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

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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

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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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friday 13th

              then get ready
              Bastille Day
              14th July
              quatorze juillet








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

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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

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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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