Ed Ruscha, a favourite

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                           An Obituary for Sue Ford

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FEMINAISSANCE
Edited by Christine Wertheim
Poetry | Prose | Essays |


Identity is dead. The 21st-century subject is an unstable fiction with no identifiable features or group affiliations. He’s a man without inherent qualities, a post-human ideal. But those who have long been hailed as Other exist in a different relation to this ideal. Unlike those traditionally self-possessed |s, these Others may find themselves split between a yearning to be contemporary and unqualified, and longing for a continued allegiance to their qualitative, albeit constructed, group identity.

It is with an awareness of this more ambiguous and refined notion of self that 'Feminaissance' approaches questions of femininity and its relation to writing. Topics include: collectivity; feminine écriture; the politics of writing; text and voice; the body as a site of contestation, insurgence and pleasure; race and writing; gender as performance; writing about other women writers; economic inequities; Hélène Cixous; monstrosity; madness; and aesthetics.



If the fact that “women do not say ‘We’” was one of the constitutive problems for 20th century feminism, the fact that women do and still clearly feel the need to say “We” is just as rich and interesting a topic for feminism today. The writings gathered here prove feminism to be alive and more relevant to all genders than ever: not just because feminist discourse remains a political necessity, but because of its artistic and intellectual pleasures. –Sianne Ngai

Contributors: Dodie Bellamy, Caroline Bergvall, Meiling Cheng,Wanda Coleman, Bhanu Kapil, Chris Kraus, Susan McCabe, Tracie Morris, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, Juliana Spahr, Vanessa Place, Christine Wertheim, Stephanie Young, Lidia Yuknavitch

Published by Les Figues Press - further info here

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                          Vale Sue Ford, 1943 - 2009
                        artist and film maker


Here are a few of my snapshots of Sue, from some time ago: Sue Ford talking with a visitor in front of big pastel irises drawn on craft paper at Micky Allan's exhibition opening at Watters Gallery, Sydney in 1978; sitting under one of her own photos at my house in Petersham in October 1982 and with Sasha Soldatow and Jeune Pritchard at the Art Gallery of NSW in October 82.

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the latest issue of ka mate ka ora is up on the web.

If you like some of the kinds of lyric poetry that I like you'll like Michele Leggott's peri poietikes / about poetry and if you don't know what I like or what kind of lyric you like why not try this kind of lyric -

Click HERE

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NEW ISSUES


extempore 3 - edited by Miriam Zolin
includes a bonus cd of great contemporary Australian jazz players.

For futher information - click here



When Pressed - Movement in Language is up on the web.
Click here


Divan 7 - Click here

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               Rudi Krausmann, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney June 2009

Rudi Krausmann will be launching his new book
on Wednesday November 11th
at 6pm
Berkelouw Bookshop
70 Norton Street
Leichhardt, Sydney

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new journals, online and in print and other news :



ecopetics nos 6 & 7 2006 - 2009
edited by Jonathan Skinner
Includes an Australian poetry feature edited by michael farrell.
Further info here



Kaurab no 108 2009
edited by Aryanil Mukherjee
Bilingual - Bengali & English
Includes an English language feature on collaboration
Further info here

Ekleksographia - Wave 2 2009
edited by Anny Ballardini
Translation Special
Visit the issue here

Attention Span 2009
Steve Evans’ annual list of invited poets’ current reading
Visit Attention Span here


Cordite October 2009
Prague Micro Festival Poetry Series with sound files
Australian poets Jill Jones, Philip Hammial, Michael Farrell,
Pam Brown and Louis Armand
at the Globe Bookstore, Prague on 15 April 2009.
Visit Cordite here

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Just published by Pressed Wafer, Maged Zaher’s
Portrait of the Poet as an Engineer.

When I read Maged Zaher’s poetry I am always intrigued by the questions he asks and amazed by the unexpected layers and turns. Practically every line leads elsewhere. Saints, sex, pop culture, dreams, romance, information technology, religion, corporate life - Dante Alighieri and Barry White in the same poem - Karl Marx, Paris Hilton, Chairman Mao, Arthur Rimbaud and other suspects are all components of the volatile constellation that comprises these sharp and often funny poems.
As a relatively recent-arrival in USA, Maged Zaher analyses a contemporary America kind-of-with-a-’k’, applying a bright intelligence and tempering his sometimes irreverent enquiry with some subtle philosophising.

                          Maged Zaher

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                               Ray Young   1951-2009

Not long after I had screened an extract from a super 8 film at an afternoon talk in July at the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art
of myself and Micky Allan silk screen printing covers for a poetry book at the Tin Sheds in 1979, I read in a note in Art Monthly that Ray Young had died. In the film, Ray is the young man glimpsed working at the light box, answering the phone and passing a joint.



Two of Ray's friends, Michael Callaghan and Marie McMahon,
have written an obituary. You can read it here.

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Praha

no customs checks 
   no cell signal

*

driven there downhill -
     AAA taxi driver on alcohol

*

from his messy suitcase
    Michael reads
          an early novel
by the sad king of Czech literature

*
              
Louis asks
 ‘why not 
      describe everything backwards’
           & answers 
        ‘because it’s impossible’

*

  to dream the impossible 
                              palindrome

*

no souvenir cockroach
    in the Franz Kafka boutique


*

five large Bubo owls 
               caged
       at the national senate

*

skinheads on the 18 tram
                to Petřiny

*

Plastic People of the Universe,
              proto punk 1969

*

cháo khi gãp,
    Vietnamese 
        at the local Trafika

*

at varying intervals
   homeless people with grimy skin
            rat through the same bin
   in Wenceslas Square

*

I buy a book
  about
       Bohumil Hrabal

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     Clouds of Reactionary Populism

     I Ain't Got Nobody sung backwards in cement. Whisper
     next chorus, remove make-up, fall into leaves. All was
     shimmering (by default). Step up to the platform of
     full self-consciousness, rise perfectly to zero.



I'm re-reading Sadly by William Fuller

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Visit The Argotist Online in which I ask Anne Waldman six questions about her recent CD Matching Half. Click HERE.

You can also read four of my poems in this issue HERE

Thanks to the editor, Jeffrey Side

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I've recently read two terrific art books :
                    Ken Bolton, cover photo by William Yang, 1986

ART WRITING: Art In Adelaide In The 1990's And 2000's by KEN BOLTON

The anthology Art Writing: Art in Adelaide in the 1990s and 2000s, presents twenty-five years of writing by Adelaide-based art critic (and well-known poet) Ken Bolton. Alan Cruickshank, CACSA Director and publications commissioner, says in his Foreword:

Ken Bolton is rare if not peerless, in that residing in Adelaide for more than twenty-five years and observing and writing about art, he has been witness to successive generations of South Australian artists and their waxing/enduring/waning careers... He has been and remains one of the very few long-term, one-city domiciled art critics in Australia, his analytical evaluations over this period being more than a valuable resource in a national landscape that has seen Art's epicentre of activity and importance easterly determined and historicised. Ken explains in his Introduction,

All of it I have written because I like thinking about art, or because I sometimes find it impossible not to. Trying to get it right, to formulate one's thinking precisely... I have always been interested in pinning down the aesthetic issue... It is a habit of thought and appreciation that seems to me philosophical (in that it seeks to generalise and abstract aesthetic rules, goals, categories, 'moves') but also idealistic (in that it is continuous with one's earliest discussions of, say, pop music-then, later, of novels, poems, art and philosophy and criticism...

Ken Bolton is a poet, art critic, editor and publisher. After studying Fine Arts at University of Sydney, he relocated to Adelaide in 1982 where he has since lived and worked. He won University of Melbourne's Michel Wesley Wright Poetry Prize for 1990. More usually he is short-listed-'Two Poems: A Drawing of the Sky' for the 1991 Victorian Premier's Award, and 'Untimely Meditations' for the NSW Premier's Award in 1999. In 2000 he spent six months in Rome courtesy of the Literature Board of the Australia Council. Associated with the Dark Horsey Bookshop at the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide, Bolton has published his art criticism in Broadsheet, Artlink, Otis Rush, The Advertiser, Photofile, Art and Text, Art Monthly, Meanjin, Agenda, Like and Eyeline. His major literary collections to date are a Selected Poems (Penguin/ETT, 1992), and Untimely Meditations and At The Flash & At The Baci (Wakefield Press, 1997 and 2006).

Artists featured include: Ian Abdulla; Mehmet Adil; Akira Akira; Micky Allan; Craige Andrae; John Barbour; Bianca Barling; Lynne Barwick; Andrew Best; Annette Bezor; Olive Bishop; Tony Bishop; Matthew Bradley; Katherine Brennan; Kristian Burford; Antonio Colangelo; Sarah Crowest; Alan Cruickshank; Bridget Currie; Jonathan Dady; James Dodd; Sonia Donnellan; Nicholas Folland; John Foubister; Kerry Giles; Simryn Gill; Agnieszka Golda; Richard Grayson; Kim Guthrie; Fiona Hall; Anton Hart; Louise Haselton; Paul Hewson; Hewson/Walker; Paul Hoban; Simone Hockley; Sunday Hopkins; Teri Hoskin; Larissa Hjorth; Aldo Iacobelli; Bronia Iwanczak; Kab-101; Yoko Kajio; Mimi Kelly; Simone Kennedy; Shaun Kirby; Macin Kobylecki; Yvonne Koolmatrie; Michael Kutschbach; Michelle Luke; Max Lyle; Peter McKay; Malcom McKinnon; Monte Masi; Vivienne Miller; Kelly Milton; Katie Moore; Kerin Murray; Michael Newall; Michelle Nikou; Roger Noakes; Bridget Noone; Ian North; David O'Halloran; Anna Platten; George Popperwell; Deborah Paauwe; Geoffrey Parslow; Andrew Petrusevics; Sonia Porcaro; Anne Robertson; Mark Rogers; Manne Schulze; Mark Siebert; Paul Sloan; Samantha Small; Jyanni Steffensen; Tim Sterling; Suzanne Treister; James Strickland; Jim Thalassoudis; Angela Valamanesh; Hossein Valamanesh; Irma Van Niele; Warren Vance; Linda Marie Walker; David Watt; Gerry Wedd; Steve Wigg; Laura Wills; Clint Woodger; Lisa E. Young; Zafari Art

ISBN 978-1-875751-34-1
RRP: $25 Paperback
Published by The Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia


                           Ken Bolton, July 2009

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THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ICELAND
Travel Essays In Art by EILEEN MYLES

Poet and post-punk heroine Eileen Myles has always operated in the art, writing, and queer performance scenes as a kind of observant flaneur. Like Baudelaire's gentleman stroller, Myles travels the city—wandering on garbage-strewn New York streets in the heat of summer, drifting though the antiseptic malls of La Jolla, and riding in the van with Sister Spit—seeing it with a poet's eye for detail and with the consciousness that writing about art and culture has always been a social gesture. Culled by the poet from twenty years of art writing, the essays in The Importance of Being Iceland make a lush document of her—and our—lives in these contemporary crowds.

Framed by Myles's account of her travels in Iceland, these essays posit inbetweenness as the most vital position from which to perceive culture as a whole, and a fluidity in national identity as the best model for writing and thinking about art and culture. The essays include fresh takes on Thoreau's Cape Cod walk, working class speech, James Schulyer and Björk, queer Russia and Robert Smithson; how-tos on writing an avant-garde poem and driving a battered Japanese car that resembles a menopausal body; and opinions on such widely ranging subjects as filmmaker Sadie Benning, actor Daniel Day-Lewis, Ted Berrigan's Sonnets, and flossing.

Eileen Myles, named by BUST magazine "the rock star of modern poetry," is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including Chelsea Girls, Cool for You, Sorry, Tree, and Not Me (Semiotext(e), 1991), and is the coeditor of The New Fuck You (Semiotext(e), 1995). Eileen Myles was head of the writing program at University of California, San Diego, from 2002 to 2007, and she has written extensively on art and writing and the cultural scene. Most recently, she received a fellowship from the Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Foundation.

Published by Semiotext(e)


                           Eileen Myles, 2009

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Shimmy and shake back to the 1980s.
Women’s band, Stray Dags perform live at the funk-a-licious
Red Rattler Theatre
6 Faversham Street
Marrickville
Saturday November 28th at 8pm.

Your hostess for the evening will be
ABC breakfast radio presenter Fran Kelly.

This is a fundraiser for filmmaker Kathy Sport's
documentary-in-progress on Australian women's music
See an exclusive sneak preview on the night.

Archival footage of my own band, CLITORIS BAND, will cost between $7,000 and $10,000.The National Film & Sound Archive holds footage of Clitoris Band shot by Jon Rhodes in 1975. Before it can be used, a “copy” must be made of the original 16mm picture negative. Negotiations with the NFSA for permission to use the film were unsuccessful.

Support this project by going along to the Dag-A-Rama.
Win a prize for the most original 1980s outfit.
View rare photographs and song clips.
Also rockin’ the Rattler roof with eighties classics,
Baby Machine & guests.
Raffle at the door.
Tickets available at moshtix
1300 438 849, and all moshtix outlets.

Tickets are limited and likely to sell out.

You can visit the website for info about the event and the film.
Click here

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JON CATTAPAN
Night Visions
21 August - 19 September 2009
Preview: Friday 21 August, 6-pm
Kaliman Gallery
56 Sutherland St, Paddington, Sydney

This latest body of work relates to Jon Cattapan’s recent visit to East Timor where he was researching an Australian War Memorial commission. The night vision equipment used by the Australian soldiers became a focus of his research. The result is a series of blue and green toned works, reminiscent of the visual perspective and representation night vision equipment employs. Soldiers in combat gear, army vehicles and army equipment populate the surfaces of the paintings. Jon Cattapan submerges these figurative elements in the patterns of weather maps and night vision data so that they are woven together as part of a brilliantly coloured nocturnal fabric.


               (cover detail, but the red is wrong, too orange here, my old scanner)

Chris McAuliffe’s monograph on Jon Cattapan, Possible Histories, reviewed by Ian North in Artlink.

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ABC1 TV Artscape: Artists At Work: Jon Cattapan
10:00pm - Tuesday, August 25
Over the last 30 years, Jon Cattapan has established a reputation as one of Australia's most significant and prolific painters. Often described as 'the poet of the floating metropolis', much of Cattapan's work responds to the notion of what it means to be a human being in the 21st century urban environment.
He is best known for his large cityscape paintings which reveal the shifting dynamics of the metropolis - charting the endless flow of information and mapping the psychological trajectory of its inhabitants.
In July 2008, Cattapan decided to take a risk and step outside of his urban milieu. After years of deliberation he finally agreed to become an official war artist for the Australian War Memorial (AWM) and was deployed to Timor Leste. To his surprise what followed was an experience he describes as "one of my luckiest breaks in my life".
Artscape: Artists At Work follows Cattapan's journey to Timor Leste and then back to his studio, in an outer suburb of Melbourne, where he creates a series of art works for the AWM, based on his unique experiences as a war artist.
(Artscape: Artists At Work: Jon Cattapan will be repeated on ABC2
Sunday, August 30 at 7pm http://abc.net.au/iview/)

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                              Vale Willy de Ville


                    Obituaries :
                          one
                          two
                          three
                          four

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The reviewer I mentioned last weekend might be able to answer his perplexed question regarding Les Murray and Lionel Fogarty by reading Lyn McCredden’s The Locatedness of Poetry in the latest issue of JASAL (Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature)

Here’s the abstract :
This essay argues that understanding the locatedness of poetry is crucial as a measure by which to sift the high rhetorics of national, cosmopolitan, globalising discourses. In an analysis of the poetry of Indigenous writers Tony Birch, Sam Wagan Watson and Lionel Fogarty, and of the Federal Government's Apology to the Stolen Generations, we can see more clearly the role of literature, and particularly poetry, in debates between the local and the global.

Click HERE for the index and scroll down to the article.
It’s there as a pdf.

Here's the question :

criminal daze

Yesterday I went to see Matteo Garrone’s film of Roberto Saviano’s novel about the Camorra syndicate in Naples and Caserta, Italy - Gomorrah. It’s a powerful exposé of corruption and of the brutal methods used to recruit young men who become so entangled in the web of crime that they have no choice but to continue living in a truly violent world. Only a few can even contemplate escape. Mattone deftly mixes and melds five stories into one. An extraordinary film of a cruel and frightening aspect of Italy that tourists only hear, read or see films about.




This afternoon I went to hear Peter Doyle give an illustrated talk on his cultural history of Sydney in the 1920s via records of criminals of the day. He has just published another book Crooks Like Us, after having spent many, many hours delving into the forensic photography archive at Sydney’s Justice & Police Museum.








Peter Doyle curated an exhibition of photos and published an accompanying book City of Shadows in 2005.



                                                Peter Doyle

Many Sydneysiders also know Peter as “Peter ‘Rockin’ Doyle”, the amazing guitarist from the bands Wasted Daze, The Magnetics and The Bopcats that played around the inner western suburbs in the mid-late 1970s.
Since then he has completed a PhD, written a novel, The Devil’s Jump, and finically researched the police archives to write the criminal history books and he is now an academic teaching media at Macquarie University. Of course, he still likes to boogie - the Doyle-Bongers Downhome Quartet – a roots blues jazz funk steel guitar and saxophone combo was getting into the groove as I left the event.


     Click to enlarge -Assembled bands The Bopcats, The Layabouts, Ratbags of Rhythm
      Peter Doyle in white shirt fifth from the right

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I like this perplexed question from a review of a new blockbuster anthology of Australian literature in today's Sydney Morning Herald.

Rehab for Everyone

hands so cold 
             fingers cold 
tucked under legs
   sitting in insect hiss 
           low white noise
   gas heater undertone 
        no other sound 
                              nothing 

almost asleep, 
       a car pulling up the hill

        a currawong 
  does that shrill thing 
                    into pink air

a huge open yawn 
           almost breaks my jaw

  the pen that makes the marks 
            alters the angles of the letters

a patch 
       of  yesterday’s chocolate 
              stuck to my corduroy sleeve -
a signal 
         imagined and interpreted

we look back 
            at the years in the tops
     waiting to be taken out of time

red brick 
       wall map of Australia 
      grass green carpet
mustard coloured plastic chairs 
          clumpy piling on the mittens

mitts on the keyboard 
         pushing thoughts and jingles
                                                out 
   to Dublin to Seattle, 
            Adelaide, Kane`ohe, 
                       Faversham, Glebe

sadly notating dim trivia 
        me-minus-you 
                    outside community

literary festivals 
           can’t help anyone 
       like a rehab book sale

making mistakes, 
             so different 
      from being morally wrong

in an unsettling world 
              it‘s a rabbit life,
built the walls from Castrol cases 

black tyre ribbons
                  strewn 
       like a giant’s licorice 
under the striated cutting
             siding on the highway, 
say goodbye 
           to the Woodford bends

sometimes the clunky 
             can incandesce 
      but I want to know
how to vitalize gawkiness, 

      sometimes 
I’m in my no-mind     sometimes 
          in a technological mindlessness 
  sometimes nowhere near limber, 
                          although that’s unusual

some people 
          just float along all the time 
     accumulating the placid

       sometimes 
 when you think you’re going down 
                   you’re not,
you’re going straight ahead 
                         to a utopia of modernity.