---

Tinfish is proud to announce
the publication of
farout_library_software
by Pam Brown & Maged Zaher.
Design by Chae Ho Lee.
• 2007 • 27 pages • US$10.

2 Excerpts from
F A R O U T _ L I B R A R Y _ S O F T W A R E


cut me down your biggest tree
fill my tank with toxic fossils
in case I live bring me a spoon
in case I die bring me a flower
for my reincarnation
and I will talk all night long
in a hydroponic haze

- - - - - - - - -

this is the life come on
an abundance of optimism
we will do it and how bring it on
the wonderful world
the total fucking brilliant world
and oh how lovely is everyone

- - - - - - - - -

The collaboration between Pam Brown (Australia) and Maged Zaher (Seattle) came about due to the absence of a poem. Maged sent Pam a submission to Jacket, of which Pam is associate editor. But Maged forgot to enclose the poem. In an effort to atone, Maged proposed a collaboration between them; this collaboration was to last for a year and a half and comprise the poems published in this chapbook. The collaboration is seamless; even Pam attests she could no longer tell whose writing was whose as she proof-read. Among the poems' subjects: change, constant change of jobs, friends, cities, and of course the software with which we mark time's passing.

Maged Zaher was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt and came to the U.S. to pursue a graduate degree in Engineering. He has published two chapbooks, as well as poems in journals such as New American Writing, Tinfish, and Exquisite Corpse. He translates contemporary Egyptian poetry.

Pam Brown has published many books of poetry and prose. Her most recent collection is Dear Deliria (Salt, 2003). She has a new collection forthcoming in 2008, True thoughts.

- - - - - - - - -

While you're there, please check out the other new stuff.
The War Criminal offer is still on for Sarith Peou's Corpse Watching.
Someday I'll Be Sitting in a Dingy Bar, by Hwang Jiwoo
is on SPD's new “recommended” list.
(And I recommend Hwang Jiwoo's wonderful chapbook of poems from Korea too - P.B.)


Also new from Tinfish:

Art feature, a new issue of Tinfish net (this one on translation), an anti-war project on facebook, the sidewalk blog (click on the photos
to make them bigger and to unveil the narrative of each sign's life)

You can purchase 'farout_library_software'
and other titles on-line
or by sending a cheque/money order
in US dollars to
Tinfish
47-728 Hui Kelu Street #9,
Kane`ohe,
HAWAI'I 96744.

---

The latest issue of Beat Scene (number 53) is out now.




                              back cover

---

                                               Cathedral : Bette Mifsud


Bette Mifsud’s exhibition, called Searching for Here, of digital montage and soft focus photographs of landscape enlarged and printed on canvas (making them resemble paintings) plus some
other works is now on at Hat Hill Gallery in Blackheath.
Until 30th September.

In the spirit of Bette Mifsud’s soft-focus images and their Gerhard-Richter-traces, I took some fuzzy, painterly photos of the opening night of the show at the gallery from my verandah just across the road last night. Including an almost-totally abstract portrait of Carl Harrison-Ford.





                                   portrait of carl

---

If you haven’t left fortress-Sydney and joined the clogged traffic on the M4, F3, M5 freeways out of town then here are a couple of things to do besides attending political rallies and spontaneous demonstrations against your particular regional bugbear during the APEC summit meeting :

Stay in and watch SBS TV tonight

                         Julia Zemiro & Brian Nankervis - Rockwizzers
Rockwiz returns (hooray) after a winter break.

And Small Boxes, a film by Rene Hernandez
will also screen late (around midnight) on SBS TV tonight.

                                    Demian Iturra in Small Boxes

Small Boxes is a film by Rene Hernandez and produced by Kristina Ceyton. Small Boxes follows the journey of Alberto Alvarez, a 20-year old Australian Latino who lives with his mother and grandmother in the outer suburbs of Sydney. Alberto works the night shift unloading boxes of fruit and vegetable at the local produce markets. On a trip to buy his grandmother new shoes Alberto notices a 'position vacant' sign and decides to go for the job. But making a change is difficult, and for Alberto it will mean learning about his identity and finding the courage to believe in himself.

Or spend the weekend at the cinema
at the underground film festival running in Sydney.
Watch a promo.


          Paul Winkler, Albie Thoms, David Perry and Festival Director Stefan Popescu

The 2007 Sydney Underground Film Festival will be joined this year by some of the pioneering UBU Filmmakers including Albie Thoms, Paul Winkler, John Clark and David Perry, who first used the term ‘Sydney Underground’ in Australia.
If young experimental filmmakers today think they have it tough, try forming the first ever group in Australia dedicated to making, exhibiting and distributing experimental films. The UBU Films group, which was founded by Albie Thoms, Aggy Read, David Perry and John Clarke operated from 1965-1970, and later became the Sydney Filmmaker’s Co-operative, producing some of Australia’s most important experimental works. The group was named after Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi, a precursor to the Absurdist, Dada and Surrealist movements. The group staged multi-media ‘happenings’, expanded and independent cinema productions, with themes that subverted the status-quo.
The aims of SUFF are all too familiar to the goals of UBU Films 40 years ago. As Albie Thoms recalls: “We were sick of all the talk about the Australian film situation and had begun helping ourselves, financing our small movies and helping each other make them...we decided to screen our films ourselves.”

The 2007 Sydney Underground Film Festival will be premiering Paul Winkler’s playful commentary on pop culture, Pop Kitsch (Paul still only uses only in-camera effects!) and David Perry’s new digital collage film, Dingbats!

I attended UBU Films screenings at the old Greek Community Theatre opposite St Vincent's on Oxford Street, Darlinghurst back in the early 1970s. Albie Thoms shot a lengthy segment of his film about Sydney, Sunshine City, in my flat in Crown Street, Surry Hills. And, a little later on, but still around 1972, we held film nights in the lounge room of our terrace house in Ann Street, Surry Hills where everyone was to bring a 16mm film to screen. On one of these nights, Albie showed his film of Antonin Artaud's Spurt of Blood.

---

yay chaser

The Chaser has been arrested again.
I know it will be in the Australian news media but for anyone elsewhere :



Article by David Braithwaite, Sydney Morning Herald
September 6, 2007 - 8:00PM :

Eleven members of ABC's The Chaser have been charged and granted bail following their arrest in Sydney today.

Julian Morrow and Chas Licciardello, two of the stars of the satirical show, were among those detained by police today, after staging a fake motorcade through Sydney as part of an APEC week stunt.

They were charged under new APEC laws with entering a restricted area without justification.

The crew members were in a convoy of three cars and two motorbikes, which was reportedly ushered through two checkpoints in Sydney's APEC security zone.

The convoy was pulled over in Macquarie Street in a block adjacent to the InterContinental Hotel where US President George Bush is staying.

All 11 have been bailed to appear in the Downing Centre Local Court on October 4.

NSW Police Minister David Campbell denied he was embarrassed by the comedians' ability to penetrate APEC's restricted zone - rather, he was pleased the "multi-layered'' security had worked.

He said the prank was inappropriate and he "did not see the funny side at all''.

The Chaser's production team had been specifically warned by police to behave responsibly during the APEC security lockdown, he said.

"[The police] said: 'We understand that parody and satire are entertaining and fun, many people watch the program and enjoy it, but please understand the seriousness of this matter and please take caution as you go about making your program.'

"That seems to have been thrown out the window and that, I think, is inappropriate."

Their motorcade, branded with the Canadian flag, is understood to have passed through at least one police checkpoint in the declared zone.

The vehicle was pulled over near the corner of Bridge and Macquarie streets.

A police statement said the show's producers were earlier this week urged to consider the ramification of stunts during APEC.

No charges were brought when the team dressed up as a police horse yesterday.

Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer said that the fact the Chaser team was arrested showed the security system worked.

But he told an APEC news conference: "Whatever you think of the humour of the Chaser ... they were clearly not going to harm anybody in a physical way.

"They presumably were, as is the nature of their show, aiming to humiliate a lot of well-known people."

Chaser team member Chris Taylor told smh.com.au that the motorcade comprised "three cars, a couple of motorbikes, and a lot of crew".

"It was a motorcade trying to get into the exclusion zone," he said.

"No particular reason we chose Canada," said Taylor. "We just thought they'd be a country who the cops wouldn't scrutinise too closely, and who feasibly would only have three cars in their motorcade - as opposed to the 20 or so gas guzzlers that Bush has brought with him."

The vehicles in the motorcade were hired - two were black SUVs imported from the US, and the other was a regular car.

Police superintendent Ken McKay confirmed the arrests had been made using new powers available under the APEC Act.


(with Arjun Ramachandran and Andrew Meares and AAP)

---

gone bush because of bush

This evening, Sydney has snipers on roofs in a ‘secure zone’, helicopters hovering overhead, steel barrier-fences up around Circular Quay. Most business people from the area have closed for the duration and have gone bush. A public holiday has been declared for Friday to dissuade people from entering the city.



The Supreme Court of Australia has supported the New South Wales Police Department and is issuing a prohibition order against protesters demonstrating in certain streets of Sydney where today, behind a ring of steel barricades, Little Johnny Howard and George Dubya were busy strengthening military ties between Australia and USA. Bilateral deal-making between dork and adoring dork. A dangerous-simpletons' love-in. The Court ruling is provocative to anyone who believes in the right to demonstrate in so-called democratic states. It was ironic, given the restrictions on peaceful protest here in Sydney, listening to a segment of Bush’s speech, in his casual, almost inarticulate style, where he decried the treatment of Aung San Su Kyi and others in Myanmar (Burma). He championed the right to protest. A true hypocrite, but an unassuming freedom-loving kind of guy, right ?

In case you don’t know, there is a meeting of various world leaders (including China, Russia, Indonesia and so on) attending an APEC ( Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) meeting in Sydney this week. If you would like to but can’t join the rally under the wondrous blast of the brand-new water cannon purchased recently, especially for this event, by the NSW government, you could look at the following example of resistance and make your opposition public in your own suburb -


Susan Schultz, poet, professor, critic and also editor of Tinfish Press has a sidewalk blog showing how small actions can have an effect.


                                  The Webster-Schultz family workshop


After today's press conference, Dubya was hungry. He remarked, as he left for lunch with Little Johnny - 'I'm glad you invited me to lunch today' - a breathy pause - 'I'm a meat guy'.

---

tonight, I'm all over the place, doing five things at once, just like
                        Jean Cocteau

---

If you're concerned, annoyed or angered by the recent changes at Australia's multicultural public broadcasting service, SBS (especially the changes to the tv news, commercials interrupting programs, the risible excuse for a weekly movie review and so on) register your opposition by signing the petition.

---

Yesterday I put the old hail-dinged 1994 Daihatsu in for a service and oil-and-grease at a country garage with a dark interior and nicely imperfect, handyman-built wooden storage shelves. A few cars were parked in a dusty, ditch-pocked gravel yard under a couple of dried-out trees. The two mechanics, in black overalls, were leaning into the engine of a big truck. I thought of Elizabeth Bishop’s classic poem -

   Filling Station

   Oh, but it is dirty!
   - this little filling station,
   oil-soaked, oil-permeated
   to a disturbing, over-all
   black translucency.
   Be careful with that match!

   Father wears a dirty,
   oil-soaked monkey suit
   that cuts him under the arms,
   and several quick and saucy
   and greasy sons assist him
   (it's a family filling station),
   all quite thoroughly dirty.

   Do they live in the station?
   It has a cement porch
   behind the pumps, and on it
   a set of crushed and grease-
   impregnated wickerwork;
   on the wicker sofa
   a dirty dog, quite comfy.

   Some comic books provide
   the only note of color -
   of certain color. They lie
   upon a big dim doily
   draping a taboret
   (part of the set), beside
   a big hirsute begonia.

   Why the extraneous plant?
   Why the taboret?
   Why, oh why, the doily?
   (Embroidered in daisy stitch
   with marguerites, I think,
   and heavy with gray crochet.)

   Somebody embroidered the doily.
   Somebody waters the plant,
   or oils it, maybe. Somebody
   arranges the rows of cans
   so that they softly say:
   ESSO-SO-SO-SO

   to high-strung automobiles.
   Somebody loves us all.





                             Elizabeth Bishop


I once lent my copy of Elizabeth Bishop's Geography III to someone and I never saw it again. Borrower, are you out there ?

---

here comes august

The Material Poem edited by James Stuart
is now available as a free download at
non generic productions.


click on cover image to enlarge

---

Sydney poet Adam Aitken covers the bookshops
in the first week of August :

Giramondo launches a new poetry collection,
Ardent by Jane Gibian.
To be launched by Adam Aitken.
upstairs at Gleebooks
49 Glebe Point Road
Glebe
at 3.30 for 4 pm
Sunday 5 August


Martin Edmond, author of Waimarino County
will be in conversation with Adam Aitken
Better Read Than Dead Bookstore
265 King Street
Newtown, Sydney
at 6.30pm
Tuesday 7 August

---

Kate Richards and Ross Gibson
present Bystander
The Performance Space
Carriageworks,
245 Wilson St
Eveleigh (aka Redfern) Sydney
at 5.30pm
Wednesday 8th August

---

The regular Lee Marvin Readings will continue through August
on Tuesday evenings in the 'Athens Of The South'

















Click here for the upcoming
reading schedule.

---

The Material Poem is a new e-anthology, edited by James Stuart and published by ‘non-generic productions’. It features the work of some 28 Australian poets, artists and critics, all of whom are engaged with poetry, and more broadly language, as a material form. It showcases the vibrancy of experimental writing practices in Australia, demonstrating how writing functions outside the purely literary. The Material Poem will be launched by Katrina Schwarz, editor of Art and Australia with new-media performances and an experimental short film screening.

Contributors :
ALEX SELENITSCH | AMANDA STEWART | CHRIS EDWARDS | ELENA KNOX | FRANZ EHMANN | GARETH JENKINS |HAZEL SMITH | JAMES STUART | JILL JONES & ANNETTE WILLIS | JOHANNA FEATHERSTONE | KLARE LANSON | KOMNINOS ZERVOS | KRISTIN HANNAFORD | LINDA CARROLI | LINDA MARIE WALKER | MICHAEL FARRELL | NATASHA DUSENJKO | NICK KEYS | NORMANA WIGHT & ANNE KIRKER | PATRICK JONES | PETER LYSSIOTIS | PETER O’MARA | RICHARD TIPPING | RUARK LEWIS | WAYZGOOSE PRESS

Performance Space (Room 3.105)
Ground floor, Bon Marche Building
University of Technology
755 Harris Street
Sydney
6 for 6:30pm, until 8pm
Wednesday 1 August

The Material Poem will be freely downloadable after the launch
The Deletions will keep you posted
Also check out more from James Stuart at c-side

---

Gary Sullivan, self-described poet, cartoonist, loudmouth is the creator of a comic strip called Elsewhere. Three copies of this funny, fascinating, off-beat comic that I’d ordered, arrived in the mail
yesterday and I read them, cover-to-cover straightaway. I highly recommend these amazing light-hearted, funny and witty, intelligibly critical, poetic and personal comic books.



Elsewhere No 2 is a collaboration with poet Nada Gordon. It's 24 pages of multi-cultural images drawn from a walk up Coney Island Avenue, Brooklyn. The comic's text is by Nada Gordon, modelled on Frank O'Hara's Second Avenue and written from notes taken on a bus trip down Coney Island Avenue in the opposite direction. As the song says, it's 'a great big melting pot' and it's wonderful too.



Gary Sullivan also has a nicely-illustrated essay in progress about Joe Brainard’s one-off collaboration with the poet Robert Creeley called Class of ‘47 on his blog, also called Elsewhere.You can order copies of the comics there as well.


                              Joe Brainard Self Portrait 1972


                              Robert Creeley strip by Gary Sullivan


                               Gary Sullivan (foto : Nada Gordon)

Gary is a participant in the Humpo feature edited by Rachel Loden and K.Silem Mohammad in the issue I’ve recently edited of Jacket magazine.



remember, dear visitors to the deletions, that you can simply click on the images, especially ones like the comic strip, to see larger size versions

---

Martin Edmond was born in Ohakune, New Zealand, the town in the cover photo of his new book Waimarino County & other excursions. The photo of the main street of Ohakune with Mount Ruapehu looming over it was taken by B.V. Davis in 1938. This book is an enthralling collection of discursive essays and short prose works concerned with memory, travelling, imagination and dreaming, identity and ‘other excursions’. To quote from an early part of the book ..when we had moved from Huntly to Heretaunga, and my father suffered his first breakdown and my mother announced herself as a poet, it came to be time for me to leave home and I did so on the Limited Express...A description of that formative train trip follows, and Martin's mother’s recent announcement draws attention to the fact that she was the well-known New Zealand poet Lauris Edmond. After finishing undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in English and anthropology Martin briefly worked as a junior lecturer at Victoria University, in Wellington. Then he joined the avant-garde theatre group Red Mole, touring New Zealand, the US, Mexico, UK and Europe. Martin moved to Sydney in 1981. He currently lives in Summer Hill and works as a writer and a taxi-driver. He keeps several blogs including the taxi-driving one, cleverly named dérives.

I mentioned Martin’s recent book Luca Antara : Passages in Search of Australia here on the deletions in January this year.



You can read a short prose piece by Martin Edmond on nzepc

Martin will be in conversation with Sydney poet Adam Aitken at
Better Read Than Dead Bookstore
265 King Street
Newtown, Sydney
at 6.30pm
Tuesday 7th August

---

Jacket magazine - new issue

                  Jacket 33
     Guest editor (myself) Pam Brown

:   :   :   :   :   Features   :   :   :   :   :

*Gordon Ball: Unknown Collaborators: 
photos from the world of Allen Ginsberg 
and his many friends among the Beats, 
from 1969 to Ginsberg's death in 1997 

*Humor in Poetry: The Dangerfield Conundrum: 
A Roundtable on Humor in Poetry - 
80 pages of discussion  from 200 pages of postings 
to the HumPo List edited by 
Rachel Loden and K. Silem Mohammad, 
and featuring:

George Bowering, Maxine Chernoff
Katie Degentesh, Gabriel Gudding
Rachel Loden, Ange Mlinko
K. Silem Mohammad, D. A. Powell
Ron Silliman, Gary Sullivan 

The Dangerfield Files, edited by Rachel Loden: 
poems from the HumPo List: 

Rachel Loden: Introduction
George Bowering, Maxine Chernoff
Gabriel Gudding, Rachel Loden
Ange Mlinko, K. Silem Mohammad
D. A. Powell,Ron Silliman
Gary Sullivan

*Mark Weiss: José Martí: "José Julián Martí y Pérez (1853-1895) may not
 be unique as a political poet-martyr (one thinks of Byron and Lorca),
 but he must have been one of the most politically involved. The very
 model of the committed artist, he was 42 when he died in one of the first
 engagements of the second Cuban War of Independence, of which he had
 been chief propagandist and one of the principal planners. He had spent
 his entire adult life in exile, chiefly in Mexico City and New York." 

 *Pieces on "Pieces of Air in the Epic", by Brenda Hillman: Barbara
 Claire Freeman, Editor.

"The generic convention of the book review is monologic; however
 nuanced and subtle, the constraints of the form typically allow the 
 inclusion of only one perspective. This collection of short texts on 
 the poems in Brenda Hillman's Pieces of Air in the Epic intends first, 
 to present a kind of collective 'book review,' that is, a form of writing 
 about poems that demands a plurality of individual voices; and second, to
 provide a forum in which poets respond to and explore a particular poem."
 - Barbara Claire Freeman

Introduction, by Barbara Claire Freeman
Marjorie Welish,Graham Foust,Evie Shockley
C.D. Wright,Forrest Gander,Carol Snow
Robert Hass,Michael Davidson,Claudia Keelan
Robert Kaufman,Norma Cole,Marjorie Perloff
Geoffrey G.O'Brien,Juliana Spahr,Calvin Bedient
Reginald Shepherd,Cole Swensen,Elizabeth Robinson
Nathaniel Tarn,Bin Ramke,Donald Revell
Patricia Dienstfrey,Michael Palmer

:   :   :   :   :   Reviews   :   :   :   :   :

Adam Aitken: "The Accidental Cage" by Michelle Cahill 

Stan Apps: "Folly", by Nada Gordon. 

Stan Apps: "My Angie Dickinson", by Michael Magee 

Cynthia Arrieu-King: "The Man Suit" by Zachary Schomburg 

Bridget Brooklyn: "Passion", by Brane Mozetic, translated by Tamara
 Soban 

Andrew J. Browne: "Don't Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing
 after the New York School", edited by Daniel Kane. 

Stephen Cope: "City Eclogue" by Ed Roberson 

Penelope Cray: "The Wanton Sublime:A Florilegium of Whethers and
 Wonders" by Anna Rabinowitz 

Mark Dickinson: "Leaves of Field": with "Open Woods" and "Moving
 Woods".by Peter Larkin 

Patrick James Dunagan: "Remembering Joel Oppenheimer" by Robert
 Bertholf 

Martin Duwell: "Sugar Hits" by Philip Hammial 

Michael Farrell: "Phosphorescence" by Graeme Miles 

Cliff Fell: Eliot Weinberger, "What happened here" (second edition) and
 "Muhammad", both published by Verso, 2006. 

Norbert Francis: Tosa Motokiyu (edited by Kent Johnson and Javier
Alvarez). "Also, With My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords: 
Araki Yasusada's Letters in English" 

Noah Eli Gordon and Erik Anderson: Conversational Noise: Some Talk on
 "Some Notes on My Programming", by Anselm Berrigan 

Anne Heide: "hidde violeth i dde violet", by Kathleen Fraser 

Cole Heinowitz: "Exchanges of Earth and Sky", by Jack Collom 

Tom Hibbard: "Somebody Blew Up America and Other Poems"
  by Amiri Baraka 

Ben Hickman: "Remnants of Hannah" by Dara Wier 

Carlos Hiraldo: "Unprotected Texts: Selected Poems, 1978-2006" by
 Thomas Beckett 

Craig Johnson: "Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems" by Noelle
 Kocot 

Paul Kahn: "I Was Blown Back", by Norman Fischer 

Carl Kelleher: "Shake" by Joshua Beckman 

Jake Kennedy: "The Men" by Lisa Robertson 

Marc Kipniss: "The Bird Hoverer", by Aaron Belz 

Louise Landes Levi: "Sunswumthru a Building", by Bob Arnold 

Michelle Mahoney: "The Pajamaist", by Matthew Zapruder 

Jill M. Neziri: "Forth a Raven", by Christina Davis 

Michael Quattrone: "Overnight", by Paul Violi 

Dr Mark Seton: "The Kamikaze Mind", by Richard James Allen 

Rob Stanton: "A panic that can still come upon me" by Peter Gizzi 

Paul Stephens: "The External Combustion Engine" by Michael Ives 

James Stuart: "From Now" by Johanna Drucker 

Ezra Tessler: "The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry and Social
 Class" by Gary Lenhart 

Dan Thomas-Glass: "Girly Man" and "World on Fire", both by Charles
 Bernstein 

Marjorie Welish: "The Totality for Kids", by Joshua Clover 

:   :   :   :   :   Interviews   :   :   :   :   :

*Kathleen Fraser in conversation with Sarah Rosenthal, 2007:
"SR: Silence has been a central trope in your writing since early on.
 It carries a range of meanings, from erasure to grief and loss to the
 spaciousness of an open field. Perhaps we could trace some of the ways in
 which silence has come up in your work over time." 

*George Bowering in conversation with Rachel Loden: 
 Like a Radio in the Dark: An Email Interview, 2007

*Alison Knowles in conversation with Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, 
 September 2006. Alison Knowles is a visual artist known for her 
 soundworks,installations, performances, publications and association 
 with Fluxus, the experimental avant-garde group formally founded 
 in 1962. 

*Eleni Sikelianos, author of The California Poem, 
 in conversation with Jesse Morse 

*Catherine Wagner in conversation with Nathan Smith, 13 April 2007 

:   :   :  :   :   Articles   :   :   :   :   :

*James Wallenstein: Ninnies and the Critics: "A Nest of Ninnies" by John
 Ashbery and James Schuyler 

*Geoffrey Cruickshank- Hagenbuckle with Alexander Nouvel: ZAP!
 (Zukofsky, Apollinaire, and the X Men) 

*Vernon Frazer and Kirpal Gordon:
Who We Are Now: A Retrospective of Michael Rothenberg 

*Aram Saroyan: Contretemps: A Minimalist Parable 

:   :   :   :   :   Poems   :   :   :   :   :

Mary Jo Bang: Three poems 

Ken Bolton: Three poems: An Australian Suburban Garden; 
EUROPE; For various movie directors 

Michelle Cahill: Three poems: The Accidental Cage; Manhattan; Poppies 


Justin Clemens: "The Mundiad", Book IV 

Kelvin Corcoran: Three poems from 'Ulysses in the Car' 

Alfred Corn: Two poems: Page and Cave; Trunk Show 

Wystan Curnow: poem: Max 

Norman Fischer: Formal Terms 

Robert Gibbons: Two poems: That Internal World; At the End of Writing 


Anna Gibbs: Culpable Blindness 

John Hennessy: Coney Island Pilgrims 

Katia Kapovich: Two poems: To Whom It May Concern; The Seventh String 


Burt Kimmelman: Two poems: House, Normandy; Crumbs upon the Table 


Rachel Loden: Three poems: Props to the Twentieth Century; Dick of the
 Dead; The Pure of Heart, Those Murderers 

Rupert Loydell: Two poems: The Secret Life of Mist; The Secret Life of
 Light 

Norman MacAfee: I Am Astro Place 

Mark Mordue: Things That Year 

John Muckle: Three Poems: Elizabeth Bishop; Nothing Wrong; Cyclomotors 


Marc Nasdor: Five poems 

Simon Robb: Excerpt from "Jane Fonda's Temple of Literature" 

Sam Sampson: Three poems: The Ship Beautiful; Reel; Diagram 

Don Share: On being philosophical 

Jaya Savige: Two poems 

Mark Schafer translates five poems by David Huerta 

Jeffrey Side: Extracts from "Carrier of the Seed" 

Stephen Sturgeon: Two poems: Friday; Fired 

Paul Violi: Finish These Sentences

          
Jacket 33

Jacket magazine:
Editor: John Tranter
Associate Editor: Pam Brown

---

friday 13th

              then get ready
              Bastille Day
              14th July
              quatorze juillet








                                      Prise de La Bastille by Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Hoüel

---

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

---

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.

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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.

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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.

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It's Winter on Wentworth Street

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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)

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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.

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