Avant Gaga in September

'Archibald's chilli', collage from 'Westernities' by Pam Brown, SOd 2016

On the FIRST TUESDAY of September (not the second), the Sappho poetry night will play host to AVANT GAGA #25, with guest poets Laurie Duggan, Pam Brown, Liam Ferney and Allison Gallagher.
Open mic too. Drinks. Food. Bar. Etceterahhh. Et, peut-être - une surprise. Hosted by Toby Fitch.

at Sappho Books Cafe & Wine Bar
51 Glebe Point Road
Sydney
on Tuesday 6 September
at 19:00–22:00

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LAURIE DUGGAN
Laurence "Larry" Duggan (1905-December 20, 1948), was head of the South American desk at the United States Department of State during World War II. In 1948, Duggan fell to his death from the window of his office in New York, ten days after being questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation about whether he had had contacts with Soviet intelligence.

PAM BROWN
is a dedicated professional amateur. Her most recent of many books of poems is 'Missing up' published by Vagabond Press last December. She lives, as the fruitbats fly, a few haphazard kilometres south of Sappho, in Alexandria.

LIAM FERNEY
Liam Ferney’s most recent collection is 'Content' (Hunter Publishing). His previous collection, 'Boom' (Grand Parade Poets), was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Poetry Prize and the Queensland Poetry Prize. He is a media manager, poet and aspiring left back living in Brisbane, Australia.

ALLISON GALLAGHER
is a writer & poet from Sydney, whose work explores gender and sexuality. Her debut poetry collection will be released independently in October 2016.

OPEN MIC
Sign up on the night from 7pm. 10 readers, 2 mins each, max.

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Join us to raise a glass to celebrate
Emily Stewart’s debut poetry collection Knocks
published by Vagabond Press

Knocks will be launched by Pam Brown
with readings by Elena Gomez & Holly Isemonger

on Sunday 14th August
at 3pm

at Frontyard
228 Illawarra Rd
Marrickville
Sydney

About the book:

Knocks is the debut collection from one of the most exacting writers of Australian poetry’s new wave. Stewart’s poetry consistently surprises in its formal range, encompassing sonnets, erasures and found poetry, and striking at the level of the image –“the computer ecstasy of first-person”. The collection conveys the sense of an extended, “stretched” present, politically shadowed, where “it is commendable / to sign up each day, but better / to maintain a patina of disobedient / actions, shoplifting or whatever”.

Individual poems consider place, persona, fandom, viruses, data and desire in evoking “a residual gala of feeling”. Yet out of variety emerges a very particular architecture: these are the works of a poet obsessed with the structure of the everyday; its litter and networks, idiom and drama: “today we hyphenate our names / today paper shredders are put to good use / today Bikini Bill's power is self-evident”.

visit Vagabond Press here
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“There is more than one kind of poem here, thank the Lord. Poems even differ between modes, get meta on our saggy adulthoods. The generation you didn’t know you were disappointed in not arriving has arrived. In Stewart poetics has a new seat in parliament for wetlands and other erasures. If you have a thing for internet stockings, read this. Not to mention mixed diction Australia, fuck! we don’t just get to live here, we get to write about that shit.”
– Michael Farrell

“Emily Stewart delivers punchy constructions of contemporary life in the Anthropocene and beyond. She wields her language sharply, imagery exploding with unexpected confluences that sweep routine assumptions aside.”
– Jane Gibian

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on Tuesday August 16th
at 7pm (I think)

at Dark Horsey Bookshop
Australian Experimental Art Foundation
Lion Arts Centre,
North Terrace,
Adelaide

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Mairéad Byrne

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa is currently preparing an anthology of highly innovative transcultural women’s poetry and accompanying short essays - women : poetry : migration [an anthology] forthcoming in 2016 with Theenk Books.

'The Argotist Online' has published Jane Joritz-Nakagawa's
succinct essay "On Feminism and Migration in the Work of Poet Mairéad Byrne" here.

Mairéad Byrne's The Best Of (What's Left Of) Heaven is available at Publishing Genius here & there's an interview by Sina Queyras here.

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click on collage to enlarge

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Three parts of the Biennale of Sydney : the theme this year was a well-known quote from cyberpunk author William Gibson : The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed.. The venues were parcelled as 'embassies' - you can interpret and riff your own allusions or metaphors on that idea. The presentations I liked were :

Taiwanese artist, Yin-Ju Chen's Liquidation maps, 2014-2016 at the 'Embassy of Spirits' at the Art Gallery of NSW.

Using a combination of media Liquidation Maps recounts traumatic political events (uprisings, massacres) in various countries - South Korea, East Timor, Vietnam, Singapore & Cambodia. Yin-Ju Chen astrologically charts the exact date & time of each incident & presents an interpretation in series of large charcoal drawings. Time's cycles are a strong component. Wall-text by Amber Tang provides historical information and astrological details.

(click on images to enlarge them)


Chun Doo-Hwan's chart: 'Greed captivated by power' -

Find Yin-Ju Chen's website here

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Thai artist Korakrit Arunanondchai's Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names (3) at the 'Embassy of the Real', at Cockatoo Island - not that the video ever seemed intended to represent 'The Real' (whatever that is). It could have screened in the 'Embassy of Spirits'.

To watch a trailer click here

Still from the video :

and for a different excerpt -

Korakrit Arunanondchai: Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 (Excerpt).

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British-based Karen Mirza & Brad Butler's The Unreliable Narrator, at the 'Embassy of Non-Participation' at Artspace, Woolloomooloo.

A video installation, The Unreliable Narrator narrates terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008, alternately from a position of the terrorists and of a seemingly impartial commentator. The video, sourced from CCTV recordings of the siege, together with telephone conversations between the attackers and their controllers, suggests that the event was performed for the benefit of news cameras: “this is just a trailer, the main feature is yet to come”.

(Unfortunately the video is unavailable to screen here but you can find an extract on the Biennale's 'Embassy of Non-Participation' website)

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NYNY poet & art critic Eileen Myles zoomed through Sydney recently & gave readings (via the Biennale's sub category 'Bureau of Writing') at Artspace & (via University of Sydney English Dept's Creative Writing) at the Footbridge Theatre -

Eileen Myles at Artspace


Eileen at the Footbridge

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sunday lunch

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readings coming up :

click on the above info to read it : : poets bios here

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Monday evening, 23rd May at University of Sydney :

Michael Farrell & Pam Brown
at 5.30pm
Common Room
Upstairs in the Woolley Building
Science Road
University of Sydney

free event - everyone welcome

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PLUS : Eileen Myles at Artspace
(tho it's sold out)
at 7pm
Wednesday 25th May
Cowper Wharf Road
Woolloomoloo

AND : Eileen Myles at University of Sydney :

Join us for a reading, conversation and Q&A with acclaimed US feminist poet and writer Eileen Myles.
at 6.30pm
Footbridge Theatre
Holme Building
Science Road
University of Sydney
Tickets available here

“Everywhere you look these days, the world has taken notice of Eileen Myles,” says Literary Hub contributing editor Adam Fitzgerald. “There’s been four or five features in The New York Times, almost as many online at The Guardian. The most recent, for T Magazine, places Myles as the triggering influence for generations of feminist writers and artists. The continuing angle in much of her media coverage: she’s finally as famous as she deserves to be.

But as Myles told me in a recent interview for Interview Magazine: poetry has always been about being in smaller rooms, that sometimes, as in her case, add up to a larger cross section of an entire culture or nation."

Hosted by Associate Professor Kate Lilley, Director of Creative Writing at the University of Sydney, and author of Ladylike and Versary.

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The Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill, San Francisco was built in 1933 by socialite Lillie Hitchcock Coit. The photo is taken on an overcast, almost typically foggy morning from the ferry to Sausalito. The closer picture below is from a visit to the tower.

The Social Realist murals inside the tower were made for the Public Works of Art Project during the 1930s depression.( there are a few more photos of them at the end of the post).

One of them, Diego Rivera's 'Man at the Crossroads' mural, was destroyed by its Rockefeller Centre patrons because Rivera included an image of Lenin. The Coit Tower muralists protested, picketing the tower. Sympathy for Rivera led some artists to incorporate references to the Rivera incident; in Zakheim's Library panel, one of the muralists, Ralph Stackpole, is painted reading a newspaper headline announcing the destruction of Rivera's mural.

There are many more murals - this is a very small sample -

as usual, click on the images to enlarge them

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new & coming up in may -

Mark Young's   O T O L I T H S -
a new issue celebrating 10 years
of poems, visuals, & variations -

Come celebrate the 10th anniversary of the journal with Pam Brown, Jesse Glass, Philip Byron Oakes, Marco Diotallevi, Travis Cebula, Charles Borkhuis, Kyle Hemmings, Daniel Y. Harris, Jack Galmitz, Mark Melnicove, Michael Allen, Raymond Farr, Jennifer MacBain-Stephens, Texas Fontanella, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, Archana Kapoor Nagpal, Pete Spence, Joel Chace, AG Davis, Márton Koppány, Sanjeev Sethi, Martin Law, Gheorghe Marian Neguțu, Niloofar Fanaiyan, Tomás Sánchez Hidalgo, Andrew Brenza, Luisa-Evelina Stifii, John M. Bennett, John M. Bennett & Baron, John M. Bennett & Jim Leftwich, Tim Suermondt, Scott MacLeod, John W. Sexton, Andrew Topel, Francesco Aprile, Catherine Vidler, Olivier Schopfer, Lakey Comess, Louise Landes Levi, Richard Kostelanetz, bruno neiva, Hugh Schwarz, Timothy Pilgrim, Billy Cancel, Cecelia Chapman, Amelia Dale, sean burn, Zachary Scott Hamilton, Bill DiMichele, Javant Biarujia, Valeria Sangiorgi, Steve Dalachinsky, Charles Freeland, Michael Prihoda, Bobbi Lurie, Glen Armstrong, Jeff Harrison, Martin H. Levinson, Carol Stetser, Christopher Barnes, hiromi suzuki, sutcliffe lovingood, Edward Kulemin, Laurent Grison, Ana Prundaru, Clara B. Jones, Marco Giovenale, William Garvin, Stephen Nelson, Aidan Coleman, Rebecca Eddy, Bob Heman, Annette Plasencia, Bogdan Puslenghea, Carla Bertola, Tom Beckett, Alberto Vitacchio, Susan Gangel, Jeff Bagato, Kit Kennedy, Owen Bullock, J. D. Nelson, Brendan Slater, John Pursch, Ginny O'Brien & Michael Basinski, Matthew Carbery, Karl Kempton, Seth Howard, Sal Randolph, Gian Luigi Braggio, Robert Lee Brewer, Shloka Shankar, Shloka Shankar & Bill Waters, Tony Beyer, Marcia Arrieta, Tim Wright, Arpine Konyalian Grenier, Michael Brandonisio, Eric Hoffman, Reijo Valta, & Katrinka Moore.

you can read the magazine here

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anthology from the recent conference
Active Aesthetics : Innovation & Aesthetics in Contemporary Australian Poetry
at University of California Berkeley, 14-16 April -

for further information about the conference & the anthology visit the website here

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Ann Vickery's Ghostly Sisters :
Feminist collaborative performance in Australia
has just been published here in issue 10 of Axon

       Ann Vickery at Berkeley, April 2016

This article examines how feminist performance has been, and continues to be, a key vehicle for the collaborative exploration of sexual difference and female subjectivity in Australia. It focuses specifically on the Lean Sisters and Generic Ghosts, whose collaborative performances occurred during the seventies and eighties, and their impact on subsequent feminist collaborative performance groups. As the article demonstrates, this counter-cultural tradition of performance typically deploys tactics of intertextuality, cross-media experimentation, humour, and détournement to critique gender oppression and its recurrence, while staging new possibilities of an embodied feminist politics.

The Lean Sisters : Netta Perrett's poster for The Poetry Water Gossip Show :: at Bondi Pavilion Theatre The Adventures of Shirlean Holmes, October 1977 (photo by Helen Grace) :: the Queen's speech - The Crunkboonk Xmasshow at The Tin Sheds, December 1977

Elizabeth Drake & Pam Brown at The Performance Space, December 1984 : Generic Ghosts - Amanda Stewart, Jan McKemmish, Pam Brown, Carol Christie at Writers in the Park, 1986 : Jan Mackay's poster for As Much Trouble As Talking 1988

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Coming up on Sunday May 15th in Sydney -

As usual, click on any images to view them

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in seattle in april -

to visit the INCA web site click here
please click on the info above to enlarge for reading

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in sydney

for information, directions
& to rsvp for the reading click here.

everyone welcome.

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in melbourne

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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 -
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.

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 :

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.
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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.
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For more information about Ann Vickery, the book, and to order a copy visit Hunter Publishers here.
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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:
    Poetry is like a swoon, but with this difference: it brings you to your senses

Instead of bombs, then, these texts are perhaps a kind of Triage. Vickery tells us in the first three lines of the book how:
    This is just fun-size confectionary,
     pet-name or a pose generator, to palliate
     the impracticalities of play

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,
    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

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.

You can find The Complete Pocketbook of Swoon here.

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