28.4.16
31.3.16
in seattle in april -
to visit the INCA web site click here
please click on the info above to enlarge for reading
11.3.16
4.3.16
If this sounds a bit 'blurby' it's because I wrote it as a possible back cover encomium for Melbourne poet, critic and academic, Ann Vickery's wonderful new book of poems Devious Intimacy -
I did 'hear' a kind of Edwardian tone in some of the poems. I suppose the distinction or binary between Edwardian and Modernist writing is entrenched but I don't think that transition was a simple one. Edwardian women did grapple with women's suffrage, class, divorce laws and so on and I think Ann's poems do that too. I don't think the traces of 'formality' she uses seem 'Victorian'. But, reluctantly, I ended up adding that hackneyed word "ironic" to conciliate my response.
Here are two poems from Devious Intimacy :
In Ann Vickery's sophisticated collection of poems you can certainly "appreciate the tenor of a carefully played code" as she applies her natural critical ability with caustic lucidity. These poems cut right through cultural habit and cant and put paid to any "theoried regrets". Beneath what is said here lie enigmatic layers of what is unsaid. In these poetry games Purgatory is "full of hoons", ecopoetry offers "Terroir on tap", "higher purpose" is possibly "hire purchase", and poets can be "word-burgled". The exhilarated scepticism of Ann Vickery's cogent language is lightly modulated by occasional ironic Edwardian phrasing and formality in mementos for friends and eulogies to favourite women writers and artists. This is arrestingly incarnated poetry diffused with female luminosity.
An Eye for an Eye
after Simone de Beauvoir
Freedom belies reciprocity. This, lovers know.
Some say her head was shaved to stave off murder,
a kindness of sorts.
Vengeance calls for the collaborator
to experience her own ambiguity
decamped as subject visibly wracked or unwomaned.
Oholah, too, was once caressed by foreign hands.
Paris lays bare the ancient crime of being-in-common.
Seduced by aesthetics the punished example
After paradox there is only theory, to fail at splitting hairs.
_________________________________
Ecopoetic Ecumenical
Purgatory is by nature hot and full of hoons.
Temperature, not temperament, a nice set of wheels.
It’s generally the assholes that get all the love poems.
Once in the greenhouse, you sat
contemplating the properties of peat, an idea of warmth
through being trapped. A poem is a miracle of distillation
strophing mood like water from plastic,
the fuelling station’s quick fix for the final leg.
When it comes to a bucket list of romance, or seasonal variation,
try razing the grapes, particularly those handpicked and curlicued.
Cling to a hundred little homilies. Leave others to their heirloom pursuits:
love’s climate countdown is inordinately inevitable. Terroir on tap.
__________________________________
For more information about Ann Vickery, the book, and to order a copy visit Hunter Publishers here.
____________________________________
Devious Intimacy is Ann's second collection after the booklet The Complete Pocketbook of Swoon, one of the ten deciBels series published by Vagabond Press in December 2014. That book has been well-received. Some of its poems are included in Devious Intimacy.
Dan Disney reviewed The Complete Pocketbook of Swoon in 'Cordite Poetry Review' -
Ann Vickery’s The Complete Pocketbook of Swoon hits an entirely different timbre, the poet taking up a cerebral stance in poems ticking like bombs. The title surely doffs toward Bernstein’s ‘The Klupzy Girl’, in which:
Instead of bombs, then, these texts are perhaps a kind of Triage. Vickery tells us in the first three lines of the book how:
Yet these texts are neither minor nor mere confections; in the first, ‘Swoon in Miniature; or, The Youth’s Pleasing Instructor’, Vickery’s encompassing gaze lights upon the spectres of Heidegger, Shakespeare, Bowie and a host of others; in this poem-as-Wunderkammer, the critique seems anti-yob and voicing revolt, an enduring shriek of concern for what we may have become: psychically anorexic but feasting nonetheless on ‘Digestible elements of a dickybird world’. Vickery’s fractious, rebarbative style is always a sharp read:
Wind-up lips at the fountain of youth,
The Complete Pocketbook of Swoon is an intertextual mosaic of glinting remnants from across canons; Vickery has sampled and remixed from tropes, dictions, genres, to create a Steinian (‘a mirror is a mirror is’) or perhaps Frankensteinian suite of texts in which affect, or vignettes thereof, seems largely abandoned in favour of traced contours of an ‘endless short circuited ghosting’ of spectacles. What seems clearest is that Vickery is not interested in taking readers prisoner with totalised accounts of individual experience; just as ‘Affection never did find a home where it wanted to stay’, these non-lyrical texts flare up as if ‘goosebumps on the earth’s curved hide’. Vickery weirdly hits all the high-notes of abjection; this poet-as-reader or reader-as-poet seems to scorn lyric traditions (truth, beauty, etc) as clichés, as nothing less than master narratives promulgated by regimes. Instead, this is a book floodlit with zeitgeistful attenuations of a changing world; its style both tracks and promotes the shift.
Poetry is like a swoon, but with this difference: it brings you to your senses
This is just fun-size confectionary,
pet-name or a pose generator, to palliate
the impracticalities of play
standing pixelated in the Radiant Light
spray. I claim my five minutes
of hegemony, you slightly more.
Tear-streaked, we wander through
Ovid, deep culture on your shoulder.
Art’s shade to cast one more version.
To build from hazelnuts a small estate,
A measure lined with elaboration
You can find The Complete Pocketbook of Swoon here.
29.2.16
This morning at Coogee Bay wreaths of kelp wrapped around my legs in the foamy wake of the waves. Breezy day, cool grey-blue ocean. I wandered up the beach to the sea pool. I swam across and then let my feet find the mossy bottom of the pool in the shady murky part under the battered concrete wall where the waves crash. Squishing squelchy toe pleasures.
Afterwards I bought a coffee at 'chish 'n' fips' and sat at a table near the park reading Claire Nashar's first book of poetry, Lake. A reading experience of being deeply and pleasantly 'fluoresced'.
As Ann Vickery says in her thoughtful and detailed introduction to the book - "Lake is a stunning debut and I expect it will itself become both impetus and node for many ... leaving a mark that is simultaneously touching, fecund and mobile."
The lake is Tuggerah Lake on the Central Coast of New South Wales. Claire includes a simple map of it that's mainly just lake and sea. The map was drawn by the cover designer Zoë Sadokierski. And the poems are like this map - mostly with just enough information, underwritten, notational, sparse with plenty of air around them. Some pages are exceptionally minimal. Some a little more 'traditional' (if that's the word - maybe 'approaching conventional' suits them better...).
Lake is dedicated to Claire Nashar's grandmother, Beryl, a geologist who spent her life researching rock composition in New South Wales. While it's a poetic account of the day the Nashars buried a loved family member it is also a profound tribute to the lake itself.
It is a beautiful work that is attentive to, among many other things, ecology, to both the effect and affect of human activity on a 'land/lake'. In her brief (three paragraph) precise preface Claire acknowledges "Long before us and long after us the area [Tuggerah] is home to the Darkinjung, Awabakal and Kuringgai peoples." She also says that she initially called this cluster of poems a 'necro-geography' because of its interest in the dead things of the lake.
This is a complex, meticulous book that uses unobtrusive yet utterly original experimentation to realise its intentions. I'll let Claire Nashar tell you more :
"The poems in this book do not always start and end on discrete pages, and none have titles, although sometimes the index points a way. Muddle-headed pronouns, tenses and other grammatical disagreements reflect the porousness of subjecthood, action and time. Such disagreements are always fluoresced by subjects like love, death and life. Where there is blank space in these poems, as with most blank things, it is not empty"
_____________________________________________________
Here are two extracts, out of context, so, really, an impression -
Published by Cordite Books and available here
as usual, click on the pages/images to enlarge them
1.2.16
Read the new issue of Cordite, THE END here.
Featuring: Abdul-rahman Abdullah, Amanda Anastasi, Judy Annear, Ali Gumlliya Baker, Stuart Barnes, Javant Biarujia, Tony Birch, Faye Rosas Blanche, Ken Bolton, Neil Boyack, Rachael Briggs, Pascalle Burton, A J Carruthers, Louise Carter, Stephanie Christie, David Colmer, Jen Crawford, Hazel de Berg, Dan Disney, Linh Dinh, Laurie Duggan, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Quinn Eades, Chris Edwards, Jacob Edwards, Anne Elvey, Michael Farrell, Toby Fitch, Caren Florance, Christopher Funkhouser, Angela Gardner, Ross Gibson, Keri Glastonbury, Phillip Hall, Philip Hammial, Natalie Harkin, Nick Harrison, Stu Hatton, Shona Hawkes, Marty Hiatt, M C Hyland, Fiona Hile, Chris Holdaway, Eddie Hopely, M C Hyland, Berni Janssen, Jill Jones, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, Kit Kelen, Christopher Konrad, Jeanine Leane, Dorothy Lehane, Cassie Lewis, Kate Lilley, Melissa Lucashenko, Adrian Martin, David McCooey, Kate Middleton, Elizabeth Morton, Stephen Muecke, Michael Nardone, Claire Nashar, Ella O'Keefe, Yu Ouyang, Melody Paloma, Vanessa Page, Charmaine Papertalk-Green, Felicity Plunkett, Vaughan Rapatahana, Aden Rolfe, Mark Roberts, Reihana Robinson, Autumn Royal, Tracy Ryan, Philip Salom, Berndt Sellheim, Carin Smeaton, Maria Takolander, Sonny Rae Tempest, Darren Tofts, Simone Ulalka Tur, Ellen van Neerven, Paul Venzo, Ann Vickery, Divya Victor, Nachoem Wijnberg, Sarah St Vincent Welch, Samuel Wagan Watson, Chloe Wilson, Rob Wilson, Robert Wood, Maged Zaher and Magdalena Zurawski
31.1.16
young pineapple photo by Lauren Young
Mark Young's Otoliths has just published its fortieth issue.
In the issue you'll find Steve Dalachinsky's long sequence as collage; Emma Smith's wonderful paintings; Karl Kempton's remarkable 30-image Rune 12: Dream of the Cross; plus plays, essays, collage, prose poetry, pidgin poetry, other prose, other poetry, photographs, paintings, drawings, animated gifs, as well as some things that cannot be categorized, from a remarkable cast of creators — Susanna Lakner, Philip Byron Oakes, Sheila E. Murphy, Jack Galmitz, Richard Kostelanetz, Bill Wolak, Kyle Hemmings, Jim Meirose, Pete Spence, Marco Giovenale, Jim Leftwich, John Crouse, John M. Bennett, Louise Landes Levi, Sanjeev Sethi, Craig Cotter & Lan Yuan-Hung, Owen Vince, Steve Timm, Raymond Farr, Pat Nolan, Olivier Schopfer, Jared Chipkin, Joel Chace, Diana Magallón, Mark Cunningham, Colin Campbell Robinson, Martin Edmond, Chris Wells, David Adès, Allen Forrest, Christopher Crew, Sarah Katharina Kayß, Melanie Dunbar, Sabine Miller, Kirsten Kaschock, Bobbi Lurie, Willie Smith, Anne-Marie JEANJEAN, Joshua Baird, dan raphael, Susan Laura Sullivan, Scott MacLeod, Thomas M. Cassidy, Dennis Vannatta, Heath Brougher, Lakey Comess, Keith Kumasen Abbott, Laurel L. Perez, Patrick Cahill, Darren C. Demaree, Jesse Glass, Anne Gorrick, Shataw Naseri, Francesca Jurate Sasnaitis, Joe Milford, Shawn Haggerty, Valeria Sangiorgi, J. Crouse, sean burn, Jeff Harrison, Alberto Vitacchio, Vernon Frazer, Mark Russell, Charles Freeland, Karen Greenbaum-Maya, Felino A. Soriano, hiromi suzuki, John Pursch, Carol Stetser, Andrew Taylor, Stephen C. Middleton, PT Davidson, M. J. Iuppa, Erik Blagsvedt, nick nelson, Shloka Shankar, Howie Good, Joe Balaz, Ric Carfagna, Michael Brandonisio, Cherie Hunter Day, Clara B. Jones, Tony Beyer, Carla Bertola, Susan Connolly, Volodymyr Bilyk, Anne M Carson, Stephen Nelson, Bob Heman, Michael David Conduit, Katrinka Moore, Ian Gibbins, Carey Scott Wilkerson, J. D. Nelson, Thomas O'Connell, Joseph Salvatore Aversano, David Jalajel, Lucas Smith, Marilyn Stablein, Seth Howard, Paul Pfleuger, Jr., Marty Hiatt, Deepika Chauhan & Angad Arora, & Tim Wright.
visit this link - Otoliths - to read the issue.
Mark says : 'It's brought to you by the letter E — that gives you a wide range of superlatives to choose from. I'm going for Exceptional. & Early.'
11.1.16
3.1.16
22.12.15
Reading in progress -
A various field - the chapbook on the top is Jen Crawford's Lichen Loves Stone. It arrived in today's mail - a beautiful small collection of poems from Susan M. Schultz's Tinfish Press in Hawai'i. It deserves a closer view -
Order from Tinfish here
Jen Crawford will have a new collection, Koel,
coming from Cordite Books in 2016.
click on images to enlarge them
18.12.15
SOON soon
Dear music lovers, the curious and the courageous;
In January 2016, we celebrate 15 years of the NOW now.
at
We got late news that we had no funding at all, but have decided to go ahead with a festival powered by the energy of the musicians and artists involved. We are still pulling the program together, thus far, musicians from Norway, Switzerland, Japan, Marrickville and Redfern are confirmed :)
Watch this space, but block your diaries.
it's on.
8pm January 18th through to January 23rd
Other venues & program coming SOON soon
A 6 night festival over three venues in Sydney.
107 Projects, Redfern
Paddington Uniting Church, Paddington
and Warehouse to be confirmed
at:
107 Projects
107 Redfern St
Redfern
Sydney
6.12.15
Shock of The Ordinary
Introduction by Munro Jones with commentaries by the author
Collectors Deluxe Edition – only 50 signed and numbered copies.
$100 cost price + $20 postage in Australia/$50 International
Taking orders now
LAUNCH
NOTE The hardcopy edition usually sells out before launch date. 10 copies are held back for sale at launch. Any extra copies will be on sale at Gallery at retail price of $125.
Photographs 1975 – 2015
by Kurt Brereton
Published by Jellied Tongue Press
(200pp 26cm x 26cm 115 colour/68 b/w photos perfect bound)
contact Kurt Brereton here.
Shoalhaven City Art Centre
Nowra
Saturday
December 19
at 12 - 2pm
2.11.15
You are warmly invited to celebrate
KEN BOLTON & PAM BROWN
two new poetry collections
from Vagabond Press
with
3pm
at
everyone welcome
For further information
Amanda Stewart
Chris Edwards
Ken Bolton
Pam Brown
Saturday 5th December
Parkview Hotel
corner Mitchell Road & Harley Street
Alexandria, Sydney
from Vagabond Press
click here
How to get to Parkview Hotel
Mitchell & Harley, Alexandria
transport & map click here
About London Journal/London Poem :
About Missing up :
London Journal / London Poem is an account of the author's thinking and seeing while on a trip to London to visit son and daughter-in-law and to travel with them and his own partner, to Berlin and Barcelona. It is an amusing calibration of self-consciousness, speculation, stereotypes and detail, reflection and discovery.
These offbeat, fragmentary yet often discursive poems were written over three years up to spring 2015. In part, they epitomize the absurdities of contemporary materialism. Pam Brown's well-practised scepticism dismantles monumental intent and splices the remains into a shrewd melange of imagery and thoughtful lyric complemented by playfulness. For Pam writing poetry is a habit, a disorganised ritual. Her poetic inventories begin in everyday bricolage. Real things interrupt the poems the same way thoughts and phrases do. You know - the fridge over there, the bus stop, surf music on a radio, a raisin squashed against a floor tile - always backgrounding a connection to the 'social' as the poems make political and personal associative links. Though disquiet is present it is usually temporary - an optimistic wit plays through this idiosyncratic poetry as a kind of placebo. But, in the end, Pam Brown simply lets the language do the work.
1.11.15
OTOLITHS
As always, it's a cornucopia of delights, with work from
A new issue of Mark Young's great poetry journal Otoliths
is ready to read here.
Pete Spence, Annette Plasencia, Shataw Naseri, Philip Byron Oakes, horace p sternwall, Kyle Hemmings, GS Smith, j4, fátima queiroz, Raymond Farr, Angelos Sakkis, John Lowther, Texas Fontanella, Mark Pirie, a. j. carruthers, Jack Galmitz, Marco Giovenale, Michael Aird, Karen Greenbaum-Maya, Dale Wisely, Olivier Schopfer, Anne Gorrick, Mike Gullickson, Simina Banu, Rob Cook, Andrew Topel, Michael De Rosa, Judith Roitman, Peter Ganick, Demosthenes Agrafiotis, Eileen R. Tabios, Steve Dalachinsky, Jim Leftwich, John M. Bennett, Volomydyr Bilyk, Lakey Comess, Seth Howard, Nicolas Grenier, Christopher Barnes, Laurent Grison, Brendan Slater, Charles Wilkinson, John Vieira, Richard Kostelanetz, Howie Good, Pearl Pirie, Willie Smith, C.S. Fuqua, Márton Koppány, Sandy McIntosh, Charles Freeland, Jürgen O. Olbrich, Alexandre Pierrepont, Cecelia Chapman, Simon Perchik, Scott Keeney, Anneke Baeten, Branko Gulin, Martin Burke, Bill DiMichele, Bobbi Lurie, Felino A. Soriano, Karl Kempton, Michael Rothenberg, Jeff Harrison, Marcia Arrieta, Natsuko Hirata, Sanjeev Sethi, Robyn Art, Jesse Glass, Vaughan Rapatahana, Marilyn Stablein, Caleb Puckett, Shloka Shankar, Johannes S. H. Bjerg, hiromi suzuki, Katrinka Moore, Mark Staniforth, John Pursch, Mark Russell, sean burn, Bob Heman, Joe Balaz, Robert Lee Brewer, Stephen Nelson, PT Davidson, Tony Beyer, Jake Goetz, J. D. Nelson, Tom Brami, Michael D. Goscinski, John Hand, Edward Kulemin, Jill Jones, & Gian Luigi Braggio.
27.10.15
I love the cover of hardline, a new collection of associative poems by Marty Hiatt. I have it propped on my desk - a new artwork. The seven poems in this gorgeous-looking book are good too. Some lines from the beginning of 'artists impression' -
hardline costs only $5.50 and can be ordered from the publisher
the cars go down the road
concrete pours itself
the milk is steamed
the click of the thermostat
a fist is broken on the skull
storm surge subsides
pollutants sent to angry penguins
the magic of gravity
and ineffectual regulation
one of my interests is finance
the lights keep going red
they copy each other
we are all wound up
we give our trash away for free
though 'we's a fiction to date
...
bulky news here.
16.10.15
4.10.15
Streets of Papunya
Martha MacDonald Napaltjarri (foreground) & Mona Nangala
painting at Papunya Tjupi art centre, 2015. Photo by Helen Puckey.
An exhibition of contemporary painting and films from the daughters of the desert art movement, the Papunya Tula artists of the 1970s, is showing in Sydney at the University of NSW Gallery in Paddington. It is curated by Western Desert art expert Vivien Johnson, dedicated supporter and lifelong friend of the artists of Papunya. Links to earlier artists, from Albert Namatjira until today, are made via paintings and a long chart of an extensive 'family-tree'. There are also locally produced educational language booklets in Warlpiri, Luritja & English and two terrific films about the community's contemporary art projects - both painting and electronic (computer) work that's going on in the Papunya Tjupi Arts centre.
The accompanying detailed & brilliant book
chronicles Papunya's art history leading to the current 'reinvention'.
For information click here
Kalipinypa (2015) by Candy Nelson Nakamarra
Doris Bush Nungarrayi painting a version of Tjurrpinyi (Swimming at Haasts Bluff) in 2012
Blackwater (2015) by Martha McDonald Napaltjarri
Papunya (1982) by Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri (1929-84)
The exhibition is on until November 7th
For information click here.
Warumpi & Tjupi, Honey Ant hills, Papunya
Photo by Helen Puckey
click on any of the images to enlarge them
15.9.15
To Adelaide:
Experimentalities: Experimental Writing: Why & Why Now?
Symposium on 17th & 18th September
Reading on Friday 18th September
Readings from Gretta Mitchell, Jill Jones, Virginia Barratt
For further information email 'experimentalities2015ATgmailDOTcom'
17-18 September 2015
Symposium, Master Class with Marion Campbell & Readings
at University of Adelaide
(Napier & Ingkarni Wardli Buildings)
in conjunction with
Australian Network for Feminist Experimental Writers
Papers & presentations on meanings, definitions, uses & techniques, prose, poetry, drama, life writing, non-fiction, art, fiction, hypertext literatures, collaborative compositions, digital & interactive writing & poetics.
7:30pm for 8pm start
at the SA Writers Centre
187 Rundle Street, Adelaide
Francesca da Rimini, Amy Ireland, A.J. Carruthers
Kate Lilley, Pam Brown, Marion Campbell
or search 'Experimentalities' on google or facebook
Volume 2015 : Another Art Books Fair was held at Artspace in Woolloomooloo Sydney last weekend. There were many independent book makers, panels on what's going on in art, books, poetry, plus a printer to make instant full colour, bound paperbacks - the Bookmachine - straight from laptop to covers, collation & staples. A totally lively event & it was great to catch up with interstate artists alongside the Sydneysiders.
Red Hand Prints from Darwin, NT at Artspace
Nick Tsoutas, PB & the P.A people at Nola Farman's launch, Artspace
(photo by Anna Gibbs)
To see some more photos click here
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