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THE LEE MARVIN READINGS

at
Dark Horsey Bookshop
Australian Experimental Art Foundation
Lion Arts Centre, North Tce [West End]
Adelaide
South Australia

every Tuesday of the month
at 7:30pm for an 8pm start
for $5

1. JUNE 3rd • LEE MARVIN in
ON BEING & NOTHINGNESS
Andrew Peek • Jill Jones
Heather Taylor Johnson • Stefan Laszczuk

2. JUNE 10th • LEE MARVIN in
ON BEING JOHN MALKOWICZ
Pam Brown • Ken Bolton
Cath Kenneally • Claire Roberts

3. JUNE 17th • LEE MARVIN in
ON BEING ONDINE
Astrid Lorange • Tom Sullivan
David Mortimer • Naomi Horridge

4. JUNE 24th • LEE MARVIN in
ON BEING, REALLY, STONKERED, K-BLAMMO, OUT-TO-LUNCH
Peter Goldsworthy • Angela Meyer
Shannon Burns • Caitlyn Lesiuk




'Allotments' - a new collection of 100 poems. Some are typically only two or three lines long. Laurie Duggan is a poet who spent thirty six years traversing an Australia he called 'Blue Hills'. He moved to Kent in the UK nearly a decade ago and began walking and photographing and notating his discoveries of 'England'. Not to be too obviously allusive (but it's irresistible) - these poems, like a mature garden patch in an allotment, are honed from years of poetic cultivation.

a frozen orange in the icebox
a disconnected battery
various items committed to memory sticks

Laurie's poems could function as usb drives - pocket-sized but absolutely crammed with a peculiar, intelligent, beautiful 'England' and with funny, whimsical and sardonic varieties of humour infusing the observations. At the launch in Sydney in December 2012, I said about 'The Collected Blue Hills' - 'The 'mundane' that Laurie Duggan writes into is rendered poetic through his quietly assiduous micro-focus.' The same holds for 'Allotments' and, as usual, there's not a word out of place.

For further information, including samples of the poems, and to buy a copy visit Shearsman Books here.




The strange thing is, or is it a 'strange thing'? Is it a normal path-to-progress thing or whatever a usual expectation might be called? The thing is that, fifty years ago, there were three plump school exercise books filled with mostly dreadful adolescent poetry, with no Beat nor NYNY genius nor Russian poet within cooee for a couple more years. The exercise books were each called 'THING' - THING I, THING II and THING III. This third 'THING' has recently resurfaced and reminds me that nearly four decades later - decades of poetry writing - my book of poems called 'Text thing' was published by Little Esther Books. In 2002. I can only wonder. Or not.
Maybe I can only note the small coincidence.

The grubby beaten up THING III with its cliched maxims in teenage handwriting looks like this :

'Text thing' looks like this :

(for Rachel Loden)

Rachel Loden commented :

With trepidation, Rachel, I'll give you a glimpse of the very tentative, inchoate and pretty terrible poems I wrote day after day as a high school student in the subtropical heat of Brisbane, Queensland in 1965. These three fragments were from February. I wonder what was so great about 'Wednesday' and I can't remember who the 'you' I was longing for was. I think I'd read too much English Victorian poetry, or the capitals of Carlyle, for my own good. And as for the Tree Gods and Goddesses - who knows? The handwriting is really strange to me now too - apart from the capitals there are those weird angular 'g's and 'f's and 'y's. Anyway here goes - juvenilia is us - hope I don't regret it -





ka mate ka ora
a new zealand journal of poetry and poetics

Issue 13, published in March, has some material from 'Poetry as Social Action', a symposium held at the University of Auckland
at the end of September, 2013

To read it and link to further documentation of the event
visit the journal here

And then read Susan Schultz's response to Christopher Parr here.




A Poetry Reading


Fiona Hile : Kate Lilley
Louis Armand : Pam Brown

on the occasion of two visiting poets -
Fiona Hile from Melbourne & Louis Armand from Prague

at
The Common Room,
Upstairs in The Woolley Building
Science Road
University of Sydney

on
Wednesday 21st May

5 for 5.30pm

everyone welcome

for directions search 'Woolley Building" on the campus map




Papers from the wonderful conference, Poetry & the Trace convened by Ann Vickery, Rose Lucas & John Hawke in Melbourne in July 2008.

'Poetry & the Trace' brought together a range of national and international poets and critics to discuss poetic impulse. The conference celebrated the many ways which poetry as a genre can question and drive our human experience. Focus was given to what Derrida described as the trace – be it of memory, desire, the past and the goal of ethics.

The conference inspired ongoing dialogues between poetries from different regions. It also encouraged debate about the role of contemporary poetries and their histories both within Australian culture and beyond. You can find the entire program here.

not every participant is included but many are -
Ann Vickery : Rachel Blau DuPlessis : Lionel Fogarty
John Kinsella : Kate Fagan : Patrick Jones : Bonny Cassidy
Keri Glastonbury : Jill Jones : Thomas Ford : Susan Stewart
Simon West : Jessica Wilkinson : Melissa Boyle
Elizabeth Wilson : Bernadette Brennan : Kate Lilley
John Tranter : Josh Mei-Ling Dubrau : Hazel Smith
Sally Evans : Michael Farrell : Melissa Hardie : Emily Bitto
Sue Gillett : Joy Wallace : Kim Cheng Boey
Anne Collett : David McCooey : Emily Finlay
Nina Philadelphoff-Puren

This is a terrific record and a great resource
with an erudite introduction by Ann Vickery.
For further information & to buy a copy
visit the publisher Puncher & Wattmann