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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CLOSING DATE: 10 DECEMBER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emerging Queensland Author – Manuscript Award

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

Unpublished Indigenous Writer – Arts Queensland David Unaipon Award

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

Non-Fiction Book Award

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

History Book – Faculty of Arts, University of Queensland Award

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

Children’s Book – Mary Ryan’s Award

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

Young Adult Book Award

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

Science Writer Award

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

Poetry Collection – Arts Queensland Judith Wright Calanthe Award

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

Australian Short Story Collection – Arts Queensland Steele Rudd Award

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

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

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

Film Script – Screen Queensland Award

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

Drama Script (Stage) Award

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

Television Script – QUT Creative Industries Award

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Queensland Poetry Festival : spoken in one strange word

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Submissions close: Friday October 22

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guests this year:

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

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

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

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

Tickets:
Free event

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

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The piece starts inauspiciously, though:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All welcome to this free event.

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

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

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

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

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

Manchester Writing Competition website :

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

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

Monday 19th July, 6pm.

RSVP to rsvp at fullersbookshop.com.au

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poetically,

steve dAvis

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

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

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

Ralph

Philip Hammial

Water

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

………………………………………………………………………………………….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emma Rooksby, poet.

All welcome to this free event.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Made of matter,

The dotdotdash crew
www.fremantlepress.com.au

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

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

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

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

All welcome to this free event.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Fullers Bookshop, Hobart
Sunday 27th June 2pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Fellowship is worth $5000.

Media release, Australian Book Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Two poems

Hole in the Ice

Drift ice in your eyes
hoarfrost in your heart

your hands
untamed sled dogs

above us
a moon poises
amid stars

target
surrounded by holes
made by darts that strayed

Patriotic Poem

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

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

The ice lets no one go

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

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

Everywhere

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

What if……

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

Who Knows

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

Libby Goodsir lives and writes in Hobart.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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BOOK TICKETS NOW here and here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be inspired! Be published!

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

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

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

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

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

Enquiries for both events [03] 5472 2647.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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TALKING HEADS AT TOXTETH

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

Friday, 4 June, 2010 at 6 for 6.30 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All welcome to this free event.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

redroomcompany.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Thursday June 3rd, 5.30pm
22 Salamanca Square

All welcome to this free event.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope to see you all there!

Regards,

steve dAvis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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So why are their books so popular?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dusk’s Tasmania has a threateningly close wilderness making the possibility of werewolves seems more real and present. “If you grow up in Tassie that’s part of being Tasmanian – that fight between wilderness and civilised life. I remember really clearly growing up with Lake Pedder protests and the devastation as a seven year old that this was a place I was never going to get to.”

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In Bunyah, no one makes a fuss of him. “You’re still just Les Murray, Cecil’s boy.” But in a big city, he’s recognised on average once a day, he says. Sometimes it tickles him. Once he was sitting in a square in Barcelona, chatting to one of his translators. “As I got up to go, two girls at the next table said, ‘Good to see you here, Mr Murray. Hope you’re having a good time.’ I said to him, ‘It cost me a bloody fortune to arrange that.’ ”

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Sydney poet Stephen Edgar is another who employs traditional forms. Indeed, in recent years he has established himself internationally as one of the most expert contemporary users of metre and rhyme in the language. His seventh collection, History of the Day, has many poems that, like Petsinis’s, are satisfying aesthetically while emotionally affecting. Edgar’s characteristic stance is standing back and considering his material, sifting it for its artistic potential while being aware of its humanity or its implications for humanity.

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Zenobia Frost writes poetry in cemeteries, articles at a desk in a backyard rainforest, and to-do lists on receipts, bits of paper, the back of her hand, and flatmates’ spare bits of skin. She occasionally orchestrates cabaret events that are really an excuse to drink tea. She writes, edits, and types for a living, but can most often be found haunting the University of Queensland, finishing the never-ending degree. Her work has appeared in Stylus, Mascara, Small Packages, Burdock (USA), Rave Magazine, Famous Reporter, and Voiceworks, and she has performed at the Queensland Poetry Festival, Tasmianian Poetry Festival, and around Australia with the Queensland Touring Poets Program. Her debut collection, The Voyage, was published by SweetWater Press in 2009.

Links to examples of her work can be found at her blog.

Ross Gillett’s poems have appeared in The Age and The Australian and in magazines including Quadrant, Overland, Poetry Monash and Blue Dog. They have featured three times in Radio National’s Poetica program and have been included in Black Inc’s The Best Australian Poems 2004, 2005 and 2006. His book The Sea Factory was one of the Five Islands Press New Poets 2006 series.

His awards for poetry include the Broadway Poetry Prize, the FAW John Shaw Neilson Award (twice), the Melbourne Poet’s Union National Poetry Prize, the Reason-Brisbane Poetry Prize, the Ulitarra Prize, the City of Greater Dandenong National Poetry Prize and the Woorilla Poetry Prize. He has read at venues across Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania, the ACT and New Zealand. He has lectured and run workshops in poetry writing, and has judged a number of poetry competitions. In 2009 he was awarded a Varuna Residential Writing Fellowship.

Ross has recently published a chapbook of old and new poems with Mark Time Books. He lives in Ballarat where he works for the Department of Sustainability and Environment.

The extraordinary in Tilda’s life materialises with the arrival of an elephant seal about to give birth on the beach near where she lives, an event that unlocks the door to all sorts of wondrous possibilities as Tilda becomes a volunteer helper keeping watch on the seal mother and its pup.

What Now, Tilda B is a wise and compassionate book, Reeves observes; ‘and, an optimistic one when much of the literature appearing for young people is short on optimism and presents grim world views.’

Lomer responded with a big thanks to her publisher UQP ‘for their faith’ and in particular to the two Christina’s – ‘my editor, and UQP’s children’s publisher’ – and to Zoe for the cover…. ‘I have to say that I actually cried when I had the cover sent to me: it’s very beautiful. You put so much into the writing and then someone else wraps a cover round it, and I was thrilled with this. And an extra thank you to UQP, and to Zoe, because with the release of Tilda UQP have also rejacketed my previous young adult novel The Spare Room to match the Tilda cover. I think it’s gorgeous, it breathes new life into The Spare Room which has kept going along in reprintings….’

‘I remember years ago at a writers’ festival where someone said, it’s okay in fiction to make things up,’ Lomer continued. ‘But if you don’t somehow have the real in there, no-one will believe it. There are many bits of the real in this book, but the key story based on fact is the arrival of an elephant seal on Dover Beach where it gave birth. This is an extremely rare event, I know of three times it’s happened in Tasmania, the previous two times the babies died – in this case the … anyway, read the book, find out!’

‘What Now, Tilda B? is a book that’s taken a while to come out, it would have been nice if it neatly took as long as say a seal gestation but I think it’s been more like the gestation of a blue whale – or like renovating a house, it just goes on and on and on….’

Event supported by the Tasmanian Greens.
All welcome to this free event.

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

tilda’s life is pretty insane already – she has to decide what to do with her future, how she feels about her surf-mad boyfriend, her hair-crazy best friend, her parents who are hanging together by a thread…and now she’s stumbled upon a pregnant elephant seal on the beach. the seal hasn’t exactly picked the best place to give birth – this little coastal town are notoriously backwards when it comes to preserving our endangered flora and fauna. they are loggers, mostly.

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[Note: The launch of Kathryn Lomer’s new young adult novel, What Now, Tilda B? will take place at the Hobart Bookshop in Salamanca Square at 5.30pm on Thursday May 6th. Librarian/teacher/writer/publisher extraordinaire Lyn Reeves will do the honours of launching Tilda into the world. Do come along for a glass of wine to help celebrate. All welcome.]

While Peter Porter was establishing his name in London as one of Britain’s leading poets, and a worthy successor to the great W.H. Auden, he was almost unheard of in Australia.

This was despite the fact, beside all those poems steeped in European culture and references to music, art and history, each of his first three collections also contained some relatively straightforward reflections on his Australian childhood.

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And then there was the Slam. I went expecting high energy and I got high energy. Emilie Zoe Baker MC’ed the event urging us to clap like Les Murray just poked you on Facebook, and Arianna Pozzuoli opened proceedings as the sacrificial poet. While the event was more of a showcase (there was none of the traditional scoring), you could sense each poet wanted to lift the bar when they hit the stage, to take the crown of ‘The Greatest Poet In All The Land’ – oh yes, this was chanted loudly throughout the night!

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This was followed by a reading from three Tasmanian Poets – Esther Ottaway, Anne Kellas and Adrienne Eberhard. I was particularly taken by Adrienne’s work. Her poems Phosphorescence (When I pull the rope, a bucket/ of drowned stars appears, as if the night-/ sky’s fallen into the sea) and Earth, Air, Water, Fire: A Love Poem in Four Elements ( from earth: We carry caves inside us/ – the heart’s dark chambers,/ water-washed cavern of the womb) are still resonating with me.

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Two-time Miles Franklin award-winner, the writer Alex Miller, has blamed political ineptitude at the federal level, as well as the apathy of writers, for endangering Australia’s oldest and most prestigious literary prize.

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Said Festival Director Jeni Caffin “I am honoured that Fatima has chosen the Byron Bay Writers Festival for her only Australian Festival appearance. Just released is Songs of Blood and Sword: a daughter’s memoir, her history of this driven family and Pakistan’s struggle to nationhood.”

Ms Bhutto will appear across the Marquee program and her attendance is supported by the generous sponsorship of Southern Cross University. Jeni explains “We are a Festival focused on celebrating Australian books and writers and our meagre resources are dedicated to that end. Occasionally, however, I encounter someone so significant that I feel compelled to bring them to our program and SCU answers the call. In 2008, we partnered to bring Shashi Tharoor, in 2009 it was Geoffrey Robertson and in 2010 Fatima Bhutto. Big voices on our regional stage.”

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

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

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

Please note all tickets are non-refundable, non-exchangeable and non-replaceable. Early Bird ticket purchases will receive the full Festival program by post following its release on 4 June.

Set in Dover, Tasmania, and based around the true story of the birth of an elephant seal on the beach, What Now, Tilda B? is a tender coming-of-age story from the award winning author of The Spare Room.

Praise for Kathryn Lomer’s writing: ‘Lomer’s eye is both steady and compassionate – and what she notices are the small aching ironies and epiphanies that so often escape our attention. As polished and precise as her award-winning poetry, her stories place us unerringly into the shoes of her characters, whose every frailty, doubt and small triumph is as familiar as our own.’ – Cate Kennedy, author of Dark Roots.

This prize is a new Tasmanian initiative – a partnership between the Centre, the Schools of Philosophy and of Geography and Environmental Studies at UTAS, Island magazine and Fullers Bookshop.

Partnership in the new prize extends the Tasmanian Writers’ Centre’s interest in facilitating writing with a connection to place and nature. This is a genre growing in force and relevance globally.

Gina Mercer, Adrienne Eberhard and Lucy Tatman will judge the prize, which offers $1500 first prize and two additional prizes of $250.

Poems of up to 60 lines may be submitted and there is no entry fee. The prize closes on 5 July.

Entry forms may also downloaded from www.tasmanianwriters.org

No playwright has been shortlisted for the 2010 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards because judges could not find a play worth nominating — a development that has baffled The Australian’s theatre critics.

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Thursday April 22nd, 5.30pm,
The Hobart Bookshop.

All welcome to this free event.

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

Jill Jones’ latest book, Dark Bright Doors, published by Wakefield Press, will be launched by Debra Adelaide at Gleebooks.

Date: Saturday 10th April 2010
Time: 3.30 for 4pm
Venue: Gleebooks
Address: 49 Glebe Point Road, Glebe.

Jill Jones’ sixth book, Dark Bright Doors, raises questions of the self, as well as the ecology of place and language. This is Jones at her most versatile and idiosyncratic, at times a little wild and dark. The poems are intimate, sharp, self-critical and very present.

We know more about the undead species who have lived in our hearts and dined on our minds than ever before. We have probed into their weaknesses, evaded their tricks and know well of their canny (and uncanny) chicanery.

We know these things … because they were once like us. Let us not rest on our laurels. Let us be vigilant and as ready as we can be for the uneasy future that is Zombie 2.0.

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The Byron Bay Writers Festival Picaro Press Poetry Initiative comprises two programs that give poets the opportunity for editorial help, promotion, and publication. The programs are nation-wide and will run annually.

Program partners are the Byron Bay Writers Festival and Picaro Press.

This special initiative extends Varuna’s current offerings for poets and builds on partnerships Varuna has established through the NSW LitLink Program, funded by Arts NSW.

Both programs are open to writers resident in Australia.

BYRON BAY WRITERS FESTIVAL/PICARO PRESS: POETRY ANTHOLOGY

Award: Winning applicants will have their poem or poems published in a poetry anthology of approximately 90 A5 pages.
Who should apply: Writers of poetry at all levels of practice and achievement and from all over Australia.
Important dates: Applications are accepted from 5 April 2010 and must be postmarked by 30 April 2010.
Application fee: $45 (including GST) per application. Fees help to cover administrative costs and sustain these programs.

BYRON BAY WRITERS FESTIVAL/PICARO PRESS POETRY COLLECTION (SINGLE AUTHOR)
Award: Two poets will each have their poetry published by Picaro Press as a single-author collection. They will have the opportunity to launch their publication at the Byron Bay Writers Festival.
Who should apply: New or emerging poets with sufficient work to be edited into a publication of 28 A5 pages.
Important dates: Applications are accepted from 5 April 2010 and must be postmarked by 30 April 2010.
Application fee: $45 (including GST) per application. Fees help to cover administrative costs and sustain these programs.

For more information, visit here.

Mackay will come alive with the sound of writers, poets, illustrators and scientists as they gather to entertain students and adults alike at the Whitsunday Voices Youth Literature Festival.

Festival co-ordinator Ellen Reiner said the July event would deliver some of Australia’s best-known authors, including Jackie French, as well as an array of other entertainment.

“Now in its seventh year, Whitsunday Voice Youth Literature Festival is thrilled to present multi-award winning author and well-known television gardening personality Jackie French,” Ms Reiner said.

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In the majesty of his years and accomplishments, Les Murray, sole author of the several increasingly massive editions of his Collected Poems – one of the great books of the modern world – is in the position of a monarch who, having successfully constructed the Palace of Versailles all on his own, is now pottering in the grounds, building sheds. Four years ago, The Biplane Houses was such a shed, and very prettily done. Now Taller When Prone is another. Perhaps I would not have had the idea of an enormous building and its satellite bâtiments if the first poem in the new book had not been about the Taj Mahal.

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New award categories

In 2010, two new prizes have been added to the Awards to recognise literature for younger reading audiences.

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The wait is over!
Discounted Early Bird 3-day passes for Byron Bay Writers Festival 2010 are now available. This is your opportunity to purchase passes for the main three days of the Festival, prior to release of the full program on 4 June.
To purchase passes, visit

3-DAY PASS
This includes entry to the North Beach (formerly Byron Bay Beach Resort) Festival site from Friday 6 to Sunday 8 August. Join us in the marquees for discussions on the hottest topics of 2010, literary debates, book launches, laughter and a ringside seat as Australia’s most compelling writers engage.
COST: $185 OR $160 for students or members of the Northern Rivers Writers’ Centre.
(For membership information visit www.nrwc.org.au )

KIDS PASS
Join Australia’s best kids’ writers for fun and frivolity in the kids marquee on Saturday 7 August from 9.30am – 3.30pm. Kids between 6 and 16 enjoy storytelling, activities and an opportunity to meet authors during book signings.
COST: $25 or $20 for members of the Northern Rivers Writers’ Centre.

HOW TO PURCHASE THE HOTTEST LITERARY TICKET OF 2010
CLICK HERE to book your Festival passes now or phone the booking hotline on 02 6685 6262.
Please note all tickets are non-refundable, non-exchangeable and non-replaceable. Early Bird ticket purchasers will receive the full Festival program by post following its release on 4 June

Full bios follow soon but please note the special date of :

Saturday, April 17th at 3pm. (Not Sunday, as is normally the case – readings will revert to Sunday after this special event)

At the Guildford Hotel, a couple of couplets from Castlemaine on the Daylesford Road (15 minutes for human kind).

By far the strangest poem in this new collection of Les Murray’s verse is called Infinite Anthology. It contains 35 definitions of words and phrases. Some are whimsical: “instant – (Australian) Nescafé”; “tipping elbow – (Aboriginal) sneaking glances at one’s watch”. Others seem to reflect Murray’s interest in technical terms: “bugle driver – attachment on a drill to intensify its power in sinking screws”. A few reveal sharp edges: “bunny boiler – one who kills her offspring”; “Irishtown – a Soweto of old-time Catholic labour”; “fibro – resident of a poorer suburb”. One, at least, is a tease: “Wedge – cloth bunched in the groin; may cause camel toe (q.v.)” – but when you look there’s no entry for “camel toe”.

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Louis Nowra, the playwright, has caused a wave of recoil because of a nasty – and by no means glitteringly nasty – attack on Germaine Greer, whose book The Female Eunuch is celebrating its 40th anniversary.

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Internationally acclaimed Australian children’s author Patricia Wrightson died this week, an official said Thursday. She was 88.

Wrightson was awarded in 1986 the biennial Hans Christian Andersen Medal — the highest accolade for a writer of children’s fiction — given by the Swiss-based International Board on Books for Young People.

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Four actors will bring to life the voices of characters from the novel, which follows a drama on the Southern Ocean as an Australian customs vessel chases a Uruguayan boat illegally netting Patagonian toothfish, and the lives and past loves of their wives back at home.

Writers’ Centre Director Chris Gallagher said the playreading would be one of the Centre’s premier events for the year.

“Tasmanian writer Katherine Johnson has created such compelling, memorable, human characters,” she said.

“For those with a love of good writing, this event will be inspirational.

“For developing writers, being able to create strong, believable characters is a key skill.

“For this reason, the Centre has partnered with the Tasmanian Theatre Company to bring Tasmanian fiction to the stage, with a focus on voice of character.

“Writers at any stage of their development will be able to learn from and enjoy this feature on excellent Tasmanian writing.”

Ms Gallagher said renowned Australian director and current Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Tasmania, Michael Beresford, had been chosen to direct the the playreading adaptation.

She said the playreading was an exciting and engaging way of bringing writing to a Tasmanian audience and was part of the Centre’s commitment to ‘writing in the city’, a series of events open to the public.

The Pescador’s Wake playreading will be held at 7.30 pm on Monday 19 April, at the Backspace Theatre, Theatre Royal, Hobart.

Tickets for the Pescador’s Wake playreading are $10 and can be booked through the Tasmanian Writers’ Centre, email admin@tasmanianwriters.org or phone 6224 0029.

Sarah Holland-Batt is sometimes a stereotypical poet: dreamy and preoccupied when gestating her next verses, which is how she came to leave her mobile phone in the fridge’s butter compartment.

But there is a strong business-like streak there, too, a determination to make a career in an art form notorious for lack of money and opportunity.

These traits have proved a winning combination. Her first book, Aria (University of Queensland Press, 2008), was released to critical acclaim and is the recipient of multiple awards, but her targeting a Fulbright scholarship paid off, too: she will leave for New York University in August to begin a masters of fine arts in poetry.

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there are copies in readings carlton & collected works in melbourne for $AUS25, or buy online

One evening in 1998, I was reading at The Irish Writers Centre in Dublin. Also reading that night was a poet from Melbourne, Aileen Kelly, who was that year’s recipient of the Vincent Buckley Prize.

Afterwards, I was outside on the steps talking to a friend when Aileen passed by on her way out and stopped to tell me that she’d liked one of my poems in particular – “Pineforest” – if I remember correctly, she asked me for a copy. At the very last minute I scribbled my phone number on the back of it and she called me the next night. We met up in town the following evening, exchanged addresses and began to write to and, eventually, email each other. We also regularly exchange books. I send her Irish collections and anthologies that I think she might like and she reciprocates with books by Australian poets. At the moment, I’m reading Motherlode – Australian Women’s Poetry 1986- 2008 Edited by Jennifer Harrison and Kate Waterhouse, which I’m really enjoying. It’s so good that I only allow myself to read a poem or two from it every night.

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I had no strong plans for what I’d do here. I wanted to write poems, maybe a dozen if I’m lucky, hopefully at least a handful. I didn’t have any subjects, ideas, not a single rhyme scheme either. The plan was to let the plan emerge out of the place, see how it affected me. If you can put yourself into the photos above, you can guess – while it’s possible, it’s highly unlikely you won’t be refreshed and stimulated being here. Oh, yeah, and by “here”, I mean between Woodend and Lancefield, not far from Hanging Rock. Or, as we were told by someone at the nearest (8 kms away) General Store, “out Cobaw way”.

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Last Tuesday evening saw the launch of the online journal Islet. Islet is an online publishing space for short prose, poetry and reviews by emerging writers as well as works by emerging visual artists. It is an initiative of the literary journal Island.

Islet was launched by Danielle Wood at the premises of Arts Tasmania in Hobart. Wood mentioned that on being asked to launch the online journal, her first response was to recall a particular day in her life when as a young girl, she’d been exposed to the glorious sweeping bays and islets of South Bruny Island through her visits to the area on the family yacht. On such visits, she’d beg to be dropped off at one of these islets, ‘and I’d wave to the yacht to come and get me when I was ready, when my Robinson Crusoe spell was over.’ The day she particularly recalls is the day when she was first given permission to row the dinghy to the islet herself. ‘This islet was so small I could circumnavigate it in about a minute, I met its single tree and its few little clumps of shrubs, sat down with my packed lunch and read my book. Very simple really, but I remember it as an extraordinary day in my life. And when I was asked to launch Islet, my thoughts returned to that day and to what about it made it so special.’ Beyond the transitional stage of her life the day marked, it was perhaps the magic of islets themselves … smaller versions of islands. ‘I think of them having the essence of islands distilled. Islands concentrated, if you like’.

Islands might give us mountains to climb, long beaches to meander along, Wood continued. Island magazine might give us long essays to read, short stories and poems to read. But islets give you short sharp doses of themselves. ‘And I think that this will also be true of Islet, the brand new publishing venture that we’re here to celebrate tonight…” Islet will appear every few months with a new selection of very short works by emerging writers and artists; poems no longer than twenty-five lines, prose of no more than six hundred words, reviews to a maximum length of three hundred words. “Its compactness of content will be one of Islet’s great strengths.”

Following Islet’s launch, contributors Cameron Hindrum and Pam Schindler were invited to read from the magazine.

Cameron Hindrum: “I submitted both of these poems to Islet. Only one was chosen – and I’ll discuss that with Anica later – but I thought I would read both of them tonight, and I’m going to start with the one that was rejected!!!”

Islet editor Anica Boulanger-Mashberg closed proceedings by thanking the writing community who’d been very supportive of Islet in its early days, ‘There are lots of people to thank, and for every person I’m mentioning there are forty thousand people … I’m not prone to exaggerations. … who’ve helped’. Anica offered thanks to Norman Raeburn and the Island board, ‘an energetic, passionate, hard-working, supportive group of people who do what they do because they care about the culture of writing….’, and in particular to Island editor Gina Mercer. ‘Thank you all for coming and supporting this really exciting new venture that I’m very proudly a part of,’ she concluded.

Islet editor Anica Boulanger-Mashberg: ['Anica is the ideal person to be editing Islet. She has enormous creative intelligence, and is pernickety in the best possible way. I know that she will have cast her meticulous eye over every millimetre of Islet, and that there will be more wonderful Islet’s to come, each of them with their own distinct personalities, their own concentrated essence.': Danielle Wood]

In the weeks between workshop sessions, you will be sustained by course material that will attempt to anticipate individual needs, tastes and interests, and this private work is at the heart of the course. While the group setting allows for times of sharing, the workshop sessions will focus primarily on individual learning, with participants working alone on tasks and themes set by the workshop facilitator. The workshop facilitator aims to structure group sessions so that new work is shared in an atmosphere of trust that is balanced and constructive for all participants.

This course will focus on the writing process, rather than on getting published. It will address specific questions about the music inherent in poetry, common errors with voice and tense, and questions about practice, such as:


• What do you do with a poem that is (still) not really finished after many months? And how do you know when a poem is complete?
• Why do good titles matter (and how do you find them)?
• How poems end.
• When is a poem a poem and not a piece of cut-up prose?
• When and how are reflective diary notes and journalling useful starting points for poems, and when are they distractions?
• Exercises, traditional forms, and finding your voice.
• How does the written poem use line endings, stanza breaks and white space effectively?
• How do other art forms (music, art) usefully influence a poet’s practice?
• In what ways do readings of other poets help or hinder?
• What can re-start your creativity in times of drought?

At the end of the course, participants will hopefully come away not with “workshop poems” but with a new direction and energy for their writing life.

Requirements

This course is suitable for those who have already set off on the path of writing poetry rather than those who are at the beginning of the journey. It is hoped that intending participants will already have a store of unpublished poems or work in progress to bring to the first workshop, and will be committed and open to exploring the intensive workshop setting over six months to reinvigorate their writing.

About the facilitator

Anne Kellas ran a popular series of poetry workshops for TAFE in the early 90s and in 2007 for the Tasmanian Writers Centre. She grew up in South Africa and emigrated to Australia in the dark days of apartheid in the mid-80s. Her first book (Poems from Mt Moono, 1989) was published in South Africa. In 1993 she received Tasmanian arts funding for work on what later became her second book, Isolated States (2001), and more recent funding support from an Australia Council grant is currently sustaining her work on a third collection. She graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand with a BA in English and German. Though tempted by an academic career, she studied librarianship and later, teaching. After a career in youth studies, she now writes full-time.

Dates and times: Poetry Alive will run as a monthly session of 2.5 hours, from May to November. This would be a total of six sessions. Sessions would be held on a Monday evening from 6.30 pm to 9 pm, on the first Monday of the month:

Monday 3 May

Monday 7 June

Monday 5 July

Monday 2 August

Monday 6 September

Monday 4 October

Venue: Tasmanian Writers’ Centre, first floor, Salamanca Arts Centre.

Fee: $300 to members. There are 10 places in the course, which will only run if all places are filled. Payment must be received to secure your place.

Bookings: Contact the Tasmanian Writers’ Centre, email: admin at tasmanianwriters.org or phone 6224 0029 to make a credit card payment.

What floors me is that even people whose stock-in-trade is language seem to feel quite happy about trashing language as essentially worthless. It’s nothing more than intellectual laziness: an acceptance of the notion that words and deeds are somehow the opposite of each other, each with a clear moral value and no prizes for guessing which is which. The lure of the false dichotomy is strong, I know — it makes opining so much easier — but you’d think a Rhodes Scholar would have been taught at some point in his education how to avoid its simplistic snares.

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It is a week of honours for Craig Silvey: his second novel is on the longlist for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and he is among 50 finalists for Cleo magazine’s Bachelor of the Year.

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Three first-time fiction writers join some of Australia’s most celebrated authors on this year’s longlist for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

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Ron Pretty is first to read. “In this section I’ll be reading a number of poems from a new collection to be published in May or June entitled ‘Postcards from the Centre’, and in the second section some poems I’ve written during my residency at the Writers’ Cottage in Hobart’. Poems in the first section include ‘Keats Hereafter’ “written some time before the movie ‘Bright Star’ came out, at a time after I’d been reading quite a few Keats’ poems, ‘Cottage Collage’ “speaking to the dichotomy between art and craft” and ‘Witches Hook’, “possibly the only outcome of my only attempt to write a novel”.

Louise Oxley opens with a whale poem, written about the overnight stay she’d shared with Ron Pretty and other members of the Five Islands New Poets’ Series 9 some years ago. “We travelled across much of the country, on the trip between Adelaide and Perth we were averaging 900 kilometres a day. This is a poem that came out of one of the overnight stops we made on that trip”. Next follows a poem that came out of a Hobart Mountain Festival collaboration, and ‘After the Diagnosis’, and finally a couple of love poems written after a visit to Wales.

Ron Pretty, following the break, suggests that since his next bracket of poems were written during his ten days in Hobart “if some of these seem a little raw you’ll know why it is’. ‘String Theory’ is first – and much admired – then a series of eight sonnets “that go by the title of ‘No. 1 Kelly Street’ “. There’s humour in the last of these, “if you’ve seen the flyer that’s circulated for this reading you’ll see me referred to as ‘the elder statesman of Australian poetry’. Must have had an effect because it’s triggered a decent poem. ‘Where is Boswell I want to know,’ asks Pretty.

Louise Oxley’s second piece opens with two poems about the joys of going backwards, including ‘Lagging Behind’. Next she reads ‘Sitting with Cezanne’. “I’ve just been to Canberra to see the post-impressionists ‘in the flesh’ so to speak; Cezanne’s always been important”. She follows with three in a suite of new poems in response to the journals of the French naturalist Labillardière. “This seems to be a sonnet evening, the first of the three is a double sonnet, the other two are more formal. Labillardière is exacting in his description of the flora he encounters in his explorations; I see the same trees on the channel and realise I’ve come to take them for granted … these poems are an attempt to see them through his eyes”.

Following the reading there’s time for questions. Ron Pretty speaks of his plans to set up a poetry imprint entitled ‘Profile Poetry’; a couple of titles a year, and probably by invitation. He notes that while he’s committed to poetry and its publication, he’s well aware of problems facing the industry, particulary with distribution. He suggests that support for the multitude of very good poets in this country is poor and in consequence, we have a situation where poets see poetry as its own reward – not bad in itself – but with publication not being sought because it’s just too difficult. “At present as poets we’re merely writing to one another; and that’s selling poetry short”. Ron mentions the positives – groups such as Red Room “who are doing lots of good things, poetry on pigeons, for instance” – and the negatives: the festivals designed for poets but not for audiences. Conversation turns to the loss of poetry publishing opportunities; Ron points out that when Penguin withdrew its support for poetry, it also meant the loss of the company’s poetry publicists. “Thus the resources for getting poetry out into the mainstream were also lost”.

Ron Pretty will be conducting a poetry workshop – ‘The Poetry of Witness: How can poets write about issues – politics, ideology, ecology? Can a non-indigenous poet write about indigenous issues?’ – in Hobart on Saturday afternoon from 1 to 4pm. At this stage a handful of vacancies remain for this workshop, ring the Tasmanian Writers’ Centre if you’d like to take part, tel 6224 0029.

Invincible Summer

In the depths of winter I finally learned there was
an invincible summer. — Albert Camus

Our laughter was as brittle as the icicles
the children licked, the edge
of your humour an ironic lance— told
through the open window of the station wagon,
to the clamour of the carpool.
Don’t you hit him with that!

We balanced our phones while chopping
onions, you mocking
your famous in-laws, their crowd
of country club lushes, yet as your husband’s
income climbed he joined a wine club and you
joined your mother-in-law at the spa,
imitating her dry tone
when she found her teenaged son
at the mirror dressed in her cocktail gown.
Try the champagne stilettos, dear, they
go better with that frock.

Just as coolly, you reported on the tempest
of your marriage while you picked
last night’s spinach soufflé off the chandelier.
Most of the wedding gift crockery
was smashed by then. But you had a scheme,
confessed to me while he was away on business.
A new baby would fix things.
Greeting him in the satin negligee bought
for the purpose. He had other news.

You stuffed his ties into a paper sack
and shouted him out the door.
That’s when your smoky voice grew slurred.
You stopped answering the phone.

A month or maybe longer before I heard about the diagnosis,
how when the doctor said, Cancer, you thought
Now maybe he’ll love me.

But he was settled then with his new woman and even the children
preferred his place when you returned from surgery
to the dark nights of chemo.
Like a veteran of an unspeakable war, you never
revealed the particulars.

And I never thought to thank you, Val— for the gentling
of your smile, the legacy of tears, how they
eased the muscles around your eyes.

Your children returned to nuzzle close like spring calves.
We lounged in your garden that first warm day when
the azaleas were in bloom. The sun found your face,
daubed it with gold.

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

Laura Jan Shore, author of historical novel, The Sacred Moon Tree, and poetry collection, Breathworks, is President of Dangerously Poetic Press. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in Australia, USA, Italy and New Zealand. Co- editor of 8 poetry books, she has taught poetry and creative writing for 25 years both on the North Coast OF N.S.W. and in the U.S.

The row that has emerged over Australian Writers Week in China underlines the danger and the value of such bold attempts to deepen the relationship beyond its mine-ship-steelmill axis.

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Greens leader Bob Brown has urged the Foreign Minister to intervene in the case of an Australian author denied China entry as he is HIV-positive.

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One of the jolting pleasures of being a publishing poet in the age of the Web is to stumble on a poem that has gone on adventures without my knowledge. The Niches section of my website collects links to poems I’ve come across on, among other places, a Spelunking site and a Wine-tasting site.

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I’ve spent a goodly part of these last two weeks at poetry readings in London: all of them well worth the return ticket. Last night’s launch of Infinite Difference however was the crowning glory. The subtitle of Carrie Etter’s anthology, ‘Other Poetries by UK Women Poets’ refers to Ric Caddel and Peter Quartermain’s 1999 anthology, Other: British and Irish Poetry Since 1970, in that ‘other’ here doesn’t mean ‘alien’ or even ‘oppositional’, just poetry that of its nature has not found a comfortable place in the shortlists or the weekly literary supplements.

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Australians can be forgiven for a swaggering confidence that one of our writers would win another Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. But we were wrong.

The Australian heavyweight finalists – Peter Carey, Thomas Keneally and J. M. Coetzee – were knocked down by a Samoan writer, Albert Wendt, who received the South-East Asia and Pacific region prize for best book in Sydney last night.

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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.

More …

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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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 …

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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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