The publisher -

Little Esther Books
(for Feral & Boffin
of Feral, Boffin + Distingué)
Box 10114, Adelaide BC, SA, 5000

The blurb -

The book -

a limited edition - six new poems - available now
aeafbooksATaeafDOTorgDOTau

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I've been reading the third issue of VLAK magazine. Among the many formidable articles, poems and dynamic graphics, my attention was taken by David Vichnar on Christine Brooke-Rose (the great British experimentalist you've never heard of) who died earlier this year and whose last book Life, End of I read, and loved, a few years ago.

I also want to recommend Marjorie Perloff's Poetry on the Edge: Reconceptualizing Lyric. She begins with a pertinent question "What happens to poetry when Everybody is a Poet?", referring to the plethora of graduate degrees in poetry in the USA that Jed Rasula addressed in his 2011 lecture The Condition of Poetry When Everybody is a Poet. To reduce her cogent analysis to one of several quotable remarks - "In the current climate, with literally thousands of poets jostling for their place in the sun, a tepid tolerance rules". In Australia we can reduce 'thousands' to 'hundreds' but a similar orientation applies.

And the third essay I want to mention is about the literary interview - Interviewing - in which David Hayman, professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin, affably recounts his introduction to writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet via Samuel Beckett and his experiences in visiting, interviewing and corresponding with Robbe-Grillet, Maurice Roche and Phillipe Sollers in the mid 1970s. (Interviewing is followed by one of Sollers' blocks of prose H (PART 2))

VLAK magazine raises the temperature on anything 'tepidly tolerant'. (sorry deletions visitors, I couldn't resist a bit of copy-writing).

VLAK is produced in Prague. It's edited by Litteraria Pragensia director Louis Armand with, from around the globe, Edmund Berrigan, Ali Alizadeh, Stephen Mooney, David Vichnar, Stephan Delbos, Jane Lewty and Peter Cockelbergh

You can see the complete author list and buy a copy here.

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Shikibu Shuffle

I recently received a box of an array of newly published pamphlets and chapbooks from Ottawa's above/ground press. One of them is a collaboration between the two well-known poets: Perth, Australia-based Andrew Burke and Perth, Canada-based Phil Hall. It's a really nice chapbook with a glued cover image (I think each cover is different), a bright orange fly leaf and a line drawing that resembles a rubber stamp, and could be a rubber stamp, on the title and end pages. There are fifteen short, minimal poems riffing on a tenth century Japanese poet. The suite is at once kind of dainty and perky. It's called Shikibu Shuffle.

The introductory page reads:

"Happy fate brought a poet from Perth Western Australia and a poet from Perth Ontario Canada together in 2009.

Then Andrew had a heart attack and was queued up for life-saving surgery.

With nothing to do but wait, kept alive by sprays and medical potions - to distract himself - Andrew agreed to work with Phil on a collaboration.

Andrew suggested the Japanese court poet Murasaki Shikibu (973-1014); her 5-line form might be a place to start.

Phil was thinking of Ornette Coleman: two quartets facing each other and going at it (1960).

We wrote in 5s back and forth, then shuffled our silence-inducing cacophony into 10s, then improvised from there...

Andrew's operation was bumped once, and then happened. He's fine.

The shuffle served its purpose, and now surprises and delights them both."

      3.

      I watch my chest
      rise and fall in the mirror

      nature in the raw

      nothing I see or think
      means anything to me

      then I plan to tell you about it

      and into each dull thunk
      like lemon on fish

      comes flugelhorn

      a faint zing

      11.

      Talking to the air

      I break cobwebs
      on the line

      cello   kite  fishing

      making lurid
      the net result

      while hammock hook shines

      sun holds   motes float

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Andy Carruthers, Sam Moginie, Pam Brown & Chris Edwards with Michael Farrell's latest book open sesame (at gleebooks, Sydney, on the occasion of a Vagabond Press chapbook launch of six other new books) Sunday, 29th July. Vagabond poet Adrian Wiggins took the photo.

See this link for the Vagabond Press launch.

open sesame - cover detail from Wilderness by Juan Davila.

For information click here.

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The fourth instalment of Pam Brown’s feature Fifty-one contemporary poets from Australia (ordered, “[i]n the interest of objectivity” by “a recently invented ‘downunder’ method — the reverse alphabet”) includes work from Jane Gibian, Claire Gaskin, Angela Gardner, Liam Ferney, Michael Farrell, Kate Fagan, Chris Edwards, Laurie Duggan, Anna Couani, and Stuart Cooke, along with artwork by Angela Gardner and Chris Edwards. It has just been published in Jacket2. You can read the poems and see the artwork here.

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Book launch - end of July

The indefatigable Vagabond Press is launching six Rare Objects:

beheld by Niobe Syme
Chooks by Adrian Wiggins
Don Juan Variations by S.K. Kelen
green thought - green shade by Kit Kelen
Imitation Era by James Stuart
under rats by Nicolette Stasko

at
gleebooks
49 Glebe Point Rd
Glebe, Sydney

on Sunday July 29th
at 4pm

For brief descriptions of the books and futher information click here

Can't help BUT be FUN with that many poets celebrating.

Everybody welcome.

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Photo by Eve Arnold, from the dust jacket of fragments : Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe (Farrar, Strous and Giroux, 2010). Read Jacqueline Rose on Marilyn here.

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Bob Arnold's southern Vermont-based press Longhouse currently has a "lost" and then found booklet by Lorine Niedecker available. It's called Homemade Poems. It's edited by John Harkey and published by 'The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative'. John Harkey says-

My zeal for textual knowledge in this case drove me to seek out Homemade Poems in the New York Public Library's Berg Collection of English and American Literature, where the book is held as part of Cid Corman's papers. Encountering the book that day — spending time reading its poems in just the form Niedecker had so deliberately inscribed and arranged then — immediately stirred in me a conviction that the textural production itself, in some form or version, deserved a much wider readership, a life outside of the archive.

You can enquire about obtaining a copy by emailing poetryATsoverDOTnet. Read further about Lorine Niedecker and view photographs and some of her rare paintings by visiting Bob Arnold's blog A Longhouse Birdhouse.

(For over forty years Longhouse has been producing poetry books, chapbooks and pamphlets by many, many poets including Carol Bergé, Gerard Malanga, Rosmarie Waldrop, Maurice Scully, Cid Corman, Joseph Massey, Janine Pommy Vega, Thomas A Clark and Tom Clark, Theodore Enslin, Ian Hamilton Finlay and so many others, and, in 2010, a pamphlet of my own poems, Sentimental).

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Coming up next week -

Melbourne Poetics Research presents:
A Ken Bolton Day
at Monash University, Thursday 21st June
Click here for program.

Plus:
Collected Works Bookshop presents:
Friday 22nd June at 6pm

John Jenkins and Ken Bolton launch their latest collaboration, Lucky for Some. Already have a copy? Lucky you! But come along anyway. The two authors will read from Lucky for Some plus a favourite each from their nine other co-written books, including Airborne Dogs (1988), The Gutman Variations (1993), Nutters Without Fetters (2002), Poems of Relative Unlikelihood(2005). John Jenkins is a Melbourne poet. Ken Bolton lives and works in Adelaide, and has hardly ever read poetry in Melbourne. As for the pair reading together from their collaborations, this is very rare indeed!

Wine & nibbles.
Everyone Welcome!
at
Collected Works Bookshop:
Nicholas Building, Level 1,
37 Swanston Street,
Melbourne

For more on the chapbook click here.

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No future ..

and some small jubilation down my street in Alexandria, Sydney ..

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This is such a great birthday greeting. I have to post it. It's my birthday today and it's Agnes Varda's, Emperor Renzong of China's, American rapper Big L's
Thirtieth of May - enjoy the day.

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                               Vale Michael Callaghan

Michael Callaghan, the artist behind the iconic If the unemployed are dole bludgers, what the fuck are the idle rich?, has died at his home in Exeter. In 2009 he was the recipient of the Nugget Coombs Creative Arts Fellowship. Michael was a founder of Redback Graphix in Wollongong and spent some years making brilliant posters in Sydney at the Tin Sheds, Sydney University's art workshop.

Back in 1978 I wrote and worked on a film, Cattle Annie,
directed by Gill Leahy in which Michael played a street punk -

       PB, Michael and Doco on location,1978 (photo by Micky Allan)

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Next Tuesday in Adelaide :

australian experimental art foundation
& Dark Horsey Bookshop present:

THE LEE MARVIN READINGS
Convened by Ken Bolton

The new writing performed
Every Tuesday in May
Dark Horsey Bookshop
EAF, Adelaide
7.30 for a prompt 8pm start.
Price $5

TUESDAY May 22

LEE MARVIN IN AN EVENING WITH LOU COSTELLO
Aidan Coleman * Kerryn Goldsworthy *
Steve Brock * Pam Brown *

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And even more - Coming up in May

UWA Publishing presents

Kate Lilley
Ladylike

to be launched
by Pam Brown

Friday 11th May
5:30 for 6:00 pm
at the Common Room
Level 4
Woolley Building A20
Science Road
University of Sydney

The publicity says :
Ladylike is Australian poet Kate Lilley’s much awaited second volume of poetry, following her 2002 debut Versary (Salt Publishing).

The title poem of this collection (‘Ladylike’) draws on pamphlets associated with the notorious case of the bigamist Mary Carleton, who was executed in 1673, and texts contemporary with it; women from Sigmund Freud’s case studies provide the material for the series of poems, ‘Round Vienna’; and the poem ‘Cleft’ is dedicated to Kate Lilley’s mother, Australian literary giant Dorothy Hewett.

Throughout this collection, Kate mines the areas of her scholarly specialisation – the early modern period – as well as contemporary popular culture and matches it with some of the twentieth century’s enduring interests such as psychoanalysis and Freud. Ladylike is a valuable addition to Australian poetry at large and will be of interest to readers of poetry, early modern history, Freud and early psychoanalysis.

Pam Brown says :
Kate Lilley's trim poems linger in thresholds between the material world and otherworlds of slippage and undersound. Women and girls - strumpet, slattern, coquette, rubbermaid, princess - wayward, proclaimed, scandalous, diminished, wronged - are recovered and redeemed. In the dolour of grief, mother and daughter coalesce imperceptibly and mourning is immense. Ladylike loves language literarily. Kate Lilley is a mistress of adverbs and discrepancies. She adroitly melds the seventeenth century with the nineteenth and the twentieth, with its cinema classics and Freudian psychosexual dreams and neuroses, into the televisual synthetics of the twenty-first. These poems are compelling and exquisite.

Kate Lilley was born in 1960 and grew up in Perth and Sydney. After completing her PhD on Masculine Elegy at the University of London she spent four years as a Junior Research Fellow at Oxford University. Since 1990 she has taught feminist literary history and theory at the University of Sydney and has published widely on early modern women’s writing and contemporary poetry. She is the editor of Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World and Other Writings. Her first volume of poetry, Versary, was published in 2002 and awarded numerous prizes internationally.

For further information click here

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More - Coming up in May

THE LEE MARVIN READINGS
Convened by Ken Bolton

The new writing performed
Every Tuesday in May
Dark Horsey Bookshop
EAF, Adelaide
7.30 for a prompt 8pm start.
Price $5

#1 MAY 1 LEE MARVIN IN AN EVENING WITH LOU REED
Linda Marie Walker * Cath Kenneally * Shannon Burns * Gretta Mitchell

#2 MAY 8 LEE MARVIN IN AN EVENING WITH LUKE ALTMANN
Christine Collins * Nicholas Jose * Rachael Mead * Rory Kennett-Lister

#3 MAY 15 LEE MARVIN IN AN EVENING WITH LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS
Ken Bolton * Steve Brock * Lauren Lovett * Carol Lefevre

#4 MAY 22 LEE MARVIN IN AN EVENING WITH LOU COSTELLO
Pam Brown * Aidan Coleman * Kerryn Goldsworthy * Stephen Lawrence

#5 MAY 29 LEE MARVIN IN AN EVENING WITH LE LOUP GAROU
Jill Jones * John Jenkins * Chelsea Avard * Mike Ladd

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Coming up in May

    Giramondo Poets present

    Kate Fagan
    First Light

    to be launched
    by Pam Brown

    on Sunday 6th May
    3:30 for 4:00 pm
    at Gleebooks
    49 Glebe Point Road
    Glebe, Sydney

    RSVP: (02) 9660 2333

The publicity says: First Light observes the details of the world with curious and restive attention. It explores the threshold between things and words, seeking out places where music and language are equal in charting human experience. Some poems sample from other writers to create new works, often as gifts for friends. Some meditate on the tipping point between poetry and prose, or revisit established forms, such as sonnets and love letters, to stage a conversation between poetry and song. Alongside these more experimental sequences is a series of discrete lyrics, ‘Authentic Nature’, which responds to specifically Australian habitats – political, cultural and ecological – while asking about the role of ‘nature’ in poetic writing. First Light is a book of sonic discovery, philosophical insight and formal playfulness; a precise study in the music of thought.

Kate Fagan’s previous collections of poetry include The Long Moment and return to a new physics. Her poems have appeared in major anthologies, newspapers, journals and on ABC TV. An acclaimed musician and songwriter, her album Diamond Wheel won the National Film and Sound Archive Award for Best Folk Album. She lectures in literature at the University of Western Sydney.

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Shearsman Books in the UK has published another extensive selection of the indefatigable, inimitable Ken Bolton's poems from 1975 to 2010.

To read a sample from the book and for further information click here.

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                       thursday arvo. Sydney Park

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Here is a link to the penultimate poem in Kevin Davies' book and below, a copy of the paper I presented on it at The 'short takes on long poems' Symposium in Auckland, New Zealand/Aotearoa on 29th March, 2012. Below that you'll find the slides used in an accompanying power point - made as a diversion for the listening audience.(Click on the text documents' titles for a full screen version).

Duckwalking but No Guitar
Here are the slides -
Duckwalking a Perimeter Slides

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