soft sunset sunday night
28.12.08
18.12.08
the ghosts of xmasses past
This time of year usually carries some nostalgia and too much sentimentality, so let's indulge in both. 1977 was a truly great year for anti-xmas festivity. The Tin Sheds on City Road was a-hopping and a-bopping. The Lean Sisters, from the precipice of simpleton theatre, performed a Workers-Control themed santamime, the Crunk Boonk Xmashow, where Santa was portrayed as a rapacious profiteer who had already sold the rights to easter to god's agent, Gabriel, before the previous year had ended, and his 'helpers' suffered mightily under his cruelly exploitative conditions of employment. After the fabulously didactic performance the audience danced on into the sweaty summer night to the music of the rockin' all-girl band, Sheila. And on Xmas Eve, a horde of happy counter-culturalists danced into another hot and steamy night to the music of Alias, Wasted Daze and Mental as Anything at the 'Christmas-is-False-Consciousness-Eve-Party'.
I don't mind saying it - those were the daze.
Silkscreen Poster by Jenny Coopes, Netta Perrett and Pam Brown 
If you can't read it, Che the shepherd is saying "And you think capitalism has
problems". Silkscreen Poster by Chips Mackinolty, Earthworks Poster Collective
Enjoy yourselves this year, pals of 'the deletions', and here's to a happy 2009
17.12.08
k a m a t e k a o r a # 6 : h o n e t u w h a r e
September/December 2008
The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) is pleased to announce the sixth Ka Mate Ka Ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics, a special issue on the work and influence of Hone Tuwhare (1922 – 2008), guest-edited by Robert Sullivan.
*Selwyn Muru,
*Hana O’Regan, He tītī me te waihoka pōhutukawa
*Robert Sullivan, Hone Tuwhare’s Aroha
*Janet Hunt, His own true voice
*Michelle Keown,: Hone Tuwhare’s socialist poetics
*Jon Battista, When grief inhabits the desolate house . . .
*Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Solar Metaphors: ‘No Ordinary Sun’
*Cassie Ringland-Stewart, Talking with Hone Tuwhare
*Hinemoana Baker, 'People leave I know’
*Peter H. Marsden, Er war ein Berliner!: Hone Tuwhare in Germany
*David Eggleton,Pūrorohū: Hone Tuwhare’s Rain Spells
*Photographs by William Farrimond, Jan Kemp and John Miller
Tributes by Barry Brickell, Tania Hinehou Butcher, Glenn Colquhoun, Murray Edmond, William Farrimond, Bernadette Hall, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Steve Lang, Michele Leggott, Jean McCormack, Cilla McQueen, Bill Manhire, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Michael O’Leary, Mark Pirie, Brian Potiki, John Pule, Gavin Reedy, Miriam Richardson, Dieter Riemenschneider, Alice Te Punga Somerville, Robert Sullivan, Apirana Taylor, Albert Wendt, Reina Whaitiri, Simon Williamson, Briar Wood
Hone Tuwharekmko is edited by Murray Edmond with assistance from Michele Leggott and Hilary Chung at the University of Auckland, and with the support of a team of consulting and contributing editors. It publishes research essays and readings of New Zealand-related material and welcomes contributions from poets, academics, essayists, teachers and students from within New Zealand and overseas.
Click here to read issue 6.
Click here for submission guidelines and further information.
15.12.08
Lean Sister Becomes High Court Judge
Virginia Bell (a.k.a. Ginger de Winter), a former member, along with myself, of the anarchic Lean Sisters Theatre Group has been appointed to the bench of Australia's High Court. Virginia was the highly entertaining mistress of ceremonies for the Leans Sisters' performance The Leans Lurch Left at the Tin Sheds, Sydney way back in 1977 and she participated in other of the troupe's energetic performances.
The Leans Lurch LeftFrom the ABC online news service :
Justice Michael Kirby will be replaced on the High Court bench by the New South Wales Court of Appeal judge, Justice Virginia Bell.
She is the fourth woman to be appointed to the High Court and her appointment will take effect from February 3 next year.
Justice Kirby will retire after reaching the mandatory retirement age.
Justice Bell began her career with the Redfern Legal centre in 1978 and served as counsel assisting the Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Services.
She has also sat on the bench of the New South Wales Supreme Court and as a Commissioner with that state's Law Reform Commission.
Virginia Bell in 2006
Onya Virginia ! (as we say in Oz)
(Virginia launched my book New & Selected Poems at the State Library of NSW in 1990)
13.12.08
Tourism
People think we’re
German tourists
or Norwegian
outside the fiscal
envelope hui
grimacing faces
Go Home Whitey
I don’t mind
I am going
home
__________________
The Buried Village
e hora noa mai ra
i te po uriuri
i te po tangotango
waiho nei te aroha
waiho nei te mamae
ka ki kino i taku kiri
i maringa awai to roimata
i aku kamo ki te iwi
ka wehe …
__________________
Northern Southland
Where the trucks
double declutch
& roar by
a black & yellow
AA sign
points a way down
Old Lake Road
I’ll never go
__________________
Poems from a road trip made in New Zealand in the 1990’s
by the writer and poet Martin Edmond
from his chapbook The Big O Revisited
recently published by and available from
Soapbox Press
36 Old Mill Rd
Grey Lynn, Auckland
New Zealand
One of Martin Edmond’s three blogs is Luca Antara
11.12.08
9.12.08
Sydneysider Tim Wright and a local moggieToday I was happily surprised to read a reflective piece on aspects of Sydney written in response to the poem 'Saxe Blue Sky' from my new book True Thoughts. It's by Tim Wright, poet and co-editor (with Nick Keys) of When Pressed. You can read it on swim/swam.
Here is the poem :
Saxe blue sky
(thursday morning)
the millennium train
whips past
the tollway to the Harbour Bridge
CHANGE GIVEN CHANGE GIVEN AUTO COINS ONLY
in bright orange
against a saxe blue sky.
the gigantic matchsticks sculpture,
one burnt, one phosphorus red and ready,
jutting up
from a closely trimmed mound of couch.
a bronze frieze in capital letters, on the corner
of the NSW Art Gallery –
CHRISTOPHER WREN, (old cosmopolitan),
(Thomas) GAINSBOROUGH -
flashes by,
seventeenth and eighteenth century ghosts,
glimpsed like brief suggestions, or notes,
as I enter the drab tunnel
towards Martin Place
on my way
to advance automation,
to sort a set of bookbinding cards
(discard, edit, or keep,
according, of course,
to a method)
cards detailed with
pencilled handwriting,
traces of colleagues
now moved on.
I remember most of them,
more, I remember their memos,
circulated notes -
our names listed,
stapled to a corner,
memo read, name ticked, then passed along
to the next name -
pre-email,
and computers then exclusive to data,
the binding card
mimicking book spines,
a card index
the instrument of record.
the train squeals into Redfern,
I emerge from the dim light
deep under the city
to see the saxe blue sky
look smoggier,
pale grey-brown on the horizon,
from here, in the inner west,
the way I walk to work,
the block – the aboriginal housing co-operative –
demolished, gone.
another set of glimpses, whisps,
traces of people
now moved on.
on this frosty thursday morning
only a small group of revenants
warming up around
a smoking 44-gallon drum.
The southbound eastern suburbs train speeds by the old Brett Whiteley matchstick sculpture faster than ignited saltpetre.
The Art Gallery of New South Wales' incomplete frieze of artists' names zips by at the same speed, and none of the artists on the railway side that I mention in 'Saxe Blue Sky' are in this photo.
29.11.08
Blue glow
crows crark
over darlinghurst,
we order
black beer
*
sitting on wet sand
watching steepling surf,
a huge dirtywater tide
threatens bondi
*
your sudden
and beautiful exit
frightened me
*
I was going to say
how we took cocaine
and danced, in ultimo,
when we were older
than we should have been
but it was your funeral,
it was too sorrowful,
now I’m stuck
with platitudes
you’d find funny,
anyway
I can say anything
in a poem
you’ll never read
*
artificially overlit
groves of myrtle
staged for you,
and never televised
(not as if we didn’t try)
the secrets
you mentioned
on your second last day
are secret still
*
three storms in three hours,
hailstones ripping holes
in the nasturtium leaves.
blackout -
using a torch to find a candle
*
I’d never tell anyone,
but just look at this,
what I’m doing now
daily crumplings
will this
take my mind off things
when
I could simply spend
more and more time
watching tv ?
*
to be here
knowing you’re not
gets me down
the latest person
I had to tell
said
‘she was someone
I always thought
I would see again’
*
you’re not around,
you’re only a dream,
always
so anti-sentimental
you drank whisky
after everyone else
gave it up
*
you loved
the halloween parade song
and the wooster group
our own theatre
was courageous,
not ‘showy’,
and failed
its experiment
new york
can wait -
I’m sorry, new york,
you’ll have to wait
*
helplessly,
I placed two perfect
nasturtium leaves
in the card from morocco
and brought them
to your delirium
*
you read my prose
from over twenty years ago
at your mother’s funeral
the piece that says
‘we don’t die alone’
and that
‘maybe love
comes to us from the dead’
I decided
not to read it
for you
two decades later
I’m not at all
certain of it
*
I’d like to sleep
tonight
all night long
in the blue glow
(in memoriam Jan McKemmish, 1950-2007)
24.11.08
A reading in memory of Jan McKemmish
On Saturday November 29th at 3pm
Jean Bedford
Pam Brown
Michael Hurley
Gallery Courtyard
University of Technology Sydney
Broadway
Part of Creativity and Uncertainty Conference
For a map of UTS click here
22.11.08
listening to
Soul singer, a family member of the great Staple Singers (known as ‘God’s greatest hitmakers’) Mavis Staples visited Australia for Womadelaide in March this year and showed that she is still singing strongly at 68 years of age. I bought Mavis Staples’ 2006 version of Curtis Mayfield’s soundtrack from the 1977 film A Piece of The Action from a wonderful music store in Richmond, Virginia a few weeks ago.
Barky’s Spirituals at 18 East Broad Street, Richmond stocks every spiritual and soul album under the sun - from Clara Ward's gospel singers, Paul Robeson, Mahalia Jackson, Curtis Mayfield, Ray Charles, Solomon Burke, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, the Four Tops, Smokey Robinson etc etc etc - you know - everybody on Stax, Tamla Motown, Philadelphia International and subsequent soul-gospel recording companies. Barky Haggins, the proprietor, said that he'd been in business for over fifty years. Barky’s has a plain, undecorated interior but the CD racks and stacks along the walls are a treasury of wonderful music.
Barky Haggins, the proprietor(dear deleted, remember, click on the images to enlarge them)
16.11.08
Adam Aitken launching True ThoughtsThanks to everyone who came along to the booklaunch at Gleebooks and, afterwards, to the pub yesterday afternoon. It was a really nice way to see the new book of poems on its way into the reading world. To read Adam Aitken's launch speechette, click here
5.11.08
A reminder that you are invited to celebrate
the publication of my latest book of poems, True Thoughts,
at Upstairs at 49, gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Rd., Glebe
on Saturday 15th November at 3.30pm.
To be launched by Adam Aitken.
For further information click here.
Everyone welcome
3.11.08
28.10.08
On his blog, Graveney Marsh, Laurie Duggan recently wrote a post titled author author - comments about Australian poets writing collaboratively.
I'd like to respond with a few notes on my own experience of collaboration and in that way correct Laurie's information on the chapbook Correspondences (published 30 years ago).
I first began collaborating with other writers in the theatre, writing group-developed scripts for the Lean Sisters performances throughout 1977.
Water Show poster & photos from The Leans Lurch Left
and The Crunkboonk XmasShow, Lean Sisters, 1977
A year later, Correspondences, published by Tom Thompson's imprint, Red Press, (in 1978) wasn't a collaboration at all - it was a shared book. At the time Joanne Burns and I were both writing poems as letters to friends, lovers and, in my case, to punks and rock stars like Patti Smith. Tom published each set of poems back to back. A photographic centerfold by Micky Allan separated the sections. Micky and I screenprinted the book's title in various colours on the cover at the Tin Sheds Art Workshop.
Centerfold : Joanne Burns and Pam Brown with boys' toys - 31 years ago in 1977
My next actual collaboration was with the musician and composer Elizabeth Drake. These were short pieces of text accompanied by sound composition on audio tape, piano and saucepan lids. Under the title And That Is Very Interesting, (taken from Gertrude Stein), we performed them at Bondi Pavilion Theatre as part of Futur*Fall, a conference centering on, and visited by, French theorist Jean Baudrillard in 1984. We later performed the pieces again in the Writers' Tent at the Adelaide Festival for the Arts as part of a small series of performances called Miss The Opera House Lights in 1984.
After that, I collaborated with Amanda Stewart, (the sound poet who had performed with us at Futur*Fall), and Carol Christie and Jan McKemmish on compiling montaged texts for voices. We performed Professional Mourning By Generic Ghosts at the University of Technology Sydney, The Return Of The Dead I. Modes of Goo in 1986, at Writers In the Park, at the Harold Park Hotel in Glebe. (The title 'Modes of Goo' was appropriated from Meaghan Morris)
After Amanda and Carol moved back to their individual projects, Jan and I continued with the montage process and wrote As Much Trouble As Talking performed by the actors Eva Sitta and Katrina Foster, with sound by Elizabeth Drake, lighting by Lee-Ann Donnelly, directed by Helen Grace and with a collaboratively-designed set, in a season at Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney in 1988 and later edited for national radio broadcast on the ABC's The Listening Room in 1989. Jan and I then spent three months as playwrights-in-residence at The Performance Space and developed two scripts Short Term Ideas and The Entire World Is Where It Is in 1989 (each performed as one-offs at The Performance Space).
Poster by Jan Mackay
I think I have sought "community", or, at least, a kind of like-minded "scene", throughout my writing life. In Adelaide in 1982 Sasha Soldatow and I formed the Bon Mot Gang in anticipation of a potential issue at the forthcoming Adelaide Festival Of The Arts. And, of course, there was an incident of censorship that gave the Bon Mot Gang a platform of protest in the Writers' Tent. Our protest and a report on the act of censorship made the front page of the Adelaide Advertiser newspaper the following morning.
In 2002, the Oahu, Hawai'i-based poet, publisher and academic, Susan Schultz and I compiled a long poem called Amnesiac Recoveries for our Department of Dislocated Memory for the web site International Corporation of Lost Structures. We sent each other poetic sequences via email and would build the poem as we continued. Our different writing styles are quite evident in that poem, but our similarities are in the political concern.
I think the book Let's Get Lost that Laurie mentions in his piece, is less a collaboration and more a correspondence. (emailed letters and poems sent from separate and distanced locations by myself, Ken Bolton (a long-time wonderful collaborator himself - with John Jenkins - see author author) and Laurie Duggan to each other over a period of six months in 2003). But my recent collaboration farout_library_software was a definite collaboration. The poems came together in series of lines, bit by bit, accumulating and continuing as a process via email over 18 months. A year after the poems were published by Susan Schultz's 'Tinfish Press' I finally met up with my Seattle-based, cyber-collaborator, Maged Zaher, in Washington DC in late October 2008.
Maged Zaher, Washington,DC October 25th '08
In poetic collaboration, just as in theatre or film making, you sometimes have to suspend your attachment to what you might have thought was one of your best ideas for the sake of the smooth concurrence of the task at hand.
And a note - thanks Laurie for representing my sonnet at the Reality Street book launch That was very generous.
please note, dear visitors to the deletions that you can visit links by clicking on the darker grey text within the post and that you can enlarge the images by clicking on them
23.10.08
Invitation to a Booklaunch
Salt Publishing
warmly invites you to celebrate
a new poetry collection
by PAM BROWN
to be launched by
ADAM AITKEN
Saturday 15th November
3.30 for 4pm
at
upstairs at 49
gleebooks
49 Glebe Point Road
Glebe
Sydney rsvp 9660 2333
Everyone Welcome
To read a sample from the book visit Salt Publishing
Available from Gleebooks
Also available online from Salt Publishing
and, yikes, Amazon UK & US
Distributed in Australia by Inbooks
Only thirteen days until the vote in the USA. I attended a rally where Barack Obama spoke to around 12,000 people at the Richmond Coliseum here in Richmond Virginia this morning. If the reception of the crowd is any measure - he'll win the Presidency.
22.10.08
Arriving at Robin's Bookstore in Philadelphia,Sunday,October 19th(Photo by Jozef Zurawski)
CA Conrad mastering the ceremonies of the poetry reading.
(Photo by Pam Brown)
Attempting to adjust a very fuzzy microphone before reading from 'True Thoughts'(Photo by Jozef Zurawski)
Magdalena Zurawski reading from her precise, breathlessly paced poetic first novel 'The Bruise'.
(Photo by Pam Brown)
Ron Silliman reading sections from the 1,062 pages of his recently published collected poetry, 'The Alphabet' (including a wonderful poem for Larry Eigner).
(Photo by Pam Brown)
Brief reports on the reading by two gracious poetry bloggers Geoff and Jacob.
6.10.08
Before & After - Place Riopelle, Montréal getting all steamed up
I am currently reading poetry two or three times a day (and night) in Trois-Rivières, Québec. I will be reading in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania next weekend on Sunday, October 19th. Anyone who`ll be in Philadelphia please click here for further info.
Hotel window - en l`automne, le simulacrum est fermé pour la saison
to ``riff`` on Susan Howe, as the US poets might say.
22.9.08
I’m travelling to Canada with a big bundle of poems translated into French by Jane Zemiro. Jane was occasionally assisted on details by French friends Daniel de Rudder of Nîmes and Loire Valleyites Danielle Fauth and Luc Martin who came to dinner at our place a few nights ago and happily ended up fine-tuning some of the translation during the nightcap hour.
I'll be participating in the ten-day-long Trois Rivières International Poetry Festival in Québec, then to Montréal for a few days. The last time I was in Québec it was summer. I wrote a poem that was a kind of inaccurate report on Montréal for a younger Australian poet, Cassie Lewis. This time I’m hoping the city will be toned golden with autumn. I’m also aiming to write a few lines for poems in these northern cities.
And it looks like I’ll just have to be there to experience more, more, more of capitalism’s implosion and a carnival of election bumper-stickering, so thence to Philadelphia, Pennysylvania where I’ll be reading at Robin’s Bookstore with Magdalena Zurawski
and Ron Silliman, courtesy of CA Conrad.
Then I'll travel down to Richmond, Virginia to read poetry at the University of Richmond, hosted by Brian Henry.
And then to Washington, DC to visit some museums and meet up with Maged Zaher, with whom I co-wrote farout_library_software.
I’ll spend a day in Los Angeles checking out the star-studded boulevards on the way home.
À bientôt mes amis.
I’ll be back here at the cyberface in early November.
Hope to see you at the Sydney launch of True Thoughts at Gleebooks
on Saturday arvo, November 15th
13.9.08
detail from a photo by Trish DaviesIt was an enjoyable book launch last Saturday, attended by a bright group of Blackheathens, a sizeable sprinkling of mountains residents from a little further south and a straggle of Sydneysiders. Here is a picture of Carl Harrison-Ford saying the things he liked about reading True Thoughts. Click here and scroll down to read Carl's speechette.
A reminder - come along to the book party at Hat Hill Gallery in Blackheath for my just-released collection 'True Thoughts' (Salt Modern Poets) on this coming Saturday afternoon. For directions, times, information click here
The famous Lee Marvin reading series in Adelaide continues to captivate the cultural minds of South Australian poetry fanatics.
The readings are on every Tuesday night.
Click here for the upcoming October program of luminaries and legends, entry fee, times and location.
Lee Marvin - "I always enjoy these poetry readings - they're so captivating"
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