New Art and Story by Wayne H. W Wolfson

Magic Hat


Youkali said she would trade me a new hat for one of my drawings. Her cousin owned a shop near a bar I liked so we had some drinks before going to get one.

I usually wore a snap brim to mute the sparks I occasionally gave off when things were going well. Knowing that I was getting one tonight, I had not worn a hat. I was only half recognized, the way one would a familiar song as heard from a distance.

Blue-gray fur and of Russian lineage, it sat, a stranger among the Pork Pies and Fedoras. I had always been superstitious and knew this outcast would bring me luck.

I tried it on as Youkali gossiped with her cousin. Two faces flushed, one with drink, one with lust.


“It’s more than I wanted to spend but no one else would ever take it which may be why it costs so much.”

Initially I was going to just offer her a piece from my portfolio. Although it had nothing to do with my choice, I had seen the price tag as I moved it out of the way while trying the hat on. I had to do something a little more special, not out of guilt but because I felt to do otherwise would cheapen my art.

We did a quick shot of Grappa out of paper cups with her cousin and then were off.

Walking down the street she took my hand. It was warm and fluttered, a bird which could not come completely to rest. She drove me home. We sat in her car for a minute.

“I will do a portrait of you.”

I was debating whether to ask her up now. Nerves won out over desire for her.

“You can do it from a picture I will give you.”

I put on some Don Byas and fell asleep.

Early in the morning I heard a noise. Only half awake I thought it was the paper-boy or the sun taking the stage.

Hours later it was time to get up. I found an envelope had been slipped under my door. Over coffee I opened it up to find an instamatic photo.

She had used the mirror on the armoire. A reversed image Youkali sitting up in bed, naked but visible only from the waist up. She knew the trick I could do, so her eyes were shut and with the look on her face it was not clear if she were coming or crying.

We met for dinner, the bar being our starting point. With the picture done we would be even, so it was unclear who would pay.

Again, a mad chorus of drinks, empty glasses lined up before us casting their shadow over tattooed cocktail napkins. It all took longer than we had realized. She could make good eggs and I had half a loaf of bread with a little life left in it.

We walked back to my place. I stopped her under a street light I was fond of. She had noticed the large envelope all night long but in a show of extreme will power had pretended not to.

She carefully pulled the picture out. She liked it as was evidenced by the care with which she handled it. I had also put the photo in the envelope which she now held in her hands.

Again she closed her eyes and kissed it. Within the beat of a heart it was floating skyward, the plastic of its surface reflecting the moon as now motionless, it took its spot hanging in heaven, a celluloid star among other abstract dreams.


- Wayne H. W Wolfson 2008

Submissions in the spirit of summer

After that fairytale end to the test in Chennai between England and India, when the Mumbai hero Sachin Tendulkar knocked up a century and the historic winning runs in a single languid sweep behind square, when the soothing balm of cricket was laid over a pained nation......

I could go on until your ears began to bleed.

I have decided, in the full knowledge that Dave Prater at Cordite will be whispering "hey, that bastard stole my idea!", to put out calls for submissions with the noble game of cricket in mind. Don't be too specific. In Australia cricket evokes long languid summers slurping on mangoes and falling asleep on the beach under the latest soon-to-be-pulped-staff-pick with the occasional bark from a radio as another wicket falls. In every corner of the world there will be different associations. I would like to sample as many as possible.

So just for the time being, submit with cricket in mind.

New Poetry by Ashley Capes

lapse into

gabrielle is weeping –
they’re smoking his hems now.

a spoon tangos spaghetti

and brown shirts gather
in the wardrobe

lens click and you pirouette,
unleash the elephants.

a robin lands in the fruit bowl

somewhere in the desert
a tomb
and in that, your smile

i start to cover things up.


- Ashley Capes 2008


Ashley co-founded Egg(Poetry) in 2002, which sadly ceased publication in 2006. He is currently studying Arts and Education at Monash, while co-editing www.holland1945.net.au and singing for his band. His first collection of poetry pollen and the storm (2008) was published with the assistance of Small Change Press.

New Writing by Jen Craig

The inheritance


My colleague took great delight in hearing that one of the students we
taught together, a student who appalled her by continual racist slurs on her
fellow students and, last month, on Barack Obama¹s biological legitimacy,
had recently inherited an aged, diseased cat. Having spent years looking
after an irascible and childless neighbour, I had heard, looking after in
the sense of occasionally ringing the elderly neighbour¹s doorbell and
bringing her soup or the local paper, our student had been furious to learn,
after the neighbour¹s death, that the stately but disintegrating terrace
house in Stanmore she had coveted had been left to the church instead of to
her.

The delight of my colleague would have been complete if I had been able to
tell her about months of exorbitant vet bills and feline dyspepsia, but this
student, always canny and now grown righteous in her anger, told me that she
had left the cat at the church in a laundry basket. The church would
understand, was all she had said.

Calling all poets

I will be away down in Sydney for a couple of days reveling with my good friend "Geordie", but will put out this call now for submissions in the expectation that we can sail under the radar of the law as we perhaps haven't done so successfully in the past.....

The usual conditions: a handful of poems in the body of the email. ATTACHMENTS WILL NOT BE OPENED. Any style any subject, but as with my drinking partners, I am always looking for something with a bit of flair and sense of adventure. Comments, too, are always welcome, although I loath the encroachment of Messrs Anonymous into the Public Domain. Times such as ours demand that every man and woman bear their stamp proudly.

Bazstralia

Recently, at the gentle behest of my most staunch and dew-eyed drinking partner, Jeff "Geordie" Graham, I began work on a collection of poems whose titles would all bear the august names of bands or singers who (and by extension...)I figured had cast some sort of spell over times and places since the turntables started turning.

It seemed a noble idea between beers and the froth that follows.

We both misted up and scrawled a whole lot of crap in the most frightening Gen-X ransom-writing that I gazed at next morning in mute horror. And yet I went ahead, pasting snippets of my life to the names of great people with heartfelt and brainless abandon until one day I fell back a little dizzy with the effort and realised all I had was a fistfull of poetry-lite and heavy lawsuits.

The poetry-lite was the problem, not the names I had attached to the waffle, as dawn bled over me. Because the names became an anchor. No-one, other than Gore Vidal, would divorce their name from even a middling work of art; assuming, of course, they were merely the subject and not the hapless author.

Speech writers have their own private hell.

Names are the very stuff of us. It will be the prevailing matter, trust me, when Jeff and I meet for lunch next Thursday. That and the bill.

The names I keep calling these things, mate. "Morrissey", "The Pixies", do you really think they'll mind?

Jeff works high up-middling in one of the big corporations, dances at Christmas parties with a witch-hat on his head. Sings through a "no" as though he had a deeper sense of its polarity but didn't want to break the party up to warn us. A man I have always considered born out of his time, such as Bowie or Frank Black or that lazy-eyed genius Thom Yorke. Loves his ex-wife as the mother of his daughter. Has never once pitied we "childless", knows he is simply along for the ride, witch-hat or no. He is a story on his own, Jeff, which is probably why I decided to dedicate the book to him.

The one with all the names inside of it.

Proper names, like proper nouns. Those ones we all own and have a right to scratch our heads at when we meet them in out-of-the-way places.

Which brings me to AUSTRALIA.

I have learnt a thing or two about naming things with this book.

One: that if there is any borrowed splendour from your creation it will not come from the name.

Two: names are important, not imported, mate. You cannot assume with names. Especially names as redolent and (apparently) unsung.

You had a good thought, you should have stopped at the second line.

As a pimply boy from Castlecrag with a hump on his back and just as much love for this strange and wonderful place (although with a little less money to spend), I set my sights on writing the Aussie version of Dostoevsky's "Brothers Karamazov". My twenties were wild and wired and roaming, but never ever in all my time before or since would I have ever assumed such an audience existed for a poem named after a country.

Change

There have been a fair few changes to the world since I last posted. Peace tables (laid out in all their Amin-ostentation) in The Congo, workable closing times in Westchester, Parramatta, Kawaguchi. Roads and highways deserted but for the few shift workers and idle dreamers the world can still afford. Australian cricket ordinary. Our enemies machine-gunned to death. May we never have to stoop so low again or cross paths so tired and out of breath.

And then, of course, there is Obama. Who inherits all this. Who stands there like a Christmas tree, all crow-faced-coddled-foundling, (my own constituency), smiling the world into tomorrow. The gift of a truly great orator, I suppose. To alert you to the steaming pile of shit you're standing in, and to its ripe (but not always cogent), potential. And still be holding the adapter, grinning, waiting for the angel to light up while you all argue over the last dram.

His work begins, as mine has, by opening a decent Atlas (believe me!) and flipping through the pages. As I followed this time-honoured protocol, I couldn't help noticing how many great cities of the world had their railway hubs sign-posted THUS, and how many of their cultural hubs signposted thus, or in even smaller font. No wonder Sarah Palin didn't know Africa was a continent and not a country. She couldn't read the font.

I spent six months of my priviliged childhood in a very white and priviliged Africa. That is not my point. Africa is not my point. Africa is a continent with too much of the wrong attention paid to it. Like the library of a dying town. Only journeymen have taken Africa's wars beyond. Otherwise war has been an import.

Tomorrow marks the 90th anniversary of the moment the guns were supposed to fall silent all across the planet. So it begins, so it ends; a very Hegelian little war.13 million dead. Someone declares dark, the other light, and so you count down the hand. Tomorrow is Africa's birthday. No more please.

Executive Decisions

It appears some genius at a certain US publisher has decided to tinker with their on-line shipping costs, so that anyone trying to purchase my titles through the on-line bookstore incur a whopping US$169 shipping fee! I therefore advise anyone interested in purchasing the twin verse-novels, "Magellenica" and "The Great Big Show", or the 2006 collection "Glass Poems" to go through Amazon, Barnes and Noble or any of the myriad places they seem to be for sale across the globe. Meanwhile I will join the ranks of writers and booksellers staring down the digitalised version of middle management trying to baffle us with their weasel words while they pocket their Christmas bonus.

The Standard

In the early 1970's, following the lead of that moral avatar Richard Nixon, most of the developed economies of the "free" world decided to quit pegging their issued notes to the gold standard. The Communist bloc regarded all this with wry apprehension. This decision happened to coincide with the blushing vaseline-lensed dawn of easy credit. All of a sudden the bills you held in your hand were not actually worth what was printed on them (ie what your government held in its reserves) but what complete and mostly unnacountable strangers haggled between themselves in the smoky confines of the bourse. I am old enough to remember the OPEC crisis of 1973 when the Arab nations took the only other way out after the humiliations of the Yom Kippur war, but even their Soviet-inspired perfidy pales in comparison with the utter stupidity and greed of western markets who have held governments to account for their spending on the one hand (at the expense, of course, of the most vulnerable), while leveraging themselves into a very tight seat indeed in what may become the greatest roller coaster ride since that honey of 1914-45.

The venality and greed of the post-war generation is, of course, pretty much a given on this site. That is not my point. My point goes back to the gold standard, to what beet-faced poets like myself skirt around like sharks around a rusty anchor. That guarantee there was a mother ship in these waters and there will be again. That underwriter of all parliaments and all royal houses, the guarantee that we will rise tomorrow and not all be speaking different tongues. Guarantor of Shelley's great fear when he woke up that fateful post-war morning all carpet-mouthed in the dungeon of his liberty.

Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to millstones as they fell.

And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem,
Had their brains knocked out by them. 1

You see, without more than paper promises that those in a position to make a difference will do so in the common interest, we will remain a market place and not a culture. A civilisation requires some sort of underpinning. Debts are all very well as long as they don't outlive their usefulness.

Which brings me back to the gold standard.

In the mid-1960's, when the world's economies were still dubiously pinned to gold, the English marched with their feet away from cricket and toward football as the national sporting obsession. Within a year or two, Britain had decimalised its currency, joined the European common market, dropped the gold standard, and introduced a truncated version of first-class cricket that could produce a result within a day. The doomsayers doomsayed and the kiddies...well, some grew up and some grew into those bull-necked wizards in the corporate boxes holding up every passage of play in every Test cricket arena in the country.

And some, of course, have always loved football the way I love cricket, can eulogise for hours on the deft touch, the lyrical dance of someone long dead just like I can. But then football was bought like everything else, once the "gold standard" of local representation was steadily vetted.

I am not English, but I lived there through the end of the Thatcher years when Millwall supporters could have governed the country (if they had not been so indebted to their bookies and the crown), and when test cricket stadiums stood empty as though the very word cricket meant "bomb".

I despaired of the future of the game then, because I had left behind an equally desultory island with a barely beating cricketing heart.

But within a matter of three or four years something miraculous happened in world sport - cricket began to pack stadiums like it hadn't since carpet became vogue. In Australia, England, Jamaica, Johannesburg, people were queueing up again to see this strange game, and nor were they disappointed. Since 1993/4 crowds all over the planet have been graced by some of the most exhilarating, tightly-contested international sport ever played.

I am here talking of Test cricket, that eternal drone some overseas visitors have commented on when gracing our summer shores. Because there are now in fact three formats of the game played at international level - the five day Test format played between 2 squads of 11 players selected by their respective country's board of control, a one day game consisting of 50 6-ball overs per side in which the highest scorer of runs always wins, and the newest version of 20-20 cricket where the uninitiated can more than half the previous formula.

As I am spelling all this out, I feel like Frasier Crane explaining Radiohead to a young girl in a lift. Cricket is not that foreign anymore. Just ask Allen Stanford, the Texas millionaire behind the 20-20 Stanford Cup in the Carribean. The game was a religion down there until about 10 years ago. Suddenly the lure of Basketball and more nefarious activities robbed cricket of one of the world's most enduring and successful sporting federations. Allen Stanford saw something worth reviving and has gone about it with all the verve and aplomb of a man who has discovered the old world at his doorstep. In other words, like a wealthy, warm-hearted American of the old school. The type who picked up Bradman's tab in the midst of the last Depression.

I am getting somewhere, my American cousins.....

In a small administrative Punjabi capital last week, by the name of Mohali, the Australian test cricket team suffered one of its greatest defeats since the 1920's. There were celebrations all over India, the financial home of cricket these days, as Australia and India have been standing toe-to-toe for the best part of a decade now. And yet for all five days of this beguiling Test match the stadium was at most half-full. The previous Test match in Bangalore was better attended, but not much better. Which isn't to downplay the quality of those attending, another matter entirely, especially at an event as strangely intimate as Test cricket. But perhaps it is no coincidence Fleet street lies under the shadow of the bells, because journalists are always listening out for some bell tolling for someone. This month it happens to be the global monetary system and Test cricket. Both have been assailed by greed, self-interest, naked ambition, and nationalism, all the usual symptoms of decline (or revival), it all depends on the editor.

In Test cricket, like in no other international sporting event I can think of, you have the lone figure (the batsman) pitted against eleven of his opposing country's most talented representatives. He has a batting partner at the other end of the pitch, but that pitch is 22 English yards long, and that's a long long way when you have just walked in with, say four chatty Indian fielders crouched in a ring just far enough away they don't cast a shadow across the pitch.

If you are interested and uninitiated, I refer you to the YouTube footage of the famous Kolkata 2001 test match to the immediate right of you right about now.

It can quickly become an incendiary clatter of tumbling Australian/Indian wickets (the nearest thing our two nations have ever come to war), or a strangely intimate affair, almost as though millions of people were peering in to a slowly unraveling family reunion. That is the beauty of test cricket, and the germ of its own demise. It really needs no apologists (and I hope I have not come across as that), and I doubt it will ever see any serious attempt at a re-packaging of its "product". Because there is often none (other than the copious tv revenue and the sheer exhilaration of the best pitted against the best), even after five days of grueling competition. That is test cricket's enduring, lyrical statement in the face of the sneers of radical-chic, punk, yobbo, yuppie. Sometimes you must search for a result, yes, even in a sporting fixture.

Five days is a long time, granted. But there are few things that can equal the rush of following the first two days of a test match as you deliver pizzas, paint a house, hold the hand of your dying mother, then stroll bug-eyed into the stadium twenty minutes after the start of play on day three, the long, silent march of that lonely figure toward his destiny before you can stop someone cheering long enough to tell you who just passed by.


1. IV and V from "The Mask of Anarchy" by Percy Bysshe Shelley

New Poetry and Pastel by Wayne H. W Wolfson

Summer’s Funeral (for Lady Ahna)

We were in October but now is the time. Keep glasses in the ice box as the rain maker won’t come.

All day the sun had been out, so much so that I felt it licking my scalp as I took my walk. I could keep the windows in my studio open allowing bugs to get in so that the cat could hunt.

At night the heat refused to flee with the light. The black dress with its pattern of red flowers laying across the back of the one chair without a trick leg, I wash my hands, still wet, I flick them at the sink three times.

The air is still warm, as if she has just left, her breath on my neck late at night after every vow has been met and broken.

I shut all the lights, let the stars spell out her name.

I want music, something blue. There should be music for summer’s funeral.


- Wayne H. W Wolfson 2008

New Poetry by Phillip A. Ellis

For Derrick Hussey

In memoriam: H. P. Lovecraft

Though time, like ice, is slow,
the moments pass, accumulate
with the weightiness of glaciers
between now and the now that saw
Howard, plunging into deadly
breathlessness, pouring the will
to fight to fightlessness, and the final
rattle of lungs, and thence silence.

And, as (I imagine) his hand
faltered, dropped the pen a span
of space, onto the bedspread,
his beloved aunt surviving
him a second's worth then more,
tears falling along her cheeks
in mournfulness, I expect there may
have been a tuneful bird that day.

I can imagine the single, solitary song
honing in through a semi-open
window, with the white, washed curtains
breathing inwards. And the song
itself is catching in the throat
of Howard's closed ears, and some spark
of life is thinking, even as it fades,
"How beautiful is life!"

How truly beautiful is life,
when there could have been a man
as moving to us as him preceding,
and living still in our memories
and our actions even now? I don't
know if there was that bird,
but I can imagine it this easily,
and it is with this that I am comforted.


- Phillip A. Ellis 2008


Tori Amos in the Morning

Listening, Tori Amos in the morning and YouTube
underneath the palimpsest of a poem,
and, like a shadow of cigarette smoke, the globe
made of tin, of the moon, lost now to time,

a free verse poem, but with slant rhyme, a growling
stomach that complains almost, all against the song
the way that a cat rubs up against the shins
and ankles, or the winter sunset wanly shines.


- Phillip A. Ellis 2009


Phillip A. Ellis is an external student studying English Honours at the University of New England. One collection of his poetry has been published by Gothic Press, and another will be published by Hippocampus Press; his concordance to the poetry of Donald Wandrei has also been published by Hippocampus Press. He is the editor of AustralianReader.com (http://australianreader.com/index.php), and Similax (http://similax-poetry.blogspot.com/). Click on the post heading for Phillip's web page.

New Poetry by David Lumsden

Hercules Goes Bananas

On rugs by the temple
vendors offer bright
prayer flags, short
in-curved knives,
pirate DVDs, despite
half here subsist without
electricity or water.

The heir to absolute power
liked Schwarzenegger movies,
and in a shooting frenzy
slaughtered his family.

Internet cafés are empty.
Large ads for mobile phones
overlook now touristless streets.

Over murky tea in glasses sticky to the touch,
we gaze out at The White Mountains
as though this high valley were a prison.

Beyond the city
gunfire descants
the sacred river,
chirping birds,
and people still
singing in the fields.


- David Lumsden 2008


David makes a living with software. His poems have appeared in lots of magazines in Australia, U.K. and U.S.A. but there's no book yet. Ages ago he edited a litmag called Nocturnal Submissions. His blog of poetry commentary is called Sparks From Stones. Click on the post heading to take you there.

New Poetry by Ashley Capes

no tyrant could match

the sixth letter was ‘e’

and it was wrong
and I wanted to correct her

but between husband and wife
history rattles

a faint breeze carries the scent of frangipanis
over three carpeted steps to the bookcase,
where novels are little train-wreck victims,
lumped together in a mountain of bodies
no tyrant could match, their spines twisted
and pages torn like bloodless arteries


- Ashley Capes 2008


Ashley co-founded Egg(Poetry) in 2002, which sadly ceased publication in 2006. He is currently studying Arts and Education at Monash University, Australia, while editing www.holland1945.net.au (issue one up now!) and http://kipplepoetry.blogspot.com/ His first collection of poetry pollen and the storm was published with the assistance of Small Change Press in 2008.

CALLING ALL POETS

I am fresh out of rants. The times are too tight, too close. Everyone knows who the bogeymen are, and nothing has come across my desk of late that inspires me enough one way or the other to review. So, once again I am CALLING ALL POETS.

Just click on the "Bluepepper" tag in the top right hand corner and submit anything up to five poems, a 1000 word comment or review in the body of the email. NO ATTACHMENTS PLEASE. I have a very good turnover time, and that applies to most things I do. Just as my bevy of exes.... The worse you will get is silence, as I won't comment on subs unless I can see some way of working with the author to make them more suitable for posting under the Bluepepper. There are no payments and thus no guidelines.

Turn(bull)

North or south of the line, beggar's east or golden west, mumma's boy or beer-tap dancer, third man or fly slip, I have always been true to my kind. Spoilt, white, male, bullet-dodger, all the echoes that would see me chased from any self-respecting chamber. Studio 54, Hacienda, the Macquarie Street public gallergy, open mic night at the old Sandringham Hotel...

But as summer comes, I am suddenly reminded of all the scratches I lay pellets for in the chill season. Small, hapless creatures disposing of my waste and keeping Buster (pictured)busy. Rats, as though the busy need names.

By the way, don't stare, he bites.

If there will ever be days of a truly republican, Cato-esque, Cicero-free, democratic Australia, they are probably brewing a little further west than the Mamre Road exit. No Jacobite massacres, just the usual grumbles in the usual 40-ton tread. Kiwis, probably, drawing our western riches from the ground. Scots and Maori A-sharp churl lending the customary Aussie D-minor drone that little bit of piquance. A bookish bunch, the Kiwis, and we have already taken over their air defence. Perhaps in time they will teach us how to take a position and hold it.Otherwise, just the usual rattle of chains.....

This nation (I mean the third assumption of those we know), was brought into being by a motion of hands some doubtless bristling day in the great breezy Georgian complex of Westminster just as the last great Queen's grieving head was finally coming to rest. And so white nations are settled.

That was one hundred seven scratchy years ago.

The usual strangers suckling our young, enticing their wolves to our throaty syllables.

...and still this profound place, this envy of the slack-jawed and the square-jawed and the millions in between....thriving despite a surfeit of roses and a talent for cricket.

But why did they pick you....how could they ever mistake you?

(Bob Dylan, 1967)

The Infrequent Poet

Recently, courtesy of Melbourne's one and only poet/rock star/editor Ashley Capes, I have come across two mature, insightful, even-tempered blogs - Kris (the saint) Hemmensely's Collected Works blog, and David Lumsden's beautifully named Sparks from Stones. The former is a surprisingly chatty site from an apparently rather taciturn, wise and gentle man, interspersed with brilliant poetry of every colour and hue. As I mentioned to Kris Hemmensley a few weeks back, it makes me want to drive down the deadly Hume and walk down this magical street populated by poets and painters.

David Lumsden's blog, on the other hand, has a far more solitary tone to it, although by that I do not mean navel-gazing, or any of that smug mingling of hauteur and tweed-radical so beloved of sites like Jacket. There is such a measured, urbane tone to Lumsden's blogging, and such a clean edge to his insights, that I reflected on my own jagged efforts with a twinge of remorse. His piece on the Sydney connection to Eliot's classic Prufrock is text book stuff for any literary blogger - measured, succint and with not a jot of barrow-pushing.

Click on the post heading to see what I mean. Kris Hemmensley's Collected Works is already on my links list.

Period

Between the pertinent facts, to paraphrase Martin Heidegger, there can only be music.

He is perhaps the only other philosopher beside Wittgenstein to truly revel in the linguistic thorns of the German language since the trenches, but unlike his shell-shocked counterpart, he only really stumbled on and over a concept of silence. The Period, as it has to exist in both cognitive and dialectic theory. That instant between two changes. What poetry thrives on. What Wittgenstein must have glimpsed manning the spotlight on the frozen river, what in Beethovian scoring would look something like.@?@?//what the?...

Well, I can envisage it because I have seen some of the scratchy pages, and we all know what Beethoven looked like tearing his lead-based hair out. The lack written all over a child's face when they're left to guess the word. Pertinence of so much happening there can only be a single measured beat to account for it. That the only depth and calibration of the great eternal OTHER, of SILENCE, is in music.

Silence is not something bloggers are good at, but then ours is a different universe, blogosphere, floating around like Icarus with aluminium wings.

There is a journalist on this scorched island writing for one of its major dailies whose father taught her everything she knows. She best float up to the blogosphere, because she has inherited her father's eye for the pertinent and all his impatience for detail.

There is a federation on this island, one of the oldest surviving, which isn't saying much perhaps, because they are tenuous things. But there has been a concerted attack on this adolescent bonding, as on many of the other tried and trusted institutions of this oh so young oh so ancient place, snatching at the hook of all our daily troubles like one of those dark eels you hook off a pier that turns your hand black and crowds your faith in doctors.

James Joyce, I apologise for all that maybe.

Her name is not important. Those who have lived in Sydney or Melbourne for any length of time will (eventually) know who I am talking about. She does not brave photos that aren't a dozen years old. She talks of mothers like some talk of diggers, as though they were all blameless and not sometimes answerable for the wrong turnings of the world. She does a hatchet job of almost every subject she preys on, but she is impetuous and almost indelible now on my fair, forever spruiking harbour city's crystalline chatter. No-one trusts her but everyone likes her in that trussed up way of port cities. Fortunately we are not the capital of this country, only its first port of call for most new constituents and its administrative centre for its most teeming most consistently bankrupt state.

She has now settled into her role as some sort of gadfly for the new "socialist" Australia. She is kidding herself. She is nothing but a whiner and an apologist depending on the day and the turn of phrase that enters her diesel-powered head. She is, in other words, a blogger, not a journalist, at least none worthy of the name even on this truth-scorched island.

I will blog now, but hopefully you will get my point and search elsewhere for something to fill the THE PERIOD, that great Beethovian scratch.

She, like those shady and not-so-shady figures in the Sydney Institute (I will parcel up all "think-tanks" with short-selling as a doomed phenomenon - call me sunny) have taken to filling up valuable real estate in Sydney's only broadsheet with half-baked commentary for the triumphal post-1998 Howard decade. Bill Clinton still had two years to run then, don't forget, albeit against Gingrich and a hostile Senate. Australia had diggers storming beaches that weren't theirs, even in 1915, usurping questions of who stormed this island's beaches when and why and for what and for how long - all old barbecue questions with suddenly two sharp ends and no prong.

It was all finger-licking fun when my nephew was a boy, except for all those usurped by the mindless chatter post- Mabo, post-Wik, about what should and could be done about the cultural, spiritual and material health of all occupants of this island.

Now she of the Calender quote is trying to teach teachers how to teach. She is spirited in her defence of nothing, just a white room with a rat lurking somewhere inside. She quotes Orwell without blinking, she one of the proudest lieutenants of one of the greatest periods of obfuscation this Federation has ever seen. Something about the erosion of a language if it is not handed down properly...

Fittingly, I suppose she means.

And she will always have a point as long as there is an alternative point of view. Which, the last time I checked, was the birth of civilisation, not its end, Socrates.

2008 National Poetry Festival

This damp spring weekend in Sydney sees the 6th National Poetry Festival, due to be launched tonight over cocktails at the Sydney Mechanics's School of Arts in Pitt street. I include a list of highlights below. Bruce Dawe giving the Judith Wright lecture should be a must for anyone interested in the state of original thought and letters in this country. I would be there myself (I happen to be a member of the Mechanics' School of Arts), but my unscrupulous landlord insists that I work long weekend shifts to maintain a roof over my head. To those of you attending the soiree tonight, please feel free to have one for me.


* Cocktail Party Opening with performances by Sarah Day, Judith Beveridge and Peter Boyle.
* Readings by poets from Australia and overseas including Bruce Dawe, Michael Hofmann (UK), John Tranter, Bronwyn Lea, Jan Owen, Vivian Smith, Louise Oxley, Alan Wearne, and many more
* The Judith Wright Lecture delivered by Bruce Dawe
* Presentation of the Poets Union Poetry prize and the Scanlon Prize for Indigenous verse
* The State of Play panel
* Pre-festival events including the 'Creative Reading' seminar.


Cocktail Party Opening - 6th Australian Poetry Festival

Fri, 01/08/2008 - 16:29 — Poets Union
Start: 05/09/2008 - 18:00
End: 05/09/2008 - 20:00
6th Australian Poetry Festival
An Australian
Poetry Festival
event.

The Festival will open with a cocktail party and you’re invited!

When: 6pm–8pm, Friday 5 September.

Where: Festival venue, Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts, first floor, 280 Pitt Street, Sydney.

Cost: $20 at the door (includes drinks, finger food, music, a chance to mingle, and highlight poetry performances by Judy Beveridge, Peter Boyle and Sarah Day)

Bookings: Please call the Poets Union on 9357 6602

Short prose by Jen Craig

Lola kills

This morning, as I was passing between two women who were chatting with smiling faces on a narrow footpath, I overheard the single statement: my friend died last night ­ a single statement which had the same intonation and tone, I was thinking, as if the woman had said instead: my friend came last night (a long awaited friend ­ a friend she had been talking about to this other woman for weeks and weeks now, each day bringing the event of her arrival only slightly closer).

If it had been possible to pause where I was passing, I might have done, if only to hear whether the apparently cheerful tone of the conversation was going to alter.

The fact that, by coincidence, a new piece of graffiti had appeared on a building nearby saying: Lola kills, only added to the gentle hysteria of the morning.


- Jen Craig 2008


Jen Craig’s short stories have appeared in various Australian literary magazines. In 2007 she finished a MA in Writing from the University of Technology, Sydney, with the completion of her first novel, Since the Accident. Her blog of micro prose can be found at http://absurdenticements.blogspot.com/.

New Poetry by Mark O'Flynn

Francis Bacon's Studio


From the perspex doorway, thick as a bank
teller’s window, every dream is achievable.
Not a draught stirs. The rosy splatter of the rainbow
arcs across the ceiling like a blood spill.
Loose feathers of paint, the forests of brushes
held fast in this holy, primal mess.

Behind the ravaged door every mother’s nightmare.
Scraps of newspaper fossilized in place,
the round mirror a bloodshot eye.
The light preserved, exactly, like the light
of a grimy London hangover. The floor,
long forgotten under tins of rubbery paint,
slashed canvases turned towards the wall
await the verdict of the rats in the temple.


- Mark O'Flynn 2008



Nets

One thing you can say about the razor wire
when the overnight spiders cast their fishing nets
and the early morning light strikes
at just the right angle,
for a moment the fence is meshed
in shimmering colour like something woven
or stumbled upon, decrepit in a swamp,
and everything to be faced on the other side
for a moment disappears.


- Mark O'Flynn 2008


Mark O'Flynn's most recent collection, What Can Be Proven, came out in 2007 through Interactive Press. He still has the great bounty of a dear and loving family, a very cute dog, and the grave misfortune to remain my neighbour until the lease runs out. His poetry, of which I have only recently become acquainted, is a compelling mixture of the tender and the sonorous, the hug and the bristle. Click on the post heading to see what I mean.