| POETRY CURRENTS | |
POETS FOR PEACE IN SYDNEY & MELBOURNE
Poets in this country, as in many others, have been gathering in demonstrations for peace in marches and readings all over the country.
On Sunday, March 16 there was a Dialogue through Poetry reading in Sydney, part of the worldwide series of poetry readings aimed at creating a culture of peace and non-violence in the world. Homi Vesal, Pam Brown, Angelika Fremd, Ruark Lewis, Jill Jones and Lucas Ilhein, among others, spoke for many of us who were unable to get to major city centres on that day.
Poets Against the War (in Sydney) marched on Wednesday 5 March beginning with a dawn reading at the War Memorial in Hyde Park in the centre of the city. John Bennett, the Sydney organiser, said “Poets have a responsibility to language. War is not comprised of victories and bravery but deaths; and dead people are not ‘body counts’ or ‘collateral damage.’ Poets do not call peace ‘permanent pre-hostility,’ nor bombing ‘air support.’ There are no ‘soft’ versus ‘hard’ targets; no attacks are ‘surgical strikes’ and bullets are not ‘kinetic energy penetrators.’” Jill Jones reported that there was a small but powerful crowd. Later our prime minister was presented with an anthology of 12,000 anti-war poems. (See the Australian poems on the Poets Union Web site.)
In Melbourne the reading was at the Linden Art Gallery in St. Kilda, where poets included Alison Croggon, Emma Lew, Phil Salom, and Jacinta Le Plastrier Aboukhater read and there were messages of support from people as diverse as cartoonist Michael Leunig and poet Les Murray.
OPEN BOAT, BARBED WIRE SKY
We’ve been much occupied over the last few years in Australia with the question of refugees and our country’s attitude to and treatment of them. Sue Hicks and Danny Gardner put together a collection, Open Boat, Barbed Wire Sky (Live Poets Press), featuring 80 poets from all over Australia and a few from elsewhere which was launched in Sydney in March.
JOHN JENKINS’ NEW BOOK
On another note, the world of poetry, if with a heavy heart, has continued with readings and launchings, though perhaps with marginally less bickering than usual. John Jenkins’ book launch (A Break in the Weather, Modern Writing Press) was one of the most successful of this year with a big turnout of literati, friends and well-wishers packing the Carlton (Victoria) branch of Melbourne’s leading literary bookshop, Readings, on March 14. The verse novel was walking out the door -- surprising, perhaps, for a book in which the main characters are all weather scientists. John pulled it off -- to quite a bit of acclaim during the night, I’m told.
TRIBUTE TO TOM SHAPCOTT
Tom Shapcott has been around for yonks and yonks, being treasurer of this influential organisation, chairman of that, professor of the other thing, and putting out the books of poetry and prose along the way. There’s a special tribute to him at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts in Fortitude Valley (Brisbane). Judith Wright is a living icon of Australian poetry, and it is wonderful and remarkable that this great arts centre has been named for her. As you walk into the space you’re taken with 1) the ungrottiness of the place, and 2) the oversized quotations from Wright’s work on the walls. They arrest you and remind you of the power of her work. We tend to take her for granted over here. The tribute to Shapcott will be opened by the minister for the arts in Queensland, Matt Foley -- unusual for an arts minister in that he likes poetry and actually goes to readings.
LAURIE DUGGAN/SPEEDPOETS/POETS ANONYMOUS
Laurie Duggan, not heard from in book form for some time, is now back on the market with Mangroves, launched at the University of Queensland on March 14 and received with pleasure by many.
The Joint Effort event the day after featured bands (Mach Pelican and Combat Wombat, among others), djs, hip hop artists, noise art, spoken word and an open mike, all at the Jubilee Pub in the Valley. The spoken word/poetry side of things kicked off early in the night and… speedpoets made their return for 2003 with their massive best-of ‘zine. (Check out Stylus, which has an interview with them in the current issue.) Speedpoets are at Belushi’s in Brisbane on April 6 as well.
Everything seems to happen in the Valley (aka Fortitude Valley, sounding like something out of Pilgrim’s Progress), including the wonderfully named Poets Anonymous. Everything’s a big open end at this open mike, in fact, it’s very open ended with no particular limits on expression (other than limits on time), no labels, no boundaries, free opinions.
SALT LICK QUARTERLY
Salt Lick Quarterly is another open ended venue -- it eschews “cheap manifestos, etc.” and puts out “first class unpublished poetry” which isn’t contextualised by literary politics. Good luck! Politics of whatever kind grows like mould everywhere you look. Salt Lick’s first Melbourne launch was at Dante’s (ah!) in Fitzroy and had an interesting line-up with Jennifer Harrison, Alex Skrovron, Patricia Sykes, Kris Hemensley, Lorin Ford and the amazing Lauren Williams.
Michael Farrell has been out and about as well -- he and Claire Gaskin were at Readings in April. Claire charmed with her generous and intelligent presentation and quietly surprising imagery; Michael, on the other hand, was wearing a “sumo/the superjesus” T-shirt (which better have been the name of a band) and read with a slow intensity. Michael is an editor for Slope.
POETS’ UNION/BEYOND THE POETRY WARS
Melbourne’s Alistair Stewart read at the Whiteley Studio in Surry Hills (Sydney, NSW) last Sunday. It’s not unusual for reviews to be used to hype the readers on a program, but his review reads: “…[this work] seems completely without substance, at best a clumsy sprawl of inner mumblings, light, blunt observations devoid of vision, or even a speck of hope. Its chief characteristic is bedlam. It should not be read, if it is at all possible to read, as anything else. It is a nightmare, utterly unpublishable. An atrocious, indescribable outpouring. A dog’s breakfast is more salutary! Indeed it is this reviewer’s firm opinion, that the alleged author be refused a mention. Let us not indulge him further.” This is so wonderfully vitriolic I’m wondering whether Stewart wrote it himself. A perverse sort of come-on, but Brook Emery who organises these readings for the Poets Union is an astute reader of poetry and unlikely to serve up bilge.
There was a poetry symposium in Sydney at the end of February/beginning of March convened by Peter Minter (poetry editor of Meanjin), Martin Harrison (creative writing professor at the University of Technology, Sydney) and Kate Fagan (managing editor of HOW2 magazine) and supported by the Sydney Poetry Network and the Poets Union on Australian Line and Space. As they said: “We now need to think beyond the ‘poetry wars’. Our destiny and responsibility is common. In the face of war, its defacement of life and freedom, we need to make powerful, collective ways to speak, think and act together.” A time to reflect on poetry’s role as a voice for creative dissent.
SHOALHAVEN POETRY FESTIVAL
I was very fortunate to be able to convince Brook Emery to join the program for the Shoalhaven Poetry Festival, which will be coming up shortly (2-4 May). He’ll join John Jenkins, Geoff Bolton, Jen Saunders (who’ll also perform her songs and have a Squidink event), Jennifer Compton, Carolyn Gerrish, Dennis Kevans and others down on the beautiful Shoalhaven. We’ll be going to the pub, to wineries, cruising down the river, having a postcard exhibition at the Tea Club (where most of the events will be).
Send me a postcard on the theme of love and/or war to: P.O. Box 94, Berry NSW 2535, Australia. And don’t forget to go to the ArtsRush site to download the poetry competition stuff. You’d better get your skates on; it closes soon. Last year MTC Cronin won the competition and read at The Loft at UTS in Sydney with Martin Harrison and John Mateer. Cronin is very interesting -- she spent most of the 90s working in the area of feminist jurisprudence but has now begun teaching writing at secondary and tertiary levels while working on a Ph.D. on poetry and the law. Fascinating.
Though Brook Emery has been around for quite some time, winning or being shortlisted for just about every poetry prize around, we’d never met before last weekend, when he emceed a reading at the Festival at the NSW Writers Centre in Sydney where Craig Powell, Barry Hill (whose big biography of the fascinating Strehlow has just come out) and I read. The hit of that reading was David Rowbotham.
Brook Emery read at Molly Bloom’s in Melbourne with actor Maggie Millar, who performed Molly’s closing soliloquy from Ulysses as a sort of invocation to the muses in the new FAW reading venue.
It seems that every reading around the country has been tinged with a sort of defiant despair about the war. This war is widely opposed in the general community here, and even more widely opposed among artists and writers. Readers are, I think, wary of simply jumping on a bandwagon and have considered their responses deeply, though there is sometimes a sense that this is not enough. As Laurie Duggan said, paraphrasing the late John Forbes, “this is just what we need, another book of poetry...” The alternative, though, is unthinkable.
INTERNATIONAL WOMENS DAY
One of the best readings I’ve been to in the last few months was the International Women’s Day reading in Tomerong down my way. Tomerong is not a large town. Without directions I simply drove there on the night and pulled up where I saw cars parked near a small hall. It had to be the reading. The committed and hardworking Sandra Lee, who also is a driving force behind the other International Women’s Day events down here (and who publishes Women In Focus aka Wif), organised it. We heard women young and old most of whom write poetry as a diversion and are not particularly precious about it -- and there was a freshness which to this jaded palate was very welcome. It’s a great reminder of what poetry is about.
Even more out of the way was the poetry weekend organised by Nicola Bowery and Harry Laing down by a local creek in the middle of a rain forest. Poetry, swim in the purest, cleanest water, a bit of something to eat, a bit more poetry… speaking of water (what a segue)…
WALKING ON WATER
I’ve mentioned the Walking on Water reading in the West Australian Rowing Club on the lovely Swan River in Perth, Western Australia, before. They take their poetry pretty seriously in WA and have produced many more excellent poets than you would expect per capita. Another organiser/activist poet, Rob Finlayson, read there this month (with Bronwynne Thomason and with musician Aven Vincent). Rob is always in among it. Workshops, poems, prose, plays, in the community… Walking on Water is always a good event. Les Murray has been in WA recently at the Alexander Library in Perth.
There are many more events than this, of course. It's a big continent. I recommend taking a trip to Pixel Papers and of course the wonderful international Poetry Kit, where you can read about the famous Parakeet Café readings in Katoomba, or what’s going on in Kyneton or Cairns, or the long lived Friendly Street Poets in Adelaide, or the UNESCO Poetry on the Peaks reading in Hobart, and many other readings and events.
Yours in peace,
