paul Caputo writing in the IBD Blog, is “designer code for ‘It was designed to look like pretty much every other serifed typeface out there.’” Caputo goes on to say that Minion “is one of those typefaces that only a typographer could love (not that other people dislike it; they just don’t notice it). If Minion were at a high school dance,” he says, “it would sip punch with its back against the wall, trying not to make any sudden movements …” “There’s nothing,” he adds, “to dislike about Minion. Sure, typographers who like to argue about the tiniest of details will say things like, ‘The slight upward angle of the cross-stroke of the lower-case e is too whimsical,’ but it’s expertly designed to maximize legibility, and the practical advantages to most designers are immeasurable.” Minion contains more glyphs than most other fonts and comes in multiple weights as well as old-style letterforms and small caps. This makes it flexible, which along with its legibility helps it to blend into the background, letting the content take centre stage.
It’s common typographic practice to team a serif body typeface with sans-serif headers, and that’s what we’ve done here. For book titles, author’s names, poem titles and so on, we’ve used a font called Swiss 721 — Black Condensed for book titles, Bold Condensed for authors’ names. Swiss 721 is really Helvetica under a different name, with a few very subtle variations. Helvetica, in fact, means Swiss. Swiss 721 was cloned from Helvetica in 1982 by the Bistream type foundry. I may of course be imagining things, but I like to think that its condensed weights are slightly more elegant than those of Helvetica, which is why I suggested using it, but Swiss and Helvetica are essentially the same font. So, what can I tell you about Helvetica?
Helvetica was designed in the late 1950s by Edouard Hoffmann, director of the Haas Type foundry, and drawn by Max Miedinger under his guidance. They were trying to improve on the popular late-nineteenth-century typeface Akzidenz Grotesk, from the Berthold type foundry. Personally, I’m not sure they succeeded, but a lot of other people seem to think they did. Four years after its release as Haas Neue Grotesk, Hoffmann and Miedinger’s font was reworked for the Linotype Company and re-released as Helvetica, which, during the 1960s, displaced Futura as the most popular sans serif typeface in the world. Since then, Helvetica has become ubiquitous. Linotype’s restrictive licensing policies are sometimes blamed for the large number of unauthorized copies, and may also have played a role in generating genuinely re-worked versions like Swiss 721. Stephen Coles, writing on the FontFeed website, says that “there are many reasons why Helvetica is so widespread, the most obvious being that a few weights have been bundled with the Mac Operating System for years. It is arguably the most respectable of the ‘default’ fonts. But it’s also used because it’s a safe, neutral choice. For many purposes, typography is more about content than style. Fans of Beatrice Warde will tell you that typographers should communicate without distraction. Helvetica, with its simple, unadorned forms, is the perfect crystal goblet. Even its ubiquity contributes to its neutrality — letters so common they become invisible.”
So, Swiss 721, to sum up, is the market-driven clone of a collection of drawings whose aim is to be invisible.
I should explain at this point that although the design and typography of this first deciBels series are attributed (inside the books) to me, the design in particular was collaborative. When Michael first told me about his deciBels idea, and explained that he’d asked Pam — and she’d agreed — to edit this first series, I seem to remember Mike stipulating some kind of design continuity for the set of 10 books, and I certainly remember him telling me that Pam had some definite ideas about the design. It’s part of Michael’s brief for the deciBels series — not just this one, but future series as well — that “form and genre are open and up to the editor, as is the design and format.” It was Pam who suggested a small, square format and type-only covers that were simple and uncluttered. I came up with some font suggestions, a few dummy layouts for the covers, and various ideas for a deciBels motif, and Pam chose those she liked best.
I constructed a basic shell for the covers early in the piece, and as manuscripts arrived we began selecting colours. I made the initial choices, and some of them were more or less rational: the cover of Stephanie Christie’s The Facts of Light is a photograph of the sky looking from Bondi toward New Zealand, the musk-stick pink and cherry red of Ann Vickery’s The Complete Pocketbook of Swoon are, potentially at least, reminiscent of school-yard crushes, Toby Fitch’s Jerilderies may be bush colours at dawn or maybe bushfire colours at midnight, and Rachel Loden’s Kulchur Girl more or less chose its own colours: those of the ticket documenting Rachel’s attendance at the Berkeley Poetry Conference of 1965. More often I chose instinctively, in ways I’d rather not analyse, and my choices were then worked over with Pam, either by email or at my computer. Pam, I discovered, is a skilled tweaker, with a fine eye for subtlety and detail — very easy to work with, too. The only difficulty I encountered, in the various sessions we had together, was deciding what to have for lunch.
The poets also collaborated (knowingly or not) on the internal design. It’s not my role to talk today about the contents of the books, but I will say — regarding what are technically called their “innards” — that from a typographer’s point of view, it’s been a pleasure to work on such a stylistically diverse range of books. If the fonts we’ve used — Minion and Swiss — do succeed in disappearing, or at least blending into the background, it’s partly due to the formal variety on display here, not only between books but often within them. One poet, Toby Fitch, typeset his own book using deciBels fonts and style sheets. He took liberties with the style sheets in keeping with the style of his poems, and I, too, found it necessary to adapt or augment our standard styles for other books in the series. You might notice, if you look closely, that all ten share the same fonts and so on — the same typographic style — but what you notice first, I think, is that their compositional styles are all different. That’s the visible part.
Coordinating a project like this is a huge job, so I might end with an appropriately huge thank you to Michael Brennan, who came up with the idea and went to a great deal of trouble to ensure that the end results were as good as they possibly could be, and that they were delivered on time, and to Liz Allen for organising today’s launch, for housing the books temporarily in her home, and for seeing to it that they make their way in the world. I’d also like to extend my warmest congratulations — to all ten the authors on their individual books, each of which is well worth celebrating in its own right, to Pam who chose them and to Michael who chose Pam to edit the first of the deciBels series. Let’s hope we see many more.
I want to draw attention to a short pamphlet recently published by Wave Books. It's called Freely Frayed,ᄏ=q, & Race=Nation and comprises three brief but powerful talks given by Don Mee Choi at a couple of conferences in the USA earlier this year. Here are two brief extracts from ᄏ=q - the central talk : click on the images to enlarge the text :
For further information and/or to buy a copy click here
Don Mee Choi's booklet Petite Manifesto was launched
by Vagabond Press in Sydney this week.
For further information and/or to buy a copy click here
Vagabond Press invites you to celebrate
the launch of the 'deciBels series'
in Sydney & Melbourne
Series edited by Pam Brown
& designed by Chris Edwards.
With the completion of the iconic Rare Objects series in 2014, the deciBels series was established to open the Vagabond list to fresh poetry & new forms for the years to come. Over the next few years, Vagabond Press will collaborate with guest editors to bring together sets of ten works. Form & genre are open & up to the editor, as is the design & format. Transnational, working across styles & categories, the deciBels is an experiment in publishing, aimed at taking the press & its readers off on new vectors. One editor, ten contributors, wide open space.
To be launched in Sydney
by Pam Brown & Chris Edwards
with readings in person by
Angela Gardner, Toby Fitch & Ann Vickery
& Anselm Berrigan, Don Mee Choi, Stephanie Christie,
Jaimie Gusman, Susan M.Schultz & Maged Zaher
appearing via Skype from Hamilton, NZ & Seattle,
New York & Hawai'i, USA.
IN SYDNEY
everyone welcome
3.30pm Sunday 30th November
where -
gleebooks, upstairs
49 Glebe Point Road
Glebe, Sydney
For more information & rsvp click here
Angela Gardner, Ann Vickery & Toby Fitch will read
Chris Edwards will perform work from his new book
After Naptime
(hosted by Liz Allen & Pam Brown)
6pm Wednesday 10th December
where -
The Alderman Hotel
134 Lygon Street
East Brunswick
everyone welcome
For information on each of the books visit Vagabond Press
