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John Gillies: Parramatta Road Project (no1)
a site specific video installation
ARTICULATE Project Space
247 Parramatta Road
Leichhardt, Sydney
(opposite Cass Bros)
Tues - Mon 17.00 - 09.00
21 - 27th June
view when dark from footpath or vehicle
opening
Tues 21st June (winter solstice)
17.00 - 20.00
You can find out more about John Gillies here & here
Puncher & Wattmann
invite you to a booklaunch -
Ken Bolton's Sly Mongoose(launch speechette by Pam Brown)at
The Fiend in Hand
58 Cowper Street, Glebe
Sunday 5th June 3-5pm
Sly Mongoose deals with the vagaries of the Adelaide
art-scene, the career of Cy Twombly, the Sydney of the 1920s, 40s
and today. A quartet of poems treats a single locale and time-frame
from the point of view of an ‘ordinary punter’, a beaver, a worried
mother and a cyclist; and there is a sequence drawn from a diary of
travel through an imaginary Africa in the 1970s, each entry partly
structured around a buried pun or near-pun; a further pair of poems
deals with after-echoes, among his friends, of the passing of John
Forbes.
Ken Bolton is self-described as a gay, light-hearted bastard, who cuts
a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary landscape,
his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him,
bow-tie askew, lipstick-smeared, grinning cheerfully at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar D-type, El Cid.
Ken Bolton has published a good deal of art criticism, some of it
collected in Art Writing (Contemporary Art Centre of South
Australia). He edited Homage To John Forbes (Brandl & Schlesinger)
and wrote the monograph Michelle Nikou. He edited the magazines 'Magic Sam' and 'Otis Rush' and has published many books of poetry. Wakefield Press published The Circus in 2010 and Vagabond Press A Whistled Bit Of Bop. His earlier titles from Wakefield Press are At The Flash And At The Baci and Untimely Meditations.
Vale Kerry Leves
1948 - 2011
Kerry Leves (foreground), Merv Lilley, Ian Syson (in background) at Bobbin Up launch,
Sydney 1999
The indefatigable Vagabond Press
is launching two new chapbooks by Brisbane poets.
Seastrands by Felicity Plunkett
and
Career by Liam Ferney
on Sunday 8th May at 3.30pm
at Gleebooks Upstairs
49 Glebe Point Road,
Glebe, Sydney
Click here for details of the launch
and here for more about Vagabond Press.
Happy fifth birthday to Mark Young's Otoliths magazine. Read the issue here
Karl #2 - 1999. Photo by Rebecca SwanIssue 3 of Polari Journal, edited by D. J. Baker & Sharon Dunne, has just been published online. Click here to read the articles, poems, features and more of Rebecca Swan's photographs.
I'll be travelling to Melbourne in May for this not-to-be-missed concert, produced by Elizabeth Drake -
A performance of
Canto Ostinato by Simeon ten Holt
The performers on four concert grand pianos will be
Lisa Moore
Caroline Almonte
Emily Green-Armytage
Elizabeth Drake (click above on the performers' names for biographical info)
Canto Ostinato was composed by Simeon ten Holt in Amsterdam in 1979.
Simeon ten Holt - “The American influence is undeniable, but the form of minimal music that I created in my work is inconceivable without the arch-typical European tradition.
…The feeling of hardly having anything to say was never as strong as with Canto Ostinato. At first, I watched the piece unfold with the utmost suspicion. This was not done, really: tonality, this open, this plain, this explicit.”
Canto Ostinato is known as an early minimalist work based on the continual repetition of different cells or bars within the piece. No two performances are ever alike, the players dictating moment to moment how these cells –the musical DNA – will be played.
No categorisation can ever account for the overwhelming emotional power of the work.
It has been performed at the Perth International Arts Festival, in the Adelaide Railway Station for the Australian Performing Arts Market, and at the Newcastle Conservatorium of Music. This is the first time it has been performed in Melbourne.
We invite you to participate in this one opportunity to experience the power and duration of Canto Ostinato.
Review by Neville Cohn, The West Australian, Perth International Arts Festival:
“I cannot recall so harmonious and golden-toned a Festival curtain-raiser as Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt's Canto Ostinato..
How beautifully this extended essay sounded with its mesmerically repetitive, golden-toned extrapolations..
A major factor that made this so compelling was the knowledge that what we heard was unique, an extemporised performance which would have differed from earlier accounts.”
The performance will take place on
Friday 13th May at 8 pm
at the
IWAKI Auditorium
ABC Southbank Centre
120 Southbank Boulevard
Southbank
Melbourne
The duration of the work is ninety minutes, uninterrupted.
As the work is being recorded no latecomers can be admitted.
Adult $45.00
Concession $30.00
Student $25
Tickets available from M-Tix box office at The C.U.B Malthouse
03 9685 5111 m-tix.com.au General Admission
A booking fee of $1.50 - $3 per ticket will apply depending on booking method.
Opening next week - Coalcliff DaysClick here for details. 
A happy avant-garde at Coalcliff. Xmas 1980. Back row L to R: Pam Brown, Erika Callan, Sal Brereton, Micky Allan. Front Row L to R: Kurt Brereton in goose carcass hat, Ken Bolton, Laurie Duggan. Photo- Micky Allan
Xmas Corpses. Silkscreen - Ken Bolton, 1980
And I'll be reading from recent and not-so-recent work in Newtown, Sydney on April 29th - for details click here
Thirty years ago, from 1979 until 1982, writer Sal Brereton and her then-partner poet Ken Bolton lived in a weatherboard house on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea at Coalcliff, north of Wollongong on the Illawarra coast of New South Wales. Many poets, artists, printers and filmmakers visited their house during that time. It was a busy hub producing magazines, books and screen printed posters. In the years following Sal and Ken's time there, the poet Alan Jefferies lived in the house. 'Coalcliff Days' is an exhibition documenting those days and you are all invited to come to the Friday night opening, the Saturday afternoon reading or visit the exhibition and floor talk during its season.
The exhibition will be opened by Nicholas Pounder, sometime poet, one-time editor of 'Polar Bear' magazine, limited-edition publisher, bibliophile and antiquarian bookseller.
Some exhibition participants will read their work at the opening.
Poets, artists, writers and filmmakers represented in the exhibition include Micky Allan, Ken Bolton, Kurt Brereton, Sal Brereton, Barbara Brooks, Pam Brown, Laurie Duggan, Alan Jefferies, Kate Richards and others…
opening - everyone welcome
6 for 6.30pm
Friday 15th April 2011
Wollongong City Gallery
cnr Kembla & Burelli Sts
Wollongong
South Coast Writers Centre is hosting an associated poetry reading at the gallery on Saturday April 16th at 1pm
For further information visit Coalcliff Days and Wollongong City Gallery.
The exhibition runs from 15th April until May 22nd
Living in the city with views of some of Sydney's worst architecture, looking for a place to land in the nearby suburbs. That's a brave little palm in a pot.
If you happen to be in Sydney next month, you're most welcome to join us for the launch of two new poetry collections from Vagabond Press: 
'Letters from Ausland' by Louis Armand
introduced by Pam Brown
'People of Earth' by Chris Edwards
introduced by John Tranter
Bring a friend!
Sunday 6th February at 3.30pm
Gleebooks
49 Glebe Point Rd
Sydney, Australia
For more info, visit please visit the publisher's website
or connect with them on basefook.
Click here for Louis Armand's site
and here for more about Chris Edwards.
In August 2010, Bob Arnold’s Vermont-based Longhouse Press published a pamphlet of six of my poems.
As Jacket magazine is now transforming into Jacket2 in Philadelphia, editor John Tranter has published a selection of accolades for the magazine in the final Sydney-based issue here. He has extracted a few paragraphs from a ‘Rolling Column’ I wrote about Jacket for the Australian Book Review a decade or so ago. You can read the complete piece here.
As I say in the column, at that time there were several co-productions planned for Jacket. In April 2001, Jacket entered into co-production with New American Writing. It was published in issue 13.
In March 2002, an overland magazine feature that I edited appeared in Jacket issue 16. Here is my introduction to the feature.
This was the first time that a co-feature appeared both online and in print (as a supplement in overland issue 166 ) and the first and last time that contributors to Jacket magazine were paid for their work, from overland magazine funds.
I have enjoyed the past six busy years working with John on Jacket magazine and, in the future, I will be continuing to contribute material to Jacket2.
Way back in time, in 1982, I was invited to give a talk on self-publishing and small presses at the inaugural Women & Arts Festival at the Seymour Centre in Sydney. On reflection, apart from computing, the use of xerox rather than offset printing, and electronic publishing, I have to ask plus ça change?
You can read the handwritten notes for the talk here.
At the Women & Arts Festival, a publisher, Pat Woolley, and I co-ordinated a hands-on workshop (in a borrowed printery at Silverwater, Sydney) teaching printing and publishing skills to women writers. Over two days we designed, printed, collated and published a large book of writing, photography and drawing. During this workshop the idea of starting a women's press was discussed, resulting, a little later, in the formation of Redress Press which was run collectively, had a huge membership and published many titles in the early 1980s.
At the offset press - publishing workshop 1982 (PB on right)
farewell reflections and shadows of blackheath
view a selection here
How can we join this branch? Perhaps Australian Poetry Ltd can provide contacts with the two poets 'running' it or with the estate of Frank O'Hara (who is currently pissing himself with laughter in his grave).
Update - John Tranter has sent a note to the deletions and an evidential photo:
Actually, it's Frank O'Hara's ghost who runs the Ken Bolton Franchise, in New York:
(Quote from a review of John Tranter's poetry in the Sydney Morning Herald, December 2010)
In May 2010 I was invited to write a review of a collection of Vicki Viidikas’s writing for Australian Book Review. It has yet to be published and, as far as I know, may never appear in the magazine.
So here it is -
Vicki Viidikas New and Rediscovered, edited by Barry Scott (Transit Lounge 2010)
In 1967 the British pop group The Beatles dressed up in embroidered mirror-cloth and tinted shades and set off on a spiritual quest for peace and love to an ashram in India. The US and Australia (whose military force consisted mainly of young conscripts) were engaged in an unpopular war against communism in Vietnam. In Sydney, a poem, ‘At East Balmain’, by former high school dropout Vicki Viidikas, marked her first publication in a moderate magazine, Poetry Australia.
‘At East Balmain’, set around Mort Bay, is about the timelessness of life on a working harbour. It introduced an exceptionally competent nineteen year old poet with an aptitude for sharp observation and description –
This day will be submerged in a thousand other days,
yet I know distinctly I felt the glance of a figure
in a singlet, rolling cigarettes as his barge went
upstream.
The 1970s in Sydney was a time of great social change driven by youth culture. It was an era, evolving from the protest movement against conscription and the Vietnam war, of long-haired pacifist hippies and the widespread use of marijuana and other ‘mind-expanding’ drugs that engendered a profusion of rebellious and high-spirited creativity. Counter cultural happenings like Jumping Sunday, a weekly celebratory afternoon in Centennial Park, Martin Sharp’s Yellow House, and PACT theatre flourished. There was the advent of underground printing presses, the UBU group’s experimental films, psychedelic music and light shows, of sexual freedom, and women’s liberation. Vicki Viidikas was publishing and reading her poems and becoming a well-known figure in the lively, male-dominated literary scene around Balmain. Just a few suburbs away in Glebe, in December 1969 Helen Jarvis had founded Sydney Women’s Liberation House, a hub for discussion and women’s activism that would thrive into the new decade.
Viidikas might have been a candidate for women’s lib, given that she wrote experientially of a darker side of female life –
I should have been selfish
not a woman, but learnt
to violate myself too, so I could fit the boat,
twentieth century and rock … ’White Poem’
Her poetry is almost always tinged with pain and her prose pieces are often about the extreme edge of relationship. ‘Punishments and cures’, a dark poem about being raped by an ex-prisoner with venereal disease, seeks, in a tentative, exploratory way, moral elucidation –
Perhaps it’s true what he said,
that all women are ugly …
One feels that
when you become a four-letter word,
and afterwards, there’s some private festering
not always cured by a doctor …
In her life, Viidikas took risks. Her friend the poet Kerry Leves says, in this book’s introduction, ‘… she embraced experience, even flung herself into or out of experiences, …’. She entered chance encounters or ‘pickups’, as she called them, and wrote about them. In ‘The Snowman in the Dutch Masterpiece’ an impoverished young woman writer drifts into a brief, whisky and cocaine drenched liaison with a cashed-up drug dealer who drives a flashy Mercedes Benz. Their few hedonistic days together are described with some detachment. Viidikas’s writing was a precursor to the coming eruption of confessional women writers but hers was an instinctive response to the condition of womanhood, not informed by a political consciousness. Many of Viidikas’s characters were ‘fucked up’. And many of them were in her second (and I’d say ‘best’) book, Wrappings (1974), a third of which is included here.
In 1975, in an interview with Hazel de Berg,Viidikas said about her writing :
What I was writing was really confessional, it was just – I’d go out to a party or something and if anything upset me or I was depressed, I’d go home and scribble things down on bits of paper, really just what my inner feelings were at the time.
Viidikas’s work is all about subjective experience. She records persistent unhappiness and trouble. The intensity of sadness builds incrementally in this collection, so that it’s a huge relief, about a third of the way in, to read the exuberantly sensuous ‘Mad Hats of Desire’ –
OK romantic
I wanted to wade your body …
… I wanted to rip suck bite kick
growl laugh nuzzle your self
madness
black mad hats
put on put off
Now I don’t know what to ask
can’t promise
log cabins apple pie
raccoon boots for winter
And later, there is a surprisingly loving poem about her Estonian father.
Maybe for Viidikas it was more about ‘writing’ than about ‘what she was writing’. She worked from a compulsion to write things down. In 1977, in Australian Literary Studies she wrote ‘… I first started writing my problems on scraps of paper when I was 15 and living away from home, and later found these ‘problems’ were actually poems.’ Description was easy for her but she was rarely analytical. She delivered her stories and poems without investigating the process. She doesn’t seem to have laboured for long over technique or form. She wasn’t interested in showing off. These are straight up confessional or descriptive pieces. Vicki Viidikas was interested in telling.
Her poetry is more playful than the prose. Sometimes her deft, free verse reads like automatic writing. She said that she wrote poetry ‘off the top of my head, straight off, in one go. … My writing is done at any time of the day or night, it’s quite a spontaneous thing… .’ Emotions were what she was trying to express. Perhaps Viidikas found solace in the ritual of writing.
Viidikas’s work often tells us that she preferred India to Australia. (‘It was Calcutta not Canberra, that honeycomb of barren souls.’ ‘The Silk Trousers’). She lived in India for more than a decade. An early story is about an Indiaphile living amongst shrines and incense in a poky Darlinghurst flat. Her last book India Ink (1984), was immersed in Indian culture and Hinduism.
Having not visited India, nor studied its religions, I found the comprehensive glossary in India Ink invaluable. Ten of those poems are republished here without aid for readers who know little about India. However, as the writing is mostly descriptive, like all good poems about place, these do make a vivid, yet never too-sensational impression.
You waited, black
stone goddess
in a scarlet sarong,
Your shoulders packed
with yellow powder,
feet dusted with red,
one hand in a blessing,
palm upright, take it easy ‘Durga Devi’
Australian poetry presses supported Vicki Viidikas, publishing four of her books in a decade. Her last title appeared in 1984. She lived a further fourteen years without a new collection and with her writing appearing only scantily in a period when women’s writing was booming. Sadly, as Viidikas’s heroin addiction increasingly formed the basis of her modus operandi, she became marginalized and publishing and performing opportunities vanished.
In 1975 she had written ‘A View of the Map’; a speculative, time-shifting prose piece. It ended – ‘My Iceland is at the centre of this map. Knowing you have visited it and gone. That I am the only permanent resident.’ In 1988 she added a new final line, ‘There is no compass.’
Melbourne publisher Barry Scott has made a respectable selection to introduce Viidikas to contemporary readers. There is though an odd inclusion of eight childish drawings that add nothing to the project (signed, copyrighted and dated by Viidikas, possibly indicating that she took them seriously). The cover portraits show Viidikas with long blonde hair parted in the middle, kohl-lined eyes, appliqued peasant blouse, a cigarette – like an icon of the 1970s.
Vicki Viidikas New and Rediscovered offers a kind of restitution. There are around twenty uncollected pieces, an extract from an unpublished manuscript, Kali and the Dung-Beetle, and a few later poems, including ‘Lust’, written only two months before her death at fifty, in 1998. 
Read an interview with the publisher here
Visit Transit Lounge press here
ALL TOGETHER NOW
A Digital Bridge for Auckland and Sydney, 2010
The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) is pleased to
announce the completion of its trans Tasman digital bridge project.
We invited contributions to build a digital bridge between Auckland
and Sydney as poetry symposiums took place in each city March and
September 2010. In June the first part of the bridge was launched:
50-plus creative contributions, a collaborative digital poem, audio
talks and photos from the Auckland symposium.
Now the Sydney sidelaunches with 60 creative contributions, a complementary digital collaboration, more audio talks, video readings, photos, and texts of papers and commentary. We present here the multiple traces (text, audio, visuals, poetry, prose) of the year’s trans Tasman exchanges, noting how often the roles of host and guest have flip-flopped, and hoping that they will go on doing so as we move between each other’s reading and writing spaces.
Click here
Pam Brown, Martin Edmond, Brian Flaherty and Michele Leggott
Editors, ALL TOGETHER NOW
The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) at the University of
Auckland is an electronic gateway to poetry resources in New Zealand
and the Pacific region. It is coordinated by Michele Leggott and Brian
Flaherty with the support of representatives from the University of
Auckland Library, Auckland University Press and the Faculty of Arts.
Information: m.leggott@auckland.ac.nz
In August this year, I gave a poetry reading at a seminar with
post-graduate students and some interested poets at Monash University in Melbourne. In the discussion following the reading John Hawke asked me what I might suggest as a topic or an area that’s been overlooked or neglected, to someone wanting to research Australian poetry. I went into a kind of awkward mental paroxysm because I don’t really trust the kinds of historicisations that have been produced here. With scant exception they’re usually traditional masculinist studies and the few anecdotal biographical books produced by poets are also usually kind of glossed-up male memoir. So I said a few things like that and then made a regrettably unthinking (stupid even?) statement about not being interested in memoir or biography much anyway. Hmmm … not quite true. Although I have been reluctant to historicise my own life-in-poetry on paper, so far.
Recently though, I read a memoir, well, actually the author doesn't like or use the term 'memoir', I read a non-fiction novel,
INFERNO (A POET’S NOVEL), by one of my favourite US contemporaries, the inimical Eileen Myles.
Eileen has written many books of poetry and has also written tons of
art criticism (see Ken Bolton on her recent collection The
Importance of Being Iceland here).
Eileen’s prose is almost always a memoir of some kind - the stories in
Chelsea Girls, a short memoir called On My Way, and a
‘non-fiction novel’ Cool For You. Inferno is about a
working class girl from Boston who has written some high school
poetry, moving to New York City and beginning a life-in-poetry through the social upheavals, drinking, drugs (speed) and sexual experimentation of the 1970s. She is figuring out her own sexuality and her place in the poetry scene and the world at large. She’s interested in things other than a simple history of herself. She connects in her encounters with a whole lot of different people, including, of course, older poets living in NYC. Eileen ran as a candidate for the US Presidency in the 1980s. She was for a time the co-ordinator or director (?) of St Mark’s Poetry Project. In Inferno she goes on a reading tour to Berlin with some punky companions (Kathy Acker et al), unexpectedly spends a year or so writing in a big country house owned by NYC art scene patrons, talks about her dad the alcoholic mailman and her mother the loving yet staunch Catholic. It is written in her usual frank, funny, sad, droll, minimal style - it’s as if Eileen is talking to you, (and to herself and to her dog, Rosie) as you read. She makes some terrific descriptions of her lovers’ labia and clitorises (once she becomes a lesbian). It’s a clever book. Here are some excerpts from Inferno :
I was preparing for my new life. La Vita Nuova, La Vita Nuova I
reported cryptically to my friends at Grassroots. I knew the ball had
fallen so I went to Oscar Wilde and bought some books. I was reading about Renée Vivien who had died for love. She sort of looked like Rose. And she wrote about someone - that I think she was jealous of - maybe Natalie Barney- that she was nothing but a cunt with a pen. This was quoted as an example of Renée Vivien’s deterioration, her slow sink into mental illness but I didn’t see what was wrong with this at all. Is it so bad to talk about a woman and her writing in the same sentence, especially to insult her? Are we supposed to be fake?
Eileen then, photo by Robert Mapplethorpe
And, these are outside a context here, but great anyway -
Poets hated anyone outwardly courting success - particularly
anyone seen courting it in our world - as if there actually were “a
poetry field.”
… No one asked me to have a life like this, to be a poet. It was my
idea. I mean and I would definitely say poetry is a very roundabout
way to unite both work and time. A poet is a person with a very short
attention span who actually decides to study it. To look. To draw that
short thing out… … Like Jimmy Schuyler once said, the writing the poem part is easy, it’s the rest of the time that’s the problem.
Eileen now, photo by Leopoldine Core
When I think about it, I do like 'memoir'. Some kinds of memoir. Take some recent, not so conventional books - Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Tony Towle's MEMOIR, John Kinsella's Genre(a wildly abstracted memoir), Bob Dylan’s mid-60s ‘novel’ Tarantula and Chronicles:Volume One, Prosper Mérimée’s short recollection of Stendhal in Simon Leys’ With Stendhal - I loved all these books. And looking at the bookshelves in-need-of-culling in this room where I stare into space, scribble notes for poems, and have corresponded with zillions of Jacket magazine contributors (some of whom have written northern hemisphere memoirs) and from where I sometimes push tiny ideas out into the ether of the internet, there are biographies, autobiographies and memoir sitting close by - Samuel Beckett, Juan Goytisolo, Mina Loy, Georges Perec, Chester & Wystan, Bernard Smith, Michel Foucault, Harpo Marx, Marjorie Perloff, Arthur Rimbaud, Jim Sharman, Mary Wollstonecraft, Edward Said, Jean Genet, Gwendolyn MacEwen, George Sand, Dorothy Hewett, Frank O'Hara, Wayne King, Tennessee Williams, Eric Michaels, Luis Bunuel, Slim Dusty (Walk A Country Mile) and more …
Maybe I could start my anecdotal narrative on the Enoggera Army Base, Brisbane in 1963, or in Crown Street, Surry Hills, Sydney in my flat above the original Maltese pastizzi booth in 1970, or.. or..
