pop-up reading in october -

click on the image to enlarge it

---

Avant Gaga in September

'Archibald's chilli', collage from 'Westernities' by Pam Brown, SOd 2016

On the FIRST TUESDAY of September (not the second), the Sappho poetry night will play host to AVANT GAGA #25, with guest poets Laurie Duggan, Pam Brown, Liam Ferney and Allison Gallagher.
Open mic too. Drinks. Food. Bar. Etceterahhh. Et, peut-être - une surprise. Hosted by Toby Fitch.

at Sappho Books Cafe & Wine Bar
51 Glebe Point Road
Sydney
on Tuesday 6 September
at 19:00–22:00

________________________________________________

LAURIE DUGGAN
Laurence "Larry" Duggan (1905-December 20, 1948), was head of the South American desk at the United States Department of State during World War II. In 1948, Duggan fell to his death from the window of his office in New York, ten days after being questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation about whether he had had contacts with Soviet intelligence.

PAM BROWN
is a dedicated professional amateur. Her most recent of many books of poems is 'Missing up' published by Vagabond Press last December. She lives, as the fruitbats fly, a few haphazard kilometres south of Sappho, in Alexandria.

LIAM FERNEY
Liam Ferney’s most recent collection is 'Content' (Hunter Publishing). His previous collection, 'Boom' (Grand Parade Poets), was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Poetry Prize and the Queensland Poetry Prize. He is a media manager, poet and aspiring left back living in Brisbane, Australia.

ALLISON GALLAGHER
is a writer & poet from Sydney, whose work explores gender and sexuality. Her debut poetry collection will be released independently in October 2016.

OPEN MIC
Sign up on the night from 7pm. 10 readers, 2 mins each, max.

---

Join us to raise a glass to celebrate
Emily Stewart’s debut poetry collection Knocks
published by Vagabond Press

Knocks will be launched by Pam Brown
with readings by Elena Gomez & Holly Isemonger

on Sunday 14th August
at 3pm

at Frontyard
228 Illawarra Rd
Marrickville
Sydney

About the book:

Knocks is the debut collection from one of the most exacting writers of Australian poetry’s new wave. Stewart’s poetry consistently surprises in its formal range, encompassing sonnets, erasures and found poetry, and striking at the level of the image –“the computer ecstasy of first-person”. The collection conveys the sense of an extended, “stretched” present, politically shadowed, where “it is commendable / to sign up each day, but better / to maintain a patina of disobedient / actions, shoplifting or whatever”.

Individual poems consider place, persona, fandom, viruses, data and desire in evoking “a residual gala of feeling”. Yet out of variety emerges a very particular architecture: these are the works of a poet obsessed with the structure of the everyday; its litter and networks, idiom and drama: “today we hyphenate our names / today paper shredders are put to good use / today Bikini Bill's power is self-evident”.

visit Vagabond Press here
____________________________________________________

“There is more than one kind of poem here, thank the Lord. Poems even differ between modes, get meta on our saggy adulthoods. The generation you didn’t know you were disappointed in not arriving has arrived. In Stewart poetics has a new seat in parliament for wetlands and other erasures. If you have a thing for internet stockings, read this. Not to mention mixed diction Australia, fuck! we don’t just get to live here, we get to write about that shit.”
– Michael Farrell

“Emily Stewart delivers punchy constructions of contemporary life in the Anthropocene and beyond. She wields her language sharply, imagery exploding with unexpected confluences that sweep routine assumptions aside.”
– Jane Gibian

---

on Tuesday August 16th
at 7pm (I think)

at Dark Horsey Bookshop
Australian Experimental Art Foundation
Lion Arts Centre,
North Terrace,
Adelaide

---

Mairéad Byrne

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa is currently preparing an anthology of highly innovative transcultural women’s poetry and accompanying short essays - women : poetry : migration [an anthology] forthcoming in 2016 with Theenk Books.

'The Argotist Online' has published Jane Joritz-Nakagawa's
succinct essay "On Feminism and Migration in the Work of Poet Mairéad Byrne" here.

Mairéad Byrne's The Best Of (What's Left Of) Heaven is available at Publishing Genius here & there's an interview by Sina Queyras here.

---

click on collage to enlarge

---

Three parts of the Biennale of Sydney : the theme this year was a well-known quote from cyberpunk author William Gibson : The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed.. The venues were parcelled as 'embassies' - you can interpret and riff your own allusions or metaphors on that idea. The presentations I liked were :

Taiwanese artist, Yin-Ju Chen's Liquidation maps, 2014-2016 at the 'Embassy of Spirits' at the Art Gallery of NSW.

Using a combination of media Liquidation Maps recounts traumatic political events (uprisings, massacres) in various countries - South Korea, East Timor, Vietnam, Singapore & Cambodia. Yin-Ju Chen astrologically charts the exact date & time of each incident & presents an interpretation in series of large charcoal drawings. Time's cycles are a strong component. Wall-text by Amber Tang provides historical information and astrological details.

(click on images to enlarge them)


Chun Doo-Hwan's chart: 'Greed captivated by power' -

Find Yin-Ju Chen's website here

---

Thai artist Korakrit Arunanondchai's Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names (3) at the 'Embassy of the Real', at Cockatoo Island - not that the video ever seemed intended to represent 'The Real' (whatever that is). It could have screened in the 'Embassy of Spirits'.

To watch a trailer click here

Still from the video :

and for a different excerpt -

Korakrit Arunanondchai: Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 (Excerpt).

---

British-based Karen Mirza & Brad Butler's The Unreliable Narrator, at the 'Embassy of Non-Participation' at Artspace, Woolloomooloo.

A video installation, The Unreliable Narrator narrates terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008, alternately from a position of the terrorists and of a seemingly impartial commentator. The video, sourced from CCTV recordings of the siege, together with telephone conversations between the attackers and their controllers, suggests that the event was performed for the benefit of news cameras: “this is just a trailer, the main feature is yet to come”.

(Unfortunately the video is unavailable to screen here but you can find an extract on the Biennale's 'Embassy of Non-Participation' website)

---

NYNY poet & art critic Eileen Myles zoomed through Sydney recently & gave readings (via the Biennale's sub category 'Bureau of Writing') at Artspace & (via University of Sydney English Dept's Creative Writing) at the Footbridge Theatre -

Eileen Myles at Artspace


Eileen at the Footbridge

---

sunday lunch

---