For the last few decades all of Les Murray’s books of poetry have opened with the same two statements. A brief biographical note tells the reader that he was “born in 1938, and grew up on a dairy farm at Bunyah on the north coast of New South Wales”. The poems themselves are then dedicated to “The glory of God.” And there you pretty much have it. Murray is the poet of Australian rural life and work, and the natural world in which they are conducted. He invests the rituals, grandeur, wonder and hardships of both spheres with a powerful sense of the sacred.

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Dr Roberta Sykes, a self-described chameleon who defied conventions to become a well-known activist for indigenous rights as well as a poet and author of renown, died at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney after failing to recover from a stroke suffered eight years ago. She was 67.

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Jen admits being ‘pleased and thrilled and gobsmacked and grateful’: ‘I have been embargoed for weeks and it has been killing me!!!!’

Ralph

The Kathleen Grattan Award

Auckland poet Kathleen Grattan, a journalist and former editor of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, died in 1990. A member of the Titirangi Poets, her work was published in Landfall and other volumes including Premier Poets, a collection from the World Poetry Society. Her daughter Jocelyn Grattan, who also worked for the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, shared her mother’s love of literature. She has generously left Landfall a bequest with which to establish an award in memory of Kathleen Grattan.

About the Competition

The award is for an original collection of poems or a long poem by a New Zealand or Pacific resident or citizen. N.B: Individual poems in the collection can be previously published, but the collection as a whole should be unpublished. Entries will be accepted from 1 May each year. The closing date will be 31 July each year and the winner will be announced in the November issue of Landfall. The announcement will be made in the November issue of Landfall.

Recently in Australia as a guest of Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre, Salley, who had been invited to speak on the theme of life and death in her work, found the time to speak to me for Edge Radio’s Book Show.

Jungian Psycholanalyst, former Booker Prize judge and of course loved and lauded author of Miss Garnet’s Angel, and most recently Dancing Backwards, Salley spoke about how she wrote her first novel at age nine, when “at a rather ordinary primary school,” a teacher recognised her boredom and set her the task of writing a book. With this exercise, she created the blueprint for her further work and, as with most of her books, death was an inportant theme.

The link to Paige’s blog: http://www.paigelovesbooks.blogspot.com/2010/11/salley-vickers-interview.html

Australian poet, Ross Donlon, has been awarded the Wenlock Poetry Festival Prize for his poem which, in the judges’ opinion, best addressed the theme ‘The Pity of War.’
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Donlon was born in Sydney and now lives in Castlemaine, Victoria, where he convenes a popular poetry reading.

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About Nandi Chinna: Prize-winning poet NANDI CHINNA, who writes in, and about, Western Australia, is Perth Poetry Club’s guest this Saturday 20 November at The Moon, 323 William Street, Northbridge, where it all happens from 2 to 4 pm. If you’d like to, please bring something to read on open mike. Otherwise, just come along and listen. All welcome. Nandi will read both before and after the break, so if you want to catch it all, be there at 2.

NANDI CHINNA was born in Adelaide but has been living in WA for 20 years. Her poetry has been published in wide variety of national and international journals. Her first collection of poetry Our Only Guide is Our homesickness was published in the Five Islands Press New Poets publishing program in 2007. She won a Picaro Poetry prize in 2010 for her poetry on the naming of places in Western Australia. She is currently undertaking a PhD at Edith Cowan University, for which she is writing poetry about the lost wetlands of the Perth Metropolitan region.

Perth Poetry Club’s November & December lineup:
27 November : Murray Jennings
4 December: Claire Potter (Writer-in-Residence at KSP)
11 December : Neil J Pattinson and Janet Jackson – last gig for 2010
Break: 18 December, 25 December, 1 January 2011
8 January 2011: Guest TBA

Info, contact info & artist bios: www.perthpoetryclub.com
perthpoetryclub at gmail.com

The Minister for the Arts, David O’Byrne, today announced the eight books that have been short-listed for the Tasmania Book Prizes for 2011.

“The Tasmania Book Prizes are a biennial recognition of excellence in writing about Tasmania and a celebration of Tasmanian writers and publishers who contribute so much to the island’s creative, and cultural landscape,” Mr O’Byrne said.

“The prizes are a partnership between the Tasmanian Government through Arts Tasmania and the University of Tasmania, in association with Ten Days on the Island.

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Aboriginal rights campaigner, author and poet Roberta “Bobbi” Sykes has died at the age of 67.

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“The arts” is a term that covers a very large set of creative activities. We can see the urge to create in almost every aspect of human existence – our clothing, our housing, our sports and physical activities, our gardens, our motor vehicles, aeroplanes, ships, and of course in the domain that is usually referred to as “the arts” – in our art, music, dance, theatre, film and literature. Human beings are naturally creative, and developing and expressing that creative urge is good for us, both individually and collectively. We seek and respond to “beauty”, although we will often have different standards of beauty, and choose different domains in which to seek it.

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In November of 2009 I interviewed Sophie Cunningham for my blog (part one here, part two here), as I was interested both in her on-hold career as a novelist and the changes she had made since taking over the editorship at Meanjin. With her recent announcement that she will not be renewing her contract as editor, in order to concentrate on completing her third novel, speculation has been rife, as indeed it was when she was appointed in the role, about the future for Australia’s best known and most loved literary journal. Despite already having an online presence that dwarfs that of most other journals, rumours abound that the print version will soon be abandoned in favour of an entirely digital operation. Critics such as Peter Craven have expressed considerable alarm at this prospect.

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Patrick White wrote a line of praise for the cover of David Foster’s first work of fiction, North South West, in 1973 and later said: ”One reason why I like Foster’s novels is that he isn’t afraid of sour milk and what’s repulsive in life.”

White would be ambiguously pleased that Foster, 66, has won the Patrick White Literary Award, the honour he set up – also in 1973 – with his Nobel prize money for authors who have made a significant, but inadequately recognised, contribution to Australian literature.

Foster, who can be almost as grouchy as his late patron, accepted the $18,000 award in Sydney yesterday, saying White had intended it ”as a kind of literary loser’s compo”. (Sadly for Foster, the economic slump has reduced the prize money from $25,000 in previous years.)

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Books have always been something of a sacred object for me, something to collect, display, show off, dip into at will, carry from house to house and even imagine handing onto my son.

Over the years I’ve spent a fortune on them and have guarded them closely. Not only that, I’ve given them as gifts and have enjoyed the process of finding the right book for the right person and inscribing something appropriate on the title page.

Point is, I bow to no-one in terms of my respect for books as both objects in themselves and as a brilliant technology for storing and disseminating knowledge.

Which is why I was bit surprised to find myself, about a year ago, boxing up several hundred of my carefully maintained collection – tomes that had travelled with me from house to house, including two stints overseas – and giving them away to charity.

Something had broken the magic spell, and I suddenly found myself willing to part with what I had previously considered precious heirlooms.

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Michael Cathcart is the winner of the Colin Roderick Award for the best Australian book of 2009.

Cathcart was presented with the $10,000 award and the H.T. Priestley Medal last week in Townsville for his book The Water Dreamers: The Remarkable History of Our Dry Continent (Text).

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“Lauren’s creative work documents the life of her grandfather, Horst Kutzner, who emigrated from Germany to Tasmania in 1952, because he got work with the Hydro-Electric Commission,” Mr Bartlett said.

“Lauren’s essay recognises the enormous impact post-World War II immigrants have had in shaping Tasmanian history over the past 60 years.

“That includes major contributions to hydro power schemes, conservation, cuisine, our wine industry, and our culture through music, literature, art and dance.

“Lauren’s work is not only a tribute to her grandfather and other Tasmanian immigrants. It’s also a valuable record of Australian history, for all of us to share,” he said.

Lauren Kutzner will now vie for the Australian Young Historian of the Year award, at a ceremony in Canberra on November 23rd, alongside other State and territory winners.

Mr Bartlett said 12 students were presented with awards for entries in special categories, including immigrant experiences, war and peace, sport, heritage, women and indigenous Australia.

“The Australian National History Challenge provides students with great opportunities to explore the past, and develop a real passion for learning,” Mr Bartlett said.

“I’d like to congratulate Lauren, and all the winners, on their outstanding success, and wish them all the best in the future,” he said.

LIST OF WINNERS

Tasmanian Premier’s Young Historian Medal:
Lauren Kutzner – Ogilvie High

Age Division Winners:
Year 7&8 Emily Doi – The Friends School
Year 9&10 Jess Walch – The Friends School

Special Category Entry:
Heritage: Louisa Marmion – Clarence High
In War and Peace: Ryan Condie – The Friends School
Immigrant Experience: Lauren Kutzner – Ogilvie High
Women – Hidden Stars: Lucy Owens – The Friends School
Australian Prime Ministers: Harriet Sheridan – Ogilvie High

Tasmanian History Teachers Association Prize for Excellence: Georgia Mohler – The Friends School, for her work on the Indigenous Australia category

Tasmanian History Teachers Association Highly Commended Award: Claire Elliott – Ogilvie High School.

Tasmanian History Teachers’ Association Encouragement Awards:
Tamara Hursey, Julia Parker and Bridger Hofing in the 5/6 Category – Forest Primary.
Eva Kline in the 7/8 Category – Devonport High.

An early history of Sydney and the fictional tale of a child raised by a pack of wild dogs have won the $100,000 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.

The Colony: A History Of Early Sydney by archaeologist and historian Grace Karskens was the winner of the nonfiction award, while Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy was recognised in the fiction category.

The Literary Awards – Australia’s richest – were established in 2008 by then prime minister Kevin Rudd to recognise and honour talented local writers.

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Baptised in Blood: The shocking secret history of Sorell

at Hobart Bookshop,
22 Salamanca Square, Hobart,
at 5.30pm on Thursday 2 December

All welcome

Sunday 7 November 3-5pm

Republic Bar & Cafe 299 Elizabeth St North Hobart

Guest poets Laurie Brinklow, Sarah Day and the open section.

Laurie Brinklow is a writer / editor / book publisher from Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada.

Sarah Day has had six books of poems published, in Australia and UK, the most recent being Grass Notes (Brandl & Schlesinger).

The SMH carries a story that literary magazine Meanjin is to become an online only publication.

I’ve mixed feelings about that.

For starters Meanjin shares a Queensland heritage along with OLO, with its name in fact deriving from the aboriginal name for the land where Brisbane is situated. So, along with many Queenslanders I feel a pride in the magazine, even though I rarely read it, because it is one of the family grown-up and made good.

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Moreover, Australian literary journals have considerably more public visibility than their US counterparts; the Virginia Quarterly Review, for example, claims a circulation of more than 7000 – which would certainly be a large number by Australian standards. But when you consider that the US population is roughly fifteen times the size of Australia, this figure becomes considerably less impressive. An Australian literary journal that published even 700 copies, proportionally speaking, would reach a more significant audience than the Virginia Quarterly Review – and, in fact, most Australian literary journals would have a circulation between one and three thousand.

The continuing importance of literary magazines in Australian public discourse is reflected in the fact that the articles they publish often get picked up by larger media outlets. (As I was revising this article in August, for example, I happened across a piece by Chris Womersley in The Age, an excerpt of a longer article in a recent issue of Meanjin. Overland staff members often appear in the broader media, like on the ABC’s The Drum. I myself was interviewed in June for The Book Show on ABC Radio National in relation to an article I published in Overland. Virtually no US literary journals would have these kinds of opportunities to interact with the mass media. While Australian lit mags undeniably face significant problems, their problems are not the same as those Genoways discusses.)

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From 6:30 pm, free with refreshments.

Near his hospital bed is his mobile phone on a charger, and a pile of books and magazines. ‘Anyone’d think I was a reader’, he quips.

Definitely on the mend.

Authors seeking the key to success can take a piece of advice from a new report on publishing: they ought to be in pictures.

The two most successful books to receive government funding between 1995-2005 were Christos Tsiolkas’s debut novel Loaded, which was filmed as Head On, and Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, which inspired Philip Noyce’s Rabbit-Proof Fence.

In contrast, poetry would barely be published in this country if not for government subsidies, according to the report to the Literature Board of the Australia Council.

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When: Thursday November 25th, 5:30pm
Where: The Hobart Bookshop, 22 Salamanca Square

All welcome to this free event.

The ructions at literary journal Meanjin Quarterly remind us that what counts in publishing, print or online, is not only money, but quality writing and editing.

It’s indicative of the economic and technological changes transforming Australian culture that this is the second publication I write regularly for to get into difficulties in just four months. In June, New Matilda shut down; four months later, it’s already in the process of resurrecting itself. Now it’s the turn of venerable Meanjin Quarterly to feel the icy gales of change. Meanjin’s editor Sophie Cunningham is departing, and the journal may now be transformed into an online-only publication.

The news that Cunningham is leaving has already aroused considerable regret and sympathy in Melbourne’s literary community. Cunningham was well-liked by her writers — certainly by me — and under her charge the journal gathered new readers and developed a vibrant, contemporary agenda. Cunningham’s last edition, a book-length love-letter to Melbourne, was a cracker.

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Issue 5 of extempore is now officially out in the world, after our launch at the Wangaratta Library. We’ve now launched an issue of the journal at each festival since 2008 and there was a tinge of sadness to the news we confirmed at the event, that Issue 5 will be our last. extempore has attracted a readership and contributor list that means we’ll be continuing to publish writing about and inspired by jazz, but we’ve decided that the journal is not the right model. We need projects that can be planned, managed and funded on their own. So it’s books from now on!

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The Chinese translations of 10 Miles Franklin Award-winning novels have just been launched, bringing readers some of the best contemporary work and offering deep insights into Australian society.

“We chose them to promote a kind of cultural dialogue, between China and Australia, because Chinese people get to know Australian culture mainly through the popular novel, The Thorn Birds, which we think is not enough,” says Professor Wang Guanglin, director of the Australian Studies Center at the Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade. The Australian Literary Translation Project, which commenced in 2007, is a joint initiative of the Australian Consulate-General in Shanghai and the center.

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If the flagship literary journal is only online, it will cease to exist.

Australia’s most famous literary magazine, Meanjin, is again about to lose its editor and the magazine, which was once described as having put Melbourne University on the map, looks like being forced to go online in a way that will effectively kill it.

None of this was made clear by Melbourne University Publishing’s bland press release yesterday, but it is common knowledge in the literary world.

Sophie Cunningham, the editor of Meanjin, was told by the board of MUP, the university press that now publishes the magazine, that she was to turn the journal into an online publication. She refused and, by mutual consent, her contract is now not being renewed.

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Tonight I have the enviable honour of launching Wayne Macauley’s new book, Other Stories. I’m excited to speak about that, but, before doing so, I’m going to begin with a brief anecdote, as launchers of books are so often wont to do.
Several years ago I was up very late one evening trying to finish reading submissions for Wet Ink: The Magazine of New Writing in order to meet an impending deadline. For those of you who’ve never had the pleasure of reading unsolicited fiction manuscripts, this might sound like not such a bad gig. Those of you who have, though, know it’s quite a different story: we get several hundred submissions for each one of our four yearly issues, and if I had to identify any quality that would characterise most unsolicited submissions for literary magazines, it would certainly be that they are almost uniformly not very good.

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Last year I had a meeting with two officers of the Australia Council.

The Australia Council – or OzCo, as nearly everyone in the cultural industries calls it – is the federal government’s arts funding and advisory body. The meeting was with two of the council’s digital and new media team, who were keen to explain the latest digital arts initiative, Arts Content for a Digital Era. The conversation was cordial but largely unsatisfying. The Australia Council officers attempted to explain why the latest strategy was a worthy initiative. I tried to explain why it doesn’t matter.

The Australia Council has lost its way, I argued. It has failed to meaningfully engage with the arts practices of everyday Australian artists and no longer enjoys the support of many of those who create art in this country. The time has arrived to seriously re-assess the role of the country’s chief cultural policy body.

I believe it is time for the Australia Council to be abolished.

There are three main reasons why.

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At heart, Phillip Edmonds’s new novella, Leaving Home with Henry, is a sort of fictionalised travelogue about driving across Australia, albeit one with a significant twist: Trevor, who has departed from Adelaide in order to escape ‘terrifying domestic moments’ and to find ‘a way to talk about the big picture’, goes to the National Archives in Canberra, only to discover Henry Lawson living among the stacks of books. Soon enough, Henry decides to accompany Trevor, and the two set off in search of the ‘real’ Australia among the many small towns between Canberra and Queensland.

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In I Write What I See: Christina Stead Speaks Melbourne-based writer and director Darryl Emmerson has dared to bring Christina Stead, the person and the writer, to the stage in a one-woman performance. To the best of his knowledge, this is the first time Stead has been portrayed on stage and any of her writings performed; and Stead is an author who has been praised by the likes of Angela Carter and Patrick White.

Born in Sydney in 1902 Christina Stead actively chose to step outside the boundaries established for women in her time. In her writing she explores sexual desire, political and economic issues, as well as gender inequality. In her life she practiced what she wrote, choosing to live with a married man, Wilhelm Blech (Bill).

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When Tim Berners-Lee and his team launched the Web 20 years ago, it was a crushing blow to the literary book review. They probably didn’t mean it: at least, there’s no record of Tim saying, “That’s gonna fix those guys at the Lit Supp once and for all.” Even so, it signalled the beginning of the end for the Sunday literary review page.

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In February treat yourself to a crime thriller which flawlessly balances ‘gripping’ and ‘laconic’. Prime Cut is set in Hopetoun and Ravensthorpe on the state’s south coast. It is about the seamy side of the mining boom. The only thing better than reading a crime novel is reading about crime in a place you know. It’s the perfect way to feel safely freaked out. Prime Cut was shortlisted in the prestigious Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger awards this year and excited much attention at the 2010 Frankfurt Book Fair.

Our short fiction list has undergone something of a renaissance – a trend we are noticing in general in the Australian writing scene. A good short story anthology is hard to find, but a great short story collection is magnificent.

In May, grab a copy of The Kid on the Karaoke Stage & other stories – twenty-eight stories from some of the best writers in Western Australia today including Amanda Curtin, Jon Doust, Peter Docker, Alice Nelson and Natasha Lester. The Kid on the Karaoke Stage is perfect bedtime or public transport reading.

In June, Goldie Goldbloom’s You Lose These & other stories follows on from her extraordinary debut novel The Paperbark Shoe. Darkly humorous and diverse, You Lose These is a diverse collection about people at the edge of society. This collection confirms for me that Goldie is a major Australian talent.

In August, stand by for The Waterboys, a high-action post-apocalyptic novel by Peter Docker. The Waterboys imagines an Australia in which Captain Charles Fremantle chose to accept the ways of the Nyungar people, and an east coast which clings to the imperialist imperative of destruction and annihilation. The novel is radical and confronting, but the future it warns us of is all too probable.

In October, from Adam Morris, lead singer of the Murder Mouse Music Blues band, comes a wonderfully grungy novel about Saul, a part-time muso, part-time teacher, the kind of guy who hangs out with the chooks in his mate’s backyard thinking about the best way to acquit his unemployment benefit on booze. This is a tight funny novel about masculine identity and narrowly missed epiphanies.

And in November, you will see K.A. Bedford’s Paradox Resolution No Extra Charge. Surely not another novel set in Malaga? A sequel to the greasily entertaining sci-fi thriller Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait, this little beauty begins at the moment Aloysius ‘Spider’ Webb opens his fridge to find it contains the head of his ex-boss, nemesis, and wannabe destroyer of the universe, Dickhead McMahon. Paradox Resolution Guaranteed.

Stay tuned. Keep reading. You won’t regret it.

Georgia Richter, Fremantle Press’ Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction and Poetry Publisher

www.fremantlepress.com.au

First of all, you should always read poetry aloud even if you are reading silently. In other words, you should hear it in your mind as you read it. You should have an idea oral reading in your head before you even think about reading it outloud.

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Well, I know I’ve been talking about this for ages, but my book of poems How to be Hungry is finally available.

How to be Hungry mainly features poems I’ve written since 2006, based around the theme of desire in its various forms.

You can order it online by following this link: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/how-to-be-hungry/13213146

On that page you can also read the blurb, or download a preview, which includes the front and back cover and a short selection of poems from the book.

The cost of the book is $15, plus delivery. The delivery charge within Australia is currently $7.99 (check the site for delivery costs to other countries). There will be economies of scale if you order more than one copy (when it comes to the cost of delivery, at least). Alternatively you can download the PDF file for $10. Note that Lulu is a US site, and these prices are in US dollars.

At this stage the book is not stocked in any bookshops. It may yet find its way into the odd specialist bookshop, but don’t expect to find it in your local Dymocks or Borders!

I expect I will have a launch in Melbourne at some stage (TBA).

I hope you enjoy the book. Putting it together has been … well … an odyssey!

Cheers,

Stu Hatton

Although she loved animals as a child, and grew up in Melbourne then Sydney with various pets – including a pony, dogs, rabbits, rats and birds – Townend says her first trip to India, in 1975, was a turning point.

”I was a troubled person at that time,” she says. ”I didn’t know what to do with my life and I felt it was being wasted.” She’d had a novel and some poetry published but wanted to do more.

Shortly after she returned to Sydney, she read philosopher Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation and was profoundly affected. ”I felt everything Peter said was right; we are specie-ist, we favour our rights over those of animals.”

Townend convened the first meeting of Animal Liberation Australia in 1976 – but only five or six people turned up. ”We didn’t even open the celebratory bottle of wine,” she laughs.

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On October 11th the New Statesman printed a previously unpublished poem by Ted Hughes which discusses the last time he saw his then estranged wife Sylvia Plath alive. While poking around on the internet trying to track down the full text of the poem, I read the comments following a news article which discussed the discovery. The angry author of the post snidely commented that the publication of this new poem should prove once and for all that Hughes was a good guy and vindicate him from the soap-box feminists who condemn Hughes for driving Plath to her suicide.

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Note that on Thursday (this week) @ 7:00pm there is a special poetry & prose
reading at the Royal Oak in the Boatshed, featuring many local luminaries, including
poetry slam winner Tim Thorne.

For those of you that came tonight, thanks for your attendance, with 15 entries it
was one of the most entertaining competitions I’ve had the pleasure of attending.
Joint winners were Tim Thorne & Valerie Tinmouth.

Next meeting is on 15th Nov – except for those going to see Leonard Cohen in Hobart
& December meeting is on 13th which is the second Monday, due to many being
unavailable the following week.

Poetically,

steve d’Avis

The discovery of a memoir by Steele Rudd’s father sheds new light on the murderous collision between settlers and Aborigines on the Darling Downs.

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I’m sitting at home in Hobart, Tasmania, 11,000 miles from Wendy Harris, artistic director of Leeds-based Tutti Frutti productions. Another considerable distance from us both are Peter Stamm and Jutta Bauer, the German writer and illustrator of a children’s book called When We Lived in Uncle’s Hat.

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HIGHLY COMMENDED: PRIZE: $300
‘Deane Street’ Garth Madsen, VIC
‘Four Poems for the Plant World’ Sue Lockwood, VIC
‘Mermaids in the Basement’ Claire Potter, WA

GWEN HARWOOD POETRY PRIZE 2010: THE JUDGES’ REPORT

Jean Kent and Maria Takolander

The 2010 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize attracted 262 entries. In reading through all these poems, we have been privileged witnesses to the power of words in people’s lives. We have also had a rare opportunity to see what an extraordinary variety of poetic enthusiasms exists in Australia today.

Inevitably, we have seen a great range of subject matter, style and skill. Topical issues such as the Victorian bushfires were a feature, as were close observations of birds, plants and natural phenomena, but the primary focus was the individual in a recognizably contemporary setting. Amongst the more impressive entries, there was an intriguing abundance of acknowledgement of other poets. These ranged from Basho to Elizabeth Bishop, from Thomas Hardy to Anthony Lawrence, just to give a few examples. There was a refreshing naturalness about this, which was perhaps in tune with the feeling (in those poems at least!) that poetry can be a normal part of life.

As the competition is associated with Island, a literary magazine which publishes poetry of a high quality, it seems reasonable to expect that the poems which are the principle contenders for the prize will also display outstanding craft and originality. The poems which nudged their way onto our short list had these qualities. They were remarkable for things like their distinctive voice or vision, their delight in words and linguistic play, their feeling of being complete and well-made, or their genuine authority and conviction.

We have commended three entries for minor prizes:

‘Deane Street’
‘Four Poems for the Plant World’
‘Mermaids in the Basement’

These three commended poems are an excellent demonstration of the variety of poems submitted for consideration in the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize 2010. ‘Deane Street’, a prose poem, reflects on the poet’s nostalgic search for Basho ‘in the back streets of Frankston’, where ‘daisies tinged purple grow out of / a crack in the concrete’ and ‘a windshield wiper flies off / in the rain’. The inevitable failure to find Basho, at whose funeral Basho’s son had sat ‘in the car park drinking a tinny and scuffing out / a fag-end on the tarseal,’ is beautifully ironic and pathos-ridden. ‘Four Poems for the Plant World’ is more traditionally poetic in its style and concerns, but these reflections on various experiences of flora are superbly measured. The sequence of poems moves towards a demonstration of how ‘a poem and a landscape’ might be considered ‘the same thing’. ‘Mermaids in the Basement’ is a literary and lyrical envisioning of the ‘absinth-coloured ghosts’ from the sea, who are courted by a poet promising them ‘baths / of rose-water and brine’ and ‘custody / of the gramophone horn’. The mermaids, like poetry, are elusive but confer on the poet ‘the silence / of his being nobody’ and then ‘his feeling / — like Somebody’.

The poem which we have chosen as the winner is ‘Thursday, July 15’.

This poem is remarkable for its depth of both thought and feeling. It is immediately engaging, beautifully paced to sustain interest from the first line to the last, and its impact remains strong and satisfying through many readings. Although ‘Thursday, July 15’ is set in a country museum which nobody but the poet seems interested in entering, the poem is intensely focused and at home in this place, so that the experience of being there becomes mesmerizing for the reader as well. Ironically, ‘it’s an army of dead’ that we’re witnessing, but the faces on the walls soon become more human. There are ‘self-made men / with painted eyes and slaughter-house shoulders’, as well as ‘cottoned women with spotted hands whose kids / were lost to house-fires and brown dams’. The landscape outside belongs to these people too, and the poet steps deftly between that still-real, outer world, watching ‘the paddock across the street tip sheep softly down the slope’, and the museum’s inner space, with its history and ‘artefacts warped and pooled behind glass’, its stone axes, coolamon basins and the ‘remnant powder of Bogong wings’. The Australian particulars are recognizable and poignant, but there is also a universal quality to the poet’s engagement with the ‘signs of what’s held on to’, and with the ultimate realization that ‘What’s past is not ended’. In the final, beautifully apt image, the old portraits in the museum ‘hang – a kind of tilted formation, as though still moving into place’. This is what the people in the poem also do, with a subtle, haunting power.

Congratulations to the prizewinners! It has been a pleasure to judge the 2010 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize and to experience this overview of contemporary Australian poetry. A prize like this provides an important incentive for poets to strive for excellence in their work, and we’re grateful to Island and The Hobart Bookshop for their valuable support of new writing through this competition.

Jean Kent and Maria Takolander, 30 September 2010

The post-festival October gig is on this coming Monday upstairs @ The Royal Oak in Launceston at 7:30 pm

The topic is “knitting” – make of it what you will!

Everyone has their reading habits. There are the ‘thou-shalt-not-crack-the-spine’ folks who read like perverts, peeking between narrowly opened pages. There are those who open books like they’re skinning rabbits, ripping the cover right around and ravaging any semblance of binding. There are the origami-ists, the ‘I-must-dog-ear-this-novel-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life’ readers, and the annotators, who write statements like, ‘I strongly disagree!’ or ‘See chapter 7’, and who are often ultimately banned from borrowing books from friends. Pervert reader: ‘You did what?’ Annotator: ‘I made some observations. You see, I’ve discovered the very subtle use of leitmot…’ Pervert reader: ‘Shut up. You’ve defiled Isabel Allende.’ There are the zombies (those who lose track of the time–space continuum and cannot be awoken from their reading, even by teary ultimatums from partners or natural disasters), the obsessives (who read everything – the imprint page, acknowledgements, index), the polygamists (who read more than one book at once), and finally, the cheaters (who read the last page first, something many people – including myself – consider both evil and masochistic, and probably tantamount to willingly watching a kitten being run over by a clown driving a steamroller).

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Pioneering poet David Rowbotham, who lived through a grand sweep of history and captured it in verse, has died in Brisbane, aged 86.

Tributes flowed yesterday for a writer considered at the vanguard of an Australian poetry that emerged in the post-war period.

Novelist Christopher Koch said of his friend of 50 years: “He deserves recognition as one of the pioneer poets in 20th-century Australian literature.

“He shared with other poets of that time, such as Judith Wright, an ability to bring Australian life and landscape alive in verse.

“Back in the 1950s that was unusual because no one took notice of Australian poetry.”

Fellow poet Bruce Dawe said Rowbotham was a “toughly intelligent” poet who “was not a slave to any school or fashion”.

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No doubt today finds you bug-eyed and exhausted and staring into space, subsisting solely on lurid-coloured energy drinks, since you likely stayed up all night to find out who won the 2010 Booker Prize.

And who can blame you? With all the shrieking bitches and bastards (I’m allowed to say it if they do) currently turning the new Australian paradigm into something not far from Once Were Warriors it’s nice to think that somebody out there cares enough about fiction to bestow occasional monetary prizes and/or decorative ribbons.

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Sandy and Rich met 25 years ago when they were both part of “the Blockade”, a massive environmental protest against the damming of Tasmania’s Franklin river. The protest worked: the dam was never built, and Sandy and Rich’s relationship kicked off in a surge of optimism and passion.

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I caught up with Tom Keneally yesterday afternoon after an hour-long “In Conversation” session with Chris Hanley of the Byron Bay Writer’s Festival on the last day of this year’s Ubud Writers and Readers Festival.

As soon as he came off stage he was swamped by loving fans with books in one hand for signature and cameras in the other for the usual “Proof that I met a living legend of Australian literature” picture.

Then Tom gave a long interview with a TV crew making a documentary film on climate change (yes, that’s what I though as well), another with a journo from the West Australian and yet another with a young local reporter. By the time that I caught up with him he’d been talking pretty much continuously for almost three hours and through all of this he had been charming, attentive, informative and funny.

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It was a strange Nobel Prize for Literature to see looming on the horizon from the distance of the Australian literary world. Australia is less like Collingwood than it is like St Kilda in literary terms. The Nobel premiership has come to us once, with Patrick White, way back in the early 1970s, when Whitlam was in power.

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It is with great sadness that I must inform you of the passing of Nicholas Barwell. Nicholas was a wonderful and widely published haiku writer, having haiku published all over the world. Nicholas helped found the Creatrix Haiku Section, and encouraged and assisted many WA writers to become skilled haiku writers.

On Perth radio stations, he as known as the WA King of Haiku. HIs great enthusiasm for haiku, Zen philosophy, cooking, gardening, music and art was infectious and he went on to mentor many WA poets or help them to further their skills.

A wonderful man who will be sadly missed by the WA poetry community and all those who came into contact with him. Nicholas passed away in Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital on Friday 1st October. His funeral will be held on Friday 8th October – no further details available yet.

*******************************************************************

Haiku : Nicholas Barwell
[from famous reporter]

swollen river
parting the reeds
five ducklings

planting potatoes
turning the soil
I turn the world

low tide
fresh paw marks
in the sand

autumn winds
fruit falling
in the orchard

squeaking swings
children’s voices
in the park

windy day
children’s kites
chasing the clouds

scattered eggshells
the doves
share their nest

filling the window
a single
sunflower

summer evening
long shadows
in the sand

outdoor concert
during the Bach
the frogs are silent

silently
the autumn moon
fills the sky

through morning mist
with measured tread
walk ibis

sudden fragrance
walking in the garden
after rain

low tide
seabirds rest
beneath the casuarinas

sunlight
turns to gold
the autumn leaves

day’s end
the gentle calm
of children’s sleep

By awarding Chinese literary critic Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday, the five-member committee in Oslo did more than recognize one of the mainland’s most prominent and worthy dissidents. They endorsed the idea that “China” can be something different from, and better than, the Chinese government. They may have helped hundreds of millions of Chinese to see and feel this truth more clearly.

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Thursday 14th October, 2010 at 6.00pm for 6.30pm
Wheeler Centre, 4th Floor,
176 Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne.
Launch speaker: Alex Skovron

Sunday 17th October, 2010 at 4.00pm
Torquay Lawn Bowls Club,
47 The Esplanade, Zealy Bay, Torquay
Launch speaker: Lyn Hatherly
Music by Gary Banks
Refreshments will be available.

Jayne Fenton Keane from Australia read an edgy syncopated piece about Miles Davis, ‘birthing cool’, followed by the dignified Mama C, who managed to avoid falling into cliché as she grappled with the notion of African identity. The beautiful Ngwatilo Mawiyoo’s spirited performance of her poem ‘Goatmeat’ stood as a passionate criticism of poverty and displacement, while well-loved Durban poet Gcina Mhlophe played with an old poem, ‘Sometimes when it rains’ – appropriate as the spring rains had just begun that day. Natalia Molebatsi sang her poem too.

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The evening will include prize announcements by The Right Hon the Lord Mayor of Hobart, Alderman Rob Valentine, and by Christopher Pearce (of The Hobart Bookshop); readings of winning poems; the introduction of Island’s new editor, Sarah Kanowski; and, of course, a glass of wine!

When : 5:30pm, Thursday October 14th.
Where : The Hobart Bookshop, 22 Salamanca Square, Hobart

All welcome to this free event.

Monica McInerney is the bestselling author of the internationally acclaimed novels, A Taste for It, Upside Down Inside Out, Spin the Bottle, The Alphabet Sisters, Family Baggage and Those Faraday Girls, which won the General Fiction Book of the Year at the 2008 Australian Book Industry Awards. Her collection of short fiction, All Together Now, was shortlisted for the same award in 2009. Monica grew up in a family of seven children in the Clare Valley of South Australia and has been living between Australia and Ireland for nineteen years.

You can watch an interview with Monica here, or read more about the book at her website.

Join Monica at The Hobart Bookshop on Friday October 22nd at 5:30pm to celebrate the release of her new book.

All welcome to this free event.

The Hobart Bookshop
22 Salamanca Square
Hobart Tasmania 7000
P 03 6223 1803 . F 03 6223 1804
hobooks at ozemail.com.au
www.hobartbookshop.com.au

Fullers Bookshop, Hobart – Monday 11th October at 6pm

GUILDFORD HOTEL
ON MIDLAND HIGHWAY, 10 MINUTES BY CAR FROM CASTLEMAINE

Castlemaine Poetry Readings is delighted to present two award winning poets from New South Wales. Two friends, Carol Jenkins and Dael Allison, are coming to Victoria especially to read together at the Guildford Hotel.

Carol Jenkins is a writer and audio publisher. Her first book Fishing in the Devonian (Puncher & Wattman, 2008) was short-listed for the Ann Elder and Victorian Premier’s Award. Her work, poems, art work and essays have appeared in magazines in Australia, the USA and the UK. In 2007 she established River Road Press which publishes audio CDs of Australian poets. So far there are twenty titles in the River Road Press Poetry Series, and more to come. She recently orchestrated a national science poetry project —Science Made Marvellous — for National Science Week 2010. She lives in Sydney with her family and is working on far too many things at once, including a new collection of science orientatated poems and a series of scurrilous essays on food.

Dael Allison is poet and essayist whose awards include the 2009 LitLink/NRWC Award for Unpublished Manuscript, the Northern Territory Literary Award for Essay, 2008, and the 2007 Wildcare International Nature Writing Prize. Her chapbook, Shock Aftershock was one of four winners in the 2010 Picaro Byron Writers Festival Chapbook Award.

She was a featured poet at this year’s Goolwa Australian Poetry Festival and WordStorm, the Northern Territory Writers’ Festival. Her background is in TAFE teaching and earth building, and in 2006 she worked on tsunami/earthquake construction in Nias, Indonesia, with the UN.

Dael is currently undertaking of Research in Creative Arts at the University of Technology Sydney, interpreting, in poetry, the 1952 Darwin-to-Timor raft trip by artist Ian Fairweather

CASTLEMAINE POETRY READINGS – (Normally) FOURTH SUNDAY OF THE MONTH;

Fine Guest Poets, and a vibrant Open Reading Section (3 minutes max miketime) with competition for the coveted Castlemaine Cup. Gold coin donation. Raffles for Book Prizes, and Book Voucher from Soldier & Scholar Bookshop, Castlemaine.

Convenor — ROSS DONLON For notices of future readings, email ross.donlon@bigpond.com

CASTLEMAINE READINGS — POETS FEATURED 2005 – 2010

Jordie Albiston, Dael Allison (NSW)Jude Acquilina (SA), Emily Zoey Baker, Peter Bakowski, Tony Birch, Kevin Brophy, Grant Caldwell, Elizabeth Campbell, Gaelene Carbis, Anne Carson, Nandi Chinna (WA), Jennifer Compton, Angela Costi, Nathan Curnow, Charles D’Astanasti, Sarah Day (TAS), Joel Deane, Ann de Hugard, Drew Dillinger (USA), Beryl Doble, Ross Donlon, Tru Dowling, Alisoun Downing, Brooke Emery (NSW), Sandy Fitts, John Flaus, Lorin Ford, Janine Fraser, Sarah French (WA), Zenobia Frost (QLD), Katherine Gallagher (UK), Claire Gaskin, Ross Gillett, E.A.Gleeson, Francesca Haig, Jennifer Harrison, Lyn Hatherly, Kristin Henry, Matt Hetherington, Lia Hills, Ella Holcombe, Lucy Holt, Andy Jackson, Terry Jaensch, Caol Jenkins (NSW) Paul Kane (USA), Cate Kennedy, Sue King-Smith, Karen Knight (TAS), Susan Kruss, Peter Lach-Newinsky (NSW), Bronwyn Lea (QLD), Michelle Leber, Lesley Lebkowicz (ACT), Ray Liversidge, Myron Lysenko, Garth Madsen, Gita Mammon, Ro Marriott, Lorraine McGuigan, Simon Meates, Tim Metcalf (NSW), Paul Mitchell, Louise Nicholas (SA), Bruce Oakman, Tric O’Heare, Peter O’Mara, Louise Oxley (TAS), Jillian Pattinson, Ron Pretty (NSW), Rhonda Poholke, Dorothy Porter, Judith Rodriguez, Pauline Rough, Robyn Rowland, Brendan Ryan, Philip Salom, Kerry Scuffins, Leon Shann, Michael Sharkey (NSW), Toby Sime, Alex Skovron, Steve Smart, Ken Smeaton, Ali Smith, alicia sometimes, Sue Stanford, Maurice Strandgard, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Rob Wallis, Lyndon Walker, Sean Whelan, Petra White, Jules Witek (music) (TAS), Lauren Williams, Chloe Wilson , and more…

The festival’s director was in fine fettle.

‘A couple of things I just want to go through: it’s been a year of turmoil in Australia recently frankly, there’ve been a few events that perhaps haven’t been decided in a timely manner. We’ve had a hung parliament – a very close election result – and of course the AFL grand final rematch today. And I don’t know whether you caught the final of Australia’s Top Model during the week…. I just wanted to let you know what happens if we have a hung result tonight in the Poetry Cup: you need to negotiate with Steve and me for about seventeen days as to who we should support, and at the end of that I’ll give a rambling twenty minute speech. In the event that there’s a draw tonight, we will run the Poetry Cup again next Saturday night, and then we’ll give it to the person that no-one likes….’

“So the rules of the Cup are: you start speaking when your minute starts…. ”

“Can you mime and do sign language first?” [Myron Lysenko]

”I think that’s been tried before…. As I was saying, at the end of the minute you will hear the sound … Mr Dolce, will you please sit down? I’m not going to ask you again!”

[Silence].

“I wanted him to say something so I could say ‘Shaddup you face’. And he didn’t. He’s clearly heard it before. Anyway; the decision making …’

‘Cameron.’ [Joe Dolce]

‘… in relation to the winning entry is final …’

‘Cameron, Cameron … ah. Can I say something?’

‘You may.’

‘No, you’re supposed …’

‘Oh! I’m sorry. “Shaddup you face”. He fed it to me and I still didn’t make the connection…’

It was a weekend of wonderful Australian poetry, infused with the Canadian poetry of Deirdre Kessler and Jacqueline Turner and the presence of fellow Canadian poet and publisher Laurie Brinklow. Some great poetry, and magic moments; I haven’t laughed as much for years. More commentary, photos and poetry when I’ve time.

Tim Thorne

Laurie Brinklow : Launceston Poetry Cup 2010

Marie Stannus

Jacqueline Turner

Myron Lysenko

Susan Austin

Two times Cup winner, Colin Berry

Cup-winning performance, Joe Dolce

Sober Poet

There are some authors I sometimes feel the urge to dislike on general principle, but then I read something of theirs and must admit that the urge to dislike proceeds from a vague sense of the writer and has little or nothing to do with their actual writing. Margaret Atwood is one such author. Robert Frost is another.

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Up on Paige Turner’s blog, [which for some odd reason I'm unable to link to, so maybe do a search on 'Paige Loves Books'], you’ll find the podcast of a telephone conversation a day or two ago with Cameron Hindrum, who’s run the festival since two thousand and two or three … some interesting thoughts and worth the listen, runs for … up to ten minutes?

A new issue of ‘Wet Ink’ has arrived in the mail. I like ‘Wet Ink’, like what they’re attempting, as I mentioned a couple of months ago when I wrote a little about the magazine … …

Publishing a literary journal isn’t all beer and skittles, one needs to navigate the inevitable criticism of style and aesthetics. One reader of Wet Ink mentions being distracted by the proliferation of line drawings supporting the writing, another states a preference for the inclusion of more poetry. Perhaps in the final analysis this comes down to no more than a diversity of taste. ‘And vive la diversification I say’,[3] (to quote Philip Mead, commenting on aesthetic differences between Australian literary magazines). ‘It’s postmodern, there’s no centre, anywhere’s a somewhere….’ That Wet Ink’s heart’s in the right place is no better exemplified than by its reviews’ policy. The inclusion of reviews isn’t a necessity for a literary journal; Meanjin survives without them, preferring to apportion extra space to primary creative material. And reviewing is subjective: some efforts succeed better than others, and in this regard Wet Ink is no exception. But who could not harbour a soft spot for a publishing outlet that provides such generous exposure of new Australian writing?

… yes, I appreciate what they do with reviews, appreciate the attention they focus on local writing. But not all their reviews work well, not in my view anyway … certainly, someone I care for was treated to a harsh and uncalled-for review a couple of years ago that addressed not the work but personality. And here in the most recent issue is a review of Sarah Day’s ‘Grass Notes’. Do you remember that old maxim about how if you can’t be positive about someone’s work then why waste your time, why not spend it on something you like and leave the other piece to someone who might possibly appreciate it? The reviewer in this instance (in ‘Wet Ink’) elicits little from Day’s work except to perceive it as bush poetry, suggesting that ‘In the tradition of drowsy farming poets everywhere else, Day pines for landscape, drinks tea and stares at “View on the River Derwent”’. How perceptive. Day, a ‘farming poet’? Well there go the reputations of Brendan Ryan and Philip Hodgins … I wonder if Les Murray owns a bush block? And all this of Day who, when it matters, is engaged enough to put aside her cup of tea and step outside poetry and publicly challenge the state premier of the day on matters of environmental concern….

A new Geoff Dean book’s to be launched by Pete Hay at Hobart Bookshop tomorrow evening … definitely worth a visit … & maybe I’ll stop off afterwards to listen to Prairie [my daughter] and Lance’s gig at Irish Murphies.

Faced with a long table behind which were seated the nine people who would decide if a poet could compete with the young scientists, lawyers and economists vying for a Fulbright scholarship to study in the US, Sarah Holland-Batt went on the offensive.

“It was terrifying but I just went in and sounded more confident than I felt,” she says. “I felt like the curiosity, the strange one, but I told them the Fulbright has a strong history of supporting Australian writers, and I wanted to go to New York University and study poetry.”

This strong history turns out to be a couple of notable exceptions to the rule that the generous year’s endowment provided by the scholarship is used to send postgraduates off to Harvard’s law school or to study aeronautical engineering at NASA. There was Colin Thiele, Holland-Batt told the panel, and Jill Ker Conway, after which she had to firm her gaze, and hold her nerve.

Her boldness worked, and this month, Holland-Batt begins at NYU, where her teachers will include Anne Carson, Charles Simic, Jonathan Safran Foer and Jonathan Lethem. At 27, she is well within the schedule she set herself when still a teenager.

“I really wanted to live in New York and I made myself a promise I’d get there in my 20s,” she says. “American poetry is so vibrant and so different to the way poetry is in Australia, where it is read by poets and a few faithful. In the US, people are really engaged with poetry, so I want that feeling of being in a place where poetry has a more central place in the literary scene.”

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The Tasmanian heats for this years Poetry Slam have been held.

On Friday it was a packed house in Devonport for the first of the heats. Competition was so fierce that after a rematch, judges couldn’t separate third and fourth so four poets moved onto the final.

On Saturday it was Launceston’s turn to host a heat.

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Why wouldnt I admit it? Bored, irritated, enervated by the whole biz –what John Forbes, amplifying the Sydney/Melbourne, 1970s, ‘new poetry’ discussion about the mainstream, called “talented earache”! Then again, as one good poem doesnt make a summer so one bad poem doesnt herald winter. Yet it speaks volumes of one’s expectation for poetry that bad writing (and I hasten to qualify : in one’s own opinion, thus disposition as well as the particular education undertaken in service of the art) can cause more misery than an inadequate menu or perpetually late train.

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Teresa Lewis is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection today, Thursday, Sept. 23, 2010. At 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, she will be the first woman to be put to death by the State of Virginia since 1912. Lewis’ crime is not one that ordinarily would warrant the death penalty. If any case has highlighted the need for the abolition of capital punishment, it is Teresa Lewis’ impending execution.

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When Meena Kandasamy speaks about the contemporary issues of her native India, she incisively reveals the societal assumptions that assign specific roles to people based on caste or gender. When she turns her attention to the past, she deconstructs the heroes. She uses her poetry like a scalpel to dismantle stereotypes.

In 2009, Kandasamy came to Pittsburgh to read at City of Asylum/Pittsburgh’s Jazz Poetry Concert. Since then, Sampsonia Way has followed the career of this 26-year-old poet, translator, and creative writer.

Kandasamy’s work articulates the voice of the Dalits, the people at the lowest rung of India’s ancient caste system. Despite the fact that the Indian constitution abolished this system, the Dalits still face widespread discrimination.

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The Australia Council’s 2009-10 financial year numbers are in and they introduce a bit of a reality check into a growing debate about priorities within Australia’s arts funding system.

If you were to take your cue from the likes of the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s Richard Tognetti (seen here in an uncharacteristically one-sided and unquestioning ABC TV news report) or the West Australian Opera’s Richard Mills (in essay commissioned and funded by the Australia Council) you could be forgiven for thinking that Australia’s art world is somehow in the throes of destroying the old to usher in the new. As Tognetti rather laughably puts it he fears the prevailing attitude is “let’s burn all the books because we’ve now got iPads.”

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I’d already heard of the Lark Distillery from Tasmanian Sue Dilley when she was part of “Tasmanian Frenzy” at the Frank Ledwell Storytelling and Comedy Festival at St. Peter’s Courthouse in July. Hosted by Patrick Ledwell, and featuring comedian Fraser McCallum and Poet Laureate Hugh MacDonald, the evening included Deirdre Kessler on guitar, Sue on mandolin, and their friend Terri Lukacko on old-time fiddle collaborating on some trans-hemispherical tunes. Sue’s a regular at the Lark when she’s home in Tasmania – Richard Lemm had shown us some pictures on her band when he did his talk on Tasmania in UPEI’s Faculty Lounge earlier this spring.

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The Hobart Bookshop, 5:30pm Thursday 30th September 2010

Pete Hay will launch Geoffrey Dean’s latest book of short stories, Mysteries, Myths and Miracles, published by Ginninderra Press.

All welcome to this free event.

In his latest collection of poetry Ashley Capes mines the quotidian. The seasons play an important part in the life of the poet as he moves from “no whispers to quicken fruit” (“dawn”) through the “sagging tent ropes” of “slow moon” to “these / people and their autumn-house hold together” in “autumn-house.” Detailing the typical emotional routines of life today – marriage, home, a bus ride, a farm, the small town, the intersections and intrusions of the issues of the day, and the occasional time for thoughts about nature, death and God, Capes explores the links between nature and human nature. He typically writes simple one- or two-page poems with little or no punctuation. His introspective moments are triggered by rain, the moon, mushrooms, night, sunrise, butterflies, an echidna, autumn, grass seeds, and particularly small town life.

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At the book launch for Red Dress Walking, my friend and fellow Marlborough Street Book Club member Simone clinked my champagne flute and slyly remarked, ‘Well Serje, now that you are an Australian author, you’ll have to stop bagging them’. I poked my tongue out at her and recommenced swanning about the room in the fabulous frock my Mum had bought me for the occasion. But Simone’s cheeky jibe rankled. For the truth was that I did have an aversion to Australian authors. A mightily strong one. When an Australian text was selected by one of the Marlborough crew for the monthly read I groaned inwardly. But there are two rules at our book club, and one of them is that you read with good grace whatever is selected.

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A group of performance poets representing a St Andrews poetry festival have won a live “cyber slam” against their counterparts in Australia, without setting foot outside the town.

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SUNDAY 26 September 2010 3pm — 5pm

Castlemaine Poetry Readings is delighted to present these award-winning poets. Katherine Gallagher is visiting from London and will appear at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival and the Australian Poetry Festival. Many of Sandy Fitts’ poems have won prizes in Australia and UK, and her first book has won the FAW Anne Elder Award.

KATHERINE GALLAGHER
Katherine Gallagher was born in Maldon, grew up at Eastville and Bendigo, and since 1979 has lived in London. She has five collections of poetry, most recently Carnival Edge: New & Selected Poems (Arc Publications, 2010, distributed in Australia by Eleanor Brasch Enterprises). In 2008 Katherine received a Foundation Award from the London Society of Authors. Currently she is featuring in the Melbourne Writers’ Festival 2010 and the Australian Poetry Festival 2010 held in Sydney.
www.katherine-gallagher.com

SANDY FITTS
Sandy Fitts is the author of View from the Lucky Hotel (Five Islands Press 2008), which won the Fellowship of Australian Writers’ Anne Elder Award 2008 for the best first collection of poetry published in Australia. Many of her poems have won prizes in the U.K. and Australia, including the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize 2007, and shortlist for the ABR Poetry Prize. In 2009, Sandy ran a poetry workshop ‘Art into Poetry Now’ at Castlemaine Gallery, as part of the Castlemaine State Festival. www.sandyfitts.com

CASTLEMAINE POETRY READINGS; FOURTH SUNDAY OF THE MONTH;

Fine Guest Poets, and a vibrant Open Reading Section (3 minutes max miketime) with competition for the coveted Castlemaine Cup. Gold coin donation. Raffles for Book Prizes, and Book Voucher from Soldier & Scholar Bookshop, Castlemaine.
Convenor — ROSS DONLON For notices of future readings, email ross.donlon@bigpond.com

CASTLEMAINE READINGS — POETS FEATURED 2005 – 2010

Jordie Albiston, Jude Acquilina (SA), Emily Zoey Baker, Peter Bakowski, Tony Birch, Kevin Brophy, Grant Caldwell, Elizabeth Campbell, Gaelene Carbis, Anne Carson, Nandi Chinna (WA), Jennifer Compton, Angela Costi, Nathan Curnow, Charles D’Astanasti, Sarah Day (TAS), Joel Deane, Ann de Hugard, Drew Dillinger (USA), Beryl Doble, Ross Donlon, Tru Dowling, Alisoun Downing, Brooke Emery (NSW), Sandy Fitts, John Flaus, Lorin Ford, Janine Fraser, Sarah French (WA), Zenobia Frost (QLD), Katherine Gallagher (UK), Claire Gaskin, Ross Gillett, E.A.Gleeson, Francesca Haig, Jennifer Harrison, Lyn Hatherly, Kristin Henry, Matt Hetherington, Lia Hills, Ella Holcombe, Lucy Holt, Andy Jackson, Terry Jaensch, Paul Kane (USA), Cate Kennedy, Sue King-Smith, Karen Knight (TAS), Susan Kruss, Peter Lach-Newinsky (NSW), Bronwyn Lea (QLD), Michelle Leber, Lesley Lebkowicz (ACT), Ray Liversidge, Myron Lysenko, Garth Madsen, Gita Mammon, Ro Marriott, Lorraine McGuigan, Simon Meates, Tim Metcalf (NSW), Paul Mitchell, Louise Nicholas (SA), Bruce Oakman, Tric O’Heare, Peter O’Mara, Louise Oxley (TAS), Jillian Pattinson, Ron Pretty (NSW), Rhonda Poholke, Dorothy Porter, Judith Rodriguez, Pauline Rough, Robyn Rowland, Brendan Ryan, Philip Salom, Kerry Scuffins, Leon Shann, Michael Sharkey (NSW), Toby Sime, Alex Skovron, Steve Smart, Ken Smeaton, Ali Smith, alicia sometimes, Sue Stanford, Maurice Strandgard, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Rob Wallis, Lyndon Walker, Sean Whelan, Petra White, Jules Witek (music) (TAS), Lauren Williams, Chloe Wilson , and more…

Of all national poetries, Australia’s is most like the Irish, in the 20th century, because neither has been much caught up with modernism, the imperative to “make it new” (in form, that is, since there are no new emotions).

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The International Literature Festival is set to begin on September 15, presenting ten days of literary events throughout the German capital. On September 21, festival organizers hope to set a Guinness World Record with a 24-hour live-broadcast reading to coincide with the UN-designated International Day of Peace.

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“The internet is full of trolls,” said Age theatre critic Cameron Woodhead, during a lively public discussion on theatre criticism hosted last week by the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne.

“If you sit a monkey at a type writer long enough he’ll write the complete works of Shakespeare. That is basically what we’re seeing [online] … generations and generations of humans will live and die and experience nothing but gibberish.”

As a rhetorical flourish, it’s a common enough put-down of internet discussion. And as a Crikey reporter commented, it’s a particularly common plaint among print critics such as Woodhead, whose institutional authority is directly threatened by the aggressive democratisation of public commentary that the internet represents.

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Now seems like a good time to report briefly on the state of haiku in Australia. There is much to say that is positive.

The Australian Haiku Society (HaikuOz) is web-based and made up of many components. Its leadership comprises a patron, president, secretary, web manager and a small committee. Most input to the site comes from the leaders of the various small Australian haiku groups and from outside sources who send news of publication and competition opportunities.

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It was a great privilege to be invited on the panel for ‘Critical Failure: Books’ at the Wheeler Centre on Tuesday evening. The session – which was one of four discussions on the state of critical writing in Australia – originated, according to the Wheeler Centre, from an article published by Gideon Haigh in the inaugural issue of Kill Your Darlings, ‘Feeding the Hand that Bites: The Demise of Australian Literary Reviewing’ in March.

I won’t rehash Gideon’s argument (you can read the article in full here) – but needless to say, it has generated much debate on this site, and others, about the state of critical writing in this country. Many people have objected to Gideon’s ‘bilious attack’; others have asked him to name names. Others have called the Kill Your Darlings team mediocre critics – and I’m happy to entertain these views in the context of the discussion. The main initiative behind Kill Your Darlings is, after all, to publish new writing that provokes thought, challenges readers and generates lively and original debate.

And so I had been looking forward to a nuanced conversation with Peter Craven, Hilary McPhee and Gideon Haigh about the traditional modes of Australian literary criticism, the problems they encounter (shrinking editorial space, dwindling readerships, erosion of critical authorities, among others), how the digital world destabilises/complements this forum, and where Australian literary criticism is – if indeed it is – moving forward.

Unfortunately, I (and I suspect many of the audience) came away from ‘Critical Failure: Books’ frustrated and disappointed (in myself, it must be said). The panel had failed in its intentions: to generate a rigorous, considerate, balanced discussion about Australian book criticism in all its forms and the changing shape of critical thinking.

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This week, virtually everyone that I've spoken to seems to have attended the event 'Critical Failure' at the Wheeler Centre, which considered the state of book reviewing in Australia. There is a weirdness, however, in bemoaning the problems with book reviewing, given that reviews, at worst, are simply a form of indirect marketing, and, at best, are a sort of informed consumer recommendation. Of course, reviews may contain incisive analysis as well (indeed, it may appear as if they only contain such analysis), but reviews are absolutely tied to the notion of the book as commodity, and it is for this reason that virtually all book reviews cover new releases. In this sense, the book review is a deeply strange hybrid genre, which combines literary criticism, advertising and news reporting (since the publication of a book is a newsworthy 'event').

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As I read articles by Peter Smith, Hal G. P. Colebatch, Mervyn Bendle and Patrick Morgan, amongst others, I never cease to be struck by the unreflective, unself-analytical conviction of these people that the world is indeed emphatically divided between good people and evil people, that they are indeed the good people, and that there should be no holds barred in the battle against the evil people. Here is the self-righteous tribalism of the contemporary Austro-American Right at its most intense.

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The first live poetry slam between Scotland and Australia will take place on Saturday.
The organisers of StAnza: Scotland’s International Poetry Festival are using Skype to broadcast the event.
A team of performance poets will gather in St Andrews to take on the opposing team at the Overload Poetry Festival in Melbourne, Australia.
The event is part is part of Fife’s Year of Culture.

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THE NETTIE PALMER PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION
Popeye Never Told You: Childhood Memories of the War, Rodney Hall, Murdoch Books
A Swindler’s Progress: Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty, Kirsten McKenzie, UNSW Press
Captain Cook Was Here, Maria Nugent, Cambridge University Press
Otherland: A Journey With My Daughter, Maria Tumarkin, Random House Australia
Reading by Moonlight: How Books Saved a Life, Brenda Walker, Penguin Group Australia

THE YOUNG ADULT FICTION PRIZE
Raw Blue, Kirsty Eagar, Penguin Group Australia
Swerve, Phillip Gwynne, Penguin Group Australia
Beatle Meets Destiny, Gabrielle Williams, Penguin Group Australia

THE CJ DENNIS PRIZE FOR POETRY
Beneath Our Armour, Peter Bakowski, Hunter Publishers
Possession, Anna Kerdijk Nicholson, Five Islands Press
The Adoption Order, Ian McBryde, Five Islands Press

THE LOUIS ESSON PRIZE FOR DRAMA
Moth, Declan Greene, Arena Theatre Company and Malthouse Theatre
And No More Shall We Part, Tom Holloway, A Bit Of Argy Bargy
Furious Mattress, Melissa Reeves, Malthouse Theatre

THE ALFRED DEAKIN PRIZE FOR AN ESSAY ADVANCING PUBLIC DEBATE
Patriot Acts, Waleed Aly, The Monthly
Stupid Money, Gideon Haigh, Griffith Review
Seeing Truganini, David Hansen, Australian Book Review

THE PRIZE FOR AN UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT FOR AN EMERGING VICTORIAN WRITER
Winsome of Rangoon, Michelle Aung Thin
House of Sticks, Peggy Frew
Cambodia Darkness and Light, Andrew Nette

THE JOHN CURTIN PRIZE FOR JOURNALISM
Shutting Down Sharleen, Eurydice Aroney and Tom Morton, Hindsight, ABC Radio National
Who Killed Mr Ward?, Janine Cohen and Liz Jackson, Four Corners, ABC Television
Stop at Nothing: The Life and Adventures of Malcolm Turnbull, Annabel Crabb, Quarterly Essay

THE PRIZE FOR FIRST BOOK OF HISTORY
From Superwoman to Domestic Goddesses: the Rise and Fall of Feminism, Natasha Campo, Peter Lang International Academic Publishers
Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919-1939, Clare Corbould, Harvard University Press
Rethinking Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France, Julie Kalman, Cambridge University Press

THE PRIZE FOR INDIGENOUS WRITING
Legacy, Larissa Behrendt, University of Queensland Press
Ten Hail Marys, Kate Howarth, University of Queensland Press
Hey Mum, What’s a Half-Caste?, Lorraine McGee-Sippel, Magabala Books

David P. Reiter: You’re an established poet based in Tasmania. Would you say the interest in Tassie is higher for poetry these days than on the mainland. If so, why?

Lyn Reeves: I’m not sure if there is more interest here than in other states, but Tasmania can certainly boast a large number of well-known and award-winning poets. It’s true that there is a supportive network of writers here. Perhaps it’s partly because it’s a small community and there are more opportunities for connections to be made and sustained. Perhaps it has something to do with island culture and the concentration of writers within a small population – as well as other arts practitioners. There’s quite a bit of cross-arts collaboration as a result, and poetry lends itself well to such projects.

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We are very pleased to announce to you our shiny new website, happily housed at http://www.hobartbookshop.com.au/ .

The website is a place where we look forward to building a community of readers. We love it when people chat to us in the shop about what they’ve been reading, and sometimes we even discover new books that we can recommend to others. The website has a page for ‘Readers’ Words’, where we invite you to share what you’ve been reading. There’s also a page where our infamous book bag can show off its travel snaps — do you have a photo of the Bookshop Bag somewhere around the world?

Please drop in for a visit, and forward the address to friends far and wide. You can buy some books directly from the site (at the moment our shipping defaults are for Australia Post, but we can arrange international postage), and there’s also an enquiry form if you’re searching for a familiar book. But don’t forget, we’re always a phone call away and happy to help you find and order books, and, of course, we want to keep seeing your friendly faces too — the website is just an extra avenue for communication.

Thanks for your ongoing support,

The Hobart Bookshop

It’s interesting, after days of listening to various writers talk, to watch certain themes emerge – particularly the ones you’d least expect. One surprising thread of conversation across the Melbourne and Brisbane Writers’ Festivals was the mixed blessing of finding a niche as a writer.

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My colleague Susan Schultz at the university of Hawaii has had me read Kathleen Stewart’s wonderful book Ordinary Affects (Duke University Press), a book of ethnographic literature about ordinary places and people in Texas. But also about Deleuzean Affect. It’s very much in the vein of Benjamin’s Arcades project, but applied to American suburbia.

Susan commented and fed me some bait:

“I’m reading this book and thinking how utterly American a lot of it is. As someone who arrived here two weeks ago from Australia, how ordinary are these affects to you, Adam?

aloha, sms”

I replied on her Foundations of Creative Writing blog:

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In Small Place, Big Ideas, Nicholas Shakespeare, ‘a Pom’, recalled something written about Tasmania: ‘Tasmania is the end of the known world. Travel any further and you are on your way home again.’ Tasmania, famed for its beauty and its controversies, is often defined by outsiders as many contradictory things: a state with an island mentality, a microcosm for the rest of the world, a parochial backwater, a Labor stronghold, a beloved symbol of Australian wilderness.

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One thing almost guaranteed to inflame jealousy is success at a tender age.
Ben Naparstek was only 23 when he was controversially appointed editor of news magazine, The Monthly.
This weekend at the Brisbane Writers Festival, the literary wunderkind will offer writers, many no doubt much older than he, advice on how to get published.

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There’s an amusing moment during Tomorrow When the War Began when a character is reading the book My Brilliant Career. She’s asked if it’s any good, and she says that it’s better than the movie. The other character replies that most books usually are. The film makers will be hoping that’s not the case with this adaptation.

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My discovery of Australian literature took place 32 years late and almost 20,000km from home, in an ancient port on the Dorset coast. The unlikely venue was Lyme Regis, setting of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman and still — just — home to the author, an elderly and infirm figure whom I occasionally spotted shuffling to the greengrocer with a straw bag and Zimmer frame.

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Islet is still calling for submissions. The new closing date is TUESDAY NOVEMBER 30 — check the Islet for more details.

I recently welcomed two hens into my household. Their official (that is, children-chosen) names are Nugget and Worm, but I call them Dame Judi and Mrs Smith. I get a lot of pleasure from looking after them: topping up their feed container, making sure they have fresh water, keeping their coop clean, tucking them in at night and so on. They rise with the sun — and if someone doesn’t rise with them to open their coop we soon hear about it — and put themselves to bed at nightfall. They spend the daylight hours roaming the yard, eating weeds, digging for worms and transacting other chook business.

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Cleveland resident Stanton Mellick didn’t believe the 1980s critics who claimed Queensland was a cultural backwater, lacking a literary tradition, with no writers to call its own.
So the former University of Queensland lecturer in English went on a 30-year mission to trace the steps of those who have written about locations in the Sunshine State.

In the process, he discovered 530 writers, poets and dramatists who were inspired to put pen to paper about Queensland, from the time it separated from New South Wales in 1859 until the present.

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While he concentrates on the laudable, Burt is not oblivious to common problems of contemporary poetry. Without naming names, he singles out “technical failure, amusia, useless dissonance, clashing figures of speech, semantic redundancy, and other problems of the sort that get hashed out in creative writing classrooms.” He salts his positive reviews with an occasional sotto voce warning, although these are usually phrased as weaknesses in the reader rather than in the poems, or as weaknesses that are really strengths of a sort. What might appear to be problems in the poetry sometimes turn out to be problems in the reader. Towards the end of a perceptive, positive and obviously well informed essay on the poems of Rae Armantrout, for example, Burt suggests that her poetry “is not for everyone: it’s usually dissonant; almost never mellifluous, unambiguous, or strongly narrative…” He notes that parts can seem opaque, that “it can be hard to know” why some poems are arranged as they are. Mary Leader’s poems “can sound amateurish in both the good and bad senses of that word.”

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Peter, a doctor, reads Rumi after a shift at a Brisbane emergency to calm his adrenalin-fizzing veins. David the policeman reads Auden while drinking coffee in an all-night service station after a Friday night shift on the Gold Coast, to restore his belief that all of humanity is not made up of grubs.

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A critic who had to buy the books he reviewed. No publisher would send him review copies.

In 2000, Frank Kermode, the great literary critic and scholar who died last week at the age of 90, gave a lecture called “The Cambridge Connection” about the history of the Cambridge University English department. It sounds like a parochial enough topic until you realize that the major figures in that department were I.A. Richards, William Empson, and F.R. Leavis—probably the most important English critics of the 20thcentury. Kermode was too modest to include himself in the list. This was a man, after all, who titled his memoir Not Entitled—but he was of the same stature and belonged to the same tradition.

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Patrick White, Australia’s most celebrated literary figure, was at best ”a glass half-empty” kind of correspondent when it came to writing to friends.

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Picture this: you have your poems accepted by The Paris Review. Such an acceptance can mark the start of a great career, lead to a book deal or to be anthologized, or perhaps solidify a reputation in the small world this correspondent and others call Poetryland.

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I have often played with the notion of authorship myself and as I’ve said elsewhere on this site one of my earliest influences was a poet who wasn’t a poet (or a person) at all: Ern Malley. My interaction with other poets has, to an extent (I hope), kept the faith.

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The posting on Spender elsewhere on this site discusses Spender’s complex and highly motivated rebuilding of his poetic record, with the 1985 Collected being an especially fragile and minimal version, which quite probably leaves out half of his published poetry. The possibility of ‘rigging the past to fit alliances and positions in the present’ is on the pitch somewhere, although I would emphasize that there are many other possibilities. Anyway, if you cut part of the written record the reasons why you do it are inherently not in the record, and any reasons you offer are subject to suspicions of being just as heavily edited as the texts themselves.

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[Angela Meyer, from the blog 'Literary Minded', August 24th 2010]:

Can you tell us a bit about why you’ve started your own publishing company? What gap is it addressing in the Australian market?

Brass Monkey Books came about largely because of my frustration that wonderful Indian books were not getting to Australian readers, and vice versa. Most of the Indian books we get here are through the UK or the US, so we are at their mercy as to what we have available here. Consequently, we don’t see a wide range of Indian titles here, and they are often about the same themes and often have similar covers – henna patterns, sepia tints, paisley borders.

The same applies to Australian books reaching Indian audiences. Apart from Tim Winton, Peter Carey and Thomas Keneally, very few Australian writers appear on Indian bookshop shelves.

I think it is time Australia and India started having direct cultural exchanges that fall outside Bollywood and cricket!

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Being involved with Verity La has been stunning. So many superb writers give fistfuls of heart at the asking. Listed below are the many offerings put together for Issue Two at Verity La.

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If you direct that last question towards the editors of a journal the answer may most likely be ‘to create order’. But if you go deeper, perhaps the true answer is ‘both’. Because in practice, journal editors open the doors and windows to artists all over the world, and invite the chaos in. The editor must create order, reach a number of pages or fill a round number of minutes, curating images and sounds into a coherent whole. Then a printer stamps it down, a reader or reviewer encapsulates it all in a thought or a sentence, and we find a little portion of human chaos has been cut and polished, filed under ‘art’ or ‘literature’ in the local library. Does this satisfy? Of course not. Because once it’s done, we go and do it all again. And we love it. It might be a fundamental function of the human mind to swing from chaos to order. Telling stories, making stories. There and back again.

Going Down Swinging No.30 — which we have affectionately dubbed ‘the clusterfuck issue’— began as all good stories do with an open invitation to chaos. We called for new work. This time, artists and writers accepted our challenge in a terrifying way — we received twice the usual number of submissions in almost half the usual time. Simultaneously, and at the same time, as Gonzo is known to say, we pulled on the strings of the past — which brought the whole, creative, dysfunctional, global family of GDS tumbling down on our heads. Some of the best of this gaggle of creative souls, Kevin Brophy, Myron Lysenko, Adam Ford and Grant Caldwell, stepped up to order the chaos of two thousand poems, stories, haiku and comics into a cohesive book. Meanwhile, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, Ian Ferrier, Ian Daley and David Prater fired spoken word tracks across the seas, filling our ears with some of the sexiest voices we’ve heard in ages. And we’ve heard a lot of voices.

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GOING DOWN SWINGING NO.30 is now available in all good bookstores, and from www.goingdownswinging.org.au

THE MELBOURNE LAUNCH AND 30TH BIRTHDAY PARTY:
THURSDAY NIGHT SWING CLUB
Thursday 2nd September, 8pm–10.30pm
The Toff In Town
Tickets: $25 (No.30 included in ticket price) Book online at http://tickets.mwf.com.au/session2.asp?sn=Thursday+Night+Swing+Club&s=138
Hosted by Brian Nankervis (Rockwiz) Launched by Richard Watts (RRR)
Starring: Maxine Beneba Clarke, Ezra Bix, Emily XYZ and Myers Bartlett (USA), Paul Mitchell and Eleanor Jackson. Plus DJ Johnny Topper, Silent Disco Projections, and the hot swingin’ sounds of FLAP!

CLOSING DATE: 10 DECEMBER

‘What a wonderful thing is the essay! All honour to Australian Book Review
and the Cultural Fund of Copyright Agency Limited for celebrating it with
the Calibre Prize.’ Robert Dessaix

Australian Book Review (ABR) and the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) seek
entries for the fifth Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay, the nation’s
premier award for an original essay and one of the world’s most lucrative
essay competitions.

The Calibre Prize is intended to generate brilliant new essays and to foster
new insights into culture, society and the human condition. We welcome
essays from leading authors and commentators, but also from emerging
writers. All non-fiction subjects are eligible: from life writing to
literary studies, history to politics, biography to philosophy, natural
history to popular science, travel writing to environmental studies.

PREVIOUS WINNERS
Elisabeth Holdsworth (2007)
Rachel Robertson, Mark Tredinnick (2008)
Kevin Brophy, Jane Goodall (2009)
Lorna Hallahan, David Hansen (2010)

HOW TO ENTER
The guidelines and entry form are available on the ABR website: www.australianbookreview.com.au/calibre-prize

The Castlemaine Poetry Readings are privileged to feature two of Australia’s finest poets, Bronwyn Lea (Qld) and Chloe Wilson (Vic.)

Both have lately featured at the Australian Poetry Centre’s Festival in South Australia also broadcast on Radio National’s Poetica.

Flying from Queensland especially for the reading at the Guildford hotel reading on Sunday August 22nd, Bronwyn Lea is a multi award winning poet and a reader who has featured at numerous festivals and been awarded a writer in residency in Rome. Chloe Wilson, a rising star of Australian poetry, is one of the feature poets in the 2010, A.P.C. New Poets’ program, lately launched with acclaim at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne .

Bronwyn Lea is the author of Flight Animals (UQP 2001) which won the Wesley Michel Wright Poetry Prize and the Anne Elder Award. Her most recent collection is The Other Way Out (Giramondo 2008), which won the 2010 John Bray Poetry Prize and was shortlisted in the Queensland and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. She teaches Poetics and Contemporary Literature at the University of Queensland.

Chloe Wilson is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. Her first collection of poems, The Mermaid Problem, was published by the Australian Poetry Centre in 2010. Her poetry has appeared in The Age, Blue Dog, Wet Ink, Voiceworks and is forthcoming in Going Down Swinging. In 2009 she won the Poetry and Youth categories of the Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing Awards and the Page Seventeen poetry prize. She is a former poetry editor for Voiceworks.

This is a rare chance to see and hear two premier poets in the stunning goldfields atmopshere of the Guildford Hotel which also boasts a vibrant Open Section in competition for the coveted Castlemaine Cup – 3 minutes maximum miketime. A sestina from Castlemaine or 15 minutes on the Daylesford Road for Earthlings.

Gold coin donation only and raffles for books by the feature poets and a book voucher from Soldier and Scholar, Castlemaine. Supported by Zac and the Guildford Hotel.

Let’s begin at the end. After Kathy Charles and I finished our interview with the very engaging Bret Easton Ellis, we sat with his publicist over a couple of glasses of Chandon, waiting for Ellis to wrap-up with our friend Robbie Coleman.

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The long list of books about gay London would not have fit in my suitcase. Fascinating though. A history of queer culture in England. Not enough poetry–there never is enough poetry in gay bookshops is there? I don’t know if my friend David Groff’s anthology Persistent Voices was there. This is a new anthology of voices lost to Aids. Is there such a thing as a poetry bookstore? As a gay poetry bookstore?

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* Peter Carey for Parrot and Olivier in America
Penguin Group (Australia)
* Brian Castro for The Bath Fugues
Giramondo Publishing Company
* J.M. Coetzee for Summertime
Random House Australia
* Steven Lang for 88 Lines About 44 Women
Penguin Group (Australia)
* Alex Miller for Lovesong
Allen & Unwin

Emerging Queensland Author – Manuscript Award

* Matthew Lamb for Down to the River
* Nikki McWatters for The Desert of Paradise
* Noel Mengel for RPM

Unpublished Indigenous Writer – Arts Queensland David Unaipon Award

* Sam Cook for ACES, DEUCES, KINGS and QUEENS
* Tjanara Goreng-Goreng for The Red Earth
* Jeanine Leane for Purple Threads
* Shawn Wondunna-Foley for Dingo finds a friend

Non-Fiction Book Award

* Krissy Kneen for Affection
The Text Publishing Company
* Mary-Rose MacColl for The Birth Wars
University of Queensland Press
* Alasdair McGregor for Grand Obsessions: The Life and Work of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin
Penguin Group (Australia)
* Mark Tredinnick for The Blue Plateau: A Landscape Memoir
University of Queensland Press
* Brenda Walker for Reading by Moonlight: How books saved a life
Penguin Group (Australia)

History Book – Faculty of Arts, University of Queensland Award

* Bain Attwood for Possession: Batman’s Treaty and the Matter of History
Melbourne University Publishing Limited
* Maria Hill for Diggers and Greeks: the Australian campaigns in Greece and Crete
University of New South Wales Press
* Ian Hoskins for Sydney Harbour: A history
University of New South Wales Press
* Grace Karskens for The Colony: A History of Early Sydney
Allen & Unwin
* Thomas Keneally for Australians: Origins to Eureka
Allen & Unwin

Children’s Book – Mary Ryan’s Award

* Bronwyn Bancroft for Why I Love Australia
Little Hare Books
* Glenda Millard for Isabella’s Garden
Illustrated by Rebecca Cool
Walker Books Australia
* Glenda Millard for All the Colours of Paradise
Illustrated by Stephen Michael King
HarperCollinsPublishers Aust Pty Limited
* Sally Murphy for Toppling
Illustrated by Rhian Nest James
Walker Books Australia
* Narelle Oliver for Fox and Fine Feathers
Omnibus Books

Young Adult Book Award

* Phillip Gwynne for Swerve
Penguin Group (Australia)
* Justine Larbalestier for Liar
Allen & Unwin
* Melina Marchetta for The Piper’s Son
Penguin Group (Australia)
* Scott Westerfeld for Leviathan
Illustrated by Keith Thompson
Simon Pulse
* Richard Yaxley for Drink the Air
Richard Yaxley

Science Writer Award

* Elizabeth Finkel for Black harvest (Cosmos: The Science of Everything – Issue 27)
Luna Media
* Elizabeth Finkel for The trouble with genes (Cosmos: The Science of Everything – Issue 31)
Luna Media
* Clive Hamilton for Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about climate change
Allen & Unwin
* Sonya Pemberton for Catching Cancer
December Films and Pemberton Films
* Julian Pepperell for Fishes of the open ocean: a natural history and illustrated guide
Illustrated by Guy Harvey
University of New South Wales Press

Poetry Collection – Arts Queensland Judith Wright Calanthe Award

* Peter Boyle for Apocrypha
Vagabond Press
* Jennifer Maiden for Pirate Rain
Giramondo Publishing Company
* Les Murray for Taller When Prone
Black Inc.
* Maria Takolander for Ghostly Subjects
Salt Publishing

Australian Short Story Collection – Arts Queensland Steele Rudd Award

* Peter Goldsworthy for Gravel
Penguin Group (Australia)
* Karen Hitchcock for Little White Slips
Picador
* Thomas Shapcott for Gatherers and Hunters
Wakefield Press
* Archie Weller for The Window Seat
University of Queensland Press

Literary or Media Work Advancing Public Debate – The Harry Williams Award

* Annabel Crabb for Quarterly Essay 34: Stop at Nothing – The Life and Adventures of Malcolm Turnbull
Black Inc.
* Clive Hamilton for Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about climate change
Allen & Unwin
* Marcia Langton for The resource curse
Griffith Review
* Mary-Rose MacColl for The Birth Wars
University of Queensland Press
* Michael McKenna for Shocked to the core
The Australian, 23 June 2009

Film Script – Screen Queensland Award

* Shirley Barrett for South Solitary
Macgowan Films Pty Ltd
* David Michôd for Animal Kingdom
Porchlight Films Pty Ltd
* David Roach for Beneath Hill 60
The Silence Productions Pty Ltd

Drama Script (Stage) Award

* Daniel Keene for Duets
* Joanna Murray-Smith for Rockabye
Currency Press Pty Ltd
* Melissa Reeves for Furious Mattress
* Sven Swenson for The Bitterling
* Rick Viede for Whore

Television Script – QUT Creative Industries Award

* Glen Dolman for Hawke
The Film Company
* Peter Duncan for Rake Episode 1 “R v Murray”
Essential Media and Entertainment Pty Ltd
* Peter Gawler for A Model Daughter: The Killing of Caroline Byrne
Screentime Pty Ltd
* John Misto for Sisters of War
Australian Broadcasting Corporation/Pericles Film Productions Pty Ltd

Some events for you Oh! Hobartians or those visiting Hobartside – and don’t forget, there’s a well known poet in town – Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Considered one of Australia’s best poets, a literary critic and an educator, he is in town for the month of August. The Tasmanian Writers’ Centre have organised that.

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With the Christchurch Writers Festival now only four weeks away, and ticket sales forging ahead, several sessions are expected to sell out this week, so if you haven’t already bought your tickets you are urged to get on to it straight away!

The great thing about writers’ festivals is the variety of international writers they introduce to the local audience, and The Press Christchurch Writers’ Festival is no exception. These sessions feature four very different overseas writers along with a local writer and journalist.

Ramona Koval presents ABC Radio National’s The Book Show, which is heard weekdays across Australia, and podcast globally. She has been praised as a master of the interview genre, renowned for engaging writers in conversations that are incisive, provocative and often funny. She makes documentary features for radio, and has written newspaper features and columns on issues of the day. Transcripts of her interviews have been published in international newspapers, magazines and in digital form. She has been invited to interview writers at literary festivals in Edinburgh, Cheltenham, Montreal, Berlin and all over Australia.!

She is the author of a novel, Samovar, and four books of non-fiction, including a Jewish cookbook. In her latest book, Speaking Volumes: conversations with remarkable writers, she shares the most fascinating interviews from her 2005 book Tasting Life Twice, along with brand-new encounters with some of the most important writers of our times.

Through Koval, we are privy to the extraordinary minds of Joseph Heller, Joyce Carol Oates, Mario Vargas Llosa, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, David Malouf, P. D. James, John Mortimer, Ian McEwan, Amos Oz, Go! re Vidal, Harold Pinter, John le Carré, Barry Lopez, Malcolm Bradbury, William Gass, Judith Wright, Les Murray, Fay Weldon, A. S. Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Martin Amis, Toni Morrison, André Brink, John Banville, Jeanette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi and Anne Enright, among others.

Listen to Ramona Koval :The Book Show
Ramona Koval appears in two sessions:
In conversation with Clive Hamilton in Requiem for a Species
Saturday 11 September 2.00pm $16/14 Conference Room, Christchurch Town Hall
Speaking Volumes: An Hour with Ramona Koval
With well-known and award-winning former broadcast journalist Alison Parr.
Saturday 11 September 5.00pm $16/14 Boaters, Christchurch Town Hall

Pressed into Service
This fascinating session features three writers who describe the world around them in frank and honest terms, and are not afraid to receive feedback via their websites or blogs.

Joe Bageant, whose style has been compared to Gore Vidal’s and who has been a personal friend of some of the most progressive thinkers of our time, writes an online colum! n www.joebageant.com that has made him a cult hero among gonzo-journalism junkies and progressives.

Jake Adelstein is the only American journalist ever to have been admitted to the insular Tokyo Metropolitan Police press club. His writing offers a unique, first-hand, revelatory look at Japanese culture from the underbelly up, and his latest book Tokyo Vice is an expose of the yakusa.

David Haywood is a contributor to the community weblogs that appear on the website Public Address. http://publicaddress.net/southerly. He appears regularly on Nine to Noon as a science correspondent. He is also author of My First Stabbing, a collection of strange meanderings, and The New Zealand Reserve Bank Annual 2010.

Pressed into Service
Saturday 11 September 12.30pm $16/14 Conference Room, Christchurch Town Hall

Congratulations to the people won tickets to see the sessions from last week’s enews.
This week there are tickets to Speaking Volumes: An Hour with Ramona Koval and Pressed into Service to give away.

To go in the draw, email: admin at chchwritersfest.co.nz with your name and contact details and the title of the session you would like to go to in the subject line.

But I’ve somehow managed to land for the moment in a city of constant change, and I find myself wanting to put down tentative surface roots. Here, the school year is filled with college students and their machinations, while summer brings tourists and those hoping to profit from them. Last weekend, I watched a young man wearing a kilt and nothing else ride a ten-foot tall unicycle while playing “We Will Rock You” on the bagpipes. For a denizen of a tourist destination, it is very important to one’s self-esteem to look like a local, but I couldn’t help but stop and gawk. The bald danger, the sense that here was a performer throwing everything he had into his art, with real risks—concussion, humiliation, broken bones, a public indecency charge from an untoward flap of his kilt. And I remembered: yes, that’s what we should be doing, always, on the page. No fear, no withholding.

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More and more writers are using voice recognition software, which is constantly improving and even has an app for the iPhone. The novelist Richard Powers has explained his process of dictating novels to his PC tablet as a return to “writing by voice” as done by authors through history.

But earlier writers, such as Milton, Dostoevsky and Henry James used the first form of voice recognition software—women.

Before stenography and then typing provided an entry into the workplace for thousands of women, handwritten transcription was an intimate exchange and was often unpaid work done by an author’s female family members.

Although the question of who really transcribed for Milton continues to be debated, the image of blind Milton dictating “Paradise Lost” to his daughters captured the public imagination and was the subject of several paintings, by Delacroix, Mihaly Munkacsy, George Romney and others.

Milton himself claimed he was taking direct dictation from God, but it must have been tiring for anyone to transcribe a work that, as Samuel Johnson noted, “None ever wished it longer than it is.”

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Americans, plugged in and on the move, are confiding in their pets, their computers, and their spouses. What they need is to rediscover the value of friendship.
Science-fiction writers make the best seers. In the late 1950s far-sighted Isaac Asimov imagined a sunny planet called Solaria, on which a scant 20,000 humans dwelt on far-flung estates and visited one another only virtually, by materializing as “trimensional images”—avatars, in other words. “They live completely apart,” a helpful robot explained to a visiting earthling, “and never see one another except under the most extraordinary circumstances.”

We have not, of course, turned into Solarians here on earth, strictly limiting our numbers and shunning our fellow humans in revulsion. Yet it’s hard not to see some Solarian parallels in modern life. Since Asimov wrote The Naked Sun, Americans have been engaged in wholesale flight from one another, decamping for suburbs and Sunbelt, splintering into ever smaller households, and conducting more and more of their relationships online, where avatars flourish. The churn rate of domestic relations is especially remarkable, and has rendered family life in the United States uniquely unstable. “No other comparable nation,” the sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin observes, “has such a high level of multiple marital and cohabiting unions.”

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The first dictionary of slang, out of print for 300 years, is being published by the Bodleian Library from a rare copy unearthed in its collections.

Originally entitled A New Dictionary of Terms, Ancient and Modern, of the Canting Crew, its aim was to educate the polite London classes in ‘canting’ – the language of thieves and ruffians – should they be unlucky enough to wander into the ‘wrong’ parts of town.

With over 4,000 entries, the dictionary contains many words which are now part of everyday parlance, such as ‘Chitchat’ and ‘Eyesore’ as well as a great many which have become obsolete, such as the delightful ‘Dandyprat’ and ‘Fizzle’. Remarkably, this landmark of English from 1699 was compiled and published anonymously, by an author who has left us only his initials – ‘B.E. Gent [gentleman]’.

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“And what an expression of personal freedom writing is, especially in a world so increasingly intent on forming a mass identity for us. In spite of cultural differences or language barriers or the subtler barriers about who’s got a right to a voice: you write, I read, and I begin to understand. You might be writing in translation, a voice coming to me from a thousand years ago, describing a culture long disappeared, but I listen to your voice, and suddenly there is a unity between us like a moment of grace … what a wonder it is, our capacity for transformation.”

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Apparently this Australian author has won awards in the past, but I haven’t read any of her books previously. I VERY much enjoyed this one!

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I don’t know if schools still do this, but back then a staple of English comprehension lessons was the question: “What is the poet trying to say?”

This question enraged me. I didn’t think the poet was trying to say anything: the poet said it. The poem was what it said: it wasn’t there to be nailed down to an unambiguous message, but instead, like life itself, shimmered in its sensual ambiguity.

The meanings of a poem exist as much in its sounds and rhythms as in its semantic sense: but it was precisely those material aspects of language that were dismissed in the insistence on a particular kind of comprehension. After all, the suspension of certainty that is at the heart of any work of art is not easily translatable into exam questions.

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I had brekky with Alex and was in a great position to watch the whales and dolphins on a gorgeous, sunny morning. Sunday became the social day. At lunch time an old family friend, Lauren, came and picked me up, with her friend, and we had sushi. They had heaps of questions for me about what exactly goes on at a literary festival. Lauren’s friend said she liked reading, and she mentioned Matthew Reilly. ‘He’s at the festival’, I said. It makes you realise that literary festivals aren’t at all on the radar of most people. Of course, the Byron audience is mostly retirees and also kids for the schools programs. There’s a bit more of a mix at city festivals, but the majority are still older. My theory is not just that there isn’t heaps programmed to appeal to 20- and 30-somethings, but that they just can’t really afford it. The older crowds have the spare time and the money for culture. It’s the same reason not a lot of people my age get to the theatre. I love it, but I can only afford a few shows a year. Anyway, that was majorly tangential. I guess I’m trying to do my bit spreading the word on loving lit (and participating in supporting it by buying books and coming to events) via this blog and my Twitter feed.

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I’ve had a series of conversations lately about my mother and other residents of her Alzheimer’s home. Politics and dysfunction are not the sole province of English departments, soccer clubs, or the U.S. Senate. Her home, too, is going through a period of turmoil, which I sensed when I last visited in late May. So “Corporate” (as everyone calls it, which means ManorCare, which means Carlyle) has stepped in, replaced the Director of her home, and we hope for the best.

We hope for the best. In my mother’s case, I no longer know what the best is. As my conversation with her current social worker ended this morning, she told me, almost as afterthought, that an orthopedic surgeon reported that she has several breaks in her elbow, but is not a candidate for surgery. That they should watch for symptoms of pain. That she is not exhibiting them now. (Not in pain from a severely and multiply fractured elbow?)

So I told the social worker about the problems I’d noticed–too few staff to cover dinnertime and sundowning chaos at the same time; overheard complaints about management, and so on. But I added that, while my mother had had a couple of years in which a flower could bring her joy ten times in five minutes, she does not seem to feel that now. That I hope for release. It felt odd, even dangerous, to say that.

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Today is Friday the 13th. Twenty million Americans are feeling unlucky today — people who suffer fromfriggatriskaidekaphobia. It’s a 99-year-old word made up of a combination of the Norse and Greek roots words for “fear” and “Friday” and “13.”

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In Carol Shields’ novel The Stone Diaries, Mercy Goodwill makes a Malvern pudding, and after reading the description of the making of it, I have never forgotten the currants, the raspberries, the cream and the bread, nor the tender love with which the pudding was made. This time of year when my currants begin to fall from the bush, the raspberry canes are laden and the berries stolen by the bluejays, the blueberries coming sweet and ripe, I remember Mercy and her pudding and concoct my own variation. Today I’m making a blueberry bread pudding that unlike Mercy’s, which is set to chill overnight, is baked. I can smell it now, sugar, eggs, cream and fruit as it steams in the oven.

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One of the more common arguments one hears, regarding the relative lack of popularity of one or another poet, is that said poet’s work is “difficult.” Such arguments are often followed by homiletics regarding the virtue or importance of difficulty. I should know: I’ve made them myself more times than I can remember.

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The humble literary journal often gets short shrift at writer’s festivals, despite being one of the main avenues through which new writers hone their skills and assume the mantle of being next year’s superstars. Not so at MWF! We love lit journals, big and small, funded and independent. In fact we love them so much we bought a shipping container, plonked it on the riverbank and let them off the leash to run their own mini festivals. Magazine features Overland, Kill Your Darlings, The Lifted Brow, Meanjin, Ampersand, harvest & The Big Issue all doing their thang from 10-5 on the Saturday & Sunday of each festival weekend. It’s FREE and we have no idea what these mags are preparing, so pop your head into the container and join in the ruckus.

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Chris who began his journalistic career at 2CO, now ABC Goulburn Murray, will join a number of top name journalists in a panel discussion on sustaining news stories on Friday and is keynote speaker at the festival dinner on Saturday 11 September at 7pm.

Former SBS and Dateline journalist, Chris Hammer will open the festival on Wednesday 8 September at 6pm in the Albury Entertainment Centre Theatrette with a talk about his book, The River which tells the story of the endangered Murray-Darling Basin. The environmental storytelling project Spatial Stories which will be launched after Chris’s talk.

Other festival guests include Looking for Alibrandi author, Melina Marchetta; co-author of Underbelly, Andrew Rule; journalist and author, Scott Monk; author of the Dragonkeeper series, Carole Wilkinson and eco-travel writer, Louise Southerden.

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What was the first thing you did after winning the 2008 Australian Poetry Slam? Is this your biggest achievement to date?
It’s definitely equal to the release of my first hip-hop record, The Massive EP. Hip-hop and spoken word poetry go hand in hand for me, and the first thing I did when I won the Australian Poetry Slam was to fund the production of my album. It was a real godsend, because I was dead broke and wondering about my future in performance.

The Australian Poetry Slam finals were a sell-out at the Sydney Opera House. It must be nerve-wracking for some people to perform in front of such large audiences. How do you build up the confidence (or psyche yourself up!) to do poetry slams?
I either wander off by myself and sit really quietly for a while, or I go for a long walk, listening to hip-hop tracks with really hard beats. Dizzee Rascal or Lil Wayne does the trick!

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At some point I looked over and saw the PanMacmillan ladies (publicists Tracey and Kate) with a boyish Bret Easton Ellis. I wondered what it would have been like for him, in this room full of strangers, in a country he’s never been to, knowing he was one of the festival drawcards (at his first ever writers’ festival, anywhere). Later on stage he wondered aloud why he had chose Byron Bay Writers Festival as his first – a kind of absurd choice as the punters aren’t even really his demographic. He wondered whether he was escaping something in California, whether something was wrong. But he’d always wanted to come to Australia, because a friend said ‘people are hot and they drink a lot’.

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The daughter of former prime minister and Griffith MP Kevin Rudd will use Bulimba literary haunt Riverbend Books as the venue to launch her debut novel.

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It was Cyril Connolly who said that literary magazines should only run for 10 years. After that, he seemed to imply, they’re in danger of running out of steam. So it was that Horizon folded after a decade of publishing the likes of Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas and Graham Greene.

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*Girls need to be taught poetry by boys who write it. (Apparently they cannot read and figure it out for themselves.)

*”Poetic craft is a sham. If poetic craft does not come as naturally to leaves to a tree then it better not come at all.” Which seems a bit disingenuous coming from one who wrote sonnets.

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This – by Australian standards, fabulously ambitious – new book by Peter Boyle imagines a collection of hitherto lost documents dating from, roughly, the eighth century BC – the age of Homer – to the end of the first millennium of the common era. These documents include delicious possibilities such as lost books of Herodotus, Xenophon, lost dialogues of Plato, fragments of lost Greek plays, a lost text by Pausanias, notebooks of Lucretius, Catullus and so on. There is a framework which has them being found in the papers of a William O’Shaunessy a kind of Classicist equivalent of Ern Malley. The texts, in keeping with our interest in the suppressed texts of the early Christians, are designed to show an element of human history which has been edited out – but more of that later. Importantly the world of the period that these texts cover is rather different to the known world as well. There is, for example, the kingdom of Ebtesum, imagined to be in the Sahara and a sister city of Kitezh which has the power to disappear and reappear in a different place (outside Kiev) two thousand years later – the latter city is presumably derived from Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera. There is also a nearby Essene community! Atlantis is a group of islands off the west coast of Africa. And just as the geography is surreal, so are the cultures and the events within those cultures: we meet on one of the Atlantean islands, to take an example at random, people who have perfected an operation to cure others of the sense that all is not well; and later we meet the sages of Ecbatan who write their sacred works in sand.

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If we look for poetry which is naive in the sense that it is optimistic about life and poetry, is not drained of energy by rational criticism, which is decorative in a profound sense, then we are probably looking at David Barnett and Michael Haslam. To put the case quickly I will quote from Barnett’s blurb to one of his books, “Now living in an isolated farmhouse on the moors, he says ‘I have plenty of time to dream, circle-dance and to connect with the goddess who continues to be the inspiration for all the poetry I write.” The appeal corresponds to the appeal of naive painters. But Barnett is an Oxford graduate, just as Haslam is a Cambridge graduate. Their access to intact sources of myth and ceremonial came from Western collections of ethnographic knowledge, not from ’the folk’. They have both led ‘eccentric’ lives in remote parts of the country, but their artistic understanding is sharpened by great learning and by contact with 20th century theories of art. To put it another way, someone genuinely naive may not get very far with attempts to write ‘naive’ poetry. There is another strand of ‘learned naive’ poetry which draws on Christian ’folk’ poetry and the naive resources of British Christianity for methods and styles. As an alternative to reading Karl Barth you can read the Hebridean folk-charms of Carmina Gadelica and make new poems imitating them.

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For me, one of the most satisfying aspects of MWF is how it involves local writers, particularly those who are beginning to dip their tootsies into the tumultuous waters of publishing. There are a range of great workshops designed to nurture the next generation of talent run by our stellar guests – this year for example we have masterclasses taught by Simon Winchester, Elif Batuman, Nadifa Mohamed, Tiffany Murray, Louise Doughty, August Kleinzahler, Louise Welsh, Arnold Zable, Cory Doctorow, Bryce Courtenay, R J Ellory, Peter James, Barbara Trapido, Francis Wheen, Gavin Pretor-Pinney & Amanda Lohrey. Wow. Be warned though, these indispensable classes have very limited places and tend to sell out quickly (some of these already have, sorry!) which is not surprising – how often would you get the chance to sit down for 3 hours with writers like these to discuss your work?

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Like anyone serious about writing, I sought to connect with an audience. The most obvious way to do so in this fragmented new century was through a handful of (mostly unread) literary journals, whose website warned that receive thousands of submissions a month so it may take some time before you hear back (if you hear back at all), whose guidelines provide a litany of dont’s: don’t send us anything over 3,000 words, don’t send us anything dealing with suicide, vomit or incest, don’t send us a non-SASE envelope if you expect a reply, don’t send your submission in July, November, the first half of January, and so on.

Too often, short-story writers end up writing for the journals and their audience, which as Stephen King noted in a New York Times op-ed, tends to consist of “other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines (and The New Yorker, of course, the holy grail of the young fiction writer) not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there.”

Conscious of breaking 3,000 words, I didn’t give my stories room to breathe. Imagining some jaded reader drowning amidst stacks of manuscripts he secretly loved to loathe, I tried to write golden first sentences that would stand out like a yacht in a barren sea of flotsam that he would want to board and never leave. And then a second, and a third.

I wrote for that reader, an object of my imagination that did nothing to cultivate my imagination.

Letting these journals dictate the terms of writing is no way to write. It compromises the writer. It suffocates the story.

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Robert Cox Agony and Variations. This collection of short stories will be launched by Geoffrey Dean.
Steve Tolbert’s young adult novel O’Leary: JI Terrorist Hunter will be launched by Dr Pam Allen.
Stephen Matthews will launch Ian Kennedy Williams’ Fugitive Places. Stories From A Suite Of Hotels.

5.30pm Thursday 19th August.
All welcome to this free event.

The Hobart Bookshop
22 Salamanca Square
Hobart Tasmania 7000
P 03 6223 1803 . F 03 6223 1804
hobooks at ozemail.com.au

Ok, admit it. You feel a sense of smug self-satisfaction every time you find a spelling error in a published novel, you laugh until you cry mocking newspaper headlines that say things like, “Thai Ministers Flea in Wake of Violence,” and you question the intelligence of any poet whose book has a really ridiculous spelling error in it.

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It’s not easy being a trade publisher in Australia these days. The outside world has caught up with us: trade is terrible, e-books are still either a promise or a threat, and there remain large uncertainties about the domestic and international economies. There’s no doubt that the ending of government stimulus payments and the raising of interest rates have dented consumer confidence, to the point that retailing in general is now in the worst state that many proprietors and employees can remember.

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The eponymous crime of Huey Dunstan is the vehicle through which the story of the life of Ches, an 80 year old pyschologist specialising in trauma, is told.

Huey is a young man convicted of a violent murder which, from all accounts, is out of character. Ches is called to provide expert witness for the defense and he starts to believe there must be a deeper psychological motive for the murder.

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When you give an interview, can you ask to see the piece before it comes out? Ellen Whyte explains why the answer is generally a resounding “No!”

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I’ve read Susan Schultz’ Dementia Blog – the ongoing blog project and also a book published under the same title (excerpts from the blog). The blog is the diary of a daughter who cares for her mother as the parent’s memory quickly fades, one crisis and change after another, in the usual sad and disorienting progression. But “progression”? Or “regression”? That, in short, is the key question. What is it that we call this human anti-narrativity? How do we describe it? Blogs, written in order, happen to feed to the browser last entry first, and so we read a blog, as it were, from last page to first page. Books conventionally turn this around. The reversal revealed itself to Susan as she wrote. Her primary response (to her mother’s changing identity) yields to a secondary response (what is the apt mode for telling others of this) and then the primary/secondary distinction dissolves. To witness is to adjust. The illness becomes the medium.

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Queensland Poetry Festival : spoken in one strange word

27 – 29 August 2010 at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts
FRIDAY Shopfront Space Theatre Space
6.00pm
Official Opening
Including Arts Queensland Poetry Award Announcements
MC: Paul Miley

7:30pm
RUPTURE THE SILENCE
Andrew Taylor
Jon Paul Fiorentino
August Kleinzahler
Arts QLD Poet-in-Residence: Emily XYZ & Myers Bartlett
MC: Graham Nunn
SATURDAY Shopfront Space Theatre Space
10.30am
THE INNOCENT ANIMALS
Adam Phillips
Judith Wright Tribute Session: Paul Sherman & Jena Woodhouse
MC: John Koenig

VERBAL SYMMETRY
Teone Reinthal
Susan Hawthorne
Jennifer Compton
MC: Jeremy Thompson
11.45am
TODAY IS A SOUND
Benna Zenabomb
Suzanne Jones
Jon Paul Fiorentino
MC: Jonathan Hadwen

THE OVERFLOWING SUN
Andy Jackson
Tiggy Johnson
Ross Donlon
MC: Zenobia Frost
1.30pm
DASHES IN THE ROAD
Angela Gardner
Tim Collins
Ken Babstock
MC: Deb Ralph

AIR FOR THE BIRDS
Brotherhood of the Wordless
MC: David Stavanger
2.45pm
EMBROIDERING THE LINGO
Pam Schindler
Les Wicks
Angel Kosch
MC: Michael Cohen

BENT FICTIONS
Kelly-Lee Hickey
Luke Beesley
Jeremy Balius
MC: Zenobia Frost
4.00pm
SWIMMING TOWARDS THE LIGHT
Martin Langford
Jean Kent
Andrew Burke
MC: Deb Ralph

THE HYSTERICAL TYPEWRITER
Broken Records Collective
a.rawlings
MC: Nerissa Rowan
6.00pm
NEONBLISTERS
Graham Nunn w/ Sheish Money & Namedropper + Cindy Keong
Emily XYZ & Myers Bartlett
MC: Jonathan Hadwen
8.00pm
A MILLION BRIGHT THINGS
A short set from every bright thing on the 2010 program + a feature set from August Kleinzahler
MC: Graham Nunn
SUNDAY Shopfront Space Theatre Space
11.00am
UQP LAUNCH
The launch of An Absence of Saints by Rosanna Licari

BEGGARS IN THE CHURCHYARD
THE QPF 2010 OPEN MIC SESSION
MC: John Koenig and Graham Nunn
12.15pm
THE PIANO THAT COLLECTS FINGERS
Madrigal Maladies
Ross Donlon
Luke Beesley
MC: Jeremy Thompson

THE LANGUAGE OF PASSPORT
a.rawlings
Jon Paul Fiorentino
Ken Babstock
MC: Deb Ralph
2.00pm
CONFESSIONAL CURSIVE
Kelly-Lee Hickey
Alan Jefferies
Jeremy Balius
MC: Graham Nunn

DREAMING BACKWARDS
Jonathan Hadwen
Andrew Taylor
Susan Hawthorne
MC: Fiona Privitera
3.15pm
DIN OF SOFT VOICES
Les Wicks
Bruce Dawe
MC: Jonathan Hadwen

YELLING FOR OUR SOULS
Nathan Shepherdson & David Stavanger
Andy Jackson
MC: Graham Nunn
5.00pm
BRING DOWN THE SKY
Tiggy Johnson
Jennifer Compton
Andrew Burke
MC: Michael Cohen

THE WRONG END OF THE KALEIDOSCOPE
QPF Filmmakers Challenge award and showcase
MC: Judges
7:00pm
THE LAST DROP OF MOONSHINE
Jean Kent
Andrew Taylor
Kelly-Lee Hickey
a.rawlings
Ross Donlon
Martin Langford
Andy Jackson
Emily XYZ & Myers Bartlett
MC: The QPF Team

Laurie Clancy, one of Australia’s most influential and award-winning authors, who published 57 short stories, four novels, four books of literary criticism and innumerable reviews and literary essays, has died of cancer at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre.

Fittingly, he chose to write the eulogy for his funeral. It began by noting that while he had recently attended numerous funerals, he had never been “the guest of honour” until now. As such, he wrote, he wanted to avoid a typical funeral, in which the recently deceased “never gets to speak for himself or gets to hear all the beautiful lies that people tell about him”. In classic Clancy style, his eulogy was witty, heartfelt and reflective, and captured his two great loves: his family and writing.

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Most of us have accepted ‘beach’ as a summer kigo. However, participants in the winter ginko of the Cloudcatchers (Far North Coast of NSW) were obliged to re-think that concept, as it was held on Thursday 22 July at Shelly Beach, East Ballina.

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I suppose, in the end, what we have is a failure to adjust our expectations to the new conditions under which we write poetry, and write about poetry. When the dissemination of poems and commentary was limited by the technology of print, relatively few people were able to disseminate their work, and they could imagine that the audience for what they had to say was larger than the number of other publishing writers. Now everyone with a laptop can get their work out there, but getting it noticed amid the crowd is an issue.

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There are (obviously) no comment boxes here at Isola di Rifiuti. I write publicly in order to write, to work out a daily regimen of attending to things (weather, scents, the odd verbal-succors of my mopishness, &c.), to make a record of what reading I do. I am hardly a social person. (The social bedlam of the networking gizmos registers naught here. I doubt that twit’d zingers and / or a marketeer’s gabble of one-upmanship a literature makes. I defriend’d my own smart-alecky self long ago.) My sense of audience is inchoate, larval, unsustain’d, shifting. I argue with what seems arguable or reprehensible (and I fully expect any counter-arguments’ll find a place without my assistance). I praise what pleases me. I am convinced that that “highly suspect activity” (Ashbery call’d it) of amusing oneself is, again, in terribly short supply, or, (as they say) “no longer valorized.” So it goes.

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I think personality is found in poetry. I look for it locally, and try to ‘solve’ myself. There’s something generally applicable too – people work like this. We all want to talk about our experiences. We’re passively theorising, making stabs at solving the boring old existence riddle. This is what people will maybe get from reading my work. They may connect. But only sometimes. (Interestingly Bantick recently labelled my poem ‘forest hill’, ‘an abortive attempt at self indulgence’. Really. I thought I had nailed the self indulgent aspect.)

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We ‘d therefore like to invite you to download the issue and start remixing. You don’t need two turntables or a microphone, just a text editing programme and sense of creativity. You can edit and re-arrange the poems in any way you see fit.

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On Monday, it was announced Dublin has been designated a Unesco City of Literature, joining the cities of Edinburgh in Scotland, Iowa in the United States and Melbourne in Australia.

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Tasmania-based calligrapher Gemma Black knows the evocative power of the pen. When the national apology to the Stolen Generations was delivered by then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2008, Black was the Federal Government’s official calligrapher, responsible for its visitor books for foreign heads of state. Convinced that the apology deserved special attention, Black lobbied to create a handwritten version, the result of which is on permanent display in Parliament House. Written on vellum, the traditionally used calf skin parchment which lasts hundreds of years, the document “is there for future generations to see what we did”.

Despite her love for handwriting she says, surprisingly, that she doesn’t fret about its decline, even though parents often approach her for advice on their children’s lagging skills. “We will always have people like me who are interested in handwriting … but it’s been a means to an end in a certain period of time and tools are changing,” says Black. “I don’t believe I should be out there fighting for it.” She points out that we’re tapping into the rich history of lettering every time we punch out a sentence on our keyboards: “3000 years of history goes into every letter we type.” Just as she can trace the links from 10th-century English manuscripts to the origins of the Times New Roman font many of us use every day, she predicts writing will keep evolving, perhaps to a future in which handwriting is an art practised by a specialist few, as it was centuries ago.

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Who knows how the Booker jury operated this time? It’s interesting to speculate. Each year one hears some judge or other protest his/her devout belief in “literary merit”, but the smell of many shortlists is too often of compromise, cowardice and crowd-pleasing. And to introduce an old note of dissent, the real problem with Booker in an age of global fiction based on the Anglo-American tradition is its absurd omission of American writing. This looked odd when the prize was set up in 1969. Now it seems bonkers.

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Poetry criticism seems to be in a perpetual state of crisis. It’s not just that critics cannot agree on which poets or kinds of poetry are the best, but that poetry critics often have no common ground. They do not share the same aesthetic values, they cannot agree on common approaches. Critical writing about other art forms—say, visual art—is, or has been, in a similar position, but I’m not sure that art critics are constantly publicly worrying (in journals, on blogs and in comment fields) about art criticism. If they are, then maybe all critics (at least those who aren’t paid) should listen to Elvis Costello: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.”

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The success of Ian McEwan – sometimes cited these days as Britain’s leading novelist – totally baffles me. I recall him being held up as a model for me as a young writer in the 1970s. McEwan, then labelled “most promising” British writer, had a short story published in Transatlantic Review, and a year or two later I had one in there too; then he had a story in American Review, so that was the one to aim at.

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…………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Interesting viewpoint. Much as I respect Ken and his place in UK poetry and publishing, I disagree with regards McEwan … though I must confess, I’ve only read one of his books ['Saturday']. Intend seeking out his most recent ['Solar' ... which incidentally is getting some bad press, I hear]. Each to his own.
Ralph

You are invited to consider the theme imaginatively, broadly, and figuratively.

Submissions close: Friday October 22

Submissions should be emailed to the editor at islet.online@utas.edu.au with ‘summer issue submission’ in the subject line.

All of Islet’s standard submission guidelines still apply, including length – poetry must be under 25 lines, reviews under 400 words, and fiction under 600 words.

Please note that non-themed submissions will continue to be received for future issues.

See the submissions page of the website (http://www.islet.com.au/submissions) for pay rates and further details.

Islet is funded by Arts Tasmania and the Australia Council, and supported by the University of Tasmania.

If you want to subvert the Chinese government these days, try writing a poem.

Given the hypervigilance of China’s censors, you’d have thought that dissenting poets would be frog-marched to the nearest labor reform camp in the time that it takes to declaim a heptasyllabic pentameter. But the apparatchiks have apparently taken their eye off the ball.

“Poetry is one of the freest media in China, but the West doesn’t know it,” says Ouyang Yu, the Chinese-Australian poet, author, translator and editor. “The authorities have turned a blind eye because Chinese society is increasingly focused on the economy. This is the best time for Chinese poets to flourish.” Although Ouyang’s verse is preoccupied with questions of identity and the migrant experience, it too is salted with the language of freedom and struggle. “Your reality is iron bars/ The shadows of the sun ten thousand miles away,” he writes in “The Wanderer.” In another poem, “Listening to the 80-year-old telling me a story,” he writes in the voice of a survivor of communist purges: “I had to be extremely careful in all those political campaigns …/ So many of my friends had died …’

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A novel about “modern Australia as an exercise in liberalism” has made the first cut for the world’s most discussed literary prize.

Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap, a story told from multiple perspectives about a child slapped at a barbecue (and everyone’s opinions about what that slap means), is on the long list of this year’s Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

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Chris Wallace-Crabbe will deliver the Judith Wright Memorial Lecture.

Guests this year:

Emily Ballou
John Bennett
Judith Beveridge
David Brooks
Michelle Cahill
Bonny Cassidy
Michelle Dicinoski
B. R. Dionysius
Lucy Dougan
Stephen Edgar
Steve Evans
Michael Farrell
Marcelle Freiman
Robert Gray
Martin Harrison
L. K. Holt
Yvette Holt
Jill Jones
Paul Magee
Iggy McGovern
Liz Macnamara
David Malouf
Angela Rockel
Candy Royalle
Zhang Shaoyang
Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Ania Walwicz
Ouyang Yu

They are waiting in local cafes to compose your letters either with the modest pen and paper, the good old fashioned manual typewriter or maybe even a feather quill, ink and sealing wax.

Presented by:
City Prom, and the Tasmanian Writers’ Centre
Venues:
Mode Cafe, Shop 1 Centreway Arcade, 82 Brisbane Street
Rossilli Cafe, 41 George Street
This Cafe, 91 George Street*
Edge Cafe, 148a Brisbane Street

Dates/times:
Thursday 26th August – Saturday 28th August, 11am – 4pm
* Also open Sunday 29th August, 11am – 4pm

Tickets:
Free event

The first Sunday of the month is sacred in these waters… nothing (or let’s say next to nothing) comes between this Lost Shark and SpeedPoets. But the first Sunday in August is even a little more special than usual, as SpeedPoets, Brisbane’s longest running poety/spoken word event is teaming up with one of this country’s finest literary journals, Page Seventeen to offer one local writer the chance to have their work published in issue #8 as well as win a pretty cool little book package including back issues of Page Seventeen and a range of other quality journals and poetry collections.

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The piece starts inauspiciously, though:

The word is douche bag. Douche space bag. People will insist that it’s one closed-up word—douchebag—but they are wrong.

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A well-dressed woman with well-dressed vowels sits in a hotel lobby and recounts the day she dropped a rhetorical bomb at an anti-Vietnam War rally.
A crowd had gathered at Sydney University and the woman, then just 20, strode to the podium. Her hands trembled; securing a spot as a female speaker had been a tough negotiation. But she had something potent to say to the men assembled in this place in 1970.
”… I’m told ad infinitum that I’m a woman, I’m a second-class citizen, and I should shut up right now because my mind’s between my legs. I say you think with your pricks …”

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Anthologies have always been risky propositions, endangered species like their bastard cousins, the so-called “little magazines” that survive on the smell of a Literature Board grant and the saintly doggedness of the very few.

Now that the internet is messing with our reading habits so that we (supposedly) can’t focus on long novels like we used to, maybe our attenuated attention spans and need for novelty will be a good thing for anthologies such as these – short texts by various hands with a vaguely unifying theme.

In the case of Wordlines, that theme is purely personal: these stories were chosen by Hilary McPhee. At the vanguard of literary publishing since the glory days of McPhee Gribble in the 1970s and 80s, she had a stint as chairwoman of the Australia Council in the 1990s and was briefly editor of the dearly departed online news site NewMatilda.com.

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By this point in my life I’ve listened — as peer, as old friend, and now as Senior Guy Who’s Been Through It All; in faculty lounge, in office, at back-yard barbecue, on barstool, by Skype, — to a lot of junior faculty cris du coer from people at lots of different institutions, and the people who suffer the most seem to be those who look on the whole process as a set of hoops one is commanded to jump through. They treat everything as a means to the end of tenure, trying to get on the right committees to get noticed, trying all kinds of tricks to change their teaching (and sometimes their grading) habits so as to get higher evaluation numbers, and they try to write the sort of thing that will get published in the kind of journal they think will impress the powers-that-be. I get it: the job is, after all, on the line. But there’s a way in which all this is to get things backwards. The idea, after all, is to do one’s job and then stand back while others assess it, not to try to do one’s job by what one imagines will be the criteria of assessment. To go about it otherwise is to alienate yourself from the work that you love, and to end up like one of those embittered kvetches one sees writing so often in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Of course stepping back and just doing what you do — writing things that come out of who you are, allowing yourself to grow unselfconsciously into teaching better — doesn’t come easily. You’ve got to find some way to be inner-directed, rather than governed by the norms of those around you. And that’s where Byron (or, rather, the Byron of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage) comes in.

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When: 5:30pm, Wednesday August 11th
Where: The Hobart Bookshop, 22 Salamanca Square

All welcome to this free event.

The Hobart Bookshop
22 Salamanca Square
Hobart Tasmania 7000
P 03 6223 1803 . F 03 6223 1804
hobooks at ozemail.com.au

Poets writing in English have six centuries’ worth of forms at their disposal. During the Renaissance, Shakespeare and Milton made blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) the standard mode for narrative and dramatic verse, while in the eighteenth century Dryden and Pope preferred the urbane rhythms of the heroic couplet. Then there are the adopted forms, not quite domesticated from their French or Italian originals: rhyme royal, sestinas, triolets. Recently, American poets have become fond of the pantoum, an originally Malay form that involves a cyclical repetition of lines. But none of these is as vigorous, even in the generally lawless and anti-formal world of contemporary American poetry, as that most conventional and classical of forms, the sonnet.

The Art of the Sonnet, an innovative and intelligent new anthology edited by the poet and critic Stephen Burt, recently tenured as professor of English at Harvard, and David Mikics, professor of Eng-lish at the University of Houston, is designed to showcase the sonnet’s surprising endurance. Of the 100 sonnets in the anthology, 17 were published since 1990, while the sixteenth century—usually considered the golden age of the sonnet sequence—is represented by just eight selections.

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Not too long ago, I could think of no good reason that writers shouldn’t blog. At least, not writers who were interested in actual contact with their readers and with other writers – who sought many of the most immediate benefits of publication without having to go through the filter of an actual publisher. But earlier this year Harriet, the blog administered by the Poetry Foundation, announced that it was discontinuing its old format–inviting a diverse group of poets on a rotating basis to blog whatever was on their minds–becoming instead a sort of poetry news aggregator, the 1010 WINS of Parnassus. Part of their reasoning behind this move was that all the “action” in poetry commentary was now taking place on Facebook and Twitter. The blog, they strongly implied, was dead.

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The prize is open internationally and will award 10,000 pounds to the writer of the best portfolio of poetry submitted. The competition is open to writers aged 16 or over, there is no upper age limit. Entry fee is 15 pounds.

Manchester Writing Competition website :

I can’t let the death last week of Australian writer Jessica Anderson go unremarked. Why? Because although she twice won the Miles Franklin Award (1978 and 1980) and her novel Tirra Lirra by the River has been on high school reading lists, Anderson was for most of her long life marginalised, a misfit, a sensitive and creative woman in 20th century Australia. And she writes about similarly marginalised people. She said: ‘I was very much, and always have been, preoccupied with people who are strangers in their society.’

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Join Sarah in conversation with radio personality Paige Turner, followed by readings from her recent collection, Grass Notes.

Monday 19th July, 6pm.

RSVP to rsvp at fullersbookshop.com.au

I’m (occasionally) helping a Tanzanian organization called Femina. Femina creates and distributes magazines about gender, sexuality and HIV.

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Further to my last post about “non-words”, I have to say that I, like Stan Carey, am a big fan of Wordnik. This is an online dictionary that takes the view that a word is any collection of letters that someone somewhere has used, and gives it its own page, where you can find both accepted dictionary definitions (if they exist) and examples of use, culled automatically from the internet and a corpus of books. Purists might be horrified, but Wordnik not only shows that a lot of the words we think aren’t words in fact have a fine pedigree (such as orientate); it provides a wonderful view of what a living, breathing thing the English language is.

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Then there are the notable omissions. I’m sure others will know their way round the other shortlists better than me, but on the Fiction shortlist, it’s interesting to note the judges have omitted both Peter Temple’s Truth, which won the Miles Franklin Award only a couple of weeks ago, and Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America.

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[unmentioned omissions might also include poetry...]
Ralph

Just reminding everyone the mind-winter gig is on next Monday upstairs @ The Royal Oak.

Due to musical commitments, I will not be able to make this one, but I will catch up in August.

Have a great night – oh – the topic is Mental As Anything – make of it what you will!

Poetically,

steve dAvis

It set me to thinking about paradise, again not the next-life kind. I have ceased to ponder a great deal what the church calls “eternal life,” honestly not so much piously leaving it in God’s hands as realizing that such existence is beyond my imagination, let alone control. I think life continues beyond this one, but I know it continues here until it doesn’t. That is a strong argument for following all the signs to paradise.

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‘Realising that such existence is beyond my imagination’ is pretty much as I’d call it too. Reminds me of a question I put to Lyn Reeves, her response to novelist Anthony Burgess’ remark that we don’t think much about death except as a very abstract stranger who will eventually come into our lives.

‘… on the whole I’d say that it’s a healthy approach, not thinking too much about death,’ she replied. ‘We are too busy living, enjoying being alive. Knowing that we are going to die can be an incentive to live more fully. But how can death be any more than an abstract notion until it becomes real for us?’

Ralph

Philip Hammial

Water

Die as much as you want. An inch
at a time or all at once, it doesn’t matter. Your conviction
that the new Human Tissue Bill will somehow protect you
is a delusion. Take it from me, I know. It’s
not for nothing that I’ve been an envoy to the Mahdi
for the past two years. Here to save us
from ourselves, his army’s contribution
to our once-beautiful city is, according
to a recent poll, extremely disappointing, that
contribution having been, to date, one point two
million black parasols, one
for every male citizen. If only
it would rain. What a sight for sore eyes
it would be to watch those parasols blossoming
up & down the length of the Avenue Foch. Fat
chance. The drought
is here to stay. It’s only a matter of time
before we pack our bags and head inland
to the great fresh water sea that supposedly covers
the heart of our continent. A rumour? Do you
know anyone who has actually seen it? I don’t. Harry Kline
in his seminal work, Paradise Now, describes that sea
in detail – abundant with fish, barges poled by djinns
who are delighted to attend to your every need, etc. But
is Harry to be believed? What if he’s sold out, become
another of the Mahdi’s innumerable stooges? Considering
how quickly his book rose (was pushed) to the top
of the best-seller list, I’d say he probably is. All
things considered, if I were you
I’d do it all at once.

………………………………………………………………………………………….

[Robert Archambeau, from 'Samizdat Blog', July 13th 2010]:

So the elder Calders were very much parts of what we think of as the Victorian way of thinking about art. The grand old critic Richard Altick gives a good, brief summary of this way of thinking when he writes (in Victorian People and Ideas:

The age’s criteria of acceptable art are usually summed up in the term ‘moral aesthetic.’ The idea that art should teach and inspire as well as give pleasure was not new; it was, indeed, older than Horace’s dulce et utile. But seldom had it been as established as it was in this period…. Poetry and painting supplemented the pulpit if they did not actually replace it. The early and mid Victorian emphasis was thus upon theme rather than expression, upon intention and substance rather than technique. The more pleasing a style was, the better; but style should never be so pleasing as to distract attention from content.

This is art at the service of morality — more specifically, it is art at at the service of paraphrasable, specific moral messages. It certainly isn’t the autonomy of art for it’s own sake: rather, it’s the heteronomy of art for the sake of something else (the moral message). But things, as I mentioned, had started to change, even as the elder Calders were scrubbing the pigeon shit off their newly-unveiled statues of generals. Aestheticism, and later some strands of modernism, were (for hugely complicated social reasons) freeing art to be for itself, taking the emphasis off message, and allowing the emphasis to settle on form. So the modernist tradition that young Alexander Calder, the Calder of the mobiles, found when he went to Paris as a young man was all about form, and this made all the difference.

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Emma Rooksby on the inaugural Fremantle Poetry Month
The evening of Thursday July 8 was cold and blustery with intermittent heavy rain, just the sort of night when you’d want to stay at home, snuggled up with a good book and a hot drink. And yet, some 130 people made their way to the Fremantle Arts Centre, to celebrate Fremantle Poetry Month and the launch of three new volumes of poetry by Fremantle Press.

As one of the three new poets whose joint volume (New Poets) was being launched that night, I’d spent my day preparing and wondering what the rotten weather would do for the size of our audience. It did extract some collateral damage: Tracy Ryan, who worked with us to edit the collections in New Poets, couldn’t be there, due to impassably bad roads between Toodyay and Perth.

But the old museum hall in the Arts Centre was full to overflowing as RTRfm’s Peter Barr stepped up to open the event. Brad Pettitt, Mayor of Fremantle, spoke of his pleasure at seeing Fremantle Poetry Month come to fruition. Then Georgia Richter, poetry editor at Fremantle Press, who together with Tracy and the Press’s editor Wendy Jenkins had chosen the poets for New Poets, shared a message from Tracy with the audience, so we knew she was there in spirit, if not in person.

The new poets, Scott-Patrick Mitchell, J.P. Quinton and myself, each read a couple of poems from our new book; as a first-time reader in public, I was amazed and impressed at the attention with which the audience listened to and appreciated the works. Then two established poets, Caroline Caddy and John Mateer, came to the stage to read from their new collections. Caroline, publishing her eighth collection, Burning Bright, with Fremantle Press, read a poem, both funny and serious, to would-be olive growers, while John Mateer shared a moving piece about a boy who had drowned at Cottesloe beach, from his new collection The West.

A brief intermission included a book signing for the new volumes, and I think we were all overwhelmed at the number of people who’d bought one, two, or even all three new books and wanted authors’ signatures in them!

The second part of the evening included performances by poets Janet Jackson, Nandi Chinna and Wendy Jenkins, plus music from Xave Brown, Amber Fresh and Lil Leonie Lionheart.

Fremantle Press is a long-time supporter of Western Australian poetry. That so many people braved the weather and turned out to this event is testament to a great interest in contemporary poetry, and to the amazing work of everyone at Fremantle Press.

Emma Rooksby, poet.

All welcome to this free event.

Where: The Hobart Bookshop
When: Thursday July 29th, 5:30pm

The Hobart Bookshop
22 Salamanca Square
Hobart Tasmania 7000
P 03 6223 1803 . F 03 6223 1804

A tale of young love, inhumanity and racism has won Western Australian writer Craig Silvey two top accolades.

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There’s an empty slot on the bookshelf between your pristine copies of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and Granta.

You’d be forgiven for believing, what with all the nay-saying surrounding the publishing industry, that the best use for the space is as a cubby hole for your shiny new iPad. Think again. Stemming from the edgiest enclaves of the book-loving universe, a glut of new literary magazines is giving a home to freshman writing and established prose. From the cool, rock’n'roll aesthetic of Pen Pusher, to the DIY origins of Litro and the fizzing poetry-illustration formula of Popshot, bookworms are corkscrewing into virgin habitats everywhere.

“There has been a great resurgence in magazines looking at the same literary areas,” says Craig Taylor, author and editor of Five Dials, launched by Hamish Hamilton in June 2008 to showcase short fiction, essays, letters, poetry and reportage. While the magazine is distributed via email, its founders intend it to be flexibly consumed – either printed out or viewed electronically. “As conventional magazines are dying out, or chasing celebrity, there’s an excellent little gap in the market,” continues Taylor. “I went to NatWest the other day and their in-house magazine had the same celebrities on the cover as all of the weekend colour supplements. I remember standing there and thinking, ‘thank God I don’t have to be the same as everyone else, schmooze the PRs, play the game’. It’s a great time to be doing something different.”

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I think a large proportion of the general public assumes poetry is boring,” Toronto poet Katherine Leyton says. “That, or they’re afraid of it.” She’s sitting in Plaza Flamingo restaurant on College Street, where an hour earlier Spain’s 2-0 World Cup victory over Honduras prompted the herd of red jerseys congregated around TV screens inside to flood out onto the sunny sidewalk. When they do, Leyton is waiting, camera in hand. She snags a young woman who announces herself as Soledad. “Will you read this poem for my poetry blog?” Leyton asks. The girl looks wary for a moment, but then smiles and nods. Reading from a sheet of paper, Soledad happily recites a Lorca poem in its original Spanish. When she’s done, she grabs her jersey, tilts her head and grins: “¡ Vamos Espana!”

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Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia is ambitious. This anthology reads as a sample of more to come, rather than a clear achievement of the sizable task that it sets out in its introduction. Over There is not, as the title might initially suggest, a collection of travel poems, nor is it a comparison of different postcolonial reflections arising from Singapore and Australia. It does contain infrequent travel writing poems, as well as comparative or postcolonial works, but these do not in any way dominate the anthology. What initially appears to characterise Over There is not a distinctly international or culturally comparative flavour, but rather the absence of these tropes. Over There is focused on illustrating the range of experiences – cultural, linguistic, political, just to name a few – rather than drawing forced conclusions about the similarities between Singapore and Australia.

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Acclaimed Irish novelist Colm Tóibín was recently in Australia for the Sydney Writers Festival as well as events in Melbourne, including one for the Wheeler Centre. I caught up with Tóibín at his Melbourne hotel to ask him some questions about writing and his latest novel Brooklyn, which I recently had the pleasure of reading.

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And while she may be unknown to some of you, don’t keep it that way… as just hours ago Emily XYZ touched down on Australian shores to commence her 3-month residency here in Brisbane. To help out, the good folk at QLD Poetry Festival and QLD Writers Centre have planned a stack of ways for you all to get to know Emily. Here’s some of the great opportunities on offer:

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Where: Upstairs at the Claremont Hotel, Perth (cnr Bayview Tce and Gugeri St)

Entry: $15, which includes a free copy of dotdotdash Issue 4: ‘Antimatter’

dotdotdash is celebrating the release of it’s fourth issue! The latest edition, themed Antimatter, features works from nationally acclaimed writers such as A.S. Patric, Peter Macrow and B.R. Dionysius; international artist Robert McGowan, up-and-coming local talents Bo Wong and Tessa Maloney, as well as interviews with Alisa Krasnostein, manager of the Aurealis Award-winning Twelfth Planet Press; Stephen Dedman, owner of Fantastic Planet bookstore; and K.A. Bedford, author of Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait.

Our launch party is hosted by the amazing Tomas Ford and the night features live music from Sonpsilo Circus and Shock Octopus, plus spoken word performances from Scott-Patrick Mitchell, Vivienne Glance, Annamaria Weldon and Brisbane poet B.R. Dionysius. There will also be a special appearance from the Perth Zine Collective and Bo Ra, the dexterous seamstress who will create little furry monsters on request.

There will also be costumes! Dressing up in full Speculative Fiction garb (whether fantasy, sci-fi or horror) gets you $5 off the door price.

All spoken word performances will be recorded for potential inclusion in our upcoming sixth issue, Jukebox. Jukebox will be released with a CD of local music and spoken word in collaboration with Spaceship News. If you are interested in performing spoken word on the night, please contact editor at dotdotdash.org before Thursday 1 July.

Made of matter,

The dotdotdash crew
www.fremantlepress.com.au

Most of the mainline reviews of Robert McCrum’s Globish – of which there have been so many so fast that I am in awe of his publicity people — are missing what is fundamentally wrong with the book. Herewith one linguist’s take on this peculiar book, within which all evaluators seem to perceive a certain fuzziness, but few are catching that it is based on an outright error of reasoning and analysis – as well as an infelicitous volume of downright flubs.
McCrum starts with the well-known fact that English is now the world’s de facto universal language. Some months ago I spent a week in Papua New Guinea (long story), and found myself for the first time in a situation where English was genuinely of no use beyond hotel counters and university folk. The fact that I could have my first experience of this kind as a relatively well-travelled person of 44, and only in as distant and isolated a location as New Guinea, is graphic indication that the old days are gone. Berlitz books used to stage dialogues where Mr. Smith has to order food in German if he goes to Berlin – that’s now antique; the hotel clerk often speaks English better than Mr. Smith nowawdays. English is everywhere – or, closer to it every year.

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Many will extol the benefits of spending the summer in the city. They will tell you of all the wonderful events, many free, how much less crowded things are, and how tickets for events are more easily available since many New Yorkers are away. This is all true. But a long wait on a subway platform or a walk in the blistering heat amid concrete and garbage will quickly reveal why so many are away and you have the “city to yourself.”
I was really not very enthused about trekking all the way to 236 East 3rd Street between Avenue B and C in this type of heat and humidity to go to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe where Urban Word NYC was sponsoring the Regional Teen Poetry Slam. Asegment about this event had appeared that Sunday morning on TV. The host, an older white man was extremely effusive about a young person’s poetry who was part of the event. He read some of his work. I was impressed.

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It’s a long time since the Art-Student and I have been to a Gleebooks event. Tonight we went to a discussion of a book (pic on the left leaves off the first two letters of its name) about Kevin Rudd’s handling of the Australian branch of the Global Financial Crisis. As we arrived the A-S observed that it was a different crowd – men were wearing ties, and women were coiffed. That plus the fact that Malcolm Turnbull was chairing the discussion should have warned us to sit next to the aisle instead of right against the wall where early exit was virtually impossible.

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Where: The Hobart Bookshop
When: Thursday July 15th, 5:30pm

All welcome to this free event.

I use Facebook in my capacity as a literary magazine publisher, too. In fact, that’s really what drew me back to the site, after my initial disgusted attempt to quit. I like the way social networks like Facebook can put writers and editors on more of an equal footing, and far from increasing cliquishness as some suggest, now these collegial conversations about life and literature are more or less public, and almost anyone who cares to can join in. Based on our experience at qarrtsiluni, I’d say it’s actually easier to reject work from people you know than from strangers, because you’re more likely to be able to find the right words, professional but empathetic. And since anyone can be an editor and publisher now, there’s a much greater sense that we’re all in this together. Our Facebook group page turns out to be a convenient way to run an email list, less restrictive than Gmail, though I do resent the fact that those of us who did the proper, social thing and set up group pages for our organizations have been penalized: you have to put the brand front and center and create a fan page in order show up in people’s feeds.

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Last Tuesday Tansy Rayner Roberts came in to the studio. She is author of a number of books, most recently Power and Majesty which is the first of three in the Creature Court Series (Harper Voyager, 2010). Tansy is a Doctor of Classics, a mother, a prodigy, somewhat of a cause celebre when she was first published at age 19 and she makes for a good interviewee with her knowledge of the writing, the world and her passion for the Romans.

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In college I developed a crush on Nathaniel Hawthorne. I not only liked his books, I liked his looks, too, at least as he appeared in a painting at the Essex Institute in Salem, Massachusetts. Nathaniel_Hawthorne

I used to take regular sojourns to see it. When people visited from California I was sure to take them to Salem so that I could tour the House of Seven Gables again and sit in its gardens–as I recall the docents’ spiel mentioned him and his wife which was very romantic to me as well–and then we’d walk over to the Essex Institute to see the painting. (I don’t think I told them why; it was a place to visit anyway.) When I saw his visage I felt full of happiness and all was right with the world.

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For the past few years, I’ve been watching the steady progress of the insult douchebag, the latest reminder that our collective choice of language taboos is nothing if not arbitrary. Still, I was surprised when a good friend told me the other day that her 12-year-old son had declared it “the second-worst swear I know.”

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I haven’t been reading much poetry lately, with the exception of Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony Volume 1: The United States (1885-1915) and published by New Directions in 1965, a book he wrote after reading endless court reports on crime.

I have felt guilty, or at least irresponsible, even though I know that reading leads to writing, and that once reading ends, my writing evaporates.

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After a long struggle, French has more or less surrendered to English, here in the European Union quarter of Brussels. The reason is simple enough: enlargement of the EU, first to take in Sweden and Finland in 1995, and then the Big Bang enlargement of 2004 and 2007 that took in 10 ex-communist states from the Baltic to Bulgaria, plus the former British possessions of Malta and Cyprus.

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Poetry was invented in the early 18th Century, somewhere in England. It is not known who invented poetry, though it is known that John Milton did NOT. William Shakespeare cannot receive credit for inventing poetry either, even though his stuff looks like poetry. Remain cautious when trying to determine if certain literary productions are poetry. Sonneteers, poetasters, and the like will try to fool you every time.

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Fullers Bookshop, Hobart
Sunday 27th June 2pm

A couple of weeks ago the poet Ted Mathys gave a well received talk about ecocriticism and poetry at the Poet’s House. In one strand of his complex argument he implies that ecocriticism is not just interested in ecological imagery or subject matter. He examines the ways in which several poets conceptualize our planet, and how images such as the Earth taken from outer space fundamentally altered our mental and ethical relationship with Earth. In other words, a nature poem can no longer maintain an innocent stance toward its subject matter.

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What makes a nation adopt a new script? İlker Aytürk, a political scientist with a penchant for the history of language at Ankara’s Bilkent University, tackles this question in a new paper in the Journal of World History (abstract only). The answer, he concludes, is something he calls “script charisma”.

The most famous case of script change is, of course, Turkey’s dropping of the Arabic alphabet for the Roman one in 1928. But Roman script, previously limited to countries that had embraced Western Christianity, made some other gains in the 19th and 20th centuries too. It was adopted by the Romanians in 1860, then imposed by colonial France on the Vietnamese. Along with Turkey, the Azeris, Uzbeks, Yakuts and Crimean Tatars took it up in the late 1920s in a short-lived attempt at Turco-Tataric unity, the last three of them being later forced back to Cyrillic under Stalin.

But what few people (certainly not I) remember is that the Jews in early 20th-century Palestine dallied with romanising Hebrew too.

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Six years ago, when it began, I was pretty dismissive of New Matilda. It wasn’t that I didn’t think there was a place for a left-of-centre online magazine, but the early issues always seemed depressingly worthy to me. Whether I’d make the same judgement now I don’t know; what I do know is that over the last couple of years the magazine has really come into its own. Certainly if one wanted a demonstration of the way in which new media now consistently outclasses the old in terms of analysis and commentary, you couldn’t find a better example than Ben Eltham, a writer whose pieces have been distinguished by their clarity, intelligence and grasp of detail for some time. I’d say something similar about Jason Wilson, whose astringent commentary on media and politics has grown steadily sharper over the last couple of years.

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We were in the Ecuadoran rain forest. This was a few years ago. We had flown from a town called Shell — named poetically for the oil company — deep into the heart of the forest on a tiny plane. My younger son held a crate of eggs in his lap. I sat on top of the vegetables. We were flying in with our food. We landed on a dirt airstrip and then canoed down a river to a lodge. Each day, we took long, sweaty hikes through the dense growth of trees and plants or we rowed down a river to look at parrot licks and spy on miraculously colored birds high up in the trees. At night, I lay in bed under the mosquito net, listening to the symphony of bird and monkey calls and reading a book called “Gould’s Book of Fish” by Richard Flanagan. I wasn’t sure why I had chosen to bring this book along. When I travel, I usually try to read a book about the country I’m in or at least by one of the country’s authors as a way of getting to know the place I’ve come to. But a friend had recommended the book to me with such vehemence that I was eager to read it right away. I knew nothing about it other than that Flanagan hails from Tasmania and that the book had an unusual physical dimension that made it interesting to hold. Both things gave me the sense of embarking on an exotic journey — exactly the kind of feeling I love when starting to read something new. Reading is like travel in that way; it offers the possibility that you might lose your sense of yourself in a strange environment, that quotidian obligations will no longer hold, that you will be someplace where no one will know your name and where, without the encumbrances of identity, you might have the possibility of really seeing.

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Author Karl (CK) Stead has apologised for quoting without permission from Janet Frame’s work in his just-released memoir, even though he believes he was well within his rights to publish what he did.

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The Fellowship is worth $5000.

Media release, Australian Book Review

Friends often ask why my reviews aren’t more evaluative. They see the central question that a critic faces as being: Is this any good? Or, where does this fit on some scale of quality? I’ve never thought this was a major question when it came to reading poetry, though I know that, in a practical sense, it can be an important question for readers of reviews. You know the kind of thing: I only have so many dollars to spend or so many precious hours free, please tell me what to spend them on. I’m guilty of this myself in fields where I’m an outsider. As part of an attempt to be more au fait with the music of the last century, I read a lot of critical material but the most useful was a collection of reviews by the late Alan Rich which contained as an appendix (accompanied, I seem to remember, by exactly the kind of moaning that I’m producing now) his list of the hundred best works of the twentieth century. At a practical level that was terrific because you could say: here are a hundred works to build my listening around.

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The fact is that I am sympathetic to the lot of literary editors, whom I think are generally good people in fairly thankless jobs – because, alas, I can’t really imagine the scenario under which anyone would thank a literary editor. By the same token, while almost everything about the way in which we write in newspapers has changed over the time I’ve been in them, review pages basically look the same – just smaller. You get reviews. You get interviews with authors. Ho-hum. It’s not very vibrant, or engaging. I will always read books pages, I imagine, but I’m bound to say that I struggle to find much original thinking on them; nor, I fear, are they gaining many new readers.

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This week’s New Yorker contains a fascinating piece by Oliver Sacks on what happens when you lose the ability to read (link to summary). The condition, alexia, is usually the result of a stroke, but Dr Sacks describes how he himself suffered a temporary migrained-induced alexia while driving in New York, which made the street signs suddenly look to him like thy were written in Phoenician.

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Ours is not a philosophical age, much less an age of Stoicism. As Frank McLynn explains in his new biography of Marcus Aurelius, the last of Rome’s “five good emperors,” commander of Rome’s prolonged campaigns against the invasions of barbarian German tribes, and the last important Stoic philosopher of ancient days, our philosophers (academics) no longer profess to help the average person answer life’s great metaphysical questions. Contemporary philosophers might contemplate such abstruse problems as whether mental properties can be said to emerge from the physical processes of the universe; what the necessary and sufficient conditions are for self-interest; where the mind stops and the rest of the world begins-not, perhaps, the pressing existential questions presented by the normal course of a human life.
Beyond the realm of professional philosophy, an ever-expanding tribe of self-appointed lay philosophers profess practical strategies for worldly success: how to win friends and influence, how not to sweat the small stuff, how to free ourselves from shyness, anxiety, phobias, poverty, extra pounds, how to ensnare the perfect mate, how to care for and feed a husband or be a domestic goddess. But, again, these regimes, while they might indeed make you thinner, more confident, or more productive, do not answer life’s great metaphysical questions.

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Melbourne author Peter Temple last night became the first thriller writer to take out the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Accepting the $42,000 award among a who’s who of Australian publishing at a dinner at the State Library of NSW in Sydney, Temple said: “Shock is the word.” He joked that Australia’s first Nobel laureate, Patrick White, would find it “unthinkable” that a crime writer had won the prize.

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He may, it seems, have also given one of the sport’s most enduring bits of slang. An errant pass is often followed up with an acknowledgment to teammates: “my bad”, as in, “not your fault”.

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CP: When I was invited to be a New Zealand Post Book Award judge, I was ecstatic – an official reason for indulging my favourite pastime! Of course I’ve had to rearrange some business activities, decline invitations, and ask my partner Tanya and visiting friends to help me with processing the summer flood of fruit (usually fifty to a hundred jars of this and that a week…) But I am deeply enjoying the wonderful range of books. New Zealand writing and book production are wonderful –I am delighted by the diversity and quality of entries.

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i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do

iii. If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

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‘The preoccupations here evident were, in fact, more decisive than I could then have realized. I had trusted so much to thinking, apparently, and had gained for myself such an adamant sense of what a poem could be for me, that here I must have been signaling to myself both a warning and the hope of an alternative.
Not too long after I began to try deliberately to break out of the habits described. I wrote in different states of so-called consciousness, e.g. when high, and at those times would write in pen or pencil, contrary to habit, and I would also try to avoid any immediate decision as to whether or not the effects to such writing were “good.”
. . . I also began to use notebooks, first very small ones indeed, and then larger—and I found many senses of possibility in writing began consequently to open. For one, such notebooks accumulated the writing, and they made no decisions about it—it was all there, in whatever state it occurred . . .’

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TC: And do you ever feel it’s a burden, blogging and so on, an unwelcome obligation?

NG: I guess. I mean, I’m blogging less because I started feeling like I was repeating myself. When I started, everything was new, everything was fun and exciting, and then there came a point after 7 or 8 years when I started to think, I’ve answered that question before, I’ve written that thing before, I’ve explained that concept before. At this point I started thinking that probably what I should do with the blog is just make it significantly easier for people searching it to find where I’ve told them things before, because there is no point writing it again and again and again.

TC: And what about the changing role of publishers in the book world?

NG: I feel right now as if we are at the end of something. And I am very pleased that I got in before it finished. Publishing was always predicated on the concept of the gatekeeper, and on the fact that it was expensive and difficult to get something into people’s hands. That is no longer true. We are still in a world that needs gatekeepers, but only just. When I was a young book reviewer, the early 1980s, I was reading all the science fiction and fantasy and horror that was being published in the UK during the course of the year, plus other stuff. It was perfectly readable by one person. That would be impossible today: you have gone from there to a world in which it is easier than it has ever been to get your information out there, to do your thing.

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So what’s Sanders’ game? I think, at some level too deep to have been a deliberate choice, he’s actually working in the tradition Wordsworth justified in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, and for much the same reason. Here’s the opening part of Wordsworth’s famous definition of the poet from that preface:

Taking up the subject, then, upon general grounds,
let me ask, what is meant by the word Poet? What
is a Poet? to whom does he address himself? and
what language is to be expected from him?—He is
a man speaking to men…

When I teach Wordsworth, I like to show this bit to my students, and then, after we’ve established the “one of the guys” quality of the Wordsworthian poet, follow it up with the next part of the sentence: “He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind…” Woo! Hah! There’s a 180-degree turn: the poet is one of the guys, but he’s also, you know, better and special, and has a larger soul. There’s the Romantic paradox, nor are we entirely free of it to this day.

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* The man – all 6’4 of him – is standing beside me. ‘You recommended a book for my wife…’ he waits and realises it needs more ‘… it was by a NZer…’ pause ‘….from Dunedin?’ It falls into place – it was a Mother’s Day gift for his wife – he loved the idea of crime fiction and a woman cop and a South Island setting. He bought Overkill by Vanda Symon. His wife loved it but unfortunately, she lost it before she finished it. I say Overkill is not so widely available now (print on demand I think – we could order it) but we have the other two. I give him our copy of the newspaper article about Vanda so his wife can read it (it’s been up a long time). He takes her second book too – The Ringmaster. Tells me again how much she loved the book. I tell him how much I enjoyed Vanda’s third one – Containment – the lack of blood and gore, the clever plot… He goes off happy.

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Two poems

Hole in the Ice

Drift ice in your eyes
hoarfrost in your heart

your hands
untamed sled dogs

above us
a moon poises
amid stars

target
surrounded by holes
made by darts that strayed

Patriotic Poem

The cold makes me
a lair from fear
places a pillow of
downy drift
under my head
a blanket of snow
to swaddle me in

I’d lay my ear to
the cracking of the ice
in the hope of hearing it
retreat
if I didn’t know
I’d be frozen fast

The ice lets no one go

My country
a spread deathbed
my initials stitched
on the icy linen

Gerður Kristný is one of the most active writers on the Icelandic literary scene. She is mainly known for her poetry and children’s books, but also writes novels, plays and short stories. Her poetry has been translated into languages that include German, English and Finnish. In 2007 her collection of poems, Höggstaður (A Weak Spot) was nominated for the Icelandic Literature Prize 2007.

Everywhere

On sills, ledges, shelves
there is a film of dust
my mother called it
the days falling through the air.

What if……

In emptying the deer’s brown pond eyes,
snagging the last gill breath, falling swift
feathered flight ……
we are plucking the heart from love.

Who Knows

I wonder will I dress on the morning of my death.
Will I fill the kettle, open the doors to the garden,
and turn on my tiny radio
or will I know there is only time for praying?

Libby Goodsir lives and writes in Hobart.

Today the Portuguese writer and only Portuguese language Nobel Prize Winner in Literature José Saramago died at age 87 in his residence in Lanzarote victim of old age and prolonged illness leaving us with a rich body of work of novels of philosophic reflection through which he created situations improbable and impossible as they were critical namely the bestseller Blindness that describes a country where everybody loses their sight and Death with Interruptions that explores social conflicts in a country where people stop dying.

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This conference will be about collaboration and creation, and about building new and creative relationships between newsmakers and audiences. This is an optimistic conference that will go beyond tired old debates about bloggers versus journalists to embrace and bring together all those who are using new technologies to communicate and access news.

New News 2010 will be more than just a conference. It will include keynote discussions and panel sessions – both free and ticketed events – and will be open to professional journalists and the general public. There will also be a series of workshops aimed at teaching digital skills to industry practitioners and the general public. It will also include an Expo space in which organisations and individuals using new media to advance journalism are welcome to exhibit their work.

Everyone is welcome. The conference is open to professionals, students, citizen content makers and the general community. New News 2010 will be designed to encourage community engagement, increase digital literacy, involve journalists the media industry and the general public.

MWF and PIJ are now seeking expressions of interest from all those people we don’t know about. If you have an innovative news-based blog, if you are a citizen journalist doing things the mainstream industry should know about, if you have ideas that are seeking a wider audience and want to be part of this event, then we want to hear from you.

Please contact PIJ project officer Tara Peck at tpeck at groupwise.swin.edu.au or (03) 9214 5239 or Dr Andrew Dodd at adodd at swin.edu.au or (03) 9214 8315

For Schmitt, political romantics are driven not by the quest for pseudo-religious certainty, but by the search for excitement, for the romance of what he calls ‘the occasion’. They want something, anything, to happen, so that they can feel themselves to be at the heart of things. As a result, political romantics often lead complicated double lives, moving between different versions of themselves, experimenting with alternative personae. ‘Reversing one’s position between several realities and playing them off against one another belongs to the nature of the romantic situation,’ Schmitt writes.

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During the CRB’s break in publication last year, your Antilles blogger put his head together with two writer friends — Vahni Capildeo and Anu Lakhan — and started a modest little publishing project, the literary and art journal Town.

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The biographies of most writers tend to be fascinating up to the time their writing begins in earnest. Perhaps poets of short verse have the time to get up to drunken shenanigans and commit adultery in ways that might prove interesting to read about later, but novelists—especially novelists whose books number pages in the high hundreds—are usually too busy sitting at their desks to do more than go out to dinner occasionally. The more prolific the author, the duller the life. Charles Dickens, in this as in so many things, is an exception. Despite writing fifteen long novels and producing reams of journalism and short stories, he still had time to father ten children; edit magazines; gad about the continent; tour and perform in America; devote himself to worthy charitable endeavors; appear at a stream of public banquets; write and act in amateur theatricals; and, as was revealed after his death, maintain a thirteen-year extramarital relationship with the young actress Ellen Ternan. This list of activities was crammed into just thirty-four years. He died—of a stroke, but it’s hard not to think it was fundamentally exhaustion—at the age of fifty-eight.

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‘Via the satellites, I’ve been working under the direction of Al Filreis at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, transcribing some recent and classic dialogues on poetry and poetics that will eventually be published in Jacket magazine once the journal takes up its new residence in Philadelphia. Occasionally, I hope to post on Lemon Hound a few excerpts from discussions I’m working on, and wanted to start with these selections from a conversation with Christian Bök featuring Charles Bernstein and students from the University of Pennsylvania.’

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‘I am currently assembling the digital variorum edition of Ezra Pound’s Cantos with Richard Taylor. This edition aims to collate all published versions of every canto, including page proofs and setting copy, where available, and to integrate digital reproductions of illustrated capitals in deluxe editions, audio and video recordings of Pound reading his poetry, and a very large cache of annals material pertaining to the production of his epic poem over the course of sixty years.’

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Reviewing is, by its nature, the chronicle of a small community: writer, book, reader. It is, for the brief time it exists, a community of equals. A reader/reviewer who fails to appreciate or understand a book tends to blame the book or the writer. And, in fact, it may well be that the book is ineptly done or that the writer is at fault. But readers are generally blind to their own deficiencies, and reviewers even more so. It’s very, very rare to find a reviewer — whose job, after all, is to convince us that he or she knows whereof he or she speaks — who will even admit the possibility that he or she is the weak member in the community he or she is chronicling.

Well, yes, but what should the reviewer do? Begin any negative review with a mea culpa, with an apology for his or her betrayal of the book under consideration? No, obviously, that would be fatuous. The problem is, rather, in the approach. Our reviews have become, at their worst, about the revelation of the reviewer’s opinion, not about a consideration of the book or an account of the small world that briefly held writer and reviewer in the orbit of a book. Reviews have turned into a species of autobiography, with the book under review being a pretext for personal revelation.

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A funding rejection for literary journal indigo, which exclusively publishes WA writers’ work, means its final edition will be released in December.

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You recently returned from the WordStorm festival. How did it go?

It went very well. I gave three public readings and sat on a panel discussion at the Botanic Gardens in Darwin where WordStorm was held. I read some of the pieces from Under the Sun and was quite encouraged by the enthusiastic response to these stories. Plus, I got to hang out with a few writers from Australia, Indonesia and Timor. I even managed to talk to Germaine Greer—she recommended an Australian short-story writer I should check out, and autographed my copy of The Female Eunuch.

You’ll be heading down to Australia in August for the Byron Bay Festival. Are you looking forward to it?

Yes, I can’t wait! I heard many good things about this festival, that it’s somewhat like a literary “rock concert,” and in fact more than 50,000 people turned up for the festival last year. I guess the highlight of the festival, for me, will be to meet one of my favourite American writers, Bret Ellis Easton, who will be headlining the festival. Besides that, I’ll be giving a few readings and sitting on some panels to talk about the art and craft of writing short stories.

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“Journals like Meanjin and Quadrant have lost their cultural relevance, because they’re just so far up their own arse…”

The founder of Ampersand, Alice Gage, said this a few nights ago at Creative Sydney. She was talking about why she started her own journal.

Whether you agree with it or not, Alice’s statement sounded bold to me, but it got zero reaction from the audience, made up of publishers, designers, writers, ad people and creatives. Furthermore, Alice wasn’t trying to get a rise, she was just saying what she thought. That it sounded bold to me spoke volumes about where I’m from – can you imagine if someone said that at a Melbourne-based cultural event? It just wouldn’t happen.

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Almond struck an agreement with the bookstore to print copies of This Won’t Take But A Minute, Honey for about $5 apiece, which he sells at readings for $10. It isn’t in bookstores: “I don’t want this book everywhere. I want it at readings that I do where it becomes an artifact that I hand to the person who I know is going to read it, not some commodity that’s renting shelf space in a Barnes & Noble.”

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This week, the winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction was announced (Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna). Every year, that prize spawns obligatory editorials about the inverse sexism of an all-female prize. Similarly, when the Man Booker shortlist is announced, there is hand-wringing about unjust omissions. Both prizes are well-known, yet both are trumped financially by the International Impac Dublin Literary Award. This year’s winner, announced on June 17th, will net a €100,000 prize, but the award doesn’t have the huge profile of the other contests.

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On Wednesday, 16th June, around midday and until 2, please join us at Collected Works Bookshop in Melbourne, for our annual Bloomsday celebration.

For anyone who hasnt attended before, we simply read from the book, James Joyce’s Ulysses, in turn, around the room. We are mostly enthusiasts & readers of Joyce. No special license required!

After Kris Hemensley’s introductory remarks, the actor James Howard will offer a little drama to begin proceedings.
There will be nibbles & tipples.
Everyone is welcome.

VENUE : Collected Works Bookshop, level 1, Nicholas Building, 37 Swanston Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3000
INFORMATION : tel. 03-9654-8873

Zenobia Frost writes poetry in cemeteries, articles at a desk in a backyard rainforest, and to-do lists on receipts, bits of paper, the back of her hand, and flatmates’ spare bits of skin. She writes, edits, and types for a living, and occasionally orchestrates cabaret events that are really an excuse to drink tea. Her work has appeared in Stylus, Mascara, Small Packages, Burdock (USA), Rave Magazine, Famous Reporter, and Voiceworks, and she has performed at Queensland’s and Tasmania’s poetry festivals, as well as around Australia with the Queensland Touring Poets Program. Her debut collection, The Voyage, was published by SweetWater Press in 2009.

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The other day, I went on a tour of someone’s e-world. My companion was a young man literally half my age. Together we visited Facebook, MySpace, blogs, Twitter, fan fiction, Wetpaint, MSN, Yahoo, Bebo, YouTube and The Pirate Bay. This is his social world, the main medium by which he talks to his friends, and sample audio, visual and literary culture.

I read poetry, and so does he. Most of the poetry I read is on paper: in books, journals and zines. Most of the poetry he reads is delivered to him electronically. He stumbles across it because a friend has recommended it on Facebook, or because he has followed an eclectic trail of links and key words and found himself face to face with a poem he has cornered in some unexpected electronic alley.

In truth, this young man discovers poetry as I discover it when I am browsing in a second-hand bookshop or at the Sunday markets. There is serendipity in both our encounters. The right poem at the right time appears in the hand, and it does not matter if the hand is holding an iPad or a book with a spine and pages that really turn.

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I am leaving my girlfriend and I keep trying to be “nice” about it, but I don’t think it’s helping either of us. In fact, it’s just making this painful process take longer. I really need to be an asshole and steep myself in assholedom. Any suggestions for where to start?
—E. Stigler, New York City

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The poet Martin Langford (let’s call him ‘the selector’) researched and found about 40 Australian love poems for this season of Love at the Bar (mainly contemporary poems and 10 of the final 15, by women writers).

“With both men and women exploring love in searching, risky ways, the poetry of relationships was enjoying a particularly strong period – and Love at the Bar is an attempt to tap into that,” says Langford, who is one of the directors of the newly established Laureate Productions and whose latest collection The Human Project has been published by Puncher and Wattmann.

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It was Sept. 24, 1975. The Ironworkers’ Hall in Vancouver was packed with card-carrying union members who had come to hear four young poets. Three of them, David Day, Pete Trower and Patrick Lane, paced in the foyer. They could hear the impatience of the audience, the restless shifting in the metal chairs, but they insisted on waiting for the fourth poet listed on the program. It was Pat Lowther. The day before, she had told Patrick Lane that she would be there, even though her husband, Roy, had threatened her. He was the poet, he had shouted. It should have been him reading to the workers, not her. From the office in the hall, Patrick dialled the Lowther house and listened to the phone ring and ring. After 10 more minutes of waiting, the emcee insisted that the readings begin.

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Carey’s speech prompted rivals to brand him a self-important snob. Bryce Courtenay, the best-selling author of The Power Of One and The Potato Factory, labelled his comments “absolute bull—-”.

“There’s the assumption that just because you’re a literary writer, therefore you are writing something of importance, of interest or entertainment or education or ability. It’s absolute —-,” he said.

Courtenay, who was born in South Africa but became a naturalised Australian in 1959, has long been snubbed by the literary establishment, of which he considers Mr Carey a fully paid-up member. Courtenay, 76, dismissed his rival’s comments as “a perfect example of that kind of inane literacy [sic] snobbery”.

“If I’m a popular writer then Peter Carey is an unpopular writer. If I’m a best-selling writer then he’s a worst-selling writer,” he said.

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You won a prize in 2009 for your chapbook. How has the process of writing and publishing New Poets differed from writing a chapbook?

To be honest they were both very similar. After months of rejection letters I figured that editors and journals probably weren’t getting the experimental notion of my work in singular hits. I figured collections would work better to capture my voice. From there it was a matter of faith really in making the right choices.

The PressPress Chapbook Award winner, songs for the ordinary mass, was a lot more contained. Very few changes were made. I think New Poets was slightly more difficult, but only because it was a sense of having to create a more sustained voice.

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When I was in my teens, the book industry in Australia wasn’t the thriving one it is today. Almost all the books I read were imports from England – even American books rarely made it to Australian shores. I grew up thinking that characters in books must live either in London or the English countryside, unless the book was a fantasy novel, in which case the characters may inhabit a made-up land. If the people that populated these books were religious, they had to be Christian. Black was the colour to be worn at funerals, and weddings were inevitably held in churches.

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Using a poet’s ear and a photographer’s eye, Kathryn Lomer infuses her writing with a distinctive irony and an intuitive understanding of the human experience.

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WHAT DO YOU THINK OF WRITERS’ FESTIVALS?
A necessary evil.

DO YOU FEEL ARTISTS ARE VALUED IN OUR SOCIETY?
Yes and no: painters, some novelists, opera singers do all right – especially if they like the media – but poets seem to be regarded as escapees from a sheltered workshop.

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What was that resolution I made to add a note to this blog once a week? It’s just over a month since my last posting, and in that time I’ve had lots of reason to think about Tasmania. I met Richard Lemm for coffee when he was in town, and we traded stories about our Tassie experiences and adventures, scheming how to go back there.

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BOOK TICKETS NOW here and here

From brushfires, to bog fires, through the flame of the holy spirit to the pagan fires of solstice, fire has been both warm companion and feared and capricious renegade. The elements of fire, water, earth and air are primal sources of inspiration and image. This workshop explores the nature of fire in its many forms, the relationship of fire to feeling, the transformative and destructive power of fire, and its use in ritual.

Photographic material relating to Australian bush fires is explored. Robyn will also explore the use of fire in her own work as examples. This workshop focuses on the emerging meaning of fire and the flame for each writer.

The workshop begins with a talk by Robyn on her own use of the ‘the particular’, analysing her poetry and some prose. It then moves into a guided moment followed by writing towards the topic, a period of writing, and feedback for each participant on their work in terms of the topic set. Each participant is given notes to keep relating to the topic for each workshop, as well as copies of Robyn’s or other poems which exemplify themes.

This workshop can be appropriate for and has been successfully conducted with, established and early writers; poets and prose writers.

Dr Robyn Rowland AO
Honorary Fellow, School of Culture and Communication,
University of Melbourne
Co-Curator,
Australian Poetry Centre’s Australian Poetry Festival, Castlemaine, 2008

Some of Robyn’s work, a short bio and photo can be viewed at Other Voices Poetry International, an invitation-only cyber anthology.

Last fall, before common sense or modesty could prevail, I agreed to act as a regional judge for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. This committed me to a conscientious sifting through of nearly one hundred novels and short story collections. For the next five months, my backpack morphed into a mobile library and I embarked on my commute with high seriousness. On the bus from Richmond Hill, I squinted at Margaret Atwood. As the subway rumbled towards Bloor, I pored over Anne Michaels. On the streetcars of Spadina, I wrestled with Pauline Melville. A Christmas getaway to Barbados offered no respite. While She Who Must Be Obeyed watched over the children on Accra Beach, I leafed my way through one book after the next, grumbling occasionally when I felt they were wasting my time.

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In the video, Kennedy refers to a book of essays recently published about him and his falling out with the Church. Called Peter Kennedy: the Man who Threatened Rome, it is no mere hagiography. While most writers — and it includes heavyweights like Paul Collins, Martin Flanagan, Hans Kung and Joan Chittister — are in sympathy with him, there is an excellent chapter by Neil Ormerod, professor of theology at the Australian Catholic University, who is critical of Kennedy, and points out very clearly why he can no longer be considered part of the Church.

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When it comes to Western Australian poets, Fremantle Press has a stellar list, including John Kinsella, Tracy Ryan, Caroline Caddy, John Mateer and Phil Salom, to name a few.

The launch of the Fremantle Poets series this year enables us to look to the future even as we continue to support the careers of some of our established poets. The first book in the series, New Poets, introduces three poets for the first time in book-length form. Scott-Patrick Mitchell, J.P. Quinton and Emma Rooksby were selected from the more than thirty-five poets who responded to our call for submissions for the New Poets volume.

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The idea was that we would get a handful of pieces which Scripsi (the literary magazine Michael co-edited with Peter Craven) would publish, but something else happened along the way. I recognised in the Edwardian prose versions a tone that I could identify with, realising at the same time that if the poems were to be effectively re-worked in English this tone was the most important thing to retain.

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In Sydney at NSW Writers’ Centre
Date(s): Saturdays 5 & 12 June
Workshop: PLAN TO BE PUBLISHED with Les Wicks
Venue: at the NSW Writers’ Centre,
Address: Callan Park (off Balmain/Lilyfield Road), Rozelle NSW 2039
Time: 10am – 4pm
More details here
or Tel. (02) 9555 9757

One of the best known poetry workshop templates in Australia will be on offer in Sydney.

Be inspired! Be published!

“Exceptional, supporting yet challenging, showing (and earning) respect, a privilege to attend this leader’s workshop”; “serendipity but fabulous”; “contributed very generously-¬ great value for money”.

Last year Ann was chosen as one of four Australian poets to be published by the Australian Poetry Centre for their New Poets series. As part of the project she spent a week last year at Varuna Writers House in the Blue Mountains where she worked intently on her manuscript under the guidance of editor, Ron Pretty.

Ann’s working life has included secondary teaching, teaching in a women’s prison and running a cafe in Clifton Hill. Nine years ago she moved to Castlemaine where she has run writing workshops and taught Creative Writing. More recently she worked in the Kimberley, teaching adults in a remote community. In 2005 she was a winner of the ABC regional short story competition, for her story, Hearts and Minds. A regular reader at the Guildford Hotel, Central Victoria, she is a six time winner of the Castlemaine Cup for best poem.

Her book, A Question of Translation, will be launched by Ken Parker at the Castlemaine Art Gallery on Saturday 26th June at 4 pm. Joy Mitchell and Ann will read poems from the book. All welcome.

All four poets chosen for the New Poets Series will have their books launched in Melbourne at the Wheeler Centre on Thursday 1st July at 6.15 pm.

Enquiries for both events [03] 5472 2647.

What are your writing goals?
To have books published around the world – stories and narrative poems that children will love – stories that will engage them and make them want to read, poems that will imbue in them a love for poetry and the rhythms of language, books with images by the amazing illustrators with whom I have been very fortunate and honored to collaborate. I want very much to publish a book of literary poetry as well, possible with my own illustrations.

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But poetry is of course the product of its specific cultural moment, however much some would like it to reflect the cultures of yesteryear. Only those poems that are truly of their time have any hope of lasting beyond it. All arguments to the contrary can’t help but sound like “a bidding of the waves to stand still”, as Judith Wright once wrote of Jack Lindsay’s reactionary Vision manifestos of the 1920s. Poetry — indeed, language itself — is like a shark: if it’s not moving, it’s dying. And, like it or loathe it, flarf satisfies this test, reflecting our culture as it noses through the reef of the nascent internet age.

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For some reason, I don’t quite believe in literature being a cathartic healing wellspring; the raw process of writing, yes. To write well is one thing; to be an artist, a human being, is another. That is something about writing (or any artistic expression) that one can never be able to “learn” or “earn” through diplomas — because that is all about life experiences, time, and taking risks. If a piece of writing seeks to be a literature that is timeless and universal, it does need to work hard at transcending beyond the recognition of an author, and reaching out towards a larger humanity, contextually and aesthetically. This is what I hope to be able to offer to others when I write. For a work to stand on its own, its author must be able to erase him/herself off. Isn’t Kafka the best mirror?

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There is something, in our culture, of the country cousin (of good family,  mind, and well-spoken, but not quite first-nightat- the-opera) about the essay.

All too often it’s thought of as a bit of harmless throat-clearing (smelling of dry almonds, according to one commentator) useful for filling in a puzzling silence between novels. A novel: now there’s something you can take seriously. A novel is storytelling, which is what culture is – plus folk-dancing and cooking. An essay is just commentary. Write a novel or three and they’ll sit up in Stockholm; a single novel in the shops and you’ll be strutting your stuff at Adelaide Writers’ Week in no time – or Vancouver or Hay-on-Wye. On the other hand, when your publisher asks you what you’re working on next and you tell him a book of essays, watch his little face fall.

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But, all the same, one could be forgiven for thinking the future of traditional forums such as the literary magazine is bleak. If, as the magazines themselves would argue, their raison d’etre is the publication of new writing, how sustainable is that commitment in a world where writers are no longer hostage to the whims of editors and publishers, and where publishing is being brutally democratised? And, in a historical moment when the multinational publishing giants are struggling, how are journals with readerships of a few thousand and spartan marketing budgets supposed to survive?

http://www.walleahpress.com.au/b25/?p=3399 [from 'The News By Me', May 31st 2010]:

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Western Australian writer, Randolph Stow, author of The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea, died in England at the age of 74.

Stow was recently diagnosed with liver cancer and died suddenly on Saturday in a hospital near his home in the Essex village of Old Harwich.

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To put it another way: Why study poetry? Because it is complex and subtle and nuanced, and offers multiple interpretations simultaneously. What literary study offers is not breadth, but depth. What it offers is an opportunity to pit your mind against some of the greatest linguistic creations of the past five centuries—difficult at times, frustrating, but ultimately more rewarding than reading something facile and one-dimensional. To use a sports analogy, you don’t get better by playing with or against inferior players.

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Despite being revealed as a hoax, the Malley poems still resonate and have been taken up and creatively reused by Peter Carey in the novel My Life as a Fake, a series of poems by John Tranter, and paintings by Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker – and the poems are still available as a collection. They were reprinted in the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991) as a postmodern masterpiece ahead of their time. Max Harris, who published the poems, was taken in by the hoax – at least in part – because he was so keen to find an ‘authentic Australian modernist’ in the European mould.

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I was about to say that there feels to me a non-specificity about many of the poems, as if the editorial choice was to go with queer sensibility rather than content, but I’m not sure if that’s true. I did remember feeling with a number of poems that without the mention of a breast here, a phallus there, and the assumed sexual identity of the poet, that they didn’t feel particularly gay – but I think I have to explain that by saying I still don’t quite have a feel of the broad range of Australian poets that I’ve been reading since arriving on these shores in 1999. I often note the embrace of language and experimental poetry and a slight distaste for the confessional and first-person. Compare that to the 50 gay poets in the American “Best Gay Poetry 2008″, edited by Lawrence Schimel, where the majority of works featured are first-person confessionals about sex, dating, HIV, and ex-lovers. There is distance inserted in many of the Australian poems here by wordplay, jokes, intellectualism, perhaps reflection, which strikes me at times as colder and less emotional, and at other times, as more sophisticated and polished. I’ll continue to ponder.

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It seems to me that a book of poetry is still an important milestone in a poet’s career. Books allow ‘emerging’ poets to be formally introduced to the world. Subsequent books allow a showcase of the poet’s development across time. And selecteds and collecteds allow for retrospectives, an opportunity to acknowledge the evolution of a poet, shifts in direction, and accomplishment.

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What will you get with your 3 day pass? How about Fatima Bhutto in conversation with Kerry O’Brien? Clive Hamilton and Ian Lowe discussing the survival of the planet with Fran Kelly? Kathy Lette and Madam Lash on living it large? Bret Easton Ellis with Ross Grayson Bell (creative producer of Fight Club)? Plus the feast of literature, laughter and ideas that has made the Byron Bay Writers Festival the event authors clamour to attend.

For now, visit our website or call Jetset Byron Bay to lock away your 3 Day Pass. And remember, Kids Day Passes are also currently on sale at Early Bird rates. Grab your child and take a seat to enjoy Shamini Flint, Terry Denton, Matthew Reilly and a host of activities and surprises.
The wings are starting to beat: be a wise old owl and take advantage of the Early Bird before it flies the coop.

EARLY BIRD TICKETS ON SALE
And running hot!
Discounted Early Bird 3-day passes for the Byron Bay Writers Festival 2010 are now available, prior to release of the full program on 4 June.

3-DAY PASS
This includes entry to the North Beach Festival site from Friday 6 to Sunday 8 August.
COST: $185 or $160 for students or members of the Northern Rivers Writers’ Centre.
(For membership information visit www.nrwc.org.au.)

KIDS PASS
Join Australia’s best kids writers for fun and frivolity in the kids marquee on Saturday 7 August from 9.00am – 2.30pm. Kids between 6 and 16 enjoy storytelling, activities and an opportunity to meet authors during book signings.
COST: $25 or $20 for members of the Northern Rivers Writers’ Centre.
Each Kids Pass accommodates one accompanying adult allowing access to KIDS SESSIONS ONLY

Why did you pick for Tilda to save the elephant seals? Was this an attempt to be different from other YA’s?

It began with me wondering who the person was who found the real mother seal in Dover a few years ago and what effect it had on that person. Then I did the ‘what if’ thing that writers do all the time. What if it was a young girl and the effect it had on her was to land her with a sort of mentor, give her something amazing to do, give her responsibility, and a sense of what she might want from life. A big ask of a seal! I didn’t think about other YA novels at all.

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Fullers Bookshop, Hobart
5:30 pm Wednesday 2nd June 2010

When the young Frank Kermode was coming out of some club (the Garrick, perhaps) where he had lunched with poet Stephen Spender in the mid-1950s, a figure appeared in the smog of the late London afternoon swathed in a muffler that covered his mouth and most of his face like a mask, and wearing what looked like a trilby.

“I’ve just been having lunch with Frank here, Frank Kermode,” Spender said brightly. “You know he’s just published a book.” The Figure paused, then pronounced, “I have been reading The Romantic Image. I find much in it to admire and much to deplore.” Then he faded into the smog. And who was that old fart? Kermode asked. “That was Tom,” Spender said. “Don’t you know Tom? Tom Eliot, of course.”

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TALKING HEADS AT TOXTETH

with ROSS FITZGERALD in conversation with IRINA DUNN about his latest book “My Name is Ross: An Alcoholic’s Journey”

Friday, 4 June, 2010 at 6 for 6.30 pm

Upstairs function room of the Toxteth Hotel, 345 Glebe Point Road, Glebe

From his first drink at the age of fourteen Ross Fitzgerald has struggled with alcoholism. His story is one of despair, courage and hope – and living to see another day. Last year he said “I turn 65 on Christmas Day 2009. If I survive, I’ll be 40 years sober. This means that I have had 40 more years on this planet than I otherwise would have had if I hadn’t stopped drinking alcohol”.

He writes about growing up in Melbourne, drinking his way through university in Australia and the US, being incarcerated and subjected to electric shock therapy and reaching rock bottom before being saved by Alcoholics Anonymous.

One of Australia’s most widely-published historians, Ross’ story is truly inspiring, insightful and brutally honest.

IRINA DUNN is Director of the Australian Writers’ Network and runs ID Editing and Publishing Consultancy.

Donation: $10/ $5 (conc.)
Join us for dinner after for a “buy one get one free” meal deal

RSVP FOR BOTH INTERVIEW AND DINNER: irinadid at ozemail.com.au
DINNER RESERVATIONS ESSENTIAL

When: Sunday June 6th, 2.30pm
Where: The Hobart Bookshop

All welcome to this free event.

The Hobart Bookshop
22 Salamanca Square
Hobart Tasmania 7000
P 03 6223 1803 . F 03 6223 1804
hobooks at ozemail.com.au

Sometimes, when you’re travelling, things don’t go to plan. So, when a piece of dust blew in my eye on saturday instead of blinking rapidly and waiting for it to dislodge, I scraped and scratched with dirty fingernails and damaged my cornea. And I spent the next twenty-four hours in mild, but frustrating pain. Eye drops? No help. Rinsing under a tap? Water goes up my nose!

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I am in the midst of what in mediaspeak is called a year of ‘downtime’and because of this unexpected circumstance I am writing to let you know that, unusually, there will be no book launch party for my new collection of poems, ‘Authentic Local’.

The adventurous independent publisher, Papertiger Media, has recently published this slim volume as part of its ‘soi3 modern poets’ series.

As the book won’t be available at a booklaunch, I’d like to ask you to buy a copy of ‘Authentic Local’ at the inexpensive price of $20.95 (Austn) from the Papertiger Media website. It has totally secure payment facilities via paypal

http://www.papertigermedia.com/shop/

Or, if you prefer to support your local bookshop – in Australia – gleebooks, Berkelouw’s, Ariel, Bray’s, Readings, Brunswick St, Polyester,Collected Works, Avid Reader, Dark Horsey and many others – please ask your bookseller to order your copy from the Australian distributor Dennis Jones and Associates -

http://www.dennisjones.com.au/

Author: Pam Brown
Title: Authentic Local
ISBN: 978-0-9807695-1-7
Series: soi 3 modern poets
Language: English
Publisher: papertiger media inc
Pub date: 01 March 2010
Extent: 81pp
Height: 218mm
Width: 135mm
Thickness: 5.5mm
Format: Paperback

Alan Sillitoe, who has died of cancer aged 82, was one of the most important British writers of the postwar era. He made his name with the novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and the collection of short stories The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959), and he is still routinely perceived as a member of the kitchen-sink branch of the Angry Generation. Such characterisations obscure the breadth and originality of his writing.

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ELEANOR HALL: To that warning about the perils of the internet.

John Freeman is the editor of the British literary magazine, Granta, and his first book Shrinking the World reviews thousands of years of human communication and comes to the conclusion that email is ruining our lives.

He says all the major changes in communications technology have transformed our idea of time and space but he says the internet poses the most serious threat yet to the human condition.

John Freeman is in Australia this week for the Sydney Writers Festival and he joined me a short time ago in The World Today studio.

John Freeman, in your book you take us through 4,000 years of human communication and then you talk about the dangers of the internet. What is it about the internet that particularly worries you?

JOHN FREEMAN: Well, if you look at the first 4,000 years of communication, people were writing slowly. They expected responses slowly. They didn’t have electronics attached to them but suddenly now we are all connected instantly and people can’t keep up with the amount of communication that we have and it distracts us and it also leads us to do bad things.

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Texts were shelved and the literary discussion hushed as the spoken-word took it’s turn on stage at the Sydney Writers Festival.

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So we finally have a result for the Lost Booker, the one that fell between the cracks in 1970. It didn’t go to Patrick White for The Vivisector or Muriel Spark for The Driver’s Seat but to J.G. Farrell, that ruminative chronicler of the crack ups of the British Empire, for his Irish novel with the title from central casting, Troubles.

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The mother of Hanan al-Shaykh, one of the Arab world’s most acclaimed authors, was illiterate; sold by her father at the age of nine, married to a man three times her age at 14.

Yesterday the London-based Lebanese author, best known for her fictional works, spoke about the memoir she wrote about her mother’s harrowing yet inspiring life, The Locust and the Bird, at a Sydney Writers’ Festival event so popular it had to be moved to a larger venue to cater to the crowd.

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Next Month: Sunday 27 June a Tasmanian theme : Karen Knight (Tas) with Jules Witek (Tas) on percussion behind and around the poems. Plus Ross Donlon, with novelist and poet, Julie Gittus launching his Mark Time Books chapbook, My Ship, before Ross takes up a residency in Hobart.

6pm Monday 24th May, Fullers Bookshop, Hobart.

Eleven prominent Australian Poets will gather for one night only to read their works, share stories about poetry and their adventures with The Red Room Company.

Participating poets all feature in ‘Poems to Share’, a new set of poetry cards produced in collaboration with design partners, Corban & Blair.

Hosted by Johanna Featherstone
Friday, May 21st
Walsh Bay Precinct, Upstairs,
Pier 2/3, Hickson Road,
The Rocks, 6-7.30pm

To guarantee your seat at a table,with a poet, please contact:
tamryn at redroomcompany.org or ph 02 9319 5090

Entry: Something to share; a gold coin donation at least!

redroomcompany.org

I’ve known Thom since he was Tom the Street Poet in Melbourne, handing out flyers of poetry — his own and other people’s — on street corners. He was also Dial-a-Poet; people could phone his number and he’d create lines of poetry for them on the spot. I always thought he had recorded several poetic messages — but no, I found out on Friday that he actually answered the phone personally, in poetry.

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There is also the demotic energy of English in, for instance, contemporary Los Angeles, which is both the multicultural capital of Hispanic California and simultaneously the headquarters of a global movie business, the American dream factory. Cross the Pacific and the perspective changes again. There, you will find Nury Vittachi, aka “Mister Jam”, a journalist and novelist of Australian descent now based in Hong Kong, who describes the lingua franca of the Far East as “Englasian” – a mostly English vocabulary set into Chinese and Hindi syntax. “Throw away your dictionaries,” writes Vittachi. “The unwritten language Englasian really is threatening to supplant English as the business language of Asia.” Still others speak of “Panglish”, the global tongue.

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Australia’s premier literary event and the third largest annual event of its kind in the world – the Sydney Writers’ Festival – will be officially opened tonight.

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It was an absence that prompted Jordie Albiston to write The Sonnet According to M: she could not find a book of sonnets that had been produced by an Australian poet – plenty of individual sonnets and the odd sequence but no entire collection.

”I was interested in applying the form to Australian language in particular. I wanted to contribute to the genre as an Australian.”

Last night, the Melbourne poet’s collection won the NSW Premier’s prize for poetry, worth $30,000. The $40,000 Christina Stead award for fiction went to J. M. Coetzee for Summertime, and Fairfax correspondent Paul McGeough won the $40,000 non-fiction prize for Kill Khalid, which was also named book of the year.

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In the face of some unwise criticism over her use of Aboriginal motifs, the Aboriginal poet, Jack Davis, rose to his feet at a literary conference and in ringing tones urged the author: ”Be brave Mrs Wrightson, be brave.”

It was not that Wrightson annexed Aboriginality for literary purposes but that she believed passionately in what Aborigines themselves – speaking for all of us -call ”country”; not simply the physical environment but the deeply inherent force of the human mind.

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Thursday June 3rd, 5.30pm
22 Salamanca Square

All welcome to this free event.

The Hobart Bookshop
22 Salamanca Square
Hobart Tasmania 7000
P 03 6223 1803 . F 03 6223 1804
hobooks at ozemail.com.au

“As a writer, I’m always afraid of monologue, of totalitarian speech, of the author who knows everything,” she says. “You can break that with humour. That’s why humour is irreplaceable. It’s like love, you can’t fake it.”

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Senior school students will be given the option to study texts ranging from Kant to The Castle and environmental science will be elevated to a similar status as physics and chemistry under the Year 11 and 12 draft national curriculum, issued yesterday.

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I guess the second question is: what was it like when you got rid of the typewriter?

CREELEY:
Well the typewriter, initially, was a great way of freeing oneself from the personalism of one’s own handwriting. I was distracted by the way I wrote. Not that I wrote incompetently but I began to be, you know, obsessed with the nature of my handwriting, which was certainly not the point of what I was doing.

I wanted something that would instantly, so to speak, objectify these words I was putting in strings. I wanted to have something, again, that would not be informed by my personal disposition in handwriting. I wanted the words to be objectified, to be actualized so to speak by being generally characterized as typewriter fonts permit, and be there on the paper as something apart from my head or my personal, physical touch. I wanted them to exist in that sense by themselves. Nothing particularly vatic or mystic. I wanted to be able to look at them the way I would look at them on a page of print, let’s say.

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The topic is…complete a poem with this first line: ‘Can I stow away in your suitcase…’

Hope to see you all there!

Regards,

steve dAvis

There’s a strong political dimension in much of your poetry. Do you feel audiences still look to poets for political insights?

Probably not. Politics flourishes in all forms of human activity. Even those who fail to see it or choose to ignore it are making de facto political statements. I look at the world around me and see, in addition to the many good things, imbalances of power, inequality, oppression and dispossession. Unsurprisingly these observations are reflected in my work although, it should be said, a great deal of my poetry is not overtly or directly political.

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While a lot of ground is covered here, Kathryn Lomer does so with a light touch and the issues never feel heavy handed. She also evokes a beautiful sense of place, the beach and the forest, while also exploring the claustrophobia of living in a small town and introducing some wonderful characters. Highly recommended.

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I’ve been sitting on what I intended to be a review of the recent swag of Australian poetry anthologies for two months or so! I’ve accumulated notes, discussed the topic with fellow poets & readers (including a frolic on Facebook), yet I’ve clearly dragged the chain, feeling more daunted by the day. It wasnt going to be an exhaustive review, more a kind of ‘thoughts arising’ on the subject. But even skirting these anthologies’ rationales —

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I’m in Tasmania (my first visit) and I’ll be giving a talk — introduced by Dr Peter Hay — at the Hobart Bookshop, 22 Salamanca Square, Hobart, on Thursday 13th May at 5:30pm.

For some time Brown’s poems have had their connective tissue, so to speak, much reduced: there is not any padding and the segue or bridging between parts is minimal or non-existent. We experience these poems, typically, as a sequence of mini vignettes, a succession of details, observations and nostrums. The connections between the segments that make up the poem seem, though, ‘true’ rather than tenuous, true though hard to name. The sequence is unforced and is true in each poem to a genuine pattern—of association, of experience, of thought—so that they are not hard to follow. Except possibly for the nervous reader who must ask always, How did we get here?

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And here lies the connection with Difficulty – works which do not surrender themselves to mere delectation. Hill has written “I have no ambition to be famously – or notoriously – obscure. The difficulties of daily living get in the way and my poems, unavoidably it seems, collide with the densities of common existence.

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Anyway: this isn’t to say that poetry can’t aim at politics, express political viewpoints, or have the kind of small-scale impact that many other kinds of actions (teaching a history class, writing an article on sociology, attending a rally, talking to your friends, ranting in your blog) can have. I mean, I don’t think Andrew Motion changes the political climate appreciably more than does John Wilkinson. Of course poetry helps in its tiny way to change consciousness, just like many other things do. But British Petroleum does what it does with equal disregard for iambs and disjunctions.

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So why are their books so popular?

“Because our books are easy to read,” Morrissey says. “However, this is considered by some to be less worthy than creating dense, hard-to-read books that no one reads.”

She reminds publishers that if it weren’t for the income of popular writers, there wouldn’t be the money to publish smaller-selling literary writers.

Above all, Morrissey says of the show: “This is not a debate for the literary establishment that goes off into literary la la land – it’s for real readers of popular fiction.”

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Is there a difference between writing for a blog and writing ‘serious’ fiction? As I’ve rather painfully discovered, it is all too easy for a blogger to just spray the words up on the screen and see what happens, a lot like swinging a fishing line into the ocean in the hope that something bites. Kerryn Goldsworthy says it all depends. ‘Even with the most casual or spontaneous blog posts, I try to make the writing something that people will enjoy reading, and I think about it at the level of things like sentence structure and word choice.’ Goldsworthy goes on: ‘The most exciting things about blogging are the opportunities afforded by hyperlinks and graphics.’

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The next accusation to be leveled at the autobiographer involves that of narcissism. What makes you think your life is so interesting that anyone else would want to read about it? Who do you think you are?

You do not hear such arguments leveled against artists who paint their self-portraits regularly, who examine the intricacies of their form and with flourish. These self-portraits are rarely considered narcissistic, at least not as far as I have heard. Artists can include a life long chronology of their self-portraiture and no one bats an eyelid, but loves to see the progress. No such indulgence is offered to the unwary autobiographer who repeats herself, whose self image changes over time, and who is inconsistent in her self appraisals and perspectives of others.

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I came to Porter’s actual writing relatively late; other than odd poems in anthologies I’d read almost nothing of his until 2001, when I bought a copy of Max is Missing. As you get older those moments when you realise you’ve discovered a major writer become less frequent, but they’re no less thrilling when they arrive. Porter’s poetry is often praised for its depth of learning, and its fascination with the metaphysical, but I’ve always thought its power lay as much in the way that depth of learning and philosophical insight is worn so lightly: for a poet of such range and vision Porter’s poetry has an extraordinary lightness of touch, a conversational poise that belies its seriousness. In this it naturally recalls Auden, but Porter was, in many ways, a more contemporary poet than Auden, as likely to draw inspiration from the television as Tacitus.

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