AVANT GAGA #4 - a night of experimental...

October’s poetry night at Sappho’s will see the 4th instalment of ‘Avant Gaga’ — a gala night of experimental poetry — this time with special guests Pam Brown, Ken Bolton (Adelaide), and Amanda Stewart, and hosted by Toby Fitch.

PAM BROWN
Pam Brown has been around the Sydney poetry realm for a long time. She recently edited 'Fifty-one contemporary poets from Australia' for 'Jacket2' where she is an associate editor. She has published many books including, this year, a pocket book of ten poems, 'Anyworld', from Flying Island Books and a booklet, 'More than a feuilleton', from Little Esther Books. A longer collection of poems, 'Home by Dark', will be published by Shearsman Books in the U.K. in 2013. In a parallel life Pam lives in the bustling town of Asbestos in South-Eastern Québec; in real life she lives two suburbs away, as-the-mynah-bird-flies, in Alexandria.
http://thedeletions.blogspot.com.au/

KEN BOLTON
A gay, light-hearted bastard, Ken Bolton 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'. Born in Sydney in 1949 he works at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide and edits Little Esther books. He 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', the book on Kurt Brereton, 'More Is Plenty', and wrote the monograph 'Michelle Nikou'. He edited the magazines 'Magic Sam' and 'Otis Rush' and has published numerous books of poetry. Wakefield Press published 'The Circus' in 2010 and Vagabond Press 'A Whistled Bit Of Bop'. Earlier titles include 'At The Flash And At The Baci' and 'Untimely Meditations'.
http://www.eaf.asn.au/kenbolton.html

AMANDA STEWART
Amanda Stewart is a poet, writer and vocal artist. Much of her work is informed by ideas from linguistics, philosophy and science. She has created a diverse range of publications, performances, radio and visual works, locally and internationally, over many years. During the 1980’s and 90’s she worked full-time as a radio producer at the ABC and since then has worked freelance as a writer and performer in literature, music, theatre and new media contexts. She is a cofounder of the Australian text-sound ensemble 'Machine For Making Sense' and the Netherlands trio, Allos. Her Book and CD set of selected poems 'I/T' is available from splitrec.
http://www.splitrec.com/

OPEN MIC
To read your work in the open mic reading, just turn up on the night and put your name on the list. 2 minutes each so we can fit everyone in. And, because ‘Avant Gaga’ is a particularly playful night, why not muck around with your poem — swap the lines around, turn it upside-down, change every verb, read it into a computer translator and have it spat back out — experiment with it and see what happens; you might even like your poem better than before.

FOOD & WINE
The wine and tapas bar will be open so you can have a meal and glass of wine while you're there if you fancy it. The Soup season at Sappho’s is over, but it’s Spring, so get your vernalagia on ...

TUESDAY OCTOBER 9TH
Starts at 7.00 pm in the back courtyard/garden at Sappho's.
51 Glebe Point Road, Glebe
Sydney
Phone: 9552 4498
Look forward to seeing you there.

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                                                            Instructional Drawing, 2012 by Erwin Wurm

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Looking east, looking in.

In Brisbane recently I listened to poets, novelists and publishers from Oceania. From countries that have experienced colonisation by France and a Maori novelist, obviously from Aeotearoa/New Zealand. The main question was largely about writing in French, in local languages, and the experience of translation in a post-colonial era.

Having been involved in several Trans-Tasman poetry symposiums that aimed to make a bridge between poets from Australia and Aeotearoa/NZ (and, this year, with Hawai'i and China as well) I know some of the difficulties of distance and disconnect that exist in the South Pacific region. In Brisbane novelist Witi Ihimaera suggested that instead of looking north (to Europe, USA etc) Australians could concern themselves with looking east. I think he made a good point. And in ensuing discussion the suggestion was made that we also look to the interior towards the indigenous Aboriginal people. It was a welcome reminder. The Pacific Islands Forum exchanges ideas, funding etc at an international government level and met recently in the Cook Islands. The Festival of Pacific Arts was held in July this year in the Solomon Islands. I've visited and attempted to explore some aspects of the cultures of Nouvelle Caledonie, Aeotearoa and two of the Mascarene islands to the west of Australia as well, across the Indian Ocean to La Réunion and Mauritius. Looking west.

The topic in Brisbane generally veered towards French-language writing and the identity of, say, a Kanak writer in relation to that. Someone remarked that Australian, Vanuatuan, Pakeha (etc) writers don't describe themselves as 'British-Australian' writers and neither do writers from the "French" Pacific think of themselves as 'French-Tahitian' or 'French-Kanak' (etc) writers.

The talks were at the new State Library and the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane right next door to the Queensland Art Gallery where there was an exhibition of portraits from the Prado Museum in Madrid. The entrance to the Gallery has a hologram of part of the Prado - it kind of cried out for a pose. I took a few photos - you can find them here.

If you're interested in reading work by some of the authors in the photos, one of the publishers is 'Au Vent Des Iles' and the web site is here.

        :        :        :        :    :        :        :        :

In the September issue of Art Monthly, Susan Cochrane, author of Art and Life in Melanesia has written an extensive illustrated report on this year's Festival of Pacific Arts. She notes, towards the end of the article : "As far as mainstream Australia and its art aficionados are concerned (with a few exceptions), the Festival of Pacific Arts, the world's largest indigenous arts festival celebrating the cultural life of our Pacific neighbours, slips right under their radar. It does not even raise a blip."

Currently, Australians mainly know about the Pacific politically, as a 'Pacific Solution' - somewhere for the Federal Government to place hundreds of refugees in the hope of discouraging their arrival by fishing boat in our country. They are to be kept, awaiting 'processing', on what is continually referred to as the 'remote' island of Nauru, in Micronesia, and on Melanesian Manus Island in the Asian Pacific just north of Papua New Guinea.

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Recycled Dreaming
An Open Letter Project
Curated by Bronia Iwanczak

at Cross Arts Books
33 Roslyn Street
Kings Cross - Sydney
October 3rd - 31st

Opening with readings/performance
Wednesday 6pm - October 3rd
Everyone Welcome

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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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