The Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival opens tomorrow, celebrating its tenth anniversary with a packed schedule of lectures, readings and discussions. It’s a big change from a decade ago, when the festival was a lonely outpost in the wilderness of Hong Kong English-language literature. These days, more people in Hong Kong are writing in English than ever before.

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Visiting author Melina Marchetta read from and spoke of her new novel ‘The Piper’s Son’ at Fuller’s Bookshop this evening. She described the novel as a difficult one to write. ‘I found it technically easy to write but emotionally hard to write.’ Marchetta added, she always says she loves the last book yet doesn’t know which of her books she loves most, ‘it’s like if you have five children, you just can’t choose but you know you love every one for a different reason.’

Asked in question time to what degree does what’s going on in her life affect the novel she’s currently writing, Marchetti noted that when she launched the book in front of her family and friends on Monday night, she said she felt they were almost like the co-author’s of my work. ‘I steal personality traits, nuances in people’s speech, I steal a lot of things … but I try very hard not to steal an event in someone’s life.’

Marchetta spoke at length of her concern at getting her characters right. She related the time she was working as a teacher and had just written the first draft of one of her novels. A student came into her office with a novel he was studying. ‘I asked him what he thought of the novel and he replied he didn’t like the fact that “she thinks she knows our voice”. Impressed at his level of insight, Marchetti asked if he’d mind reading her manuscript. ‘He said yes, he’d do it. I made him promise that he would not leave his house with the manuscript, not take it out and about with him. He promised me that. Then his twin brother came to see me two days later and said to me, ‘I really loved your book Miss’. I said, ‘you weren’t supposed to read it’, and he said ‘no, you said it wasn’t to leave our house.’ Then their friend came a couple of days later and told me how he loved it too. And the great thing about it was – they were very cheeky – they came to me with ten pages of notes of what I’d done wrong.’

‘They wouldn’t hand over the notes unless I gave them a free period. I was more desperate for those notes than I’d have been to get notes from my editor. I wanted those notes, I wanted to know what they had to say. And they were pretty brutal. And some of their suggestions I used and some I didn’t.’

‘I know one of those boys really well, he’d be twenty-four or so now. He was at my book launch the other day: he reads every one of my manuscripts and still gives me feedback.’

“From the author of Looking for Alibrandi comes her new novel The Piper’s Son. Five years after Saving Francesca, revisit the characters you loved as they negotiate the perils and pitfalls of life, love and (not) growing up.”

Multi award-winning Australian author Melina Marchetta will speak about her long awaited new novel. RSVP to amy at fullersbookshop.com.au

Thursday 11th March
5.30 for 6pm
Salamanca Collection Gallery, Salamanca Place, Hobart

A Salamanca Collection Gallery / Tasmanian Writers’ Centre event

Coffee

Thursday. One day after
the most hopeful day
in the history of presidents
and I still feel
that whether I shoot myself or not
might come down to a spilled coffee
or a parking space.

Thursday. And the space between evenings
and mornings is dead air.
Mornings collapse into afternoons,
afternoons bring me drinks
in anything that’s clean

until the sun sets
and my eyes
can’t pick up light anymore.
The hard truth of you,
a curled fist slipped into my ribs
and left clenching.

Three days without words,
touch remains out of reach
and there is no stepladder down from this.
There is no hardhat or handrail
and the safety inspectors are long since dead
from misfortunes of their own.

Saturday is unsure of itself, and overcompensates.
Sunday is trying to be quietly sick without us noticing.
Monday never called, or wrote,
or chipped in for the cab.

And by Tuesday,
with heat bringing everything inside us
to the surface of our skins,
there’s the hope in my dilated veins
that the faintest touch of my elbow to yours
across a table for a few unnoticed seconds
will be enough to see me through the night.

Geoff Lemon is former poetry editor of harvest and Voiceworks, and founder of Wordplay Collective. A six-time slam winner, he’s published in Best Australian Stories, HEAT, Blue Dog, Island, and Going Down Swinging, and also writes music journalism for MTV and Beat. Visit heathenscripture.wordbuzz.com.au for words or wordplay.org.au for noises.

Margaret Bradstock
'I think the last poem I'll read is 'Mingmarriya Country'. It's after a silk screen print by Queenie McKenzie of the Bungle Bungles up near Broome. Again, it's one I love so much I've got in on my wall. The quote from Queenie McKenzie is 'My name mean grow up from these hills....' '

Emerald Roe
'His wife starts to remonstrate. He just looks at her and says, 'That's once'.'

Geoff Dean
'... and not quite concentrating. Whatever: his body suddenly slid out of the plastic bag and took off down the street at a rate of knots that he never acquired during his life. We watched in awe as his frozen body slid under a truck in Argyle Street, running a red light as ...'

Liz McQuilkin
'... in the trappings of tradition.
A white wedding planned with her partner,
the topic of the year....'

Liz Winfield: 'I remember what a great thing it was as I was starting out and then developing as a writer, to have the presence and support of Robyn Mathison, always there to encourage. It's a tremendous gift that Robyn gives to other writers ... as well as to people in general, of course ... and dogs and cats and all other living beings. So please welcome.... '

Lorraine Haig: 'At a poetry workshop last year, we were asked to imagine ourselves as a colour. This is called 'Colour Me Orange' ...'

Robyn Mathison
'Come on', I coax.
'It's time to leave the typewriter
and fly into the world.
You'll meet editors,
perhaps even
a publisher and readers.'

“It’s been a remarkable journey punctuated by the usual stresses that all small magazines experience: establishing a subscriber base, diversifying cash flow, distribution frustrations, and relying on voluntary labour in the initial stages. But it’s been a hoot, and I for one wouldn’t have had it any other way.”

Edmonds noted that though we seem to be living today in a spectator society, Wet Ink and its crew feel they’re participating rather than spectating. “And that has given us a sense of power. Today, I can happily announce that we’re selling copies overseas in places such as the US, Canada, the UK, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Africa and Fiji. We’ve gone g-l-o-b-a-l! But we still of course need ongoing support from the locals. Otherwise it will be to no avail.“

“Thinking of coming here today, I was reminded of the beery night five years ago in the Exeter Hotel in Rundle Street in Adelaide where Emmett Stinson, who was to become one of our fiction editors, and I were drinking up some Dutch courage. For some reason, we came to the conclusion that – to borrow the title of a story by Raymond Carver – Wet Ink could become a ‘small good thing’. We hope it’s that at least.”

Edmonds introduced two readers – Gillian Britton, published in outlets such as Brave New Word, Famous Reporter (FR3 : April 1989) and more recently in Meanjin – and Shannon Burns. Both read a piece of fiction before Edmonds returned to the microphone to announce the Wet Ink Short Story prize, to be judged by Peter Goldsworthy and Wet Ink’s two fiction editors, Emmett Stinson and Sally Breen. [Entry forms are up on Wet Ink’s website, the competition closes on 31st August, 2010. First prize is $3,000 and publication in the March 2011 issue of the magazine. Two highly commended entries will each receive $100 and publication in the March 2011 issue of Wet Ink and a year’s subscription to the magazine.)"

“Just to reiterate" Edmonds added in closing, "the Wet Ink Short Story Prize is now open. It closes in August, go to the website – and subscribe: it’s a lovely experience, subscribing. If you feel just a bit religiously opposed to subscribing, you can buy it in the book tent. Thank you very much.”

Shannon Burns, Gillian Britton

As an emerging writer I’ve had my fair share of disappointments, yet I don’t hold any of the involved responsible – they’re all victims of an un-childfriendly society. When I redraft my novel, I usually take a trip to Lorne and write non-stop for a week. I have written 7 drafts of my novel in three years and raised my daughter. Last year I was made redundant at work and decided to just focus on my writing. But without the extra money coming in, I had to forgo my trips, and this makes redrafting difficult with my daughter around. I can usually redraft half of my novel in that one week. I investigated fellowship opportunities but residencies are usually offered for only three weeks or more. There’s no way I could leave my daughter for three weeks – it would be detrimental to her, but also my husband can’t take that much time off. One particular three-week residency at a state writer’s centre offered a three bedroom cottage on a secluded farm. When I enquired if my daughter could visit on the weekends they agreed. I was delighted. But then they put this on their website: ‘children and pets are not permitted’.

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Greer herself said of The Female Eunuch in 1970, in the summary introduction: ”If it is not ridiculed or reviled, it will have failed of its intention. If the most successful feminine parasites do not find it offensive, then it is innocuous.”

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The tragedy is that many non-sesh folk do not realise that, for so many of us, sesh is not merely a sexual orientation. It is a kind of ’self’ — a sensibility, aesthetic, intelligence, humour, spirituality and creativity — so that to try to muzzle it is to try to muzzle the soul.

Given the sadness, I was struck by the enthusiasm and playful delight which bubbled through the room. Perhaps this was a simple expression of joy to be meeting in a richly religious context where the energies and expressions which are subtly or overtly damped down in many other religious contexts could flourish.

One week later, I was having lunch with a group of friends when poet Michael Farrell produced a copy of the book he has recently co-edited with Jill Jones, Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets.

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When is a writers festival about writing and when is it about issues and ideas? If we’re talking Adelaide Writers Week, the focus is very much on creative writing rather than, say, the more prosaic topics such as the future of journalism or how to get published that seem to crop up at almost any other writers festival in the country.

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Hours before musician Paul Grabowsky raised the curtain on his first Adelaide Festival last weekend, South Australian Labor Premier Mike Rann unveiled a big plank of his party’s arts policy for the March 20 election.

Outside the Famous Spiegeltent, which has been pitched in Elder Park beside the Torrens River, Rann declared his government would make the biennial Adelaide Festival of the arts an annual event from 2012 should the government be re-elected for a third term.

The 17-day Adelaide Festival would join the newly annual Fringe Festival and annual music festival WOMADelaide, thus underscoring SA’s claim as “the festival state” each February and March, the Premier says.

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This new, free, quarterly online journal will go live from March 16, and will publish short works by emerging writers as well as work by emerging visual artists.

LAUNCH DETAILS
What: Launch of Islet, a new online journal for emerging writers and artists
Who: Award-winning writer Danielle Wood will launch the journal
When: Tuesday March 16th, from 5.30pm
Where: Arts Tasmania, 146 Elizabeth Street
Contact: Anica Boulanger-Mashberg (Islet editor), islet.online at utas.edu.au or 03 6226 2325

Both starring at the atmospheric Guildford goldfields pub, a few klms down the road from Castlemaine on the Daylesford Road – 15 minutes for humankind. Vibrant Open Section competing for the prestigious Castlemaine Cup. 10 places for 2 minutes. Raffles for great book prizes and book voucher from Soldier and Scholar. Wines and coffees. Genial host, Zac. Gold coin donation. 3 pm kickoff. 5 pm stumps.

URL

Robert Dessaix, Kerryn Goldsworthy
Kerryn begins by introducing Robert, outlining his extensive writing career and mentioning his most recent book On Humbug, from the hard cover essay book series being produced by Melbourne University Press. Goldsworthy flags that in the context of On Humbug, listeners should be warned there may be some bad language in this session, “anyone who has an objection to the ‘f’ word needs to shut their little ears now because, you never know, it may get dropped….”
Dessaix: “Which ‘f’ word is this?”
Goldsworthy: “Robert does lots of ‘f’ words…. ”

Asked about his career trajectory – as academic, broadcaster and fulltime freelance writer – Dessaix suggests he has little sense of himself as a writer. “I feel I write – but as for some sort of trajectory, no”. More to the point is that in the living of his life he constantly encounters chasms … “and since I can’t leap chasms any more I have to fly across them with the only sort of wings I can possibly think of, the wings of words.”

“You’re a literal flyer as well,” Goldsworthy remarks, “a compulsive traveller. Why do you travel? Your reasons for travelling seem very different to me from most people’s.”

“Well there’s a one word answer: I travel to be transported.”

“But I have a more complicated answer. I think that we go on vacation, which is slightly different, in order to escape either banality of our lives – our everyday lives, the every-dayness of our lives, the domesticity of our lives – or else the clogged nature of our lives.”

“But we travel, it seems to me, for another reason. And that’s why I think travel is a very particular word. I travel to find somewhere where I find myself interesting.”

“I do not find myself interesting in Devonport. And I apologise to any Canadians in the audience but I do not find myself interesting in Calgary. I do find myself interesting in Hobart but … here’s a thing … I do not find myself interesting in New York.”

“I think inside every one of us there’s a conversation going on. There is a table, and there are four, five, six people – voices – sitting around the table. And this conversation can either be joined or not joined. And when it comes to somewhere like New York…. New York is a sort of yuppy upstart at the end of the table who won’t shut up, talking about a hundred and one different things at once.”

Whereas Paris, Dessaix observes, is in a completely different category – a dowager louche – and as such is always welcome at his table.

“And Paris is not a comment on New York. It’s a comment not even on me, in a sense, it’s a comment on the conversation that I think is going on inside me. And that’s why I do not say ‘New York is not interesting’. I say, ‘I do not find myself interesting in New York’. And I actually think we live with people because we find ourselves interesting with them. I find myself absolutely fascinating living with …” [breaks into laughter].

“And I have lived with people with whom I did not find myself absolutely fascinating – sometimes very interesting, up to a point – but not fascinating. And these are things that aren’t really susceptible to logic. You either feel it or you don’t feel it. And that’s how I see the world.”

Goldsworthy introduces the subject of ‘home’. Dessaix suggests that ‘home’ – alongside ‘conversation’ – is one of the most important words in the English language. It’s a word that really only exists in English. “And perhaps in Mongolia: how would I know?”

“‘Home’ is a wonderful, wonderful English word. ‘Home’ isn’t a word I use to describe my little house in Battery Point – not really – ‘home’ is my very core, and goes right back to childhood. It’s my anxieties and my loves, my fears and my deepest experiences. I go out into the world and circle about but almost as soon as I leave home, almost as soon as I shut the door, I start coming home. It’s not nostalgia for home. I start magnifying, I start amplifying, I start letting the world orchestrate those things that are fundamental to me – and that is home.”

Goldsworthy moves on to ask how one might live ‘a good life’. “In your books on both Gide and Turgenev you said they’d lived, by their own lights, good lives. Could you maybe enlarge on that a bit? What’s a good life?”

Dessaix suggests if he knew the answer, he might have stopped writing. “I write in order to discover anew each time. The French speak of ‘a beautiful life’, and I think that’s what I’m trying to live. I’m not really trying to live a meaningful life any more. Once I was; I mean really I was, in my twenties and thirties. I’ve given up on meaning – except in little capsules of meaning – but I would like to live a beautiful life. And so in my books I try to look at what it felt like to live different kinds of lives”.

Gide was a homosexual man, Dessaix continues, who also lived and adored his wife through 43 years of marriage until her death. “He was passionately in love with her. Turgenev fell in love with an opera singer and stayed crazily in love with her for 40 years; again, without any physical involvement.” This fascinates me, Dessaix adds, admitting he’s always interested in learning of the ways people love. “I know that the way people love on ‘Home and Away’ could not be the end of the story, it can’t possibly be. And all those young people in the Toyota ads who leap in the air air and feel that they know what it might mean to love … from my point of view are trapped inside a cage that at least to me seems rather small”.

Goldsworthy switches to the subject of Robert Hannaford’s ‘Blue Jumper’ portrait of Dessaix. Dessaix laughs. “I went and sat in his studio in Mile End. And it was ferociously cold – I had on a red shirt, then I put on a blue jumper, then a black leather jacket – and then a critic in the Sydney Morning Herald said it was clear I had no dress sense. It wasn’t that, it was … jolly cold.”

“I think it’s a very good portrait,” he adds. “It caught something, and that’s what you want. He caught not just the way I looked, he caught more than the moment.”

Goldworthy wonders whether he saw something in himself within the Hannaford portrait that he hadn’t recognised; perhaps an unfamiliar self?

“Yes. I saw a precariousness in me that I hadn’t realised was so obvious.”

“You were very unwell as I recall during that period of your life so perhaps he caught that fragility?”

“Yes, but I’m obviously much unweller now!!!”

Goldsworthy laughs. “We’re all older than we were Robert.”

“Yes, yes.”

Goldsworthy backtracks to Dessaix’ Gide and Turgenev books to question the notion of courtly love. Courtly love’s gone out the window these days, says Dessaix. “But in Turgenev’s case I think that he was a valiant knight who loved the lady in the castle”.

“Robert, your mention of courtly love having gone out the window leads me to recall something you mentioned previously, that in our headlong embrace of sex we seem to have lost sight of eros. How so; in what way?”

“Well maybe it’s just my age talking,” Dessaix replies. “I think that eros is something much more embracing than simple desire or sexual attraction. For one, eros is a kind of electricity that passes between you and the world. It needn’t necessarily be a person. It can be a vase, a flower, a certain song, it can be the air… Eros is something much vaster and it’s the source of a lot of our pleasure in life. Sex, it seems to me, in the end is much simpler, but in the sort of society that we’re living in, people confuse the two. Most of the people that I’ve written about have not confused the two. I agree that too much emphasis and importance, too much weight really, is given to sex in our society. Not only by religious organisations but by society in general; but it needn’t be the big deal that we turn it into. I think other things are much more important. I mean, in my … what do we say nowadays – a primary relationship? Is that what we say?”

“I don’t know what it is, I have no idea, don’t look at me.”

“Well that one, anyway; the one that goes on in Hobart…. The important thing to me is the sense of humour, the sense of a shared conversation…. It is shared values. It is the knowledge that we love certain things. I resent the fact that the word ‘unfaithfulness’ is only used to mean that you went and had a fiddle with somebody else.”

“Indeed! Indeed! I think the huge hurdle for me in the erotic life was always jealousy, and: ‘I’m going to rip her arms off and beat him to death with them.’”

“Yes. Have you got over that?”

“Fortunately…. One can go to jail for things like that, for quite a long time.”

Goldsworthy introduces the topic of banality. Dessaix agrees much of his life is taken up with the performance of banal tasks – “not necessarily boring: cleaning my teeth, washing the dog” – banal in the sense they’ve very little depth and repeat themselves. “What cuts across banality is of course love, number one. Being loved and loving; creativity; but above all, virtuosity. It’s doing something with virtuosity, that’s what kills banality stone dead. It can be the virtuosity of your garden, the virtuosity of your flower arrangements, the virtuosity of hanging your painting or of a conversation. It’s a strange word isn’t it, but to me that is the opposite of banality.”

“So it’s not so much what you do, it’s how well you do it or with how much heart you do it?”

“Yes. I mean I know it’s said that you can clean the lavatory and praise God while you’re doing it but … well I’ve tried that, it doesn’t work. I can’t break through that barrier.”

Dessaix’ mention of praising God brings Goldsworthy back to another line of thought. “You have said, and I quote: ‘I don’t believe in God and I’m not an atheist either’. Yet you seem to remain very interested in the differences between Protestant and Catholic ways of thinking, seeing, behaving and believing. Is that a remnant of Christianity, or are they metaphors for … ?’

“Well, I use ‘Christian’ in the sense that if the censors want to divide us into tribes, that’s probably my tribe,” Dessaix replies. “But the Archbishop of Canterbury probably wouldn’t think I was one. And the Pope certainly wouldn’t. I come from a family where my adoptive father – from Walleroo, I have to tell you – came from a large Catholic family of thirteen children. My mother had all sorts of backgrounds – Calvinist, Presbyterian – and so I could see the two kinds of mentalities. I have the Protestant mentality. The world is disenchanted, there is only literally me and Truth with a capital ‘t’. There is only text. That all started with the Reformation. The world started to become disenchanted from the Reformation and you’re left with just the text. Whereas the Catholic can rest back in the bosom of the church. If I tried to rest back in the bosom of the church I’d just fall backwards, there is nothing there. They’re very different mentalities, and I’ve been able to see them both in operation. Yes, these things continue to interest me. I’m muddled. I know that Richard Dawkins says he knows that God doesn’t exist, or something doesn’t exist that he would call ‘God’. I know that the Archbishop of Canterbury – who is the most brilliant intellectual – knows that God does exist. Well where am I going to stand? I haven’t the faintest idea. And so, I think different things at three o’clock in the morning, ten o’clock in the morning, three o’clock in the afternoon and half-past five … this conversation inside my head goes on. And: I enjoy it. I think I’ll get to the bottom of it before I die … but of course I won’t.”

…..

Time is up. Kerryn Goldsworthy invites questions, possibly the most interesting being one that returns to Robert’s observation he’s given up on meaning. “Could you, or would you, expand on that?”

“Oh, that’s a cruel question. I suppose what I’m wanting to say is that once upon a time I would have thought that by the time I got to twenty-six it would all make sense. That I would be able to see how it all worked, that I would have found the key. Well, twenty-six came, thirty came, forty, fifty, sixty … and more …. I have not found the key, and I’ve decided that beauty will have to do. Of course, there’s meaning in my going shopping. I have to buy dog food or else the dog will starve to death: of course at that micro level there’s meaning. I meant it at the macro level. I think I’ve given up, it’s all too complicated. It seems you need higher mathematics nowadays to begin to understand just one side of the argument. I can’t cope.”

…………….

[It's my last session at the festival, I'm heading home to Hobart tomorrow. There's a reading at the Republic Hotel in North Hobart on Sunday afternoon at 3 pm, with Sydney writer Margaret Bradstock one of the featured readers; Robyn Mathison too, from memory. Cheers,
Ralph]

As has already happened several times this Writers’ Week, I later felt a strong connection to something another of the writers was saying; talking late last night on the phone to Robert Dessaix as we discussed how his Thursday session might go and what sorts of things we might talk about, still mulling over what John Coetzee had said that afternoon, I was startled to hear Robert saying ‘I’m interested in the question of what a good life is, and what we have to do to have one.’ What I heard, when he used the word ‘good’, was a seamless meshing of meanings, both as in ‘living the good life’ and as in ‘being a good person’. Some people might argue that these two things are mutually exclusive but not, I think, Robert. Something to ask him in the session.

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Mike Ladd introduces Robert Gray, suggests he’s currently working on his ‘Collected Poems’ “which he’s described to me will be slimmer than his ‘Selected Poems’”. Gray begins with a prose poem, prefacing its delivery with the observation that when he knows what he’s about to write, he writes a prose poem. “When I don’t know what I’m about to write, I write a series of broken lines which I see as a ladder with which to climb down into the unconscious and lower yourself into the dark’. He follows this with [forgive my spelling] ‘Joan Airdley in Catalan’, about a woman who’d discovered she has breast cancer and subsequently goes to live in Scotland to paint the seas crashing in, the sun in winter over the Scottish coastline: small, fuzzy and indistinct, ‘”an indication of her illness, I believe”.

Gray doesn’t read for long, and is followed by Jill Jones. “I still think of Jill as essentially a Sydney poet,” says Ladd, “perhaps because the first poem I remember reading of hers was ‘Saturday morning in Ashfield’”. Jill begins by suggesting she’ll be reading predominantly from her new collection ‘Dark Bright Doors’ this afternoon – “it’s a bit of Adelaide, Sydney, Paris and New Zealand” – but begins with a piece from a long sequence, called ‘Futures and Stardust’. Then follows ‘Oh Ground’, ‘The thought of an autobiographical poem troubles and eludes me’, and “a piece composed of a sort of style I made up myself, each of its six lines has six words: ‘Yellow Lilies’”.

Next follow three poems inspired by or referenced from visual works, “two inspired by paintings by Sidney Nolan, the other from a work by Annette Willis. The first ‘ ‘The Tree Within’ – is after ‘Lagoon Wimmera’, one of Nolan’s earliest paintings. The second – the poem ‘Seeds’ is partly in reponse to Annette’s photography, while the third returns for inspiration to Sidney Nolan. Jones ends with the poems ‘Material’ and ‘Figure’ … “though they’re not the final poems in the book,” she adds. “For that, you’ll have to buy the book,” she suggests, adding “Can a poet say that?”

Cate Kennedy – “Her poetry deals with talismans and stories”: Mike Ladd – begins with a couple of poems about South Australia, The first – ‘Joyflight’ – is the title poem of one of her two poetry collections. Kennedy shares much in common with Tasmanian Kathryn Lomer, the ability to switch effortlessly between genres – poetry, short fiction, novels [& not to forget Kennedy's reputation as one of our finest essayists]. Her second South Australian poem is ‘Last Man Standing’, one she’s never before read in public “but after yesterday’s article in the ‘Adelaide Advertiser’, I think it’s about time I did”. It’s a poem about her Uncle Bob “who was a mechanic – unfortunately – during the trials at Maralinga. ‘radiation therapy was never going to beat it’, she recites, adding “huh!” with an inflection that registers scorn along with total involvement as she reads, it’s evidenced in the movement of her hands, the inflection of her voice – not only writer but entertainer as is confirmed by the audience’s response, the affirmation at the end of each poem (not merely polite) and the periodical laughter periodically interspersed through the more humourous passages of her poems.

Kennedy concludes with the poems ‘8 x 10 colour enlargements $16.50′, ‘The Zen Master’ (“anyone who has a four year old child will understand why I haven’t been writing too many poems to send out for publication recently”, and ‘Swimming Class”.

“It’s interesting today to hear the number of speakers who mention images and photographs in their poems”, Ladd reflects. “I swear we didn’t plan it this way, it’s what happens when you team five poets together at a function like this.”

The first poem from Craig Sherborne, the last of the five poets on the afternoon’s bill, is inspired from a recent book by Peter Porter and entitled ‘The Great God Gatsby’. This is followed by ‘Slipper’, “about a relationship breakup”, then a poem “about assignations that come with infidelity” and, on the same theme, ‘Icehouse’. These are dark and bruising poems, though the mood appears to lighen a little with the next poem, ‘Journo’ … “I used to be a journalist, but can’t really consider myself one any longer as I haven’t practised if for two years” … and ‘Race Day (“next poem: let’s go to the races”). But any lightness of mood – ‘my mother called her glamourpuss / my father called her forty’ – dissipates with the poem’s details of indiscretion. Nor is there joy in Sherborne’s final offering, ‘The Live-long Day’, speaking of the elderly couple for whom pills have become “their other money” and for whom the only topic worth discussing is the weather “which as usual is as cold as charity”.

In the East Tent some ninety minutes later, David Malouf Malouf introduces Kevin Hart, who was born in England, grew up in Queensland and is now based in Virginia in the USA. Hart opens with a love poem, ‘Come Back’, followed by ‘Facing the Pacific Night’. “I can never read this to Americans,’ he observes, ‘because it’s about driving east to the Pacific Ocean – as such it’s untterly unintelligible in America.” Hart moves next to ‘Harangue Death’. “What’s always interested me about theology is the mystical strain’, he admits. “With this poem, I wanted to write about something to harangue. And I thought of so many topics, but in the end narrowed down my list to just one: death. No-one is an advocate or friend of death.”

Next comes ‘Making a Rat’. “Often I write in the evening or late at night. This has its pleasures. If I’m up writing a poem and it’s any good, I wake in the morning and savour it over coffee, thinking ‘This is very good’. But there are other times you can write a poem at night and by morning have completely forgotten about its existence so when you wake up it comes as a surprise to have composed anything at all.”

Hart reads two or three poems from a series called ‘Nineteen Songs’. “I’d read more, but … some of these are illegal in Virginia, Kentucky and a few other states….”

“Much of my writing has been characterised by critics as about heat, night, sex and God,” Hart continues. “And it’s true. But since moving to America I’ve written about snow – this next poem, with my tremendous descriptive ability for titles, is called … ‘Snow’”.

Following ‘Snow’ comes ‘Hands’, about the experience of growing up in England and having horrible difficulties with schoolwork. “I’d stay behind at lunch time to do extra work – I didn’t have a lunch time basically – until one day my teacher met with my parents and outlined the difficulties I was experiencing in class. One of my weaknesses was I couldn’t tell the time … the outcome of which was I was given a cardboard clock with hands to help me learn. I must admit, it took me the better part of a week to learn how to use it: hence, ‘Hands’”.

“Here are a few new poems,” Hart continues, “some of them haven’t even been let out yet. Some of them return to that question of the mystical: if you can’t trust the mystics who can you trust? I think I’ve probably cornered the market on prayer poems – when the Penguin Book of Australian Prayer Poems comes out, I hope to do well out of it.” He reads ‘Dark Bird’, a poem sparked by his father’s death last year. “As I was walking to work one morning, a bird brushed right past me, startling me. I immediately stopped, pulled out my notbook and wrote this poem”.

Next is a love poem – ‘With You’ – set in Virginia where he lives, and ‘The Butcher’. “When I was a kid, I was utterly useless at school work, hopeless at maths, until about the age of thirteen. Then, it was as if a window had been blow open. Suddenly I understood much more about maths, went from last to first in the subject in my class. My father had his suspicions about my report card….’

Hart concludes with a couple of poems about his father – ‘My First Tie’ and ‘Father’ (written a few days after his father died), when it’s time for questions and book signings.

Tea with Steve Brock and Geoff Goodfellow then an invitation to Wakefield Press’ twenty-first birthday celebrations at a swish address in the city. Enjoyed catching up with Kim Mann and Jill Jones, and it was good to meet Phillip Edmonds whose doing good things with local journal Wet Ink. (I’ve mentioned this before, that I appreciate the way the magazine bothers to review Australian work … a commitment that isn’t at all necessary but is nevertheless appreciated; I’d also suggest it’s a magazine working at the coalface of Oz writing in that it’s not content to simply survive on government funding but seeks commercial advertising support as well). I also spoke briefly with Phillip about 70s journal Contempa which he edited. ‘Can’t keep away from journals?’
‘Ah well I didn’t intentionally set out to publish another journal, but Wet Ink just fell naturally into place so we ran with it.’

Some interesting things poetic today and tomorrow : Roo Borson, Robert Gray, Jill Jones, Cate Kennedy and Craig Sherborne in a Poetry Panel this afternoon, and Jude Aquilina, Kevin Hart, Sam Wagan-Watson and Chris Wallace-Crabbe appearing tomorrow morning.

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

First prize: “The Thaumaturge” by Christopher Konrad (WA)
Second prize: “Halfway Across the Desert” by Karen Dixon (WA)
——————————————————————————–
Highly Commended:
“Worship” by Mags Webster (WA)
“The Crescent and the Cross” by Paula Jones (WA)
“China Landscapes” by Glen Phillips (WA)
“The Balinese Sonnets” by Roland Leach (WA)
——————————————————————————–
Commended:
“Dispersion of Seed” by John C. Ryan (WA)
“From Lighthouse Hill” by Dick Alderson (WA)
“My Grandmothers” by Julie Watts (WA)
“Change” by Kathryn Lomer (TAS)

And – from the Fellowship of Australian Writers Western Australia website – the judge’s [Les Wicks] comments:

Dylan Thomas once said “a good poem is a contribution to reality”. I think that covered the less tangible qualities, but it needed something to cover the craft aspect of our work so I supplement this with a line of my own – “poetry breaks the habits of words”. I’m happy with the two combined.

More …

The inaugural issue of literary journal Kill Your Darlings will be launched at Writers’ Week next Friday.

The website of the same name has existed since September 2009 and features a vibrant mix of reviews, author interviews, literary anecdotes and industry news. This first hard-copy issue goes a step further by including short fiction, cartoons and non-fiction commentary.

More …

Monumental

Oh yes. It was a landslide. Another landslide.
A foregone conclusion but it’s already a shambles.
I knew it would be, said it would. Haven’t you heard?
Yes. The bottle of wine on the Government jet.
The Minister & Co couldn’t resist the idea of
wine on the way back from the dry zone.
I don’t know. Cabby Savigong or something.
They’ll all vinegar to me. Creasoak. No bubbles.
Yes, up North. The Land Rights land. Aboriginal.
No, only one bottle. No, they weren’t drunk
in the dry zone. It was for the return trip.
No, it wasn’t taken out of the plane. Even
so, as soon as the wheels touched the ground
they were in the dry zone. Well, sort of.
That’s the point. Who knows who’s responsible.
The airport might or mightn’t be dry in the dry zone
the tarmac might be separate from the airport
& once the bottle of vino was taken on board
it might have been up to the pilot anyway.
The Crime & Misconduct Commission are conducting
their usual enquiry. It’ll be a whitewash.
They know which way their bread’s buttered.
Whose idea? Well, who knows whose idea.
It could have been the adviser to the Minister.
It probably was. She’s the one who took the rap.
There’s no doubt she took the wine on board
but the others must have known for sure−
the pilot, the Minister, whoever went along.
It’s not as if the Government jet’s a jumbo.
The Minister denied all knowledge & responsibility.
She’d deny all knowledge of & responsibility for
someone sitting next to her wearing a balaclava
& carrying a violin case. So guess what comes next.
The Premier sacked the adviser & then took off
to apologise to all & sundry in the dry zone
at tax-payers’ expense, of course. $9,000. Yes
the Minister tagged along but it was his show.
He can’t help himself. 2,000km & back. Mr Apology.
Finally, the adviser decided she’d had enough.
She hadn’t handed out How-to-vote cards for nothing.
So she leaked, blabbed. She went to the police.
Yes, she spilled the beans on her own Minister
& what does the Premier do? He reinstates her.
Would you read about it? I mean, would you?
Nothing much? Yes, of course it’s nothing much.
It’s an unholy bloody mess. A total shambles.
Talk about a stuff-up, a monumental stuff-up.
It’s a complete & absolute disaster.

Graham Rowlands’ most recent book is his Collected Poems, published in 2009 by Lythrum Press.

Famous Reporter 41 (June 2010)

To succeed as a writer—and I define “success” quite simply as being able to continue in one’s work—you not only have to “create the taste by which [one] is to be relished” (Wm. Wordsworth) but you have to create relationships and infrastructure and paths of distribution. Start a press, start a blog, form a reading group, start a reading series. If you can synergize with institutions, do so, but don’t sit around waiting for them to recognize or rescue you: they can offer you everything but initiative. This is the best path I’ve found for resisting the otherwise inevitable alienation from one’s own creative labor that comes from permitting oneself and one’s work to be processed by workshops and editors and tenure committees.

More …

Yesterday I read the manifesto of Joe Stack (1956-2010)–after he set fire to his Austin, Texas house and then flew his Piper Cherokee into an IRS office building. I found myself for the first time in many years wanting to turn to Ezra Pound’s Cantos. I am an insufficient Modernist scholar, one who adores Hart Crane but never quite took to T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound; this may explain why I now teach contemporary poetry more than any other and get at the Modernists through allusions rather than texts.

More …

wild life rifle fire
Paul Siegell
96 pages
Otoliths 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9806025-6-2
$10.00 + p&h
Lulu URL link
Amazon URL link

Paul Siegell’s wild life rifle fire proves, if proof were needed, that the electrifying art and legacy of Concrete Poetry is not dead!

Siegell’s book-length carmen figuratum not only flashes the reader back to the heady first days of the Noigrandes Group in São Paulo and Eugen Gomringer’s adventures in VisPo, but even further back to Medieval anagrams, Greek bucolic poems and Sumerian figure poems. Here we find DaDa dynamite and typographical talismans freshened by a poet whose native gifts imbue this exciting work with a whole new sense of “poetic object.”

Siegell’s haptic heroism compels the reader to re-examine the basic elements of a language that we too often take for granted, in the process creating an energetic and always surprising work of both visual art and poetry. Not to be missed! —Vladimir Slender-Hedge

Signed copies of wild life rifle fire are also available. Full details can be found at Paul Siegell’s blog, ReVeLeR@eYeLeVeL.

Nowadays it seems to me
that everything’s a sign:
this pelican planing
beneath pearl meniscus
cloud cover,
wraiths of morning rain,
to alight on a rotting pylon,
scanning the mangrove fringes
for flashes of silver;
three curlews watching me
of late from the shade
of a young melaleuca,
resembling three shaman-
eyed fates as I make my way
to the pewter river:
messengers in avian guise
who cross borders,
mercurial couriers, passing
from what is unknowable
to the unknown…

In the gallery cafe courtyard

Having licked the velvety jade
lining avocado rind,
a she-dragon refocuses,
assumes a cobra asana,
regarding us expectantly
with gimlet-eyed
attentiveness
reserved for the sole
occupants of quiet cafes.

An ibis fusses, fossicking,
more savvy than the saurian,
one glance down an arc of bill
enough to ascertain
there’s nothing at our table
worth the scavenging.

Tepid coffee, tepid water
fuel a brief exchange on zoos.
Something can be gleaned
from how another views
a small prehensile, watching him
and hoping for a crumb to fall.
The water dragon makes him nervous,
and the zoo-talk palls.

Nor is he charmed by winged seeds
that the rosewood strews about our feet,
propeller flukes of stalled attempts
at launching conversation, on a day
when minds aspire, but zeppelins
decline to rise,
grounded by a lack of helium.

Words ignite, but fail to fire,
stubbed out on the unvoiced thought
our only common ground is sourced
within the third conditional,
that absurd modality denoting
unreality, hypothetical
desire’s demise:

If you weren’t…
(younger/married/foreign)
If I weren’t…
(so burnt):
this subtext…

Still the water dragon waits,
impassive sphinx of spherulite.
Our dialogue is foundering,
the cups empty, the table bare.
She doesn’t know we haven’t
any crumbs to spare for her.

Jena Woodhouse is a Queensland-born poet and writer of short and long fiction. Her work has been widely published in literary magazines and has received a number of awards. Her latest publication is a narrative, ‘Farming Ghosts’ (Ginninderra 2009), and she has recently been awarded an International Writer’s Fellowship to Hawthornden International Writers’ Retreat at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland.

walleahpress.com.au/FR41Woodhouse.html

The novel that brings Melbourne to life for me is always going to be Monkey Grip. Published in 1977, it kicked off the literary career of Helen Garner and the publishing story of McPhee Gribble. It’s all sex, drugs and rock’n'roll as Nora cycles the streets of Fitzroy and Carlton, past Victorian verandas trimmed with elegant cast-iron lacework. It was a good film too, with pub-rock scenes featuring the hot band of the era, The Divinyls.

More …

Those who come across the seas

[On April 16, 2009, a boat carrying 47 Afghani asylum seekers exploded near Ashmore reef after being taken over by Australian Defence Forces. 5 refugees died and many survivors sustained critical burns.]

Nation: now just a memory
Ocean: our deliverance or our grave

Open-ended: furious heat, incessant thirst
Navy: two warships gleam in the horizon’s haze
Escort: our hope steered two thousand kilometers astray

Inferno: for the match-striker, death defied detention
Skin: our last defence incinerated

Identity: father, taxi-driver, BOAT PERSON
Letter: go back
Lies: boundless plains to share
Essence: pain is to life like blood is to veins
Grafted: in this sterile purgatory they piece me together
Attentive: a guard at my bedside watches
Lest I rise like Lazarus and live here

Susan Austin is a poet, occupational therapist, and a social justice and climate activist. She lives in Hobart where she is involved in the local writing community.

walleahpress.com.au/FR41Austin.html

Like the embrace of a new lover, a change of city brings its own internal shifts. As the centre for Books, Writing and Ideas opens, Liza Power meets five writers who came to town.

More …

Publishers, literary agents, and booksellers were among those gathered in Sydney today for a major symposium on digital publishing.

With the release of e-book readers such as Amazon’s Kindle, publishers in the United States and the UK have already restructured to make sure they’re at the forefront of the new digital era.

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Anyhow, I figured I’d make another attempt at it but this time in an online form. No payment – for younger Tasmanian writers only. Submissions welcome, to cedricswall@walleahpress.com.au – you’ll find a webpage ‘under construction’ at walleahpress.com.au/cedricswall.html

Cheers,

Ralph

… we all assumed that the vast majority of unsolicited submissions – meaning those manuscripts which had not already been vetted by an agent and deemed worthy of representing before a publisher – were likely to contain few hidden gems. So the revolving door of receptionists were trained to respond to telephone inquiries from aspiring authors who wanted to submit manuscripts, by first suggesting they find an agent; and if they still wanted to submit their manuscript, to send it in marked to the attention of Margaret Rogers. Anything that arrived for Margaret Rogers was destined straight for the slush pile – because Margaret did not exist. Her initials were simply code for Manuscript Rejection.

More …

I’ve had an ongoing interest in all the discussion around e-book readers for some years now. For obvious reasons. And I’m not sure all the current flurry about the new Apple tablet and the like will be a big advance.

In other words, I’ve never been convinced by the slight clunkiness of e-book readers and still am not (quite), though I relented late last year and bought one. No, not a Kindle. I didn’t like the idea of that enforced connectivity nor do I have endless cash to pay for it. I bought a decent little device, the Ecoreader, that works offline with all the main formats, including pdf and text files.

Mainly, I wanted something that I could use to read poetry books and manuscripts, my own for checking, and works by others. Also for the endless document files I have hanging about. Something lighter and more compact than a computer, that used epaper, that in fact saved endless printing but might also offer some pleasures of reading in a different way.

But what actually happened?

More …

Mazerati parrot

This year my mountain slid to the ground
and fish flew in the air.
And I swam for my life through a city of fear.
No escaping this damned, this Götterdämmerung,
my life an opera score for crazed musicians.

My teahouse in the mountain’s still there,
but the birds have nowhere to sleep.
And the white heat this summer
makes glass, salt and feathers
objects of despair.

***

See this cut-glass vase, so perfect for roses,
belonged to the violin-player at No. 17.
She went crazy from an early age,
though she sired three sons.
Made of wire tendrils. Of sharp green.

Her daisy-wheel garden of pastels
was her delight, and captive birds,
jackdaws, parrots, sang for her
while she silently read,
a garland of dead roses on her chair.

Anne Kellas has lived in Southern Africa, the UK and Australia, and has published in magazines, journals, anthologies and online publications since 1968. Her third collection, working title “Silent Mountain” (with an Australia Council grant) nears completion. Poems from Mt Moono, ’89, deals with migration from apartheid South Africa. Isolated States came out shortly after 9/11. Anne is also a publisher (Roaring Forties Press, The Write Stuff) and blogger (North of the Latte Line).

walleahpress.com.au/FR41Kellas.html

Australia dominates the shortlist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize in the South-East Asia and Pacific region, and can hope for another triumph following Christos Tsiolkas’s popular win for The Slap in the regional and overall competitions last year.

More …

Just a reminder that the Poetry Pedlars Readings for February are on tomorrow upstairs @ The Royal Oak @ 7:30pm

Competition this month was ‘My Wild Side’ – make of it what you will!

Please bring any original poetry books for sale…

Hope to see you there!

Poetically,

steve dAvis

away from home

bowties or butterflies:
the sauce of your choice.

an umbrella collapses.
the chairs are inseparable.

-

this display a glass
bottomed gondola.

model train derailment
halfway into the mountain

-

like restless in ‘the
method of immersion’

la lingua madre
surfacing for breath.

-

bus stops pine needles carpet
the terra rossa tennis court.

imminent arrivals
text-to-destination.

-

grammatically the tutor tells me
you cannot enter the walls –

stick figure stuck
in a stone cell to illustrate.

-

poems of place.
souvenir this that

his own little
piece of vesuvius.

-

up/down some
(unsigned?) street in pistoia

reception deserts us returns.
digging deep for lost vocab.

-

but cinema centrale
settles it:

visiting mono-linguists
wilt in the provinces

-

uncorrupted/
unembalmed

not much now
to hang the gown on

-

most frequently
asked question?

what to feed the children
death or fairytales.

-

makes two of us out of a tower’s
skinny staircase

the renaissance
spills into the backyard.

-

radio guide
re-tells the tale

of the twins
history and hearsay

-

somewhere more specific
than piazza napoleone?

…hotel universo.
see you at two.

-

this winter air frigid
as a pen chained to the bank desk

handwriting flatlining
in fingerless gloves

-

still scrawls my “xmas
high-rise haiku”:

inflatable santas
hung from the balconies/with care.-

(bit rich?) as benedict declares
the way we worship

obscene wealth
a modern sin.
-

finest rain
stencils awnings in the square

lavoro in corso
loose cobblestone vaguely cubist

-

thank you gesture
the eyes of the mime.

could’ve/should’ve
squeezed the accordion in.

-

almost a memory
that pillion rider’s

shirt-tail billow
ing into the past.

-

in your dreams!
a skybed absorbs local turbulence.

flying nervously in circles
above sydney suspense (viewed literally)

Chris Brown lives in Newcastle, Australia. His poetry has appeared in a number of online and print journals including, most recently, cordite, overland and The Age. He has work forthcoming with mascara poetry and foam:e.

The UWS Writing & Society Research Group in collaboration with the UTS Centre for New Writing presents an illustrated seminar by Neil Astley of Bloodaxe Books Island Voices: Contemporary Poets from Britain and Ireland
Date: Wednesday 17 February
Time: 5.00pm – 7.00pm
Venue: Studio Room 1.05, UTS
Address: Bon Marche Building, UTS
Cnr Broadway & Harris Street, Ultimo
RSVP essential: writing@uws.edu.au

Neil Astley is founding editor of Bloodaxe Books, the renowned British poetry publishing house which has produced over 900 books by more than 300 writers since its foundation in 1978. As well as publishing famous names in literature from all over the world – its poets and books have won virtually every major literary award given to poetry, from the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Pulitzer to the Nobel Prize – Bloodaxe has discovered and helped establish the reputations of many of Britain’s most promising new writers, and is known especially for its range, from traditional English poets to playful postmodernists, with a special interest in contemporary American poetry and poetry in translation; and is widely credited with transforming the publication opportunities for women poets in Britain. Bloodaxe has also been filming and recording poets, and in this seminar, Neil Astley will premiere a film, Island Voices, featuring some of Bloodaxe’s best known poets, with a discussion to follow.

Neil Astley has won a Gregory Award for his own poetry, and has published two poetry collections, Darwin Survivor and Biting My Tongue, and two novels, The End of My Tether (shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award), and The Sheep Who Changed the World. He gave a controversial lecture – with far-reaching effects – on the state of British poetry at StAnza, Scotland’s poetry festival, in St Andrews in March 2005:

http://www.stanzapoetry.org/stanza06_archive/lecture.htm

Six Reasons
(for Axl)

He’s the heart
of a Neruda ode
when he bows
to new words.

He’s the conqueror
of a chaise longue
climbing as if gaining
ground on heaven.

He’s king of all wild things
following the hounds over
a realm of cushions.

His face, when sleeping,
is a laser etched crystal.

He’s a deep dream diver
steeped in consolatory kisses.

He’s the sun that dances
the day out with
Moby’s Beautiful;

and his pet canary sings
from its powder coated
cage.

Karen Knight (2010)

A collection of new and selected poems is a milestone in a poet’s career, one that should not go unacknowledged. Deb Westbury has a solid reputation as a fine lyrical poet, as well as being an influential teacher and mentor. The poems in The View From Here are taken from her four previous collections, as well as a range of new poems. Westbury has not been an overtly prolific poet. Her career stretches back to 1990 when Mouth to Mouth, her first book was published. That makes this a long awaited collection.

These poems are highly readable. The metaphors crisp and clear. Westbury eschews structural formalism, preferring to let tone and image stand alone. There are no linguistic tricks or intellectual abstractions. These are poems about human relationships, memory, grief, and the natural world. They can be both lyrical and vernacular, peppered with urban scenes as well as natural imagery. A peach stone is described as:
         the swirling red
         thumbprint of the stone exposed (p. 27).
There is even a little comic eroticism:
         A quick one in the parking lot
         and his footprints on the inside
         of the windscreen (p.96).
The tone is consistent throughout, yet there is an assured variety in the narratives and subjects that interest her.

Throughout there are poems of emotional power employing juxtapositions of urban ephemera against the natural, or mythical worlds.
         the city’s outline appears through the smog
         like a ruined Avalon
         burning (p.90).
A sparse, imagistic quality permeates the language, as well as a colloquial pleasure in story telling. This is achieved notably in ‘Death in Thirroul’, a strong poem about the death of Brett Whiteley told with warts-and-all clarity from the point of view of the background characters. Elsewhere there is a political sensibility at work with poems about Tienanmen Square, refugees, the homeless, the status of women. The book balances between poems concerning the social world, and those of personal, introspective reflection. As the title of the collection suggests The View From Here expresses an individual perspective of the world, informed by an intimacy of detailed observation.

Structurally the book commences with the new poems, and returns in reverse chronological order to the earlier work. The effect of this is unusual, where the reader seems to know progressively more than the personae of the poems. Another small structural point concerns those poems which are sometimes footnoted, or prefaced with the locations of where they were written, or set, (Katoomba, Port Kembla, Upstate New York). A minor point, but if the reader is unfamiliar with these places, I wonder if the effect of this limits the poem’s availability. It seems to me the poems are bigger than these self-imposed constraints.

I mentioned grief previously, and this cuts to the quick of Westbury’s measured output. Since her last book Flying Blind (2002), and back to the earlier Surface Tension (1998) there has been a profound and articulate silence. The first poem of this present collection, and a significant number of others, are eloquent in their description of the process of grief – grief at the death of her son, Luke Westbury.
         What began in my heart
         comes out like a nail between my shoulders (p. 15).
It is hard to know how to talk about the intimate detail of poems like these. In a prescient way one of the earlier poems ‘The Prince,’ in a mixture of fairy tale and industrial imagery states: ‘there is no mystery so great as misery’ (p. 118). There is an elegiac poignancy in the way these poems speak the unspeakable.
         He would have been seventeen in May.
         He was
         reckless (p. 78).

While the event behind these poems is emotionally harrowing, a philosophical paradox is also implied: how to keep writing, and indeed why? Sometimes sorrow and pain for the writer can lead to literary exaltation for the reader. These are profound poems. Westbury handles the emotional intensity of loss with images imbued with dignity and powerful understatement. The poems are a way of not letting go, or as one of the themes this book returns to – the persistence of memory.

The final section of the book contains poems from her first collection Mouth to Mouth. These poems were on the HSC English syllabus for ten years, and it is easy to see why. They are accessible, suburban narratives, lyrical and vernacular, as well as imagistic nature poems. Rather than the echoes of death, which punctuate the collection, the book is perhaps better framed by two poems typical of Westbury’s strength of observation. In ‘Coffee and Rain’ she sees ‘a man / in the building opposite / standing at the window.’ Twenty years later, in ‘Roundabout at the Family Hotel,’ she similarly observes another figure:
         His face is shiny with the secret
         joy of one whose wishes
         have all come true (p. 29).
It is this sense of hope, one that has looked in the eye of mortality and grief, which remains. Westbury articulates a domesticity of human failings that, being human, leave much in which to rejoice. She has one of the purest poetic voices around.

ZOE DATTNER:
But to give you an Australian title that has inspired me, then it’s Peter Temple’s Truth. It reminded me that writers need to really think about the way they’re going to tell their story; just because you have the English language at your disposal and an alphabet of 26 letters, and various grammatical rules and structures doesn’t mean that stringing two words together should be easy. It’s not, and you’ve really got to consider, in the most intricate way, what is remarkable about the way you string two words together. And if it’s not remarkable, why? If you’ve got the time and the interest and the talent and the audacity to write a book, then make it remarkable.

More …

Tranter grew up in Sydney, daughter of poet John Tranter and literary agent Lyn Tranter. The bookish environment seemed normal, she says, and literature just the business of grown-ups. From her childish perspective, what those bohemian adults really did was hang out, drink, argue and generally misbehave. Of her father’s legendary falling out with Les Murray over the purposes of poetry, she says airily: “I can’t really remember it. I was pretty caught up in my own world. Dad was always having that argument with someone, and he was having it with Les at that time … ”

She trails off. “But I always saw the value in Dad’s point of view. He’s an anti-romantic.” She pauses again, reluctant to speak for him. She says she took some of his views very seriously – especially the importance of craft and of literary tradition – but adds that, after all, “he’s my Dad, so I would have wanted to do things my own way …

More …

Grant acquittals time: a necessary evil. Thankfully, managed to finalise 2009’s acquittal yesterday and hand it in. Tried to explain the magazine’s interest in the notion of ‘islandness’ – to quote from a report in Prince Edward Island’s ‘Guardian’ newspaper last week, the way in which the establishment of connections around the world in places like the Falklands, Mauritius, Malta, Iceland, Prince Edward Island, Tasmania contribute ‘to the enhancement and enrichment of our understanding of the cultural, social, political and economic reality of islandness’ – by the publication of writers in the current issue from Trinidad and Prince Edward island, and in the next issue by poets from Vancouver Island and Iceland. Running the danger of having too many irons in the fire … ?

Lunch today: Tasmanian Writers’ Centre’s Chris Gallagher put on a spread for visiting Adelaide poet Kimberley Mann, who read along with Anne Morgan, Jenny Barnard, Karen Knight and Jane Williams. Kim spoke of the pressure of combining a full-time job with writing, doesn’t faze her though sometimes the writing takes a back seat – ‘I love my job as much as I love writing’ – then she’s right back into it. Kimberley’s chock full of energy, speaks passionately of the need to write of/create space for issues and values that matter – of the decision to not write ’safe’. Says she’s totally impressed with the Tasmanian Writers’ Centre’s interest in environmental writing … ‘Tasmania … yes … (figuratively scratches her head) where else would it be?’ Spoke with enthusiasm about the Australian Poetry Centre’s upcoming poetry festival in Goolwa, South Australia in late April and handed out flyers [the rollcall looks exciting], along with the programme for the Adelaide Writers Festival…. Wouldn’t let me get away without reading something (which was sweet) so for a Tasmanian feel I read Anne Collins’ ‘Albert Road, Moonah’, a favourite.

Some recent acceptances for the June [or possibly, July] issue of ‘famous reporter’…

Poetry
Stefanie Bennett, Chris Brown, Margaret Campbell, John Egan, Geoff Goodfellow, Libby Goodsir, Syd Harrex, Rory Harris, Gerður Kristný, Graham Nunn, Helen Parsons, Rachel Petridis, Ron Pretty, Vaughn Prain, Graham Rowlands, Flora Smith,David Terelinck, Les Wicks

Fiction
Sarah Annesley: ‘The Smell of Books’
Jennifer Compton: ‘Bushfires’
Robert Cox: ‘Blue Day’

Launch speeches
Pete Hay’s launch of Robyn Mathison’s collection, ‘To be eaten by mice’
Kathryn Lomer’s launch of Anne Morgan’s collection, ‘A Reckless Descent from Eternity’ [to be confirmed]
Robyn Mathison’s launch of Molly Guy’s short story collection, ‘Reading Between the Lines’

Cheers,
Ralph

We are writing with news of a transition we both deem very exciting.

By the end of 2010, John Tranter and Pam Brown will have put out 40 issues of Jacket (jacketmagazine.com). It began in what John recalls as “a rash moment” in 1997 – an early all-online magazine, one of the earliest in the world of poetry and poetics, and quite rare for its consistency over the years. “The design is beautiful, the contents awesomely voluminous, the slant international modernist and experimental.” (So said The Guardian.)

After issue 40, John will retire from thirteen years of intense every-single-day involvement with Jacket, and the entire archive of thousands of web pages will move intact to servers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where it will of course be available on the internet to everyone, for free, as always. But the magazine is not ceasing publication: quite the opposite.

Starting with the first issue in 2011, Jacket will have a new home, extra staff and a vigorous future as Jacket2. Jacket and its continuation, Jacket2, will be hosted by the Kelly Writers House and PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania.

The connection with PennSound, a vast and growing archive of audio recordings of poetry performance, discussion and criticism, is seen as a valuable additional facet of the new magazine, as is the relationship with busy Kelly Writers House, a lively venue for day-to-day poetic interchange of all kinds. The synergy in this three-way relationship has great potential.

Al will become Publisher and Jessica Lowenthal, Director of the Writers House, will be Associate Publisher. The new Editor will be Michael S. Hennessey (currently Managing Editor of PennSound) and the new Managing Editor will be Julia Bloch. John will be available as Founding Editor, and Pam will continue as Associate Editor.

More news about Jacket2 in the weeks and months to come. Meantime, the Jacket2 folks extend gratitude — as many in the world of poetics do — to John and to Pam Brown for the extraordinary work they’ve done. And John, for his part, is mightily pleased that Jacket will be preserved and will continue and grow in a somewhat new mode but with a continuous mission and approach.

- John Tranter & Al Filreis

http://jackemagazine.com

links:

Al Filreis: http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/ & http://writing.upenn.edu/

Kelly Writers House: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/wh/
3805 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA: tel: 215-746-POEM

Kelly Writers House Director Jessica Lowenthal: http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/people/staff/

Michael S. Hennessey: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Hennessey.php

Julia Bloch: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Bloch.php

Pam Brown: http://thedeletions.blogspot.com/

John Tranter: http://johntranter.com/

Al Filreis

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis

Australasia’s richest literary prize has been axed by the West Australian government.

WA Culture and Arts Minister John Day said he would discontinue the Australia-Asia Literary Award (AALA) following an external review of the award, in tandem with the Premier’s Book Award.

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Haircuts by children, a play about communist Russia, and Marianne Faithfull are just some of the acts in store at Perth’s International Arts Festival (PIAF).

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When UPEI English professor Richard Lemm left P.E.I. on a warm day in August 2009 and arrived in Tasmania in the dead of winter 31.5 hours later, he felt rather befuddled.

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Included in issue sixteen, the southern summer 2010 issue, is work from Thomas Fink, Satu Kaikkonen, Nate Pritts, Jane A. Lewty, Craig Foltz, Michael Basinski, Stephen C. Middleton, Márton Koppány, Arpine Konyalian Grenier, Raymond Farr, Jeff Crouch & Sheila E. Murphy, Joel Chace, Caleb Puckett, Philip Byron Oakes, Ed Baker, Tom Beckett interviewing William Allegrezza, William Allegrezza, dan raphael, Alyson Torns, Jeff Harrison, Grzegorz Wróblewski, Michele Leggott, PD Mallamo, Ray Craig, Mark Cunningham, Cecelia Chapman, David-Baptiste Chirot, Vernon Frazer, Helen White & Jeff Crouch, James Yeary, Robert Lee Brewer, Michael Brandonisio, J. D. Nelson, Scott Metz, Geof Huth, Corey Wakeling, John M. Bennett & Thomas M. Cassidy, Sheila E. Murphy & John M. Bennett, John M. Bennett, Rebecca Mertz, Felino Soriano, Cath Vidler, David Wolach, Carlyle Baker, Stu Hatton, Jenny Enochsson, Robert Gauldie, Rebecca Eddy, Joe Balaz, Bobbi Lurie, Andrew Topel & Márton Koppány, Hugh Tribbey, John Martone, J. Gordon Faylor, Evan Harrison, A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz, Bob Heman, Guillermo Castro, & sean burn.

Peter Goldsworthy is a charming, quietly spoken GP from Adelaide with a double life.

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The ”cultural cringe” is the term devised by late Australian social commentator A. A. Phillips to qualify postwar Australia’s delusions of artistic inadequacy. Although it is 60 years since Phillips coined the phrase, and although it could be argued Australia has come a long way in establishing a self-sufficient cultural identity, enough elements remain to prove we are still looking over our shoulders instead of at ourselves.

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No writer in history so mysteriously passed into myth, long before his death, as JD Salinger, whose last published work was a fragmentary prose piece titled ‘Hapworth 16, 1924′ which appeared in the New Yorker (19 June 1965).

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

The writer Peter Goldsworthy counts among his many admirers Clive James, a man with whom he has long had in common one standout trait: a multiplicity of gifts, literary and other. Today Goldsworthy has one more thing in common with James: an AM.

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ABC-TV1 8pm Tuesday 26th January, 2010.

Laurie Brinklow has relished working in the beaming glow of Island authors.
The 51-year-old Charlottetown publisher has, for years, shared in the glee Islanders exhibit after having penned works to be bound between two covers.
Between 50 and 55 books of diverse description have been published since Brinklow founded Acorn Press in 1994. Whether a children’s book or a cookbook, the final product that hits the shelf brings unabashed joy to P.E.I. authors that are clearly far more set on simply telling a story than in acquiring wealth from their writings.
“It’s definitely a labour of love,’’ said Brinklow.
“There’s such a prestige about having your name on a book…my favourite part has been actually working with the authors to make something that they’re really proud of.’’
Yet an exciting new chapter yet to be written in Brinklow’s life has led the lover of literature to shelve her publishing company. Prospective buyers have already voiced interest in purchasing the business that Brinklow, a single mother of two, could only operate as a business sideline from her home while holding down a full-time job at the University of Prince Edward Island.

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If, as Thomas Carlyle said, ”the history of the world is but the biography of great men”, then the history of the last century or so must be a record of sports people. I came to this conclusion when a man on a train vociferously declared that Ben Cousins was his hero. His friend, who was a bit long in the tooth, denied this. For him Peter Carey was ”the greatest man that ever lived, a real f—ing hero”.

I nearly fell off my seat. This rough-as-bags man bound for the outer western suburbs thought Peter Carey, the celebrated Australian author, was a hero. I was stunned and impressed, my prejudices waylaid for the moment. When his friend angrily contradicted him, Peter Carey’s fan clarified himself. ”Sure he was,” he said. ”He kicked more than 500 goals and played in three premierships.” Now, I don’t know much about football but I do know that Peter Carey, the scribe, has not taken to wearing tight shorts and running around an oval, clutching an oddly shaped ball as though his life depended on it.

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[Teri Louise Kelly, The Independent Weekly, January 14th 2010]:

Produced by the University of Western Sydney, HEAT has been rolling on for a few years now, in the process establishing itself as one of Australia’s most eclectic literary journals.

HEAT 20 continues the charter of diverse subject matter and author biogs, with essays, prose and poetry from China, the USA and Ireland, as well as touching base with Italy, Peru and Africa to name but a few thematic detours.

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The best joke about the cultural cringe I’ve heard was told to me many years ago by the writer Frank Moorhouse, who quipped that “Meanjin” was an Aboriginal word meaning “rejected by The New Yorker”.

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Announcing the February Melbourne launch of the ground-breaking anthology, Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets, edited by Michael Farrell and Jill Jones (Puncher and Wattmann).

To be launched by Christos Tsiolkas and Kathleen Fallon
Tuesday 2nd Feb, 7pm
Hares & Hyenas
63 Johnston St, Fitzroy

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Robert Minhinnick (Wales), Arianna Pozzuoli (Canada), Emma Jones (Australia via England), Glenn Colquhoun (NZ), Elizabeth Smither (NZ), Louise Oxley, Jordie Albiston, Brook Emery, Lucy Dougan, Jan Owen, Jeri Kroll, Jill Jones, Esther Ottaway, Grant Caldwell, Andrew Lansdown, Ron Pretty, Steve Evans, Kate Llewellyn, Harry Laing, Lisa Gorton, Emilie Zoe Baker, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Sarah Day, Amelia Walker, TT O, Bronwyn Lea, Yvette Holt, Mike Ladd, Bel Schenk, Paul Hetherington, Lyn Hatherly, Sandra Thibodeaux, Andrew Burke, Martin Langford, IQ, Ann de Hugard, Michelle Leber, Rachael Petridis, Chloe Wilson, Anna Kerdijk Nicholson, Libby Hart, Sand Writers group, Gawler Poets, Friendly Street Poets, Poets Union, café poets, poets from all states and territories, the list goes on. There will be appearances by other guests and entertainers, hip hop artists, comics, a publishers’ market and a poetry slam, poetic monologues, a teachers’ professional development day, workshops for children and adults, masterclasses, poetry linked with film, radio and stage, on the wharf, in the park and by the river, book launches, a Goolwa Café Poet launch, a Festival Club, dawn service, open mic sessions and a series of panels and forums.

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A 60-year annual tradition that involved a mysterious visitor leaving roses and a bottle of cognac at the grave of writer Edgar Allan Poe on the anniversary of his birthday appears to have ended.

In a custom dating back to 1949, an anonymous visitor has come every year on Jan. 19 to lay three roses and a half-bottle of cognac at the Poe grave marker in downtown Baltimore.

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Hay: There’s nothing coherent on this tape….”

Flanagan: “Neither enlightening nor interesting.”

Hay: “No, that’s not quite true. You said some great things about Demidenko, best things I’ve heard said about Demidenko….”

Flanagan: “I won the Victorian Premier’s Prize Hazy.”

Hay: “You did?”

Flanagan: “It’s secret, till … October twentieth.”

Hay: “That’s great, fantastic … you beauty … ”

Flanagan: “It’s a pisser isn’t it?”

Hay: “Oh, we’ve got weeks to hold our breath.”

Flanagan: “Yeah, I’m sorry, you’ve been sworn to bloody secrecy.”

Hay: “Won’t say a thing. Ah that’s wonderful. Beyond all belief.”

Flanagan: “From Victorians too.”

Hay: “Yeah, well Sydney is so imperialistic that in a sense even Victorians are victims. Ah, that’s great, I could just bawl!”

Conversations: an interview with Pete Hay and Richard Flanagan [29th September, 1995].

Jaime Robles
Robert Sheppard
Nathan Thompson
Ben Smith
Ashley Chantler
Nigel Pickard
Peter Gillies & Rupert M Loydell
Reviews: Peter Riley, Carrie Etter, Lisa Samuels
Notes on contributors

It took me a few weeks to read Blake Bailey’s exhaustive and exhausting (770 pages tip to tail) biography of John Cheever. Living with Cheever even for a month was no picnic: as his wife or children would tell you. He was a depressive, conflicted alcoholic, notably “enchained within the prison of self” even for a writer: when his children read some of the thousands of pages of his journals after his death, what shocked them was not the detail of his homosexual lusts and affairs (“If I followed my instincts, I would be strangled by some hairy sailor in a public urinal. Every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy, was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol”), but how rarely he mentioned his family.

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The second issue of Town might be read as an oblique (and rather belated) response to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting held in Port of Spain last November. Or else simply as a collection of poems and images by five writers and one artist based in or connected to a number of countries around the world that happen to belong to the postcolonial entity called the Commonwealth: Australia, the Bahamas, Canada, Gibraltar, Guyana, India, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom.

Read the contents of Town 2 online.

Contents

2:1….Easter Monday: The North Side, by Nicolette Bethel

2:2, 2:3, 2:4….And Evil Eyes Can’t Even See Their Own Hell, Holes 2, and Holes (all 2008), by Sandra Brewster

2:5….Contemporary Poetry in the UK: An Introduction, Part 1, by Ken Edwards

2:6….Commonwealth of Bees, by Alex Houen

2:7….Lightning in the Fall, by Ian McDonald

2:8….Sickness Brings Not Understanding, by Vivek Narayanan

Notes on contributors

I’ve sometimes wondered if festivals are what you have instead of a culture. But that ignores how important festivals have been in stimulating and influencing the best of Australian work, by exposing local artists to their most exciting international contemporaries and through their roles in commissioning and staging local art.

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There was hardly a more loved and admired man than my Uncle Keith. Employed by the railways he lived and worked in country towns. He was brilliant at any sport, had a fondness for beer and spent as much time as possible with his mates. For many he was the quintessential Aussie bloke.

There was another side to him, of course. He hated gays (”pillow biters”), Aborigines (”coons”) and artists of all persuasions (”wankers”) and believed the moon landings were fake. He only gave me one piece of advice: ”Be average. Never try to be different because no one likes a smart arse.”

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after a break in january the castlemaine poetry readings will recommence in february, on sunday 28th at 3pm.

2010 will feature an amazing collection of interstate and victorian poets. interstate visitors include peter lach-newinsky (nsw), zenobia frost (qld) and karen knight – with jules on percussion – (tas).

also highlighting the best poets in the central victoria.

now in our fifth year, 2010 will begin with a dynamic duo; peter bakowski and nathan curnow.

peter bakowski is touring with his new book and castlemaine is one of the first stops. nathan curnow is hot poetic property after his successful ghost project.

as always with the vibrant open section – 2/3 minutes in competition for the castlemaine cup.

3pm kickoff – 5 pm stumps at the atmospheric guildford hotel with host zac, an iambic pentamter down the road from castlemaine on the road to daylesford/ballarat – 15 minutes for humankind.

Here’s a thoughtful piece from retired Washington Post literary editor Bob Thompson. In “Writing about Writers” he recounts having to interview Joan Didion about her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking – three days after her daughter Quintana’s memorial service. “What was I supposed to do?” he writes. “Ask her how she felt?” He also remembers trying to talk to Phillip Roth about his writing, on the author’s strict condition that the interviewer not ask him any questions about his personal life – when his is a life mined for fiction more overtly than most writers.

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I’m trying to explain to my friend why she needs a kindle. She’s a writer, and reader, but she’s reluctant. She loves browsing bookshops, she adores the physical feel of the book in her hand, the smell of the fresh page, the different font. Me too, but I wanted a kindle the moment I heard about it.

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[two topics covered by Blundell here, the first on the third season of the US television series 'Mad Men', the second on the H.G. Nelson-hosted 'Bush Slam' currently playing on ABC1: Ralph]

While the show features various bush poets and songwriters, the best known of whom are probably James Blundell and Melinda Schneider, the rest are largely unknown outside their artistic realms. But even if some of the verse is rather woeful (although some of the practitioners are so glumly earnest they’re difficult to hate), the show links to a social tradition in poetry going back to the folk ballads of early Australia. And whatever their crudeness of literary form, the hastily written poems and songs often reflect a wealth of social history with some quiet originality.

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Publishers see poetry as poison as their lists continue to shrink. Schools neglect it. There is an assumption that poetry is difficult not just among booksellers, but teachers. We have no national poet in the way that Don Bradman is the national sporting icon.

More than a decade ago, the so-called Angry Penguin himself, Max Harris, wrote in this newspaper that, so far as respecting the place of poetry is concerned, “We are inhabitants of Limbo-land, cultural and intellectual paupers, with little sense of the formative factors that made us what we are.”

For Harris, “A time has come when we need a bit of poetry in the head as much as bread in the stomach.” He had a point. Maybe it’s time to think again about the place of poetry in national life?

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’selections and dissections’
nick-e melville
128 pages
Otoliths 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9806025-4-8
$14.95 + p&h
URL

This is poetry from within an international concrete-typographic tradition to which it pays respect as a means of placing itself precisely in its own distinct take on language. Gide said most good writers have their own specific sense of irony, and that’s one of the things nick-e melville shows in the work here. But by irony is not meant that commonplace smart-arsedness of British literary middleclass detachment and defence; on the contrary this is a way of viewing and engaging that is basic, delicate, and political. — (Tom Leonard)

What nick-e melville creates within selections and dissections is text as experience, presenting us with different ways to look at visual language, different ways to understand the ubiquitous textscapes of daily living. The pages of this book are filled with games, but games of the most serious kind, games about the act of being sentient textual beings. Melville, a textual imagineer, examines the spaces between letters, the negative spaces between lines of text, and even the halftone atoms of printing, always looking for the surprise in the printed text. To read this book is to experience these acts of textual imagination as cinema, as vibrant and moving sequences of thought. — (Geof Huth)

Check out the entire range of Otoliths books & the print editions of the e-zine at The Otoliths Storefront.

Happy New Year to you all!
Mark Young

Coinciding with the Indigenous Writers & Educators Conference 12-13 May, in Darwin. Find out what’s working and not working in the Indigenous writers industry; discuss the gaps and ways to fill them; a networking opportunity for Indigenous writers and educators;
professional development and inspiration for stakeholders. Featuring Marcia Langton, Alexis Wright, Mary G/Mark bin Bakar, Melissa Lucashenko, Wesley Enoch, John Maynard, Phillip McLaren, Bruce Pascoe, Brenton McKenna, Lorraine McGee-Sippel, Deborah Cheetham, Dizzy Doolan, Archie Weller and more!

“Wordstorm is the only Festival I know that genuinely provides an opportunity to grapple with the range of issues associated with Indigenous writers and writing. This alone would make it an essential Australian literary festival. Wonderful too to explore the worlds of
East Timorese and Indonesian writers. Over in the East, it’s easy to be patronising and think of Darwin as a small regional centre. But every time I visit I’m increasingly struck by the thought that it’s an international centre, and that it’s time the rest of Australia came to clearer terms with its position in the national and international community.” Peter Bishop, Varuna

Ursula K Le Guin has accused the Authors Guild of selling authors “down the river” in the Google settlement and has resigned from the US writers’ body in protest after almost 40 years’ membership.

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Former Australian coach John Buchanan tried to gain a greater understanding of his players by asking them to write poetry or read a passage of literature at team meetings. Some players enjoyed it; others, including Shane Warne, thought it was a joke and openly resented at having a blow-in (Buchanan never played international cricket) judge him.

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LH: What do you think the purpose of a review is? If you also write about books on a blog, why? What does blogging let you do differently?

AF: The purposes of a review are to bring attention to a book and to help readers better understand or appreciate it. Blogging is a wonderful invention as far as the calling-attention-to-a-book aspects of reviewing are concerned. And blogs encourage reviewers to expand their parameters; they can show respect for a book without needing to review at length. I mention books in my blog on Harriet, and probably will in my new blog American Witch as well.

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As any marketing guru worth his thick-rimmed spectacles will explain, The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 Pulitzer-winning novel, was always destined to be a smash bestseller. Consider its zippy premise. In a post-apocalyptic landscape where hordes of cannibals roam — pausing only to roast mutilated human babies on a spit — two protagonists known as “the man” and “the boy” scour the ashen planet for signs of life, or “anything of colour”. The perfect stocking-filler!

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When H.G. Nelson was approached to host an ABC television series about poetry, the man best known for his no-holds-barred sports commentary wondered if he was the right person for the job.

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The 2010 Festival is from 21st to 25th January in Jaipur India.

We find it easier to use our hands to punch than applaud. Our actors have to be crowned in Hollywood before we bow down.

Disgrace. What’s wrong with this picture? This has been a bonzer year for Australian films but the omission from any category in both the AFI and IF nominations, let alone awards, of the screen adaption of Disgrace, the Booker Prize-winning novel by J.M.Coetzee, is as puzzling as it is disconcerting.

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Whoever ”invented” poetry probably wasn’t thinking about places with underground opal mines or names such as Nuriootpa. Nor, for that matter, were TV producers thinking about poets or rural Australia when they jumped on the idea that busting the bulge, finding a soul mate or disciplining troublesome children could be turned into everyday entertainment fodder.

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LH: Have you been in a position where you have had to write about a book that you don?t care for, or a book that is coming out of a tradition that you are perhaps opposed to, or resistant to on some level? How do you handle such events? Or how have you noticed others handle these events?

JD: I reviewed William Logan’s last collection for the TLS and discovered that while I’m still not entirely sure I *trust* him his powers of persuasion are real enough that while I may not share his taste I see why he likes what he does, and I also see that his complaints and criticisms are often offset by praise and understanding. Sometimes not. Still, a good surprise is enjoyable. I guess I don’t totally *trust* him because his tastes seem so set.

That I dislike, when I can tell after reading two reviews by a critic pretty much what they’ll think about anyone. I really don’t know in advance what Ange Mlinko will say, or Daisy Fried, or Gary Lenhart.

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Whatever the problem is, I am always a part of it.

My cell phone, my jeans, my salmon, my cotton sheets, the dyes to color them green, my car, my commute, my coffee, my hair color, my soap, my book, my lamp light, my laundry, my groceries and my grocery bag, my president, my money, my daughter, my daughter’s diapers, her blocks, her magnets, her dolls — every thing I do or use or touch seems to connect me in turn to a web of destruction. That is the crushing truth of our current existence on this planet.

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Another skirmish has begun in the tired old culture wars, with the conservative magazine Quadrant accusing the Australia Council of a “patently political decision” in cutting its funding from $50,000 to $30,000, thus threatening its literary content.

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Last week the Literature Board of the Australia Council slashed its annual grant to Quadrant magazine by 30 per cent. The board reduced our funding from $50,000 to $35,000. This is a big chunk out of our very modest operating budget and a major blow to our publishing operations.

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Anna Mendelssohn, also known as Grace Lake, who has died aged 61 of a brain tumour, was principally a poet, and a poet like no other, but was also a painter, musician, actor and, earlier in her life, a political activist. She came from what she described as “a very strict working-class socialistic Jewish background” in Stockport, Cheshire. But what impelled her throughout her life was a 1960s spirit of radical revolt. At first it was political but, after a great turning point in her life, it was artistic.

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When a woman in 2009 sits down to write, she perhaps feels rather sexless. She is inclined neither to express nor deny: she’d rather be left alone to get on with it. She might even nurture a certain hostility towards the concept of “women’s writing”. Why should she be politicised when she doesn’t feel politicised? It may even, with her, be a point of honour to keep those politics as far from her prose as it is possible to get them. What compromises women – babies, domesticity, mediocrity – compromises writing even more. She is on the right side of that compromise – just. Her own life is one of freedom and entitlement, though her mother’s was probably not. Yet she herself is not a man. She is a woman: it is history that has brought about this difference between herself and her mother. She can look around her and see that while women’s lives have altered in some respects, in others they have remained much the same. She can look at her own body: if a woman’s body signifies anything, it is that repetition is more powerful than change. But change is more wondrous, more enjoyable. It is pleasanter to write the book of change than the book of repetition. In the book of change one is free to consider absolutely anything, except that which is eternal and unvarying. “Women’s writing” might be another name for the book of repetition.

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Despite the confected outrage that inevitably accompanies events like the Orange Prize (“Why isn’t there a prize for MEN’S writing”, “Women ask for equality and then demand special treatment!” etc etc (and no, given the viciousness of a lot of this stuff I don’t think it’s accidental The Guardian seems to have disabled comments on the Cusk piece) it’s always seemed obvious to me not just that the perspectives and sensibilities of women writers are fundamentally different from those of male writers, but that our culture quite systematically privileges the writing of men over that of women. Anyone who thinks otherwise might want to run their eye down the list of writers in contention for the Nobel each year, and ask why the men so outnumber the women, or wonder how it is the Miles Franklin judges managed to “not notice” they’d shortlisted five books by men this year. Because men are better writers? Because men tend to address the big questions while women stick to the domestic? Or because we fail to value women writers, and persist in seeing importance in the subjects men choose to address precisely because men choose to address them? After all, what is it that distinguishes a novel like Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap from a host of other large social novels by “middlebrow” female writers such as Joanna Trollope, Margaret Drabble or Julia Glass? How is it that a man like Tsiolkas or Sebastian Faulks writes a big social novel it’s a cultural event, but when a woman does it’s entertainment?

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now I have taken all the bread and gathered it
inside my whale-like belly
for another time, or for when they dissect me
or if I have children

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One of my goals for this year was to have finished a draft of Cinema – my movie-inspired poems that I hope will become my next collection. I’m pretty sure I haven’t done that – I think I probably have enough-ish poems, but not enough poems that are good enough, and that work together to do what I want them to do. What I want them to do is work individually and together to create something of meaning.

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I think there is something to be said when a writer takes the things which most conflict and converse within them, and reactivate the intersection of these experiences; sensing always an action that is yet to be layered in time.

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Canyon by Andrew Slattery
Little bit long time by Ali Cobby Eckermann
Evengelyne by Helen Hagermann
Awake During Anaesthetic by Kimberley Mann

Australian Poetry Centre, 2009

I read the four New Poets chapbooks with a high level of curiosity and expectation. Published by the Australian Poetry Centre, these collections represent the rebirth of the Five Islands Press New Poets Series, which published the first chapbooks of approximately 75 Australian poets until its cessation in 2007. The Five Islands Press series provided an important stepping stone for a number of poets who since their first collection have established themselves in the Australian poetry landscape.

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And travelling with them, as always, are the drum-bangers of the toxic media right. The likes of Melbourne’s village idiot, Andrew Bolt of the Herald-Sun, Alan “the Parrot” Jones, and that gaggle of sclerotic reactionaries clustered around the op-ed pages of The Australian and Quadrant magazine fly in the face of fact and reason. A difficult feat with your head stuck in the sand, admittedly, but somehow they do it.

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In Australia, poetry written by truck drivers, called dust poetry, is slowly coming into the limelight.

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It turned out (we discovered this the next day), that there was a fox hunt being conducted in the area. Fascinating, how private land, which people around our way defend with such passion, should change into public land without boundaries when pursuing foxes—the great hunter-capitalist liminality!—and that reserve land, where shooting is illegal, should become part of the script. That’s part one of the shire-as-killing-zone.

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Just a note to say that the print editions of issues 13,14, & 15 of Otoliths are now available from The Otoliths Storefront. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to find them.

Historian Dame Judith Binney, who was hit by a truck during heavy rain in Auckland on Friday, was in a critical but stable condition on Sunday, hospital staff said.

Dame Judith was crossing Princes Street, near Auckland University, just after 5.30pm, when she was struck by a truck. She was taken to Auckland City Hospital with serious head injuries.

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I raised the possibility of a memorial reading and John’s son was keen on the idea. Other poets like Alex Skovron and Pio are also enthusiastic about this. We would welcome a Tasmanian contigent. Or, if that fails, a Tasmanian reading to celebrate John.

I have also bought a book and will take it into Collected Works Bookshop on Friday, 11th. December. Anyone who wants to write something regarding John is welcome to do so in this book. I will writing in my eulogy and poem I wrote about John. The pages of the book are A5 in size. I would appreciate it if you could make this known to any other poets who were fond of John.

Perhaps the pick of the poems in this book is his elegy for a fellow poet, Margaret Scott. ‘The Fires’ also may be a poem of farewell to Tasmania, the island where he has spent much of his life. Flying out of Tasmania over a bushfire, he thinks of Margaret Scott, two of whose houses were incinerated in fires, and who always said to him, in a motherly way between cigarettes, ‘Now tell me what you’ve been doing/and where you’ve been.’ He also remembers how Margaret used to keep herself awake while driving at night by repeatedly shouting, ‘Elephants! Elephants!’

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Special guest stars Chris Mansell and David Musgrave, plus the famous Rocket Readings prize, all hosted by Linda Godfrey. Open section readings have a three minute limit. This event will also be the SCWC’s end of year celebrations, so do come along for a glass of wine and a very entertaining and stimulating evening of poetry.

When: 6pm-8pm, 8 December 2009
Where: Phoenix Theatre, corner of Bridge Street and Gladstone Avenue, Coniston (next door to Coniston Railway Station), NSW 2500
Cost: Free event, all welcome
Bookings and information: contact SCWC on 02 4228 0151 or email
scwc at 1earth.net.

Evie Wyld, a bookseller from south London, has won the 2009 John Llewellyn Rhys prize with a debut novel set in Vietnam and Australia, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice.

In a year in which the shortlist included the winner of the 2008 Booker prize, Aravind Adiga, and the 2007 Orange winner, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the 29-year-old Wyld expressed surprise and delight at having taken the £5,000 prize. “It hasn’t really sunk it yet,” she said.

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In this issue

Fiction [Michelle Cahill, Nicholas Rasche)

Memoir (Ted Sturges, Jennifer Compton, Bill Cotter, Michael Wood)

Launch speeches (Sarah Day, Nathan Curnow, Enza Gandolfo)

Blog post (Kris Hemensley)

Essays (Mal Robertson, Brian Parker)

Interview: with Queensland poet Zenobia Frost

Haiku from the 4th Haiku Pacific Rim Conference, Sept 09 – including new work by Graham Nunn, Ron Moss, Lorin Ford, Andrew Reeves, Beverley George and Sharon Dean

Reviews of literary journal Blast 9, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Nathan Shepherdson, James Charlton, the anthology Fishtails in the Dust, Jane McKie, Stefanie Bennett, Louise Nicholas & Jude Aquilina, David Stavanger and Stephen Edgar, as well as a roundup of new work by Pam Brown, Mala Anthony-Ranu, Barbara de Franceschi, Andrew Sant, Louise Waller, David Gilbey, Karen Knight, Bronwyn Lea, Kerry Leves, Marcella Polain and Alison Thompson

Poetry from Mark Young, Brendan Ryan, Ross Donlon, Les Wicks, Rory Harris, Geoff Page, Michael Sharkey, Susan Hawthorne, Anthony Lawrence, Richard Lemm, Brenda Saunders, Pete Hay, Edith Speers, Mark O’Flynn, Rob Riel, Kent MacCarter, Prulisa McEvoy, Geoffrey Miller, Marlene Marburg, Judy Gaudet, Graham Nunn, Stefanie Bennett, John Latta, Glen Murdoch, Robin Loftus, Dael Allison, Cameron Hindrum, BN Oakman, Shane McCauley, Liz McQuilkin, Stuart Cooke, Jacqui Stewart, Kathryn Allen, Stuart Barnes, Zenobia Frost, Alison Hope, Nicholas Laughlin, John Hale, Geoff Dean, Heather Taylor Johnson, Meena Kandasamy, Paul C. Pritchard, Max Ryan, Gary Egan, Gelsey Bell, Mark Jones and Leon Van Der Linde

Remember that scene in Fawlty Towers where Basil says, “Zoom! What was that? That was your life, mate.”

While not being as bleak as Basil, this year does have a “where did it go?” feel about it.

It was an eventful 12 months in literary circles, so let’s have a brief retrospective. Australian books of the year? Well, if literary prizes are the yardstick, the fiction race was close to a triple dead heat between Tim Winton’s Breath, Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap and Nam Le’s The Boat. In nonfiction, Chloe Hooper’s book about the Palm Island case, The Tall Man, was a clear winner. As one writer quipped to me, “The most surprising thing about Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize was that he beat Chloe Hooper to it.”

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Flavorpill: A lot of literature tackles unanswerable questions and subjects — what is the purpose of writing for you?

Javier Marías: I think it was Faulkner who once said that when you strike a match in a dark wilderness it is not in order to see anything better lighted, but just in order to see how much more darkness there is around. I think that literature does mainly that. It is not really supposed to “answer” things, not even to make them clearer, but rather to explore — often blindly — the huge areas of darkness, and show them better. So in my opinion it does not really matter if subjects are unanswerable (all of them are, possibly), as literature is not expected to solve riddles or mysteries, but just to show them — perhaps putting them in a slightly new light, perhaps calling attention to overlooked aspects of them.

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The Book Of Hopes And Dreams has been re-launched as an e-book and is available for a minimum donation of $2 (though larger donations will be gratefully received).

Please make your payment via paypal to dee@thunderburst.co.uk and send an email to that address to let me know you’ve paid. As soon as funds are received you will be emailed your e-book. All funds raised (minus paypal admin charges will) go direct to Spirit Aid.

NB: Spirit Aid is one of the best, most-efficient charities in Scotland. It is staffed entirely by volunteers, who donate their time willingly because they wholeheartedly believe in the ethos of Spirit Aid, which is to give practical assistance to war or disaster torn regions of the world and to promote peace in a secular, non-religious way. Because it is staffed entirely by volunteers, 90% of all funds raised go direct to its projects… unlike many other charities, which have to deal with huge staff payroll and other administrative costs.

A Facebook group has been set up to help publicise The Book Of Hopes And Dreams. Members will be informed of what is happening and will be kept posted about sales and money raised.

http://www.facebook.com/groups.php?ref=sb#/group.php?gid=206604665798

Please please please, help to spread the word about the re-launch of The Book Of Hopes And Dreams. You can help, just by forwarding this email onto your friends. Alternatively, if you have a Facebook, please post the link to The Book Of Hopes And Dreams Facebook page on your Facebook page. Or you can post it on your blog or on your personal website. This will take just a minute or two of your time, and may help to generate more sales, which means that more children in Afghanistan will get the medical attention that you and I take for granted.

To find out more about what Spirit Aid are doing in Afghanistan, click on this link.

Thank you.

I wish you all the best

Dee Sunshine

The influential poetry/art magazine Mok (issue 5), first published in Spring 1969, is being re-issued in a limited edition to celebrate its 40th anniversary. Mok will be launched in Melbourne at Collected Works bookshop at 2.30pm on Saturday December 5th, with a poetry reading and discussion including Kris Hemensley, Richard Tipping, John Jenkins, Rob Tillett (TBC) and a tribute to Vicki Viidikas.

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Jacob Polley vividly remembers the moment he “discovered” Emma Jones, the new star of Australian poetry. “I just thought ‘wow’. Where did she get this stuff from?,” recalls Polley about the first time he heard Jones, then 28, read one of her poems.

It was 2006 and Polley, one Britain’s most prominent rising poets, had organised a small gathering of students and writers at Cambridge University in his capacity as a visiting fellow at the university’s Trinity College. “I thought I would bring a few people together to read out some of their poems and I had met Emma socially through an Australian friend of hers and I heard she was a writer so I asked her to come along.”

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Judge: Michael McGirr
Entries close: Friday 5 February 2010, 4pm
Awards ceremony: Saturday 29 May 2010 4pm, Eltham Library

$2000 Open Section First Prize and
$1000 Open Section Second Prize
for stories up to 2500 words

$1000 Local Writers’ Section Prize
for stories up to 2500 words

$400 Young Writers’ Section Prize
15-19 years – for stories up to 100 words

Competition details and entry form are available here.
For more information please email artsinfo at nillumbik.vic.gov.au or phone (03) 9433 3359.

I initially I thought it no more than mildly interesting in a world full of more interesting events when I read that Roman Polanski had been imprisoned in Switzerland prior to being extradited to the US on a 30-year-old charge of rape. But, increasingly, in the news, on Facebook, Twitter, the LRB blog and in conversation, I’ve been reading the argument between those who think he should not have been arrested and those who think he should, even after all this time, be returned to the US for sentencing, although the woman concerned (Samantha Geimer – she has allowed her name to be published) has now said that she doesn’t want the matter pursued.

Then I got twitchy when I read the petition written by Bernard-Henri Lévy, and signed by Paul Auster, Milan Kundera, William Shawcross, Claude Lanzmann, Salman Rushdie, Mike Nichols, Neil Jordan, and, to bring up the female numbers, Diane von Furstenberg, the Isabelles Adjani and Huppert, Yamani Benguigui, Danièle Thompson and Arielle Dombasle.

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John West’s ‘I Like People’ won the 1998 Melbourne Poets’ Competition and was published in The Australian.

These journals have quite distinct agendas. For Going Down Swinging (GDS), this involves ’storytellers – waging a lifelong campaign to take over the world, mind by mind’ as Lisa Greenaway writes polemically in her editorial to issue 28. This ‘campaign’ draws together Australian and international writers and artists, yet champions ‘local, imaginative solutions’. The brief for readers is to ‘keep charging at the flanks of the publishing industry, publish and buy independent, subscribe to community radio, arm yourselves with imagination’.

Indigo has an emphasis on local production in common with GDS, but doesn’t share its cheeky didacticism or its scope across the arts and media. However, its agenda is no less clear. In contrast to the rather more amorphous and international GDS, Indigo constructs Western Australia as geographically and culturally important to its writers (contributors must have lived in Western Australia for at least 10 years), and its purpose is to advocate for its local talent and to increase publishing opportunities for Western Australian writers.

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Brother Anthony of Taizé, known as An Sonjae in Korean, is a retired Professor of English who has lived in Seoul for the last twenty nine years. He is also one of the foremost translators of modern Korean literature into English. David Prater caught up with him over a cup of green tea to talk about Korean poetry and society, Ko Un and the future of inter-Korean relations.

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… I have two main specific concerns. First is that I have no interest in making my writing practice academic. As I have said elsewhere recently my work is primarily libidnal, the product of an urge to write. It comes before any theorisation not afterwards. As an aside here I’d like to emphasise that this is not a post-Romantic spontaneous overflow of feeling, or some shamanic ‘channelling’. Rather it’s an accelerated process of writing and simultaneous editing, which incorporates reflections and experiments on how the poem should appear, what the language should be like, what elements should be used and in what complexity of structure, and so on. Essentially it’s not that I write carelessly (though of course sometimes I do), it’s that I write quickly.

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All that’s needed to blog is internet access. Downloading a blog platform from sites such as blogger or wordpress isn’t difficult, and wordpress offers a variety of free templates allowing for the expression of individual styles and sensibilities. Owning your own website offers even more possibilities as the range of free wordpress-styled templates available from web designers goes far beyond the number supported by wordpress itself.

Blogs are about everything and nothing; they open, they close. Technorati, a company maintaining a search engine for blogs, conducted a 2008 survey which found that of 133 million blogs considered, only 7.4 million had been updated in the previous 120 days. ‘That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled,’ the New York Times reported of the survey results. Nevertheless, the dream remains alive for many bloggers who post on every topic imaginable. Readers’ feedback further enlivens discussion. How blogs manage to take on lives of their own – whether they’re characterised as democratic, generous, vigorous blog environments – depends very much on the nature of the blog owner.

I’ve kept my blog ‘Currajah’ for two or three years, recording snippets of literary news – often something I’ve googled – or perhaps short text extracts from thoughtful posts on other literary sites. Less frequently I’ll write something myself, perhaps a roundup of an afternoon’s reading at the Republic Bar and Café or a few notes on a book or magazine that’s come my way. A blog presence appeals as I’ve a magazine and various books to offer so in this sense it’s a promotional tool – yet not overbearingly so.

Similar-minded blogs have histories stretching back far further than ‘Currajah’. Anne Kellas with ‘North of the Latte Line‘, another local literary blog, was among the first to explore the opportunities opened by blogging. ‘North of the Latte Line’s’ contributors include Ivy Alvarez and Chris Mansell who concentrate not only on local news but on literary activities far and wide. Dedicated to regular updates of news and discussion, Anne – after investigating the merits of Twine and other new medias – has settled on Twitter as a means of fomenting continued discussion and activity. Another blogger, similarly interested in the dissemination of literary news and information – but spending far more energy on her project than I’ve time for – is Genevieve Tucker with reeling and writhing. Her emphasis continues on Australian literary news and content, but what’s distinctive about ‘reeling and writhing’ is Genevieve’s informal and personalised approach.

While other blogs are as varied as individuality allows, my interests generally veer towards the literary. For poetry, I might try reading multi-award winning poet Jill Jones’ ‘ruby street‘ or Derek Motion’s ‘typing space‘ or John Latta’s ‘Isola di Rifiuti‘. Martin Edmond – one of the finest writers in the country, in my opinion – keeps the blog derives detailing the daily trivia of his life as a Sydney taxi-driver while moonlighting as an essayist and playwright. Edmond provides human interest within an amiable writing style; nothing’s contrived. Kris Hemensley’s ‘poetry & ideas‘ combines the authoritative with the personal while ‘hispirits‘ offers Andrew Burke’s breezy but informative take on poems, poets, readings and ‘writerature’. Graham Nunn’s ‘another lost shark‘ posts poetry, literary news and interviews, festival and publishing promotions and opportunities; contributors in recent months have included conversations with local writers Karen Knight, Jane Williams and Lyn Reeves.

For political opinion, you could do worse than check out ‘larvatus prodea‘, an Australian group blog founded by Mark Bahnisch discussing politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. In a larvatus prodeo post early this year on the issue of blogging, Bahnisch noted that If it is true that modernity erodes connections, then perhaps postmodernity seeks to recreate that feeling of connectedness virtually? His observation drew an equally perceptive response, (MikeM, Feb 25th 2009): What skeptics seem to forget is that for centuries people have been developing relationships by writing letters to one another. The distinguishing feature of blogs and the like is that they are open letters, in effect, to the world. If you are interested in what someone writes, there’s a standing opportunity to respond.

Not everyone cares for the blogging environment, just as not everyone cares for computers. This morning a letter from Mal Robertson arrived in my mailbox, mentioning his need to check references before submitting the final proof of an essay to appear in famous reporter 40. Why not notify me by email I wondered idly, before recalling sentiments espoused in one of his previous essays: I will do anything for genuine correspondence. If I had lost an email, I would not bother. What is sent into the universal ether is of little consequence. Mal, I empathise; and am reminded of correspondences from another friend, Robyn Mathison. To receive one of Robyn’s well-crafted letters in the mailbox is to feel cherished – and further confirms, if such is needed, that there are many who continue to hold the well-written letter in high regard. Blogging seeks to forge similar connections, utilising modern mediums; analogous to what’s been before, and to what of course continues.

The Australians are well represented by the invariably inventive Peter Carey for His Illegal Self; Geraldine Brooks is a strong contender with Peoples of the Book, a complex historical narrative based on a true story; while Helen Garner’s The Spare Room, a compelling account of a frenzied death as watched by an exasperated friend, the narrator, features as does Steve Toltz’s Booker-shortlisted debut, A Fraction of the Whole, in which a son recalls an unusual father.

Tasmanian Richard Flanagan is deservedly nominated for Wanting, a beautiful book exploring colonial brutality.

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Since I got back from the northwest I’ve taken in a rich mix of cultural activities here in Hobart. This may be a small city, but it’s culturally thriving and active. Beginning last Thursday I’ve been to a book launch, an art exhibition, and a talk by an artist.

Late Thursday afternoon I went to the launch of Senator Bob Brown’s Earth. Self-published after being shopped around to various publishers, the book was eloquently and elegantly launched by Pete Hay (poet and author of Vandiemonian Essays).

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I’ve been meaning to write something about Australian book launches. They have some formality here, and carry a certain weight. It’s customary to have someone celebrate the book’s arrival by speaking about it at some length—not the publisher, but someone with related expertise or a relationship to the book’s concerns who can “place” and laud it.

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Publishers prosecuted a spirited, clever, nationalistic, broad-based and expensive lobbying effort to defeat proposed changes to territorial copyright the Rudd government was considering.

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As publisher of an independent magazine funded by subscriptions and my checking account, I wonder if it will be time one day to hang up the print and move to web. I’ve mentioned this in passing and people look at me in horror. Often, these people are not currently subscribing to the magazine. “I can only subscribe to three magazines this year,” they apologize. I smile. I’m not going to make them feel bad. I’m in this magazine business for the long haul, and we’ll get through recession or not.

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Iconic New Zealand writer Witi Ihimaera has admitted that his latest novel includes plagiarised material.

Ihimaera’s new novel, The Torwenna Sea, is set in Tasmania during the 1840s and details the lives of Maori transported to the island off Australia as convicts.

But the novel contains passages re-printed without acknowledgement from a number of writers.

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Listened to an open section of eight poets [good poems too] as well as the launch of a chapbook from BN Oakman and a reading by Robyn Rowland.

Ross habitually reads a couple of poems to introduce the reading … one, on this occasion, a poem about hens by Sarah Day, a recent guest to Castlemaine … it struck a chord, (I’d visited friends not long ago, really took to their four gorgeously plumed hens who are destined to die of old age: they’re doted on by the family’s children who view them as pets so they’ll never reach the cooking pot) … Sarah presents powerful images, but (more than that, and particularly with environmental themes) does so with integrity, she walks the talk

BN Oakman’s full of energy, witty – and humble. ‘If there’s one thing a reader appreciates, it’s a good listener. You’ve been that this afternoon, thank you.’ Robyn Rowland – particularly enjoyed the poems where the personal came to the fore, one poem spoke of the weight of depression, the relief once it’d been lifted. [More to the point, as she added with humour, what to do with all that energy once the weight of depression had lifted]. Also presented was some moving poetry on her relationship with her mother. I’d not heard Robyn read before and felt thoroughly absorbed.

Peter Carey – novelist
Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (Bloomsbury) has huge ambition and an author equal to the task. Travelling from Nagasaki to Guantánamo, this very beautiful novel sets out to grasp the nettle of our modern history. The most utilitarian of us will find it “relevant and contemporary”. At the same time, it is a work of art, as human as the feel of another’s hand. Colum McCann once wrote himself inside the skin of Nureyev. In Zoli he created Romany characters that Romany readers have been pleased to own. Now, in Let the Great World Spin (Bloomsbury) [winner this week of the National Book Award for fiction], he has reinvented the city of New York in all its breathing, fighting, whining, joyous clamour.

Wendy Cope – poet
In January, Areté Books published A Scattering, Christopher Reid’s tribute to his late wife, Lucinda. His poems about marital love and bereavement are immensely moving. Reid is a first-rate poet and this is his best book to date. Later in the year, the same author came up with something quite different. The Song of Lunch (CB Editions) is a witty narrative about a publisher meeting an old flame in an Italian restaurant. The story is sad, as well as funny, and very enjoyable.

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Now any lesser poet might cry “foul” but with the deepest respect I must concede to Derek Motion, the winner of the first ever Australian Poetry Blog Battle. All pageantry and honour to you, Derek. May you continue your wild journey of the blogosphere, defeating foes, spreading rumours and writing marvelous, marvelous poetry.

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What are you most proud of writing?
Imaginary Life. If you’re lucky as a writer you get one “gift” book where you break through into a different kind of writing. That was mine.

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A few weeks ago, in the St. Vinnies around the corner, I saw a hardback copy, a 2nd edition, of The Vivisector for sale and almost bought it: but its spine was cracked and it had been written in in biro so I didn’t. Then, not so very long afterwards, as if some power was importuning me, there was another, a first edition this time, without its dust jacket but otherwise in pretty good condition . . . so I did buy it. Even then I wasn’t sure if I would re-read it, White’s not easy, he doesn’t write page turners and at 642 pps this is his longest book. Well, I got hooked. And I’m still hooked. About twenty pages from the end and I don’t want it to finish. It is hardly the book I remember from 30 years ago, my memories of it were almost entirely taken up with the early stages, Hurtle’s childhood and growing up, his love affair with the prostitute Nancy Lightfoot in pre- and post-World War One Sydney. And I was too young and too naive then to appreciate White’s own presence in the book, his own amusement, delight, disgust, fascination, obsession with the character he has made, his habit of twitching Duffield’s male or hetero drag aside to reveal flashes of his own lineaments as an artist and a man: I suppose I mean I read it quite literally the first time, as realism, and failed to realise the depth of White’s duplicity and artistry – where the two can be distinguished.

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Reading Richard Reeve’s 2002 interview with you in Deep South, I got a strong impression that you are largely out of sympathy with the current state of poetic practice in New Zealand – both with much of the poetry being produced by individual poets, and with the infrastructure by which poetry is published, reviewed, and brought to the attention of its potential audience. Is that fair comment, and have your views changed since 2002?

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The gossipy session was called Sweet Staple High; it was all about the future of lit-publishing in Australia. What are the newer journals offering? Facilitator Chris Currie began things by asking for a show of hands. ‘Who has been published in Meanjin? Overland? Southerly?’ etc. There weren’t many hands going up and so the point was made – most of the young writers in the audience hadn’t been published in those venerable old journals. But I felt a little confronted too. I’ve been published in a few of them and I didn’t raise my hand. I was a little embarrassed to do so, but mainly I didn’t want to single myself out in the crowd.

This made me think (as some things do (thought = isolation)): if the older lit-mags do use a ‘stable’ of writers (the general consensus at this session was yes, they do), then is there also a younger stable? A group of young writers who clearly identify with certain magazines, certain trends, certain arms of certain festivals? I think there is, but I’m not so sure what that means. There certainly are some lovely looking new magazines being produced in the country, with design being a major concern. As for what else these journals should be doing to promote literature / art, it was a bit fuzzy. And no mention was made of online alternatives.

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Wednesday December 9. The Christmas Special. Kevin Brophy and Myron Lysenko with a special guest from the U.S. (Note 7 pm Wednesday for December reading).

What happens when the Federal Government puts a call out to the public to make suggestions about a cultural policy? After a few hours of reviewing some of the submissions, it would be fair to say that the quality and usefulness of the submissions so far have been decidedly mixed.

Despite its rather wonkish description, a national cultural policy may be the most significant development in arts and culture in Australia for a long time. While governments spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on the arts and billions more on other activities that generate Australian culture, Australia hasn’t had anything like a cultural policy since the Keating Creative Nation era.

Why do we even need a cultural policy? There is a legitimate argument that government should butt out of culture entirely. But for those who support or accept the idea that governments fund and regulate the arts, it is difficult to argue that they should do so without a policy.

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It is an intriguing position to be in when you return to a book you have read a few times before and find that when you read if for the third time or fifth time you are reading a book you don’t remember reading before. Language has acted beyond memory or reveals a new layer of recollection.

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If someone were to ask me the hardest thing about writing, I fear my answer would sound a bit petulant: ‘It’s the loneliness.’ Even when my day is going well I still miss, sometimes, the companionship of a job, any job – the chatting with work colleagues making coffees in the staff kitchen, the in-jokes, the breaks in the day that are to do with camaraderie and talk. Alone in your room you write a line and there’s nobody to bounce the idea off; you worry that perhaps you are in danger of losing perspective, of becoming a crashing bore, of losing your touch. That’ll be your story out there under the bright lights, delivering its hard-won routine, and nobody in the audience will get it. It will stutter to a halt, lose their attention, stumble offstage to a chorus of slow claps, and there won’t be a damn thing you can do about it. At times like this I understand my suffering friend, on tenterhooks before his name was called, going out there with his raw material to invite the heckling. At least he’d know to do it differently next time, with that brutal feedback, and that’s his reward for bravery.

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Three years ago Gerald Murnane filled out an entry form for the Melbourne Prize for Literature only to discover that conditions stipulated half the $60,000 prize be spent on international travel. He immediately ripped it up. The much-admired novelist and essayist is also renowned as famously stay-at home – he has been out of Melbourne perhaps half-a-dozen times in his life and never been on a plane.

When his publisher, Ivor Indyk, told him he had entered him this year, Murnane was dismayed – until he learned conditions had changed and only ”encouraged” local and international travel.

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When I moved to England in 1988, Aussies were considered the Irish of the Pacific, a recessive gene. The person between two Australians was called an interpreter. An Australian in a suit – a defendant. It was presumed our main topic of conversation was how long we had to go on our parole.

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In a second piece of good news to come from the Federal government today, the Productivity Commission’s mooted changes to the import regime for books have not been accepted.

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Omar Musa is rapping to a small but appreciative audience at the Word in Hand poetry slam in Glebe.

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According to Greens leader Bob Brown, he and the chainsaw wielding, pulp mill building John Gay, chief executive of forestry company Gunns, have something in common – they are both “bushies.”

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Best-selling Australian author Kathy Lette has hit out at a leading industry magazine for failing to include the work of any women on its annual list of top 10 books.

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One of the funniest examples I’ve seen of somebody being cut off was at the Sydney Institute. Several people in a row had stood up and made statements. When it came time for the next question, the Executive Director, Gerard Henderson, gave a very sharply worded instruction that the audience was invited to ask questions, not deliver lectures. He then called on a woman who took to her feet.

‘When I was a young girl …’ she began.

‘That is NOT a promising start!’ Henderson cried

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As a bonus, actor John Flaus, he of the wonderful voice and presence, will launch Bruce Oakman’s, Chalk Dust: Poems from the Social Domain (Mark Time Books) during the afternoon’s proceedings. Gold coin donation. 3 pm kickoff – 5 pm stumps. Watch out for rookus in the 15 min drive from Castlemaine.

TinFish 19 / Since its inception in 1995, Tinfish Press has consistently been a spunky purveyor of local writing. Susan Schultz, a professor of English at UH–Manoa, started the small company to provide a platform for experimental voices from the Pacific. From the start, Tinfish has been more Ginsberg than Silverstein, a subversive voice with little regard for convention.

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Beverley Farmer hesitated before accepting the Patrick White Literary Award, which she felt ”was filled with ambiguities. I could understand some people might feel patronised or written off or that it was consolation for not quite making it.”

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Two pilot Australia Council schemes invite you to get creative in the digital era.

‘Arts content for the digital era’ (or ‘artsdigitalera’ for short) is The Australia Council’s response to the impact of digital technologies on the arts sector, artists and arts audiences.

Some of the artists, organisations and audiences we support have demonstrated the need to be educated in, or to develop a confidence with, digital technologies. Others have been working authoritatively in this space for a decade or more, and need recognition as well as financial (and other) support in order to continue.

Outside of the typical Australia Council community there is an emerging breed of practitioner who might not come from a traditional arts background, but who proactively create and share their work across digital platforms. They attract (and are themselves) an emerging type of audience, possibly a co-creator or a remixer.

The Australia Council needs to continue supporting the two spectrums of the community we already know well. But we also need to start exploring relationships with these ‘digital natives’. In working together, learning from each other’s unique skills and abilities, we have the potential to produce innovative new creative experiences on platforms which could feasibly provide economic sustainability. The Geek in Residence and Digital Culture Fund provide support and opportunities for both within the ‘Arts content for the digital era’ Strategic Initiative.
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Geek in Residence brings the expertise of technically confident artists and creative technicians together with a host arts organisation. The pilot program will seed innovative digital arts practices by providing an opportunity to intensively share skills, ideas and experiences.

The Digital Culture Fund is a pilot grant available to confident digital arts practitioners. The Australia Council is asking initially for expressions of interest from these new creators working at the frontier of digital technology. With a strong focus on the ‘live event’, the ultimate arts projects could exist in either physical or online worlds.

For more information visit the ‘Arts content for a digital era’ blog.

THE Australia Council and the ABC provide two radically different examples of how cultural agencies can deal or fail to deal with technological change. Where the ABC has spent the last decade experimenting, making and learning from mistakes and innovating with digital technology, the Australia Council has retreated further and further away from engagement in contemporary culture. The results are on the board to see.

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Then there is Bearup’s determination to keep away from the predictable tourist trail. He spends a day with poet Les Murray in the hills behind Gloucester; meets a Christian family home-schooling their children while driving around Australia; gauges the temperature of the logging-greenie debate in Tasmania; gets into an ugly debate with some racists from Young; meets tree-changers living in Tasmania, including a neurosurgeon who now translates Chinese poetry; spends time with some of the crazies living in Lightning Ridge; and then it’s on through Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia. One of the most interesting chapters is written by Bearup’s partner, Lisa Upton, and describes working as a receptionist in a brothel in Port Hedland.

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BALLARAT LAUNCH: Dr Robyn Rowland AO
Date: Saturday, 5th December
Venue: The Ballroom, Portico Wine Bar,
203 Dana Street, Ballarat
Time: 1.30 – 3.30 pm

MELBOURNE LAUNCH:
Dr David Reiter, publisher Interactive Press
Date: Sunday, 6th December
Venue: The Hayden Raysmith Room,
Ross House, 4th Floor,
247 Flinders Lane
Time: 2.00

The first thing you notice when you unbox the Kindle is that the screen appears “on”. It takes a moment to realise that the electronic book reader isn’t powered on at all. What’s on the screen are instructions for plugging it into your computer to charge it up. For many Australians, the Kindle will be their introduction to e-readers and something called E Ink.

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Dear faithful blog reader

There was a time when writers would quietly stow themselves away and compete for space in prestigious journals by writing the best piece they could. Or they held up another writer as some kind of creative nemesis, a necessary yardstick for their own ambition/progress.

But now, thanks to the wonders of the blogosphere, we can go head-to-head in public smackdowns that immediately determine whose work has impact, relevance, appeal, musicality, sexuality, popularity, freshness, verbal vaporessence, grounding, counterbalancing and a well-developed ‘haunting yet transparent’ latency of meaning.

So thus I challenge poet Derek Motion to the first ever Australian Poetry Blog Battle!!!

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I am pleased to announce here what is without doubt an Australian & worldwide first: a poetry blogging battle to the death.

These are the rules, proposed by the poet, playwright, flaneur, & sometimes-blogger, Nathan Curnow (& then carefully checked ny myself, of course):

The tally is of comments posted on our “Blog Battle” posts which remain up and open for three weeks (culminating in the Melb Four W launch). Thereby the competition shall be declared over and the winner annouced.

The poet who receives the most comments on their blog will bask in validation, knowing that it truly confirms their poetic worth, the relevance of their practice and their place in Australia’s literary canon (the variety of commenters will also be taken into account too (so you big fans out there can’t simply comment 100 times, Australian Idol like, to ensure your favourite wins)).

In turn, the loser must abandon their blog FOREVER.

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In his address to the National Press Club on Tuesday, Peter Garrett called for a debate on Australia’s cultural policy between now and 2020. He asked that it be a bipartisan conversation rather than one bogged down in the culture wars debates of recent years. Speaking as a long-serving culture warrior, I think that’s a very tall order. After all, avant-garde arts activity sometimes has an ideological agenda and there’s nothing to be gained by pretending otherwise.

However, I suppose it’s possible to come at the question obliquely and ask: what impact should national cultural policy aim to have on contemporary Australia? There may be broader support for some outcomes than is generally assumed. Perhaps there may even be more common ground about funding priorities than the usual unedifying sniping between the practitioners and advocates of the various art forms suggests.

Let’s start with an urgent problem that might generate a consensus. Noel Pearson, in the latest Quarterly Essay, makes an impassioned plea for Aboriginal education to develop an extended curriculum and to institute a longer school day. He invokes the example of Jews and their remarkable successes in the fields of both mainstream academic instruction and maintenance of a distinctive culture. He thinks that without the active support of state and private schools, combined with higher overall standards and sustained formal instruction in Aboriginal languages and traditions, indigenous high cultures will vanish.

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THE venue might have been a clue. Against the creaking masts of Sydney’s National Maritime Museum, The Boat by Nam Le was named winner of the $100,000 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction yesterday.

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Thursday Nov 19th, 5.30pm, at The Hobart Bookshop: Kathryn Lomer will launch Anne Morgan’s new book, A Reckless Descent from Eternity.

Tuesday Nov 24th, 5.30pm, at The Hobart Bookshop: the launch of Molly Guy’s new book, Reading Between the Lines.

And don’t forget to join us in the shop tomorrow (Tuesday Nov 3rd), from 5.30, for the launch of Sarah Day’s new book, Grass Notes.
All welcome to these free events.

Regards,

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

Political commentator and academic Ranginui Walker says people these days think he has mellowed.

But the 77-year-old from Te Whakatohea, who was last night honoured for his non-fiction work at the 2009 Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement, says he hasn’t changed.

“People’s perceptions have changed as they have become conscientised,” said Professor Walker.

“They see me now as an elder statesman and some Pakeha who didn’t like me in the past say ‘you have mellowed in your old age’ and I say ‘no, you have caught up, I’m the same person’.”

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So turn on the porchlight, & get reading.

Mark Young

It can be argued that Southeast Asian Writing in English has not achieved as much attention as African Writing in English or Indian Writing in English, even though English as a language reached most parts of the world wave after wave as a result of colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Manila have been major outposts under British and American colonialism, but the output in English from these big Asian cities has not made much impact on the global literary landscape, the same way that writings from India or Africa have. Where is Southeast Asia’s answer to Midnight Children or a House for Mr. Biswas or Things Fall Apart?

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I still feel a million miles from Oz poetry, but since I am a player I feel I should attempt to answer back, though clearly I want to speak from the place of St Victor and perhaps I find it comforting to take on the role of the “expatriate Australian poet in Europe”, even though I am writing this in Glebe Sydney. For me, the European experience is a welcome escape from “Asia” as a dominant framework for my identity and poetics. Interestingly Robert Adamson has taken “Pol Pot in Paris” for Best Australian Poems 2009 and here is a convergence of the Asian and the European – the clash of Enlightenment and what John Kinsella sees as the animistic strains in my work. Pol Pot the Buddhist teacher who finds a revolutionary vision based on ideas he’d gleaned while studying electronics in Paris the forties. It seems that Pol Pot spent most of his study time reading about the French Revolution and going to meetings with other Indochinese communists in the Latin Quarter.

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At just 30, Vietnam-born, Melbourne-raised writer Nam Le has been blessed with early success. The Boat, his debut collection of short stories, was published last year to a wave of international critical acclaim. In addition, Le has been awarded several major awards, including the Dylan Thomas Prize – the richest in Britain. Furthermore, he is the fiction editor of the Harvard Review.

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We’re delighted to announce (to those who haven’t heard already) that Picaro Press has been selected to hold up the poetry end of Varuna’s new Publisher Partnership Program. Basically, it’ll involve publication of up to three new titles each year, supported by national distribution, commitments from selected booksellers, publicity … and other nice things which poetry typically misses out on. It’s a great opportunity for writers, but it’s also an opportunity for Picaro Press to better develop its book publication and distribution systems. Hence, a few changes to the way we operate.

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In order to experience the new site in full, existing bookmarks for ABR on the web need to be updated. To do this, simply delete your old bookmark;
open a new Internet Explorer window; type in ABR’s address http://www.australianbookreview.com.au; and create a new bookmark.

”We’re proud when Kevin [Rudd] speaks Mandarin. Contrast this with [US President] Barack Obama, yet to make a speech in Bahasa, a language he speaks fluently; in the US, it wouldn’t play so well … We have some xenophobes too … But most of us aren’t that way.”

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Most of us have a reference point of creativity which touches a chord for us, gives us meaning, connects us to our place: some lines of verse by Judith Wright we learned at school, a scene from The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, a Namatjira or a Nolan, a Paul Kelly song.

But the fact is there are numerous reasons to support and celebrate the arts; to paraphrase an 80’s pop song lyric, to say “That’s what I like about the arts.”

So here’s my top ten:

1. The arts are fun — from the mosh-pit to the Opera House;
2. The arts are good for you — they keep the mind alert and the body active;
3. The arts help you understand yourself, describe your identity and fulfil your potential;
4. The arts bind communities — creating groups and networks in shared experiences;
5. The arts contribute to the economy — creating jobs, exports, tourism, new goods and services;
6. The arts drive innovation — in new technology and new applications of old technology and in thinking up new ways to express and entertain;
7. The arts nourish learning — boosting literacy and numeracy levels, preserving our great collections and making them accessible;
8. The arts are local — they help you understand your country, a Yirrkala bark painting or The Man from Snowy River or a movie like Lantana;
9. The arts are universal — they speak a common language to every man, woman and child; and,
10. The arts express the zenith of human experience and capacity — they’re a source of boundless inspiration.

A country without libraries or galleries, without poetry or music, sculpture or dance, without our stories, without reflection, is simply unimaginable.

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Award-winning authors have launched a war of words against book publishers and the organisers of our top literary awards.

From next year, the number of shortlisted works in the NZ Post Book Awards – formerly the Montana Book Awards – will be reduced by 10 and the number of categories cut from eight to four.

The same amount of prize money will be handed out, but authors are concerned that fiction writers are missing out under the new scheme.

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Room for more, of course, can only be made by winnowing. At the book’s London launch, Clive James objected that it was too heavily freighted with Aboriginal writing. I did not find it so. Certainly a proportion of the Aboriginal writing does not set out to qualify as “literature”, since it consists of letters and petitions to white authority figures. These powerful extracts toll through the book like a bell; reminding the reader of the cost that has been paid, by the Indigenous people, for the immigrant Europeans’ right to thrive and develop such a luxury as a literary tradition. So we hear from Narritjin Maymuru, writing to the director of Aboriginal welfare for the Northern Territory, in 1963: “Mr Gise who looking after for all the Aborigines in the NT. We want to help us belong to this country Yirrkala, please Mr Gise? Because … those maining people will be chasing us to other places, we don’t like that.”

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Turns out that Launceston did exist and the iphone is not the be-all tool of the modern world, it does have it’s glitches. Not only does Launceston exist, its poetry scene is alive and well-and-truly-kicking butt.

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“PEN was more or less a literary tea party with a small budget and limited influence in the book and academic industry,” he explained. Mailer put it on the map, he said, by organizing an international writers’ conference and tapping his wealthy friends for support. “Mailer being Mailer, however, had ways of offending others who were part of PEN,” Mr. Talese said. Some resented the commercialism, while many women were furious at him for his antifeminist stance. Mailer meanwhile was insulted because he felt PEN did not appreciate him. PEN didn’t even bother to honor Mailer until last year, after his death, Mr. Talese said, nor was the group interested in cosponsoring some of the Mailer awards.

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L.K: I think, mid-decade, Salt took risks on a lot of newish writers at a time when it wasn’t so fashionable to do so. When a lot of publishers were closing ranks a little. Partly just to adequately represent the poets they already had. Some of those were young poets which, again, the scene is a lot more healthy and open to them now. A lot of the poets who now counsel against publishing “too soon” were themselves first published in their 20s, so it’s nice to see that happening again, kicked-away-ladders notwithstanding. So these risks paid off in that it made a pool of work widely available, in a variety of different styles and voices. And I guess when you’re judging a competition that involves reading hundreds or thousands of submissions there are certain things that stand out as different and interesting. And let’s not forget that 90% of prizes have different judges from one year to the next, so it’s kind of a different prize every year. Salt have had a good relationship with the Forwards because they’ve brought out some interesting, well-written books. End of story.

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Tuesday November 3, 2009, 5.30pm @ The Hobart Bookshop 22 Salamanca Place Hobart.

Douglas Adams is releasing a new book this month – not bad going for a dead bloke. To be pedantic, the Douglas Adams Franchise is doing the releasing, under the cultish Hitchhiker banner, but that’s still a fair effort for a soul long gone and dearly missed.

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The 2008 Man Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga turns 35 today.

Adiga, who was born in Madras in 1974 and now lives in Mumbai, is the fourth Indian-born author to win the Booker Prize, the others being Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai. Another winner VS Naipaul is of Indian ancestry, but is not India-born.

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One of the world’s most respected authors, Canadian Alice Munro, has revealed she’s had a recent fight with cancer.

Munro, 78, who earlier this year was named the third recipient of the prestigious Man Booker International Prize, honouring her life’s work, briefly alluded to her health Wednesday night at a sold-out literary event in Toronto.

In an on-stage conversation with fellow author Diana Athill, Munro said she’s had heart bypass surgery and “just had cancer.”

Still, Munro said she’s “been lucky with her health,” unlike her mother, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at a relatively young age and died in her late 50s.

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Triple Poetry Treat – a celebration of the poets of Central Victoria.

Three outstanding poets from the Golden Triangle of Poetry.

Rhonda Pohlke (Ararat)
Rob Wallis (Castlemaine)
Tru Dowling (Bendigo)

Gold Coin Donation.
Open Section – 2-3 minutes. Best poem in the Open Section wins the Castlemaine Cup
Book and book voucher raffles
Sponsored and supported by: Zac and The Guildford Hotel, Soldier and Scholar Bookshop, Castlemaine.

Presented by Wollonogng City Gallery and South Coast Writers Centre

When: 2pm, Sunday 25 October 2009
Where: Wollongong City Gallery, corner of Kembla and Burelli Streets, Wollongong
Free event
All welcome

About Boey Kim Cheng
Kim Cheng Boey came to Australia from Singapore in 1996. He lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle. Hisaward-winning collections of poetry are After the Fire (Firstfruits, 2006), Days of No Name (EPB Publishers, 1996), Another Place (Times Books International, 1992) andSomewhere Bound (Times Books International, 1989). His latest book Between Stations (Giramondo Press 2009) is a collection of personal essays exploring notions of home and belonging.

About Debbie Lim
Debbie Lim’s poetry has appeared in Blue Dog, Quadrant and Poetry Without Borders. She was winnerof the 2008 Inverawe Nature Poetry Prize.

About Michelle Cahill
Michelle Cahill is a poet and editor of Mascara Literary Review. Her
first collection, The Accidental Cage (IR Press) was shortlisted for the judith Wright Poetry prize, and she was co-editor of the
transnational anthology Poetry Without Prders (Picaro 2008)

Speaking of good poems, I’ve just received advanced copies of The Best Australian Poetry 2009 (UQP), edited by Alan Wearne, author of the much-admired verse novel The Lovemakers, and much more besides, and The Best Australian Poems 2009 (Black Inc), edited by the equally illustrious Robert Adamson.

It’s very pleasing to see the ALR so well represented in each volume, and with poets ranging from Peter Porter, who needs no introduction, to Fiona Wright, who made the Adamson book for her fine poem about the Victorian bushfires, Kingslake. I’m gratified, too, to see that John Tranter‘s long poem The Analglyph, which ran over two pages in the May 2009 ALR , made Adamson’s cut.

It is good, too, the see the ALR’s young and talented poetry editor, Jaya Savige, in both volumes for the same poem, The Pain Switch, though I’ll have to have a word with him about giving is best material to The Other Place (it was published in The Age).

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When researching his book The Ghost Poetry Project, local poet Nathan Curnow believed it necessary to get close to the subject matter.

At great personal cost to his nerves, Mr Curnow spent 10 nights in 10 haunted locations across Australia in an attempt to find a language of courage, fear and unbridled terror.

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That great comic genius Barry Humphries once quipped: “Australia is the Brisbane of the world.”

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While we might not be witnessing a crisis in reviewing, exactly, it does seem to this correspondent (and I’m far from the first to say so) that the critical function has taken a serious hit with the full-blooded arrival of the amateur, courtesy (first and foremost) of the Web. If publishing is defined merely as going public, then anyone with an online account can be deemed — via a few self-published screeds — an author, and so it should come as no surprise that, along with this once and future flood of publishing, we’ll enjoy a bewildering array of possible critical parameters.

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Sixteen years after he debuted on the poetry scene with the acclaimed collection Nil Nil, Don Paterson has triumphed over one of the strongest poetry shortlists in years to take the Forward prize for best collection with Rain, a work which judges said showed the Scottish poet’s “total mastery of his art”.

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One of the ornaments in Herta Muller’s apartment in Romania was a fox skin rug on the floor. One day, she noticed the tail had broken off. She assumed it was an accident. But over the next few weeks, the paws were cut off, one by one. Finally the head was cut off and laid on the fox’s belly.

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But what does any of this have to do with Tasmania, you’re asking, perhaps yawning slightly, distracted by the wind blowing outside or the mutter of traffic along your street … Well, in the late 1990s Irene gave up the store and moved to Hobart, her husband’s home town. Our friendship continued by letter, and through their intermittent visits to North America. I never imagined going to Tasmania—it was simply too far away and too expensive. Then, in 2005 my second book was nominated for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Someone asked what I’d do if I won and I heard myself say “I’ll go to Tasmania to visit Irene!” I won the Award …

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Yesterday, in an article for Crikey, I commented on (what seemed to me) an astonishing suggestion in Time magazine that the Nobel Peace Prize should have been awarded to nuclear weapons. Let me repeat. A. Peace. Prize. For. Nuclear. Fucking. Weapons.

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… there is a plethora of traditional lyric at this moment in Australian poetry writing and that’s what’s getting quite a bit of attention (via, to be repetitive) reviews, awards and the publication of first collections.

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I’ve just returned from a trip to Western Australia. I was attending a conference in Fremantle just south of Perth perhaps the most isolated major city in the world. Fremantle is home to one of the most interesting museums I have visited, the Western Maritime Museum, specifically, the historic shipwrecks gallery. A central part of this museum is part of the wreck of the Batavia (see below) that floundered on uncharted rocks of the Western Australian coast on 4th June 1629. The British ship the ‘Trial’ was the first confirmed European landing on the great Southern Continent in 1620 some 150 years before Cook, but the circumstances surrounding the Batavia and the fate of its crew and passengers have made it the most famous of the early ships to stumble upon Australia’s at times treacherous coast.

The story of the Batavia is an horrific one. The ship hit Houtman’s Abrolhos Rocks off the West Australian coast on the 4th June 1629. Most of the 260 passengers and crew survived the wreck and landed safely on the barren islands nearby. The captain left the passengers and most of the crew and headed for Java in an open boat to get help. He successfully returned 14 weeks later only to find that 120 men, women and children had been brutally murdered by members of the crew and the passengers. The Captain tried the men, supervised the hanging of 7 after first cutting off their right hands. He showed mercy to two additional young men found guilty but seen as minor ‘players’, one a 17 year-old boy Jan Pelgrom and the other a soldier, Wouter Loos. They were marooned with a small amount of water, food and supplies.

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Friend Warren Burt alerted me to a radio program on Paul Celan & Martin Heidegger just broadcast by ABC: A message in a bottle: encounters with Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger. It’s just streaming audio at the moment — click here —, but by mid-week, it should be available as a free mp3 download as well. I listened to a good part of it and it seems interesting & well-done enough, focusing on the unavoidable Todesfuge and then on the poem describing Celan’s meeting with Heidegger in 1967, Todtnauberg. My essay on that meeting & the poem that came out of it, “Translation at the Mountain of Death,” is now gathered in Justifying the Margins, the volume of essays just out from Salt Publishing. Below, my translation of that poem, which may be useful to have at hand when listening to the broadcast.

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The October edition of the Australian Literary Review has a long one and a half tabloid-size page, club-sandwich review of four recent first collections by Australian women poets and it reads like an academic marker’s commentary. It’s a kind of straight estimation rather than a critical appraisal and makes no real enquiry as it asserts its authoritative position (the reviewer might have said ‘authoritative voice’ here but I just cannot use the word ‘voice’, ever. That’s worth another short blogpost in itself).

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Australian poet Emma Jones has won Best First Collection at Britain’s prestigious Forward Prizes for Poetry.

The 32-year-old Sydney native became the first Australian to win the STG5,000 ($A8,935) Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection with her debut, The Striped World, on Wednesday.

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This year’s Nobel Literature Prize could go to a poet for the first time since 1996, Swedish literary circles say as speculation hits fever pitch ahead of Thursday’s announcement.

A Spanish language author has not won the prize since 1990, so it could be time for Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa to clinch the coveted distinction — or it could go to Romanian-born German writer Herta Mueller or Israel’s Amos Oz, both mentioned as possible winners for years, experts in Stockholm note.

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It isn’t all gloom, at least among those with tertiary education. Many retirees are finding a home in arts bureaucracy, one of the growth industries of our post-industrial age. The writers centre is a splendidly rackety institution, part of the creeping state control of what are called creative industries.

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The publisher of Penguin books in Australia, Ben Ball, has accused the new editor of the Melbourne-based literary magazine The Monthly of a “gross betrayal of basic editorial standards” for allowing the author of one biography of Julia Gillard to critique another in the October issue.

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Alan Summers:
‘I’m the Embassy of Japan’s roving “Japan-UK 150″ haiku & renga poet-in-residence at Bath Central Library’s poet-in-residence for October (into November) starting with National Poetry Day this Thursday at 2pm.

‘Everyone is invited. Visit here for more information about the 1000 Verse Renga.’

Alan Summers: I’m the Embassy of Japan’s roving “Japan-UK 150″ haiku & renga poet-in-residence at Bath Central Library’s poet-in-residence for October (into November) starting with National Poetry Day this Thursday at 2pm.

Everyone is invited. Visit here for more information about the 1000 Verse Renga:

A Confident Voice: Reading Your Poetry In Public
with Harry Laing

Poetry audiences are precious. Let’s make sure we don’t switch them off!

Too often poets don’t do their work justice because of a lack of vocal confidence.

Particularly tuned to poets this workshop will focus on each participant’s particular vocal style and qualities. There will be time to work in a more detailed way, discovering the range of the body’s natural resonators and building confidence in getting the sound ‘out there’. Participants will be challenged to take a few more risks and tackle more demanding material. We’ll look at using different voices for different occasions and on matching the sound to the style of the material. Poets will practise on their own work as well as the poems of others.

Time: 12noon-3pm 25 October
Venue: Glenfern, 417 Inkerman Street, St KildA East VIC
Cost: APC members $40, non-members $50
To book phone: 03 9527 4063 or email: admin@australianpoetrycentre.org.au
BOOK FAST, PLACES ARE LIMITED!

Harry Laing is a writer, performer and poetry educator who brings a passion for words to voicework sessions. He has read and performed widely. Mark O’Connor has called him ‘perhaps Australia’s finest reader of poetry’. He has taught many workshops, both in schools and for adults, including weekends and longer courses under the ‘PoetryAlive’ banner. He was a Poet On Wheels in 2006. He has written and performed in 5 one-man comedy shows. His second series of pieces for radio, ‘Tales Of A Tree Changer’ was aired on ABC RN in 2006. His second collection of poetry, Backbone is due to be published in 2009.

3pm – 5pm this Sunday, 11 October – Republic Readings, featuring two of Australia’s outstanding writers: Tasmanian poet and novelist Kathryn Lomer, and poet Ross Donlon, visiting the state for the Tasmanian Poetry Festival. Plus an open reading. All welcome. Free event!

6pm – 8.30pm THIS TUESDAY, 13 October – Don’t miss the Tasmanian Writers’ Centre’s reading by new novelists, in conversation with Rachel Edwards. Tasmanian Peter Kay’s novel Blood is a darkly funny exploration of our national cover-ups, told in distinctly Australian voices which will make you laugh and cry. West Australian Amanda Curtin’s novel The Sinkings is an unforgettable story about the ways cruelty and ignorance, kindness and empathy mark individuals and histories. Readings @ the Lark, The Lark Distillery, 14 Davey St, HOBART. Free event!

6pm this Wednesday, 14 October – Everyone is invited to Island’s 30th birthday! Please join us to mark this historic occasion in Tasmania’s literary community – thirty years (!) of publishing this premier national literary magazine. Free refreshments and your first drink free. Featuring the announcement of the 2009 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize winners, and the launch, by Duncan Kerr SC MP, of the latest edition of Island magazine showcasing the 2009 Wildcare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize winners. Upstairs bar, Republic Bar & Café, cnr Burnett and Elizabeth Street, North Hobart (venue has no disabled access.)

For a modern girl with a career in print, radio and television, Marieke Hardy can be a bit old-fashioned.

She’s a firm believer in embracing new media, she’s on Facebook, she wrote an award-winning blog for four years and she loves Twitter: ‘‘You get people who can craft those 140 characters into something quite beautiful.’’

But e-books?

‘‘No. Not into it. I will never do it. I love the feel and smell and taste of a book, what it feels like to hold it in your hands.’’

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featuring the launch of the latest edition of Island [showcasing the 2009 Wildcare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize winners].

As well, the announcement of the 2009 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize winners.

Judges for this year’s Katherine Mansfield literacy awards spent many hours under their reading lamps with around 1800 entries to choose from.

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3Lights Gallery is a UK website edited by Liam Wilkinson who does ’solo exhibitions’ of haiku along with a haiku journal. Tasmanian Ron Moss was in the immediately preceding ‘exhibition’.

It’s not the easiest thing to arrange an interview with Peter Temple. The South African-born novelist, who has taken more than the crime-reading world by storm with his recent work, has a horror of being interviewed that seems related to the intensity he brings to the exercise. But finally a date and time are agreed and we meet in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, in inner Melbourne, at the kind of cafe that resembles a New York diner; anonymous, plain, the opposite of a place to be seen. There are heads down over newspapers; plenty of people intent on breakfasts and sports news; some in secluded dialogue, others in what looks like a professional talk.

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ABC Radio National is Red Room Company’s media partner for ‘Sea Things’.

SUBMIT YOUR POEMS OF THE SEA! Visit pool.org.au

Mark down November 26th in your log and paddle to the ‘Sea Things’ closing event at the Royal Australian Naval Sailing Association, Sir David Martin Reserve, New Beach Road, Rushcutters Bay, Sydney, 5:30-7:00pm.

Morning Friends: just a quick note to clarify the time of Words on Water on Friday, as it may incorrect in some versions of the program. The cruise is scheduled to leave Home Point at 6.30 pm, not 7 pm.

I apologise for any inconvenience. If you were coming on the cruise and have not yet done so, please book a place with me asap. There are very few places left.

Thanks for your support of the Tasmanian Poetry Festival–hope to catch up with you on the weekend. Best wishes

Cameron

The push for a greater focus on print literature in the national English curriculum is being resisted in some states, with submissions from education authorities arguing against a “strong emphasis on literature”.

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Flamboyant comedian Dame Edna Everage will receive a prestigious Irish award tomorrow in recognition of the entertainer’s career.

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What is to become of travel writing now that the world is smaller? Who are the successors to Chatwin, Lewis and Thesiger? William Dalrymple names a new generation of stars and sees a sparkling future for the genre – one less to do with posturing and heroic adventures than an intimate knowledge of people and places.

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COSMOS BRYSON, 1942-1949

Peter Bryson, better known as Cosmos, was a mechanical fitter, navigator, songwriter and community radio announcer, perhaps best known as the navigator in 1967 of the Trident, which sailed for the French nuclear testing zone as an act of defiance.

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With experience as playwrights, actors, producers, journalists, editors and visual artists, the aim is to provide interesting responses to art and culture and produce creative writing in response to life and art…

Please join us for this free event.

Thursday October 15th, 5.30pm, at Mawson Pavilion.

‘ … You must let me know (if you haven’t already) whether you would like to come on the boat on the Friday night. Positions are filling up quickly and we can only take limited numbers. Please get in touch to make a booking. (If you miss out on the big boat, I’ll arrange to have you towed behind in a dinghy.) Email me at tpf_inc at yahoo dot com dot au

Friday night also sees the launch of Sarah Day’s new collection, Grass Notes. This is a late addition to the Festival and may not appear on some versions of the program. Clive Tilsley will launch the book at 8.30 pm, kicking off the Friday Night Readings @ Mud.

There are sure to be other highlights of the Festival – Robin Archbold, a slam poet from Byron Bay, will make your head spin, and Kevin Gillam is not to be missed as he underscores his poetry with live performances on the cello. I am also looking forward to Nathan Curnow’s evocative ‘Ghost Project’ poetry, and also the work of our three touring poets from Queensland – Zenobia Frost, Rob Morris and Kristin Hannaford. Ron Moss brings up the Tasmanian contingent, and Jacquie Williams will win this year’s prize for the poet who has covered the most miles to join us, arriving from Darwin to share her verse evocations of giving birth in a Darwin hospital during Cyclone Tracy – among many other things. Ross Donlon will also join us, and read at the Republic Readings in Hobart the following Sunday in case you miss him at the Festival – which you shouldn’t!

Absolutely something for everyone – please come along and, as always, bring a hundred of your closest friends. Look forward to seeing you there, spread the word, and otherwise take care and keep the pen moving!

Cameron Hindrum
Director
Tasmanian Poetry Festival.

A few weeks into his stay at the Michael King Writers’ Centre, Ian Wedde looks like a happy man. The fresh air up on Mt Victoria must be doing him good. Or maybe it’s those early morning walks around Devonport, before he settles in his studio for a day of writing.

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Tim Winton’s multi-award winning literary masterpiece Cloudstreet will be shot in WA, it was announced today. Who would you cast in the lead roles?

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Where: Readings at Carlton.

Sofie Laguna insists she has a sunny personality. Her first novel for adults, One Foot Wrong, a story of bloody revenge by an abused child on her depraved parents, might suggest otherwise.

“Even while I was writing the most terrible things, I felt very relaxed, very detached,” she said yesterday in Melbourne, where the shortlist for the 2009 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards was announced.

Laguna, 41, seems the outside chance in a fiction list that includes such heavyweights as Murray Bail, Richard Flanagan and Geraldine Brooks.

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I’m pleased to introduce you to a new web site just for storytellers and readers: penwag.com. It’s a simple web site with no gimmicks, just an online place for friends to share stories. If you’re a storyteller, a reader, a teacher, a student, a hillbilly, a writer, or a wannabe writer, come wag your pen or read a story.

If you have some favorite stories that you like to share with friends – perhaps around the campfire or around the water cooler – come share them with a wider audience. If you have stories that were passed down from your great-grandfather and you’d like to share those memories, please come visit. Perhaps you teach writing – your students can come try their storytelling with a public audience. Perhaps you want to try your hand as a short-story author, but don’t have time or the inclination to convince an editor to include it in his or her magazine.

Or maybe you love to read stories. Do all your friends have a good story to share over lunch? Come find a funny story, and pass it on.

It’s a great place for student writers to practise their craft and let the world read their stories. English teachers and home schoolers take note!

Registration and use of the site is free for all. You register using your email address and a password. Using your email means you don’t have to remember yet another user id. We’ll keep your email private, and not share it with others.

There’s regularly new development on the site. If there is some feature that you’d like, but don’t see, hang around, it’ll probably show up later. Better yet, email me through the contact link, and ask for it. It may already be on my list, but should be a higher priority, or perhaps it’s a completely new idea. I have a long list of features to add to make the site better and better.

Ultimately, though, the success of the site depends on the stories that are out there. Come tell us a story. Don’t feel like you have to be a master storyteller. There are some good stories on our site, there are some silly, some long, some short. Come read a humorous story when you need a good laugh. Hope you can join us.

–
Don Branson
penwag.support@gmail.com

http://coders-log.blogspot.com/

http://penwag.blogspot.com/

The teaching of Australian literature in schools and universities and the liberation of literature from the contextualising clutches of critical theory are two key interests of the new chairman of the Australia Council’s Literature Board, Dennis Haskell.

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This workshop is open to people new to writing poetry, as well as experienced writers, and will give you an invaluable look at the breadth of Australian women’s writing.

Jennifer Harrison and Kate Waterhouse have edited the important new anthology Motherlode: Australian Women’s Poetry 1986-2008.

Kate and Jenny will kick off by taking you through their experiences reading over 500 books by contemporary poets in editing Motherlode, and the implications they see for poets today, including: why this poetry goes where none has gone before, the editorial process, choices and the impact of these on the final selection of poems and poets, and of course, what makes a poem more likely to be selected.

You’ll hear and be asked to read examples and extracts of selected pieces, demonstrating the breadth of styles, forms and techniques available to you as a poet.

Please bring two examples of poems you would like to workshop – if possible, on the very broad themes of parenting, women’s life experience and world view, children, loss, nature, women ancestors.

We’ll close with a discussion of the pitfalls and pleasures of writing on these rewarding and important subjects. All welcome.

Members $30, non-members $55. Salamanca Arts Centre Meeting Room.
Bookings: admin@tasmanianwriters.org or phone 6224 0029.

6-week course commencing 22 October 2009

The Australian Poetry Centre is pleased to announce that this highly successful workshop from 2008 will run again in October 2009.

Poetry: History & Appreciation is a 6-week course on the art of poetry and its long history, ranging from the storytelling and choric roles of preliterate cultures, to our own time. We will look at how Classical cultures, Christianity, the rise of printing and of the electronic media affected poetry¹s themes and its forms. The course will also show how Australian poetry rose out of Western traditions, and will speculate on where poetry might be going next. Some key poems will be looked at in detail, but the broad, changing picture will be kept in mind. All interested readers or writers are welcome.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe, poet and essayist, was born in Melbourne. Altogether he has sixteen volumes of poetry, a novel, and numerous prose works. His Selected Poems 1956-1995 (Carcanet Oxford Poets) won the Age Book of the Year Prize. In 1987 he won the quinquennial Dublin Prize for the Arts and Sciences, while in that year he also went to Harvard as Professor of Australian Studies. His latest book is Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw (Carcanet 2008).

6 sessions from Thursday 22 October 6.00pm-8.00pm until 26 November
Venue: The Centre for Books Writing and Ideas, State Library of Victoria
Cost: APC members $280, non-members $300
To book phone: 03 9527 4063 or email: admin@australianpoetrycentre.org.au

joanne burns Brook Emery Les Wicks
with music from Maryjane Leahy

accessible & engaging –
unique perspectives on a world icon

@ Bondi Social
1st floor 38 Campbell Pde Bondi Beach
2.15 for 2.30 October 10
FREE

Open mike session where audience members can read their poem on or around Bondi. Prizes for the best poems. Winner will be published in “Guide to Sydney Beaches”.

This event is part of the celebrations for Waverley’s 150th Birthday. Proudly supported by Waverley Council.

joanne burns has had many collections of her work published, the latest being an illustrated history of dairies Giramondo Publishing 2007. She grew up in Rose Bay and Dover Heights, Bondi was often her ‘playground’ from very early childhood into early adulthood. She was a member of the Bondi Ladies Swimming Club for a couple of years, and taught beginners in the ‘Learn to Swim’ classes at Bondi Baths in the summer of 1961-2. In her teenage years she also played tennis at the legendary Tib Dorahy Tennis Club of North Bondi. She attended 1st Class at Bondi Beach Public School, where her great aunts Beatrice and Marjorie Taylor were Headmistresses.

Brook Emery has published three poetry collections: dug my fingers in the sand (FIP 2000), which won the Queensland Premier’s Prize, Misplaced Heart (FIP 2003), and Uncommon Light (FIP 2007). All three were short-listed for the NSW Premier’s Prize. Individual poems have won the Newcastle Poetry Prize, The Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize, the Max Harris Award, and the Australian Sports Poetry Award. He calls Bondi Beach his second home. He was once a Beach Inspector there and is a Long Service member and former captain of Bondi Surf Club.

Maryjane Leahy has been playing classical guitar for more than 30 years and has been a composer for 15 of those years. Her current focus in composition is music for contemporary guitar. She is also pursuing her life journey through music in a Masters degree in Composition, looking at incorporating Indian rhythms into Western orchestral music. All of Mary-Jane’s guitar pieces are a reflection of her personal experience and each has been written for someone who, at the time, had a great impact on both the direction and meaning of her life journey. Her recent collaboration with Dominic Wy Kanak has taught her a great deal about the relationships between white and Indigenous Australians.

Les Wicks’ 8th book of poetry is The Ambrosiacs (Island, 2009). Wicks has been a guest at most of Australia’s literary festivals, toured widely and been published in over 200 newspapers, anthologies and magazines across 12 countries in 7 languages. He runs Meuse press, which focuses on poetry outreach projects, the latest being “Guide to Sydney Beaches”. Les was a westie kid with family in Bondi. His main ambition in life was to live over east which he has managed to do for about 35 years.