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.
30.5.12
21.5.12
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 -
18.5.12
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 *
26.4.12
And even more - Coming up in May
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
20.4.12
More - Coming up in May
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
18.4.12
Coming up in May
Kate Fagan
First Light
to be launched
on Sunday 6th May
The publicity says:
First Light observes the details of the world with curious and restive attention. It explores the threshold between things and words, seeking out places where music and language are equal in charting human experience. Some poems sample from other writers to create new works, often as gifts for friends. Some meditate on the tipping point between poetry and prose, or revisit established forms, such as sonnets and love letters, to stage a conversation between poetry and song. Alongside these more experimental sequences is a series of discrete lyrics, ‘Authentic Nature’, which responds to specifically Australian habitats – political, cultural and ecological – while asking about the role of ‘nature’ in poetic writing. First Light is a book of sonic discovery, philosophical insight and formal playfulness; a precise study in the music of thought.
Kate Fagan’s previous collections of poetry include The Long Moment and return to a new physics. Her poems have appeared in major anthologies, newspapers, journals and on ABC TV. An acclaimed musician and songwriter, her album Diamond Wheel won the National Film and Sound Archive Award for Best Folk Album. She lectures in literature at the University of Western Sydney.
by Pam Brown
3:30 for 4:00 pm
at Gleebooks
49 Glebe Point Road
Glebe, Sydney
RSVP: (02) 9660 2333
14.4.12
Shearsman Books in the UK has published another extensive selection of the indefatigable, inimitable Ken Bolton's poems from 1975 to 2010.
12.4.12
8.4.12
Here is a link to the penultimate poem in Kevin Davies' book and below, a copy of the paper I presented on it at The 'short takes on long poems' Symposium in Auckland, New Zealand/Aotearoa on 29th March, 2012. Below that you'll find the slides used in an accompanying power point - made as a diversion for the listening audience.(Click on the text documents' titles for a full screen version).
Duckwalking but No Guitar
Here are the slides -
Duckwalking a Perimeter Slides
5.4.12
short takes on long poems
Auckland and Waiheke Island, Aotearoa-New Zealand 28-30th March 2012
I've uploaded an album of photos of the symposium and the extras here.
Renowned US poet and critic, Rachel Blau du Plessis, crossed the Tasman Sea to visit Sydney yesterday. She had been invited to present her reflections on the long poem and her own practice in writing 'Drafts' at the University of Sydney. This was followed by a reading of her poetry and, later, dinner in Chinatown.
You can see some photos of the Sydney occasion here.
4.4.12
k a m a t e k a o r a
a new zealand journal of poetry and poetics
A new issue of ka mate ka ora focusing on the myriad facets of poetry translation was launched in Auckland last Friday. It includes articles by Laurie Duggan, Jack Ross, Jacob Edmond, Cilla McQueen, Jane Zemiro and others. Read the journal here.
17.3.12
10.3.12
3.3.12
A poetry symposium coming up in Auckland, New Zealand at the end of March - short takes on long poems (click on the symposium title for program & info | plus, here is a link to Duckwalking a Perimeter, the poem I'll be presenting - for anyone who's going to NZ).
27.2.12
In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, originally published in France (Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien) in 1975, Georges Perec notates the comings and goings from a couple of cafes, a bar tabac and a bench in Place Saint-Sulpice over three days in October 1974.
Here is a short extract from the book-
Small poodle-type dog.
A sort of double of Peter Sellers, with a very pleased
expression on his face, walks by the cafe. Then a woman
with two very young children. Then a group of 14
women coming from the rue des Canettes.
I have the impression that the square is almost empty
(but there are at least twenty human beings in my line
of sight).
A postal van.
A child with a dog
A man with a large "A" on his sweater
A "Que sais-je?" truck: "La collection 'Que sais-je'
a réponse à tout [The 'Que sais-je' collection has
an answer for everything]"
A spaniel?
A 70
A 96
Funeral wreaths are being brought out of the church.
It is two thirty
A 63, an 87, an 86, another 86, and a 96 go by.
On her blog When Is A City, Christina Juhlin selects some quotes from Georges Perec on writing urban and ordinary life here.
21.2.12
more from paris
Mina Loy wrote two pieces on Gertrude Stein. A few decades ago now, I read Gertrude Stein in The Last Lunar Baedeker, a selection of Mina Loy's writings edited by Roger Conover and published by the North American poet and photographer Jonathan Williams' press The Jargon Society, in the UK in 1982. You can find that lengthy piece here.
Now, in Stories and Essays of Mina Loy edited by Sara Crangle, published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2011, there is a shorter piece on Gertrude Stein. Mina and Gertrude met in Florence sometime around 1910 or 1913, and became friends. This piece is Mina Loy's introduction for Gertrude Stein (originally written in French) for a Paris salon run by US expatriate Natalie Barney in 1927.
Please click on the images to enlarge them. (The French original follows the English translation). Please excuse the wonky pages.
4.2.12
The Bois bores me
Hope Mirrlees : Collected Poems, edited by Sandeep Parmar has been published by Carcanet in the U.K. It has a great Introduction and extensive notes on the poems.
Hope Mirrlees was born in Kent in 1887. She grew up and was educated in Scotland and, in 1910, went to study classics at Cambridge, where she met her companion, Jane Harrison. She moved to Paris in 1922 to live with Jane Harrison at the American University Women's Club in Montparnasse. Jane died suddenly from leukaemia in 1928. Hope Mirrlees moved, in the 1940s, to South Africa and didn't publish again until 1962. She died in England in 1978.
Even though it was first published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1919 I didn't read Hope Mirrlees' long out-of-print PARIS - A Poem until ninety years later. It is experimental, unlike her other poems which are conventionally organised into left-justified stanzas. The late Virginia Woolf scholar Julia Briggs called PARIS - A Poem “modernism’s lost masterpiece, a work of extraordinary energy and intensity, scope and ambition.”
As I've said, PARIS - A Poem has been out of print for a very long time. It could only be found as a pdf file on the web here. Now, it's included in the Collected Poems and Mike Tortorello's Pegana Press has published a limited edition of the poem. According to him Paris - A Poem influenced T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Virginia Woolf. My poem American Memories, Melbourne was directly influenced by Hope Mirrlees. You can scroll down to the end of this post to read it.
Philadelphian novelist and biographer of Hope Mirrlees (a limited edition), Michael Swanwick, has annotated PARIS - A Poem.
Here is my poem influenced by Hope Mirrlees' PARIS - A Poem. It was written in late 2009.(Click on the title for a full size version).
American Memories, Melbourne31.1.12
Little Esther Books has published two new booklets (14.5x16cm). Both books designed by Ken Bolton for Feral, Boffin & Distingué of Adelaide. Ken Bolton's Four Poems is a reprint of the classic Four Poems published by Sea Cruise Books in Sydney in 1977. The cover image 'Optikon' is a detail from a painting of an aerial view of East Sydney by Michael Fitzjames.
Longtime collaborators John Jenkins and Ken Bolton have written new poems in Lucky for Some. Cover image and inside drawings by Ken Bolton.
Ken says - We wrote these poems quickly: John Jenkins arrived [in Adelaide] from Melbourne with a change of clothes, toothbrush etc - and fifteen or more ordinary envelopes, in each of which were four or five lists of phrases suitable as titles or as prompts for first lines of poetry... and so they continued and produced thirteen (lucky for some) new poems of twelve lines each.
Sydney poet, John Tranter, likes these booklets so much he has them all stitched up...to see the transformation visit his web journal.
Little Esther Books, Box 10114, Adelaide BC, South Australia 5000
The second instalment of the feature I compiled for Jacket2, 'Fifty-one contemporary poets from Australia', has been published. It is ordered, in the interest of objectivity by a recently invented ‘downunder’ method — the reverse alphabet and includes work from Pete Spence, Jaya Savige, Tracy Ryan, Gig Ryan, David Prater, Peter Minter, Geraldine McKenzie, David McCooey, John Mateer, and Cameron Lowe, along with artwork by Pete Spence. Read it here.
The first instalment includes Mark Young, Tim Wright, Fiona Wright, Adrian Wiggins, Alan Wearne, Corey Wakeling, Ann Vickery, John Tranter, James Stuart and Amanda Stewart, along with artwork by Louis Armand and Paul Sloan. You can read the introduction and Part One here.
There are three further instalments to come.
26.1.12
22.1.12
In Chinatown this morning the racket of acrobatic Dragon Dancers and drums was rowdy and rousing. The stalls covered in red and gold decorations were buzzing - it seems many facsimiles of many things can bring luck - including a pineapple! Red lanterns were everywhere. Long paper Dragons with slightly fearsome faces 'snaked' around the arcades. A calligrapher painted a small new year banner for us to pin on our front door. She said it was for health and wealth in the coming year. So, here it is - may the Year of the Dragon be an auspicious one for my friends.
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