early february recess

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26th January - Invasion Day, Australia

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screenshot from basefook -

pleased to be invited on to the VLAK Magazine editorial board

click here for the link to VLAK
and here for the link to the work.

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Announcing a collection of contemporary Australian poetry audio
Click this link to listen or download

Click on the image to read the front page

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TAXON

        the floating eye
        the pallid dove
        the bastard of bread.

                                                       ye   hic
Each taxon breathes on you     yo   haec
                                                       ya   hoc

    Inflect and there are splinters in the heart.
    One doesn't have a heart, is dead
The eye floats mean-looking ... but
I would like to point out
that no eye is smarter than me.
(Can either be your Secret I D or mine, in the grammar of this
poem.)  All yr taxons intermingle.
Je, Je vous kill, being a virus.
I'm sick of being a pallid dove; the phainopepla loves only you but
species cannot intermingle, for example
    the dead and the living
    part of two different taxonomies
Don't make me laugh.

I don't understand a word - don't get it.

Can I be some of those things I never was?

I'm living with someone again. Who
has a lot of dirty laundry
and is dead. He's gendered, because we are living in the past -
which is a tense.
Can I be different now? Your syntaxonomy
stretched to limit - It's not a thing. Not like the bastard of bread.

I have the gestures of some of the dead,
I am poking in your Secret I D to tell you,
we don't have to be any way we were.
We owe nothing to the peace effort, or a cause,
clipping our wings. Inside each one I will touch and say
we owe nothing to the others. We are not a species
we are not endebted eaters.
I'm gonna sit here breathing on your soul.
Can't think of anything else to do.

Alice Notley - a biographical note - here

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Nature morte-portrait

Le nil le calendrier et la blague à tabac
Nature
Comme doit être la peinture
Morte
Et la littérature
Une tête sans chevelure
Des yeux en trait
Une virgule
Un nez plat un méplat
Au front
Mon portrait
Mon coeur bat
Et c'est la pendule
Dans la glace je suis en pied
Ma tête fume

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Still Life-Portrait

Cigarette papers datebook and tobacco pouch
Life
Ought to be like painting
Still
And literature
A hairless head
Eyes straight
Comma
A flat nose a plane
On the forehead
My portrait
My heart beats
It's an alarm clock
In the mirror I'm full length
My head smokes
        Translated by Kenneth Rexroth

Pierre Reverdy website here.

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OTOLITHS
A Magazine of Many E-Things
Issue 31
Read it here

VLAK
Prague, New York, Sydney, London, Melbourne
Issue 4
Contents, ordering - click here

ZONE
Canterbury - Collective Poetry Magazine
Issue 1
Contents, ordering - click here

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Coming up at ModCon

Followed, this coming Friday by Ann Vickery and Ali Alizadeh
launching The Political Imagination -
a special issue of 'Southerly' magazine:
click on the posters to enlarge them

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Acts is a sequence of performative, diegetic abstractions that pep up the experiential with humorous cynicism. Here are some sentient strategies for tackling a theory. Ali Alizadeh poeticizes Jacques Lacan's three interrelated levels of reality - the symbolic, the imaginary and the real. A question might be 'Is poetry a mere side-effect of philosophy?' Does Ali Alizadeh know the answer? One thing I know is that you can savour these shrewd poems without needing any Lacanian expertise. They are genuinely responsive to this erratic world and will account for it, genially, on your behalf.

For further information visit Black Rider Press

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Last week, I visited Rangitoto Island, & climbed to the summit.
Photos of this young volcano can be found here

Farewell Rangitoto, Farewell Aotearoa, New Zealand

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At Auckland University today, Susan Davis presented a selection of flags made by her late husband, the poet and artist, Leigh Davis. The class, 'Poetry Off The Page', is an undergraduate course in the English Department - the students are inventive and know how to make art from language in a variety of ways. To see photos of the flags and the presentation, click here and then click on the images in the set.

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Happy Hybridities for Adam Aitken
from the album Great Gift Ideas from New Zealand

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Memorial Hall, Whanganui, Aotearoa New Zealand

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Matapouri, Tutukaka Coast, North East Aotearoa New Zealand

for more paradisiacal scenery from Matapouri click here

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Friday 20th September
in Wellington, New Zealand

AUSTRALIAN POET : PAM BROWN
in conversation with Gregory O'Brien

DATE AND TIME: Friday 20 September at 6pm
VENUE: International Institute of Modern Letters,
Kelburn Campus, Victoria University

For further details, click here

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September in New Zealand

I'll be visiting Auckland for the month of September as a guest of the University. There's a packed schedule of events during my visit including a symposium with poets from Australia, Hawai'i, Singapore and New Zealand. Links to the information to date can be found below - and please click on the posters to enlarge them for reading:

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For the full symposium program with information on the speakers and the associated public reading please visit this link.
For my schedule please visit this link

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Tuesday nights in Adelaide :

click images to enlarge

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1969 : The Black Box of Conceptual Art

Ian Burn, Installation Photograph for Xerox Books,1969

Currently on at the University Art Gallery, Sydney University
Information, gallery address, times, catalogue download : here

Here's a poem I wrote after seeing the retrospective of Ian Burn's work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney in 1997:

 
At the Ian Burn Show
        MCA 1997

at the Ian Burn show
  there's a badly recorded
b&w video of Ian Burn
        & colleagues        performing
 anti-authoritarian art spiels -
drumkit, keyboards, guitar, voice -
  it's the 'Art & Language' days,
the mid-seventies -          recorded,
    most likely,    on a Sony portapak
         (I set one up -      a tripod
    in the lounge room
      of our communal house
& let it run       full twenty-minute
      brackets   to film   quotidian comings
   & goings).
ah -         here's Terry Smith
   with plenty of hair - a stringy beard
&, possibly, an Afro -  singing along
              in the refrain -
'...ee...gal - it - tar -i - an...ism...!"
        gustily.
I'm chuckling now - this is
   amazingly cheering -    I feel
      it's my culture - or was - &,easily,
 could become
                 karaoke !
as it contains,   for me,
    equivalent nostalgia.
ingenuous, idealistic
                  and schismatic !
direct-action practising populist artists
   (anti-institutional-intellectual-academy)
vs
theoretical conceptual post-object artists
   (yet not always nor certainly pro-academic)
it was my schism too,       our exegesis,
      "artists think" ?        well, maybe -
 they did,           for a decade
all under the same
                   tin roof

from Text thing (Little Esther Books, 2002)

Ian Burn, 1969

Read a newspaper article here

Roger Cutforth, Noon time-piece (April, 1969)

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