then get ready
Bastille Day
14th July
quatorze juillet
Prise de La Bastille by Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Hoüel
11.7.07
friday 13th
then get ready
Bastille Day
14th July
quatorze juillet
Prise de La Bastille by Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Hoüel
7.7.07
A Question of Fear
Earlier this week I listened to Alexis Wright presenting
a Sydney PEN lecture called A Question of Fear
Alexis Wright (foto : Eddie Jim)
Alexis Wright is a Waanji woman from the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. Her latest book Carpentaria won the 2007 Miles Franklin Award. She has worked extensively in government departments and Aboriginal agencies across four states and territories as a manager, educator, researcher and writer. Alexis was coordinator of the NT Aboriginal Constitutional Convention in 1993 and wrote Aboriginal Self Government for Lands Rights News, later quoted in full in Henry Reynold’s Aboriginal Sovereignty, 1996. She is also the author of Grog War and Plains of Promise
You can listen to this powerful lecture or download the transcript,
courtesy of ABC radio, by clicking here
5.7.07
The riches, the riches
On the train in to Central Station, I’d been reading Cinema Eden - a selection of essays by my favourite novelist Juan Goytisolo. When I say ‘favourite novelist’ I mean it. I don’t read many novels but I adore Juan Goytisolo’s prose. I like his critical writing, his novels, memoir - all of it. Since I first read Landscapes After The Battle in the late 1980s I have read everything he has written that I could find translated into English.
Anyway, after bombing out (or, at any rate, feeling that way) of my late-morning interview at the Arts Ministry, I decided, perhaps inspired by Juan Goytisolo’s small book, to uplift my general engagement and, hoping for cultural enrichment, to walk down to the Art Gallery of NSW to see The Arts of Islam.
But, after leaving my coat and bag at the hat check, I decided to have a look at the current Anselm Kiefer exhibition first. I’ve seen individual pieces by Anselm Kiefer before and when my partner, Jane Zemiro, and I were in Berlin some years ago we visited his ‘library installation’ at the Hamburger Bahnhof.
At the NSW Art Gallery the Kiefer artworks are strewn, Sydney-style, across various locations. As you leave a down-escalator you are sort of thrown onto a wall with a large truncated concrete staircase that was, according to the wall-didact, inspired by an Ingeborg Bachmann poem. This powerful work seems incidental to the traffic of “art-lovers” looking for the toilet or heading to another show, and the same goes for the rest of the installation. It feels, slightly horribly, a bit like an undisciplined circus. Kiefer’s interpretative sculptures of three of classical mythology’s goddesses are placed like decorative objects in a touristic pot-pourri shop right next to the cafeteria - in fact, they seem to be in the cafeteria as the staff clatter around them with food and drinks on trays and are stopped to answer location queries by lost “art-lovers”. The fallen palm-tree that accompanies Kiefer’s analysis or quest of the relationship between a fecund earthy field and its dire heavenly aspirations lies in the busy corridor between his large wall panels and a show on Picasso-et-al and modernism. Perhaps the curator here sees this possibly obstructive representation of Palm Sunday, and Jesus Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem, as belonging somewhere between modernist abstractions and passageway crowd management. Frankly, no matter what you think or feel about Kiefer’s work, the Art Gallery of NSW’s presentation of this sombre and serious artist is risible.
Installation at White Cube Gallery, U.K.
Seeing Anselm Kiefer’s large installation in Berlin was an utterly different experience. There, you could take this artist seriously. And you could surrender to his investigative art, whether bleak or wry, affected or genuine. The space was large enough, quiet enough (no cafeteria or bookshop within cooee of the artworks) to respond in whatever way you wanted.
Library installation (detail), Anselm Kiefer. (Foto - Pierre Joris)
Berlin's Museum for contemporary art opened in the former railway station, Hamburger Bahnhof, in November 1996. This gave the Nationalgalerie (National Gallery) the first permanent home for its collection of contemporary art.
The Hamburger Bahnhof was built 1846/47 in late classicist style. It is the only old terminal station building remaining in Berlin. For forty years it served as the terminal between Hamburg and Berlin until it was closed in 1884. And (already) in 1906 it was found to be too small for a station and was converted into a museum of traffic and building. Located in "no man’s land" between East and West Berlin, the Hamburger Bahnhof remained unused after the Second World War. Successive restoration began only after the GDR handed the building over to the City of Berlin in 1984. The war-torn building was inaccessible after 1945. It stood empty for many decades and
in 1987, the Hamburger Bahnhof was assigned to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Foundation of Prussian Cultural Heritage). In 1989 the competition for the conversion of the building was won by the architect Josef Paul Kleihues, a museum specialist who designed an ideal concept for the multi-functional usage of the new museum. After reconstruction and modernization the museum, as noted above, opened in November 1996. The first major exhibition followed in 1997 with works by Sigmar Polke.
Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
To end more positively on the riches of Wednesday, I'll direct The Deletions' visitors to Peter Campbell's article on these Palm Sunday works by Anselm Kiefer in the LRB earlier this year, and also say that the exhibition of the arts of Islam is excellent in spite of the expected and traditional absence of women (apart from two images - in a Maghrebi and an Afghani miniature) and even if this avid “art lover” had to crick and crane to read the poorly placed labels.
30.6.07
Saturday
Saturday, and I’ve spent today hanging Serengeti blinds on the back windows of the house. I think they must be ‘Serengeti-style’ blinds as they were purchased for a modest price at Spotlight in Penrith and don’t actually come from Serengeti, Tanzania. They’re more likely to have been ‘Made In China’. My hanging is possibly minutely crooked but passing strangers, blind people in a hurry and those with the naked eyes will probably not notice.
While I was going up and down the aluminium ladder I was thinking about the books I’ve been reading recently. I finished Joe Amato’s book Industrial Poetics : Demo Tracks for a Mobile Culture early last week. At first I found that I was resistant to the book. Its notes and bullet-style presentation seemed a bit scrappy to start with but then, as I kept reading, I began to follow Joe Amato's thinking on ‘how to tell the difference between life and art’ more receptively and I started to enjoy and empathise with segments recounting board meetings and job interviews from a poet’s viewpoint. I was always almost instantaneously sceptical of the first whiff of managerial language in my old job in a university library and in my previous careers. Joe Amato analyses the places ‘art’ is given by the ‘real world’ very convincingly and he firmly upholds a belief in whatever it is that makes poetry a ‘mysterious’ artform. This book crept up on me - my persistence was rewarded.
From the end of Industrial Poetics - “I have nothing at all to say. But I wanted to say it anyway.” Fellini’s sublimely absurd gesture in 8½ reminds us that most art haunts the peripheries of the orthodox, the administrative, the organizationally competent. If this has nothing to do with an aversion to thought or theory or intellectual work or even technique, neither does it suggest a reluctance to say what needs saying that “nothing” need be said. Industrial mojo bids us stay tuned and attuned to the present moment…Communities of poets and artists do what they can with the storehouse, the library, the archive, the authorized versions - this much they must do - but their overriding aim is to contribute…'
I’ve also been reading innovative women poets : an anthology of contemporary poetry and interviews. It’s edited by Elisabeth A. Frost and Cynthia Hogue. It is a collection of fourteen in-depth interviews with experimental women poets of the last forty years and includes lengthy selections of their poems and good brief introductions to each poet. It’s a fascinating and enriching book. The poets are the late Gloria Evangelina Anzaldua, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Jayne Cortez, Rachel Blau du Plessis, Alice Fulton, Susan Howe, Harryette Mullen, Alice Notley, Alicia Ostriker, Sonia Sanchez, Leslie Scalapino, C.D. Wright and (the late) Barbara Guest and Kathleen Fraser.
For Australians reading The Deletions, I bought my copy of both Industrial Poetics and innovative women poets via mail order from Dark Horsey Bookshop
The Eighteen Nineties is a Pelican book first published in 1913 and reprinted eight times until the edition I’ve been reading was published in 1939. I found it in a second-hand bookshop in Blackheath. When I expressed an interest in the book the co-proprietor of the shop, a lover of art, architecture and culture in general, Dorothy Quin, gave it to me. It’s a collection of essays about the fin de siècle but no, it’s not about or by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, it’s by Holbrook Jackson.
It is series of essays that review the art and ideas at the close of the Nineteenth Century and covers figures of the times like Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, the poet John Davidson, the playwright making an entrance - George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, and topics like 'Decadence', 'The Minor Poet', 'The New Dandyism', 'The New Fiction', 'The Revival of Printing', 'Black and White' and 'British Impressionism' among others. I've been interested to read the take on Francis Thompson who was, infamously, a god-possessed and fraught young druggie (opium) - a poet whose visions remind me of Cocteau, Blake, Ginsberg, and Michael Dransfield all together. One of the fascinating facts about Francis Thompson is that like the earlier poet, John Clare, he walked to find his fate. As a teenager (from the age of seventeen) Francis Thompson studied medicine in Manchester but abandoned repeated attempts to take a degree and decided he wanted to live by writing. He tried earning a living in various jobs but eventually, in 1885, hurt by his father's disapproval, he left Preston and walked to London. Actually walking into years of poverty, laudanum addiction and destitution.
I found a copy of a pocket-sized pamphlet of Francis Thompson's The Hound of Heaven at another very good (meaning 'kind-of-irresistible') second-hand bookshop,Lamdha, in Wentworth Falls last summer.
26.6.07
What to say ?
As every Australian resident knows, there is currently, and suddenly, a national political emphasis posed on past and ongoing crises concerning the Indigenous peoples of this country.
I’ve been a member of ANTaR, Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation, for some years and I will leave it to that organisation to speak, but I do want to draw attention to the extraordinary political stress that has been imposed upon Australian Indigenous people in the last week.
Check Living Black and Message Stick for commentary, information and for events for the upcoming NAIDOC (National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) Week from July 8th until July 15th.
17.6.07
In Blackheath
What to do on a rainy Saturday night in Blackheath? Stroll across to one of the pubs on the highway and meet up with friends. Some fresh from a rivetting, brain-stretching couple of hours at the Blackheath Philosophy Forum and a poet, Tim Thorne, visiting from Launceston, Tasmania. All anyway ready for a glass of wine, a quick dinner and all flush with tickets to a concert in the Blackheath Community Centre, the veritable hub of the town.
The Spooky Men’s Chorale is an amazingly ‘different’ kind of acappella singing group. No dinner suits here, no kitschy chintz and no spiritual agenda. It is a group of sixteen very talented modern Mountain Men who perform with wit, aplomb and in great voice. From their own blurb they are a ruthless bunch of larrikins based in the Blue Mountains. The Spooky Men strike while the irony is hot.
The Spooky Men's Chorale, Blackheath, 16th June 07 (fotos: Trish Davies)
Spooky Men in Canberra (foto: Andy Cranston)
The Kazakhstan Kowgerls from Tasmania, were in Blackheath as part of their Hit the Rode Yak tour of the Blue Mountains. Their music is a mixture of open-throat singing, country and western (but no yodelling) and as someone remarked, they’re kind of like The-Kransky-Sisters-Meet-The-Leningrad-Cowboys. Very satirical.
Kazakhstan Kowgerls, Blackheath, 16th June 07 (fotos: Trish Davies)
Together in Tassie 2006 (foto: Sarah Delaney)
And on Sunday morning call in at the recently opened (only three months ago) Hat Hill Gallery to see the current show of paintings by Christine Townend and a wonderful collection of photos of 1920s Australian theatre, recently acquired by gallery co-director, Viken Minassian.
12.6.07
Red Room Company
Johanna Featherstone has put the poems and the miniature essay/lecture from Occasional Poetry up on the web at the Red Room Company web site
6.6.07
Poetics from the end of the century
From 1992 to 2000 in the U.S., Los Angeles writer and film maker Christopher Reiner edited WITZ: A Journal of Contemporary Poetics. He says “ It's no longer as contemporary as it was back then, but I'm putting PDF files of the original issues up on my web site, for anyone who's interested.”
So far, there are seven issues available for download, with more on the way. Visit the WITZ Archives
Stephen Ratcliffe :Interoptions, Nick Piombino on Writing and Persevering,Edward Foster on Alice Notley and Douglas Oliver, Michelle Murphy on John High, Stephen-Paul Martin on Jacques Servin, Keith Waldrop on Cole Swensen, Susan Smith Nash on Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Bruce Campbell on Walter Abish, and ‘Witz End’ by David Bromige.
John High’s ‘Working Notes from Moscow’, Clint Burnham interviews Steve McCaffery, Raffael de Gruttola on Steve McCaffery,Karl Young on Anne Tardos, Susan Smith Nash on Barry Silesky, John Tritica on Stephen-Paul Martin, Thomas Taylor on Rochelle Owens, Alan Davis on Harryette Mullen. Susan Smith Nash on John Perlman, Serge Gavronsky interviews Raquel Levy, Johanna Drucker on Chris Tish, Clint Burnham on Karen MacCormak, John Tritica on Sheila E. Murphy, Charles Plymell on Jim McCrary.
David Bromige / Robert Grenier : A Conversation, Susan Smith Nash on Kathleen Fraser and Janet Grey.
Charles Bernstein on ‘Community and the Individual Talent’, Daniel Barbiero on subjectivity, Dan Featherston on political poetry, Chris Stroffolino on Cole Swensen, Clint Burnham on Pam Rehm.
Mark Wallace On the Lyric As Experimental Possibility,94 Karl Young on ‘Roman Reading’, Robert Grenier and Chris Stroffolino on Don Byrd, Daniel Barbiero on The Art of Practice, and Harry Polkinhorn on Left Hand Books.
Susan Smith Nash on Leslie Scalapino, Mark DuCharme on ‘Poem’s Tensity’, Stephen Ellis on Edward Foster and Susan Smith Nash, David Giannini on John Perlman.
For those who might have been turned away due to the venue having reached its capacity, Johanna Featherstone’s Red Room Company blog carries a description of the Occasional Poetry event at the Sydney Writers Festival last Sunday evening. I’ll link the final documentation, including the poems and the ‘mineslec’ (miniature essay/lecture) once Johanna has put it up on the web
29.5.07
Three photos
Unpacking my photos I find lots from France but I especially like these three.
Resnais dreaming
In Brittany
dark grey granite houses
tuck low into the landscape
like rocks
darker hedgerows protect them
from the winds we walk into
along the coast
small red tractors
plough patches of pink soil,
across the narrow road
eschallots burst
from black plastic groundstrips
this is the kind of place
you’d locate a film
but not live in,
Godard made one here
but none of us
remembers it
bleached & tufted grasses conceal
the purple thistle
on the windswept bank
above a glinting choppy bay
a group of hikers
singing loudly
strides by
just outside the house
& here comes Daniel,
with a wicker basket
of saltwater prawns -
back from fishing in the rocks
some of the last beret-wearers
of the 21st century
are on their knees
weeding their fields
at sunset
the rye field blurs
like double vision
Godard dreaming
(click to enlarge images)
25.5.07
22.5.07
awake and refreshed
tho with nothing on the page
Derek Motion reviews Peel me a zibibbo in the latest issue of galatea resurrects and ends with two lines from
Ken Bolton, quoted from the title poem.
Peel Me A Zibibbo is a group of recent poems - five poems written for friends. It's a 14 page C5 sized chapbook. Here's the title poem -
Peel me a zibibbo
I could go
in any direction
but it's best that here and now
I remain lesbian,
keep my vanishing cream
sealed.
I'll go south
eventually
to follow the sheen
of your signals,
in the meantime
my problem's like how to
design a wall didact -
serif or not's
a big decision
*
it's October so
the bogong moths
are back
and the koels - the October
crack of dawn racket -
are back again too,
mauve jacaranda petals
are stuck
on the windscreen wipers rubber
*
by now the wall text task
is impossible -
application decreasing,
attention span diminishing -
transparency an aim,
how coded the coding
*
imperfection in kindness
comes with the void,
you need to
choose
the 'I'm feeling lucky' google option
*
drinking in the cemetery
sounds like an early
Nick Cave song
but it's
something-to-do,
it's also the subject
of Paddy Fordham's
drawing
*
should I start carrying
my books
in clear plastic bags
inside
my polyester document bag,
is this a solution ?
16° centigrade
95% humidity
what a precipitate place
*
shouting Shakespeare aloud
to the sea
in Surfers' Paradise
in 1964
after hurling your body down
fine off-white sand dunes.
now it's 2006
you're experiencing thanatos
high up on a Seidler balcony.
if you are in doubt
(slurp over drinks)
what gives the false poet
such confidence ?
*
awake and refreshed
tho with nothing on the page
*
John T phones -
this cloudy gloomy
early summer day
is 'like the fifties' he says.
every day ?
miserable childhood ?
photographic weather memory
à la recherche du temps inclément
*
I was reading
about the sweet potato farmers
of Osaka
living such long lives -
nonogenarians, centogenarians -
when Kurt called in with his new book
Hyper Taiwan
Taiwan - it's 'sweet potato island'
hi Kurt, hi John T,
hi Nick, Paddy, hi Shakespeare,
peel me a zibibbo
would you,
one of you guys ?
Ivy Alvarez writes a short review of My Lightweight Intentions
Never-Never Books * 157 Wentworth Street *
Blackheath * NSW 2785 * Australia
13.5.07
Meshings
NEW AT MESHWORKS :
Cambridge Experimental Women's Poetry Festival
Cambridge University, UK - October 2006
Organizer: Emily Critchley
The CEWPF feature brings you video documentation of readings and talks by:
Andrea Brady, Lisa Samuels, Kathleen Fraser, Susan M. Schultz, Rod Mengham,Susana Gardner, Geraldine Monk, Peter Middleton, Redell Olsen, Carol Mirakove, Keith Tuma & Justin Katko, Marianne Morris, Tom Raworth, Catherine Wagner, Coupons+Coupons, Camille PB, Kai Fierle-Hedrick, Kristen Kreider,Tim Atkins, Ken Edwards, Wendy Mulford, Peter Manson, Maggie O'Sullivan,Caroline Bergvall, Leslie Scalapino and Lucy Sheerman.
For more further documentation of the Festival, please visit the Archive of the Now and HOW2
Unpacking my posters I found this one screenprinted by
Ken Bolton in 1979 or 1980 for the Wollongong Poets’ Union reading series. It was printed at Coalcliff, on recycled matrix computer paper provided by Leigh Stokes (then of
Wollongong uni). It’s a beauty.
click on image to enlarge
10.5.07
Beat Scene
I don’t know where I’ve been for the last 50 issues of Beat Scene but until John Tranter lent me a copy of number 51 just the other day, I had never seen it before. And if you’re interested in the Bolinas Scene (and I am) it’s a great issue of this terrific magazine from Coventry in England, edited by Kevin Ring.
Cover photo: Lewish Warsh & Anne Waldman in front of Angelica & Tom Clark’s house, Bolinas, California, 1968 (foto : Tom Clark)
Number 51 has articles, interviews, photos, book covers -
Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Allen Ginsberg, Lewis Warsh, Tom Clark, Philip Whalen, Joanne Kyger, Robert Creeley, Anne Waldman, William Burroughs, Gilbert Sorrentino, Jack Kerouac, Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, Michael McClure, Bill Berkson - and the list goes on.
Ted Berrigan
I like this magazine. I’ve ordered number 51 and other copies from the Beat Scene website. If you’re an old beatnik poet like me you should do likewise, daddio. And thanks, John T. for sending it to me.
remember, click on the images to enlarge them
8.5.07
Red Room Event
The Sydney Writers' Festival &
The Red Room Company
present
Occasional Poetry
An installation of poems, mannequins and materials that investigate poetry's relationship with costume, fashion and the slogan.Taking the wit and disguises of the late Australian poet, Gwen Harwood, as its “muse” The Red Room Company has commissioned three Australian poets to each write a poem for an occasion.
Featuring poetry by
Adam Aitken, Greg McLaren and Claire Potter.
On Sunday June 3rd at the End of Season Party the participating poets will give a reading and poet and associate editor of Jacket, Pam Brown, will deliver the 2007 Mineslec (‘miniature essay/lecture’), a public address on the topic of occasional poetry, pseudonyms and fashion.
Installation venue:
‘Simmer on the Bay’
Walsh Bay
Thursday 31st May - Monday 4th June
End of season party:
Readings and Mineslec
(poems will be available to wear)
Bangarra Mezzanine
Wharf Theatre
Hickson Road
Sydney
Sunday 3rd June at 6.30pm
free or by donation
Visit the Occasional Poetry site.
30.4.07
Tick tick tick
Coming up in May...
Poetic impermanence at work :
The Australian editor of Poetry International Web, poet and founding editor of Vagabond Press, Michael Brennan has just updated the Australian component of the site, including expanded entries with poems and critical work on Gig Ryan, JS Harry, Jane Gibian and my own poetry
Hi Michael
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY OTOLITHS
one year old today
Otoliths #5 cover
The editor, MARK YOUNG, says :
It's also May Day, so arise & join in a chorus of ‘The Internationale’ with Paul Siegell, Andrew Topel, Jordan Stempleman, Ernesto Priego, Paolo Manalo, Eileen Tabios, Jeff Harrison, Katrinka Moore, Corey Mesler, Raymond Farr, Steve Rodgers, Robert Lee Brewer, Mark Cunningham, Martin Edmond, Steve Timm, James Sanders, Audacia Dangereyes, Thomas Fink, Spencer Selby, Maria Zajkowski, Richard Lopez, Marcia Arrieta, Tom Hibbard, Matina Stamatakis, Louise Landes Levi, Márton Koppány, Anny Ballardini, Jill Jones, Craig Santos Perez, mIEKAL aND, Dax Bayard-Murray, Ed Schenk, MTC Cronin, Alana Madison, Alexander Jorgensen, Andrew Taylor, Carol Novack (& Stan Crocker), Stephanie Green, Maurice Oliver, Caleb Puckett, David-Baptiste Chirot, Derek Motion, James Maughn, Michael Rothenberg, Tom Beckett, Nick Piombino & Richard Kostelanetz as they "change henceforth the old tradition".
Mark Young, 2003
Blackheath Philosophy Forum
on again this coming Saturday. May 5th.
Literature as Experimental Philosophy:
George Eliot on Truth and Realism
A talk by Moira Gatens
Professor of Philosophy, University of Sydney
In our era an idea is abroad that fiction has little to do with truth, and that novelists are a species of liar. George Eliot, one of our greatest 19th Century English novelists, considered her work in fiction to be both realist and truth-seeking. In one letter she referred to her writings as a set of experiments in life. Through an examination of some of her novels, this talk will endeavour to explain what Eliot meant by ‘realism’ and what is involved in her commitment to truth. Moira Gatens will argue that Eliot’s worldview still has much to contribute to moral philosophy today.
Blackheath Public School Hall
corner Great Western Highway and Leichhardt Street,
Blackheath
4.00pm Saturday May 5th
$5.00 entry
coffee and cake available
pub talk after the talk
Siena, 2002. Foto by Olivo Barbieri
: : PAPER SCISSORS ROCK : :
: : WHAT MAKES THE ART WORLD TICK : :
: : CRITIC, DEALER, ARTIST, CURATOR, COLLECTOR : :
How they co-operate or don't, how they put pressure on each other, or take turns to own the art. A forum on the different social actors and professionals in the contemporary art world, and their interdependence. The power of a work of art, the influence of critical evaluation, the role of the art market, the rhetoric of sales.
Petra Arends : Wayne Tunnicliffe : Ted Colless :
Peter Hill : John Young : Amanda Rowell :
Moderated by George Alexander : curator, writer, coordinator
Contemporary Programs, Art Gallery of NSW.
A component of An Incomplete World
Warhol, Lichtenstein, Kiki Smith, Hirst
Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, Richter
Sydney 19.5 - 29.7
Art Gallery of NSW
16.4.07
Katoomba poem
Katoomba, (view from Leura), Autumn 2007
Sydney poet Adam Aitken has written a poem set in Katoomba, a tourist town in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. He says - It is an allegory about the "history wars" debate, in which one side is the voice of white settler descendants who deny their complicity in the colonisation of the country and their part in the decline of Indigenous power. This suggests to me an image of the Garden gnome (the white settler) standing next to a stereotype "Native". Together they claim a false mateship and solidarity which the migrant/cosmopolitan stranger will never have. (The strange tourist only wants a view, some fresh air and peace and quiet, not politics.) A poem about (not)belonging (once again!)
Katoomba
While jogging
on a freezing winter's morning
history never feels
cleaner or more
freehold
than a 1950s
catalogue of multiplying accents
at Echo Point's landscape exclusive -
having settled here
for the "cure "
for walks, bush, art and open fire,
in short
for a sense of belonging.
After a couple of months of thinking
you are tolerance incarnated
you pass
a loin-clothed Aborigine
standing with a spear
on one leg
next to a white garden gnome
sharing smokes and taking in the view
as if they owned the place
and they'd seen you coming
and stared,
and knew all about you
a thousand years
before,
as if they owned the place
one thousand years
before.
Adam Aitken, Glebe, Summer 2006
13.4.07
Dear viewers
Just a note for the five regular visitors and the two or so strays :
'The deletions' is best viewed using Safari and Mozilla Firefox browsers.
And if you'd like to see larger versions of the photos just click on them.
'The deletions' is best viewed using Safari and Mozilla Firefox browsers.
And if you'd like to see larger versions of the photos just click on them.
4.4.07
Scribblings poems
For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Book of Poetic Journals
edited by Tyler Doherty and Tom Morgan
has just been published by Bootstrap Productions
It's a collection of the kind of poetry that records, or, at least, begins from the quotidian of place, often written in the first person and usually taking off into poetic enquiry in a consciously temporal mode. Poetry that the editors describe as 'Journal Poetry' :
It includes work from:
Bob Arnold ↔ Ken Bolton ↔ Daniel Bouchard ↔ Pam Brown
Thomas A. Clark ↔ Jack Collom ↔ William Corbett ↔ Tyler Doherty ↔ Marcella Durand ↔ Ryan Gallagher ↔Jonathan Greene ↔ Joanne Kyger ↔ Louise Landis Levi ↔ Joseph Massey ↔ Rachel McKeen ↔ Tom Morgan ↔ Hoa Nguyen ↔ Shin Yu Pai ↔ Mark Pawlak ↔ Michelle Naka Pierce ↔Stephen Ratcliffe ↔ Michael Rothenberg ↔ Andrew Schelling ↔ Joel Sloman ↔ Dale Smith ↔ Stacy Szymasek ↔ Aaron Tieger ↔ Joseph Torra
For more information and to buy a copy at US $18
contact Derek Fenner and Ryan Gallagher at bootstrapproductions@gmail.com
Bootstrap Productions
21.3.07
high hills poems
Wordly goods
on this last day
of February
outside Cupid's Cup Cakes
on the main street
of this utterly strange
hilly town,
dawdling down
to Iso Bar
to take account
of the planet's fields -
wild beast grazing,
a scene cut intermittently
with alluring products
carried up street poles
by narrow vertical lines
cabling connection
to anywhere else
hoping for a place
deep in the shade,
verandahs all around,
somewhere to contemplate
what brought us here
to such manicured beauty -
formal garden hedges,
well-tended kerbs
no gangs no blades
up here in the hills,
just x-box and the dole
they say
the kids are drunk
or on ice
at their clubs
or anorexic wherever
in rehab.
hopeful beginnings,
promised more
than pleasure,
but
they're not grown up,
not a..d..u..l..t
just caught in a reverie,
not ready
for voting driving loving
working cooking
learning new languages
new skills, talents,
what legacy ?
*
without income
for the first time
in a long long time
sounds like a song
coming on
(undercurrent worry
too)
on the last day of February,
the end of four months
on the road,
anyway, without
a fixed address
and the sun shines down
around, all around,
waiting for the book exchange
to open
to hire a computer
to check the mail, and the spam
and the petitions,
to let the government know
we don't like it ! at all !
etcetera no we don't !
illegal detainees, climate change,
education policy, refugees,
equal rights for gays,
indigenous land rights,
justice, etcetera.
my ergonomic-chair activism,
today
the mere thought
of these emails
only exasperates
perhaps I'll delete them
straightaway
*
all my things
boxed and stored interstate,
I miss some of the stuff,
need it, even,
most of it
I've forgotten
as a sanyasin
travelling
on air
might
My poem Worldly goods is set in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, Ken Bolton, co-ordinator of the Lee Marvin Readings in Adelaide, wrote a poem in response, but he hasn't been to the Blue Mountains for many moons and has mistaken the place for Blackheath, a town that could benefit, variously, from having an Iso Bar :
Mademoiselle Apollinaire in Blackheath
for Pam Brown
In the end you are tired of living between always between
& wend your way to the Iso Bar here rather than in
Adelaide tho there is an Iso Bar in Adelaide too
You have lived in Adelaide
You have had enough of leaving Sydney
for Melbourne never to arrive
Blackheath’s Iso Bar must do
connecting you electronically to the world
making modern the cow in the nearby field
the hill the old car coming down the road
& in it a modern farmer Denis Gallagher say
more a poet really than a farmer
a gardener
something modern like a well-tended kerb
or the distemper of youth
a lawnmower a ladder crack cocaine TV
anorexia
& the sun shines down
waiting for the book-exchange, a computer
& politics
—to be avoided some days
others to be embraced—
Politics
In our ergonomic chairs
You remove us from abstractions the expansion of the
spirit—
producing heat
involving the body
Like something intense & blue in Chagall
the memory of an object—a shirt a book an
ashtray with paperclips & your pencils in
a bottle, bound with an elastic band
You will have them soon
A sanyasin travelling on the air at night
lands at home
the moths batting about you as you write
Life tossed off like a glass of spirits
For who can stand outside time
Ken Bolton, Adelaide, a couple of years ago.
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