Sticky Wicket

Those few amongst you who give a squat what Justin Lowe thinks or feels won't be too surprised to know I have ambivalent feelings toward Mark Davis, he of Ganglands fame, a boomer railing against his tribe. As a 1964 baby I have been afforded the somewhat dubious honour of sitting on the demographic fence, but that's what defines me as an X, surely. The snaking shadows cast by fireworks, nefarious, skulking, grumbling, caustic as Lear's fool. Not a generation at all. Y is a generation. An honest to goodness biblical generation, not something spawned in a Sex Pistols song. We haunt the stage, we 1964-73 mob. I am a 43 year old man who finds more in common with 24 year olds red-eyed with the hours they have to work to pay off their HECS debt than the 45 year olds barking at them to earn their 12 bucks an hour. I paid next to nothing for my education, for what it was worth. I did not treasure it, rather railed against it if truth be told. Kids now know the value of their time on the campus. For that they are damned and damned in equal measure from one side or the other of the old boomer divide.

For a start, these kids read, voraciously. But not the right stuff, of course. Ring any bells, ye of the '68 putsch? Poetry is a matter of life or death for them, as is history, music, in fact pretty much everything but post-war politics. Ring any bells dropouts, draft-dodgers, groupies? I love listening to the Anne Summers of this world harp on about how dyslexic and sub-literate are the youth (Y for youth, get it now?) of today. But like I say, I sit on the fence. I still remember listening to those posturing manifestos drawled from campuses all over the world, the same empty slogans borrowed from previous generations who actually lived and died by them, the icy assumptions of children in thrall to power ("all men are rapists" has to be my lasting favourite). Where would the Anne Summers, Ray Martins, Robert Mannes, John Pilgers et al be now without the latitude of post-war youth? It was a unique experiment in child-rearing they have yet to appreciate because that kind of latitude will never be repeated. They ate the whole cookie.

But I am concerned here with Mark Davis, what brings him back ten years on to rake over the still hot coals of Ganglands. It wouldn't happen to be a publishing deal would it? I speculate. As I say I sit on the fence. I am working my way to an interview I heard on ABC radio a few weeks back, prompted by Mark Davis' article in Overland magazine, and reproduced in concise form in the Melbourne Age. It began

Somewhere deep in the fabric of Australian cultural life it is forever 1974. The Whitlam government is still in office. THIS DAY TONIGHT is still on television. Patrick White has recently won the Nobel Prize. The last fading bars of Eagle Rock echo from the Sunbury stage.

Sonorous, peripatetic syntax in a Pilgeresque kind of way. Pressing all the right buttons, hints of an underlying message, the promise of a cut away.

Instantly Mark Davis has fallen into the trap he accused the Boomers of in Ganglands - of stereotyping an entire generation. He writes like a Boomer, he is a Boomer, so what exactly is his point in this whole line-drawing exercise.

Squat.

He is selling a line, selling a book, himself.

Every word Mark Davis has ever written was addressed to his Boomer market, not to the issues, and for that he betrays himself as a boomer. Child of the golden age, occluded from staring into the sun too long, eating that campus food, listening to the echo of his own priviliged feet down the corridors of one of the plushest campuses on the planet.

I get ahead of myself, once again, because my point was a talk I heard on ABC radio recently between our Mark, the ubiquitous Richard Neville and a rather shrill Sally Warhaft, editor of the excellent fledgling Australian journal The Monthly. I was tooling down the M4 at the time between my Blue Mountain exile and my weekend job in North Ryde, so I thought I'd check in on what the Boomers were doing. I mean I switched to Radio National.

And there was Mark Davis employing his best bed-time manner on a rather wistful, dilatory Suzanne Donisthorpe as she pretended to chair a debate between these parties. Sally Warhaft was supposed to represent the "benighted" (Suzanne's words), but it very soon became apparent she was neither happy with our Mark or the moniker. Ms Donisthorpe, I have to say, seemed to have already made up her mind about the whole debate sometime in 1998 or thereabouts, and I see why she is more producer than presenter. She sounded tired. Sally Warhaft sounded anything but. Richard Neville sounded reasonable with all the wisdom of his colourful and privileged years.

The round table sound became something of a triangle with very pointy ends as Sally W vented her daddy's girl spleen at the perennial nerd that is Mark Davis. A more courageous man I have rarely heard on ABC radio unless you count that Steve Waugh innings in 199-, but that betrays one weakness of mine too many.

Mark Davis, for those of you who have the misfortune to live beyond the realms of this fascinating if rather hide-bound debate, has been arguing since 1997 that the reins of cultural, economic and political life in Australia are in the hands of a kind of club who all fucked and fought each other on campus in the 60's and 70's and now shrug off any suggestion they are THEM, THE MAN, THE HEAT, THE ESTABLISHMENT, another creak in an already creaky door. They simply don't have it in them to grow up that much (that, at least, is the kernel of his argument that got stuck in my teeth).

Sally Warhaft is, on her own admission, in her mid-thirties, however a little prickly around matters of chronoglogy in this particular performance like one with something to hide. In the midst of defending her demographic call as editor at The Monthly, she slipped once or twice, but you could forgive her, you HAD to, she was that shrill.

"If there was anyone that HOT out there, they'd be found."

This from the apparent spokesperson for the benighted on the pointy table of aunty's reason. This millenial aphorism following up some rather scintillating attacks on Generation Y's ability to express themselves ("I get fifty to a hundred UNSOLICITED manuscripts a week!!!" poor dear. "They are largely unpublishable.") This, on top of some isolated case of a happy student oblivious to the fact there weren't one but two world wars, seemed to be her case for a defence of the infedensible.

That talent is not self-evident is one of the tragedies of the boomer generation, I'm afraid. Their lense is geared to the spectacle, the next big thing, their expectations heightened (whether they want to admit it or not) by the technical, sociological and economic fireworks of 1914-18, 1939-45. Unfortunately for the rest of us, culture doesn't work that way.

New-(ish) Poetry by Oscar Vallazza

ON THE BEACH

I watch the kids of a new nation
washing the sins of old crimes
in the surf of an old land
reaching into the waves of the endless water
of a world of myths and spirit
under the watchful eye
of Julian Rocks

The mountains lie on the round horizon.

- Oscar Vallazza Byron Bay, 9 July, 1995

Giramondo

The Giramondo Publishing Company

warmly invites you
to the launch of the new
poetry collection by

Jane Gibian

Ardent


to be launched by
Adam Aitken
on Sunday 5 August
3.30 for 4 pm
upstairs at Gleebooks
49 Glebe Point Rd
Glebe

More Black Inc.

Tanya Levin, author of People in Glass Houses - An Insider’s Story of a Life In and Out of Hillsong, will be discussing her explosive memoir at two events in Sydney in August 2007.

People in Glass Houses is the first insider’s account of what it’s really like growing up inside the country’s most ambitious, entrepreneurial and influential religious corporation. Opening up the world of Christian fundamentalism, this is a powerful, personal and at times very funny exploration of an all-singing, all-swaying mega church.

Stanton Library Event

Venue: Stanton Library, 234 Miller Street, North Sydney
Date: Tuesday 7 August
Time: 1pm
Bookings: No bookings required.

Gleebooks Event

Tanya Levin in conversation with Steve Cannane from JTV

Venue: Gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe
Date: Thursday 16 August
Time: 6.30 for 7pm
Cost: $10/$7 conc. gleeclub welcome
Bookings: Ph: 02 9660 2333 or visit www.gleebooks.com.au to request a place.

For further information on Black Inc. books, please visit www.blackincbooks.com.

New Poetry by rob walker

jazz channel

did lester young charlie parker dizzy gillespie and buddy rich at the philharmonic
in 1953 know that they would be the sound track to turbulence and three
layers of clouds of three different shades of white travelling at
three different speeds modal merging with melodic to
this diorama somewhere between osaka and
singapore as i down brandy cointreau
white wine and beer and
slip into a fog of an
indeterminate
decade
?

- rob walker 2007

rob walker is a poet and teacher from South Australia. His latest chapbook phobiaphobia (poetry of fear and anxiety) will be released by Picaro Press later in 2007.

Special Black Inc. News Bulletin

Black Inc. Books Australian Small Publisher of the Year!

The 2007 Australian Book Industry Awards were presented by the Minister for Arts and Sport, Senator George Brandis last night in Sydney.

Black Inc. is pleased to announce it has been awarded the Australian Small Publisher of the Year 2007.

Black Inc. would also like to congratulate Alice Pung, author of the bestselling memoir Unpolished Gem, who was awarded the Australian Newcomer of the Year 2007. Unpolished Gem was also shortlisted in the Australian Biography of the Year and Australian Book of the Year award categories.

2007 Books Alive Great Read Guide

Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung had been selected for 2007 Books Alive Great Read Guide. The Books Alive Great Read Guide is an Australian Government initiative that showcases 50 books so good everyone will want to read them.

For further information on the 2007 Books Alive Great Read Guide, please visit http://www.booksalive.com.au/

For further information on the Australian Book Industry Awards, please visit http://www.publishers.asn.au/index.cfm

For further information on Black Inc. books, please visit http://www.blackincbooks.com

Binary Blues

I apologise to all for my tardiness of late, but on top of writing commitments I have had a run of bad luck with computers and am awaiting a replacement hard drive. I managed to rustle up something, but am not sure how long the window will remain open (pardon the pun). Contributors get back to me on or about the 26th (three days from this post), and see whether things haven't improved. Once again sorry, but we have all been there.

The Land of the Beigists

Could the national epidemic of somnambulism and mediocrity become an election issue? Steve Burrell set the ball rolling in last weekend’s Sydney Morning Herald with a competent if not overly original article on the current intellectual and spiritual malaise overwhelming this country. He was careful not to slide into political polemic, for the current Federal Government is merely one symptom of a chronic distemper that has afflicted the land down under since its earliest days as a colony. The old excuses no longer wash, however, and it seems our egalitarian legacy is only ever flaunted these days in defence of the average. I encounter people almost daily brimming with energy and ideas, but what Steven Burrell and many others are worried about is that they seem to be working in a bubble that eventually either bursts quietly or drifts off north of the line to people more receptive to the fresh and extraordinary. It is not a problem unique to Australia, of course, as the post-war generation ages and constantly shifts the cultural, economic and political goal posts to suit its changing needs, but we are perhaps more vulnerable than most because more practised than most at dragging down the “tall poppy” in the name of an egalitarianism that never really existed.

Now the deputy leader of the ALP, Julia Gillard, has stepped into the debate with her address last night to mark the 75th anniversary of the Australian Quarterly. She views the erosion of once vibrant cultural institutions in this country as a deliberate and sustained attack by some on the right of politics who feel compelled to fall into line with the nascent “global monoculture” of expediency and silence. “Their attempt to denigrate people like our philosophers, artists, writers and even climate scientists as out-of-touch, inner-city elites, and to claim that our egalitarian values are unsuited to new economic necessities, risks subsuming us into the blancmange of an emerging monoculture.”

Fighting words, Julia! But I would take issue with her on the origins of this attack. As far as the old right-left divide holds any relevance at all, there has been a steady erosion of values coming from both sides, often from within the very institutions themselves. I find it ironic that the culture of the individual has fostered a resistance to comprehensive education in much of the three post-war generations and that this has in turn peopled the world with semi-literate somnambulists barely cognisant of their rights and potential, let alone how to go about defending them.

In the world of international poetry, to bring this argument a little closer to home, there are already strong signs of this monoculture taking hold as the academies spit out armies of bright shiny things, their heads crammed with faux Ashberrian angst and the latest post-modern antitheses of eloquence and aesthetic. Anyone who doubts my take on things (and they are legion, I’m sure), please take some time from your busy schedule to surf the net and sample what’s on offer in all the major English-speaking cultures re all things poetic. Then track down some of the latest work being translated from the French, German, Romanian, Russian etc and much the same pattern emerges. Does this reflect the majority of what is being written and read and experienced by young poets, or simply what is being sought by their ageing, cloistered doyens? Some of it is very good, of course, but I am concerned here with the emerging global monoculture and what poets could and should be doing to arrest or even reverse it. The poetic, after all, is a duty not a right. Comments always welcome.

No Reaction

We're gettin' no reaction, with due apologies to this nation's Shadow Minister for the Environment. I asked for submissions recently, but perhaps you are all holding off waiting for the new website to be up and running. Well, you may be waiting sometime as my designer seems to have fallen asleep at the wheel and I am about as IT savvy as my nine year old dog. So please, feel free to send me poetry or stories (max 1500 words). NO ATTACHMENTS PLEASE. There are submission guidelines below the merchandising, but I pride myself on being less pedantic and far more punctual than most.

Trends in German Poetry

The Writing & Society Research Group
presents an informal symposium with
poet in residence Ulrike Sandig
on trends in contemporary German poetry
and her German-English translation project
with Australian poet Jane Gibian
Friday 15 June
3.00-5.00pm
Fair Trade Coffee Company café
33 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe(www.fairtradecoffeecompany.com.au)

Ulrike Sandig was born in 1979 in Grossenhain Saxony, and lives in Leipzig. She has studied and worked in France and India, and has a Masters Degree in Religious Studies and Indology from the University of Leipzig. In 2001 she co-founded the literary group "augenpost". Her publications include a volume of poetry Zunder (2005), and der tag an dem alma kamillen kaufte (an audio book with Marlen Pelny, 2006). In May 2006 she was awarded the Meran Poetry Prize. She is currently a student at the Leipzig Institute of German Literature.

Ulrike Sandig's residency in Sydney is hosted by the UWS Writing & Society Research Group and the UTS Centre for New Writing, in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut.

Latest JS Harry

The Giramondo Publishing Company
invites you to the launch
of the new poetry collection by
J.S. Harry
Not finding Wittgenstein:
Peter Henry Lepus Poems
to be launched by
David Malouf
and Kerry Leves
on Thursday 21 June
6 for 6.30 pm
upstairs at Gleebooks
49 Glebe Pt Rd
Glebe
RSVP: 9660 2333
Giramondo Publishing from the
Writing & Society Research Group
University of Western Sydney

New Poetry by Wayne H.W. Wolfson

A Single Veil

I walk.
A ghost which looks like you in the fog, it is just a memory which has yet to be burned away by the dawn.
The mornings are now damp, a gossamer of fog wraps itself around everything.
I walk among the canals, there is a scent, anisette and spoiled milk, which makes me dizzy.
I walk.
I stumble.
I know.

- Wayne HW Wolfson 2007


Izabel

You are hurt, but not even sure why. Ah, where are you my autumn friend? Your name is now alien in my mouth. Heavy on my tongue, a piece of paper.
All the paper on the table, hanging off the edge of the table, flapping slowly. Sunday night coming down, a sheet at a time. Pages, swollen, pregnant with words.
My only friend, duty. My autumn friend. Fall. Somewhere is a place with no words, I will go too, when I have no choice, holding her ink stained hands.

- Wayne HW Wolfson 2007


Mahler

Death is private, but eventually we are all there.
Tiny yellow flowers shot up from in-between the rocks. These little patches of color could hypnotize if you walked the whole shore.
Now she is on top.
Many rocks go without her flaxen hair.
There are some greens to be seen too.
Thin violent jags.
This morning, coming out of the shower, I thought I heard her laugh, but it was only yesterday.

- Wayne HW Wolfson 2007


Wayne is young poet from the States who has just returned from a yearly sabbatical in Paris.

Meanwhile, beyond the land of the beigists

The Stinging Fly is hosting a showcase for Ireland's various literary magazines during Listowel Writers Week, which kicks off tonight.

We'll have copies of the various journals for sale, as well as providing subscription information and submission guidelines.

Please come and visit the table in the Listowel Arms Hotel on Thursday, Friday or Saturday (May 31 - June 2).

Other magazines featured include Crannóg, Cyphers, The Dublin Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Shop, Southword, Succour and The Yellow Nib.


Bluepepper addendum

Pubs and books, Sydney readers!! Remember when that was more than an idea to be sneered at by the seemingly relentless tide of makeover people, those inextricably smug, painfully inarticulate and dangerously thin-skinned creatures who poison our favourite drinking holes and then raise our rent as a thank you?

PS Yes, I am speaking from bountiful experience here. Shutup or I'll write a poem about it.

Black Mark

Quarterly Essay 26: His Master’s Voice By David Marr PB $14.95

John Howard has the loudest voice in Australia. He has cowed his critics, muffled the press, intimidated the ABC, gagged scientists, silenced NGOs, censored the arts, prosecuted leakers, criminalised protest and curtailed parliamentary scrutiny. Though touted as a contest of values, this has been a party-political assault on Australia’s liberal culture. In the name of “balance” the Liberal Party has muscled its way into the intellectual life of the country.And this has happened because we let it happen. Once again, Howard has shown his superb grasp of Australia as it really is. In His Master’s Voice, David Marr investigates both a decade of suppression and the strange willingness of Australians to watch, with such little angst, their liberties drift away.

“More than any law, any failure of the Opposition or individual act of bastardry over the last decade, what’s done most to gag democracy in this country is the sense that debating John Howard gets us nowhere.”DAVID MARR, HIS MASTER’S VOICE

*David Marr will be touring Australia - see below for Quarterly Essay 26 events*

Memories Like Angels

After four long years, Brentley Frazer has finally released his much anticipated follow up to "Dark Samadhi", a book I savoured both publicly and privately. I may as well 'fess up now that I have written the blurb for this one, at least the one that appears at the publisher's web site, but some of you will already be well aware of my regard for this Brisbane poet recently relocated to Melbourne. We share a common sensibility, although our styles and artistic milieu are markedly different, and his energy and commitment to new writing is far more effective than mine. Would that there were more Brentley Frazer's in our small but vibrant poetry scene and a few less of those Sydney beatnik hacks last seen penning dross for the harbour city's most august and questionable rag. This one has the long and typically Frazerian title of "Memories like angels at a ball tripping over their gowns" and is available first and foremost at the publisher's website (just click on the post heading) as well as all good bookshops worth the name.

Call for submissions

I am in the process of setting up a website, but as my web designer is about to fly back to Malta for a whirlwind of avuncular advice and grappa, I will keep the bluepepper flying for the foreseeable. If you feel you have anything worthwhile to add to this kitchen experiment with fridge magnet forever at your back, then please send me your best and honest, and please do so secure in the knowledge the whole lot will be linked to the new website (if and when it happens) and will continue pretty much as is in that capacity. As far as I can fathom from the white fog sprouted at me by IT guys (I am in my forties and do drink and so on a great deal) this will mean many more hits for anyone posted at bluepepper. The website I envisage as a more permanent display of contemporary poetry's newest and brightest, but we have all heard that before, so I will attempt (very much against my Scorpio nature) to tread lightly from here on in. So please feel free, which is, I am afraid, what your poetry will continue to be in this particular corner of cyberspace until the aprons are finally off and the fridge magnets politely fed to the belching one-eyed monster canvassing your electorate any day now.

New Poetry by Les Wicks

BURNT RUBBER AT THE DEAD ZONE

Elena has a new art, her brushes

this black Kawasaki Big Ninja, ZZR-1100, plus a radiation detector.

Girl of speed and silence,

technology beyond fingers, a stretched drum-skin of abyss

and straw where the Monkey Law of Curiosity is written in poison.

She rides through Chernobyl taking photos – the Luminous Law of Poke.

Snow promises “reconciliation”.

A few declining shards of occupation, even tour guides

but visitors cannot stay -

canned by quiet, the innate dissonance

of human clutter without the tribe…

well-fed eyes skitter, shoulder muscles clench beside placards

for the 1986 Mayday Parade

Party of Lenin leads us to the Triumph of Communism.

Magazines unread, Fish and Hunt.

Kindergarten trips are postponed

for 30 generations.

"Chernobyl" means wormwood and

is an iridescent palette. This woman passes

rusting nests of tanks, Sikorski bones. My own

daughter was born that week 1986, this alp of news and a slow, implacable

gyre of contractions as we watched Nightmare on Elm St, then Cheers.

A hoar of antiquity in the toss of their manes
Prejevalsky Horses shave grasslands, this new age of life -

roses go the way

of any managed thing.

Peace is imposed on this tiny patch as

confident wolves ignore the scent of dead farmyards.

Wild boar multiply, move in to simple wooden huts that

drink radiation but refuse to desert

their contract of shelter.

The Ferris ("Devil's") Wheel will not turn.

Washing, 20 years untouched, still on the line.

Vovik + Tanya = love (maybe still/

600 miles away and them nervously with new children

waiting for the taint).

Elena reassures us

that bitumen protects,

doses at their lowest in the centre of roads.

No one is surprised by this, enduring haven of we beasts that ate.

Is this the last human ecology?

Roars of our engines, the septic gasp.

Opal eyes peering from tarmacadam coats.

Les Wicks 2007

Folly

For reaons completely unfathomable to me, Google has decided to butcher their blogging program, and until I can find my way around the ten tonne boulder they have rolled across my path, visitors are simply going to have to live with the format as it stands. Or you could email Google and let them know what you think of the genius who thought he'd earn his Christmas bonus early by touting this folly.

In the meantime, however, you may be interested to know that The Great Big Show is about to hit the bookstores. I would post a link here, but I was hungover the day they handed out IT degrees.

Oh no, there it is. Now for the cover art......

Justin Lowe makes a correction (or two)

I have withdrawn The Great Big Show from public circulation while I finalise its publication and release. I thank those people who showed an interest and hope the rest of you do likewise when it hits your bookstores.

Black Inc. makes a correction

Please note this correction to Friday’s March & April events information.
Bookings for these events at Gleebooks can only be made by calling 02 9660 2333 or by visiting www.gleebooks.com.au/events

Another Country by Nicolas Rothwell

Nicolas Rothwell in conversation with Murray Waldren, literary editor of The Australian newspaper.

For several years now, Nicolas Rothwell has traveled the length and breadth of Northern and Central Australia. Another Country collects sketches and portraits written over this time and combines them into a book that reveals another Australia. Another Country is a portrait of people and places. It is also a literary achievement – a mesmerizing, many-faceted journey into the landscape, and beyond.

Nicolas Rothwell is the author of the award-winning Wings of the Kite-Hawk and the novel Heaven and Earth. He is the northern correspondent for The Australian. In 2006, he won the Walkley Award for coverage of Indigenous Affairs.

Venue: Gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe NSW
Date: Tuesday 6 March 2007
Time: 6.30 for 7 pm
Bookings: Tickets $10/$7 conc. (Gleeclub welcome) through Gleebooks
02 9660 2333 or email morgan@gleebooks.com.au


Quarterly Essay 25 – Bipolar Nation: How to Win the 2007 Election by Peter Hartcher
Peter Hartcher in conversation with Maxine McKew

Australians are more economically secure, yet existentially as anxious as ever. On the one hand we see a more prosperous, confident and "aspirational" society, and on the other the continuation of a well-cultivated sense of fear, xenophobia and insecurity.
This fascinating Quarterly Essay analyses today’s ‘bipolar nation’. It revisits Donald Horne’s Lucky Country, looks at the legacy of Paul Keating, and discusses how John Howard will set out to craft an election-winning strategy. It explains how the Lucky Country and the Frightened Country will be the two grand themes of the election, and in doing so lays out the political agenda for 2007’s election year.

Venue: Gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe NSW
Date: Monday 2 April 2007
Time: 6.30 for 7 pm
Bookings: Tickets $10/$7 conc. (Gleeclub welcome) through Gleebooks 02 9660 2333 or email morgan@gleebooks.com.au

For further information on Black Inc. books, please visit www.blackincbooks.com

The Great Big Show

For the past year I have been poring over books and maps and unpublished diaries and digging deep into my troubled soul in an attempt to piece together some sort of narrative thread set against the tragic events in East Africa between 1914 and 1918. I am pleased to announce my efforts are at an end and that those who wish can assay the results for a nominal fee by clicking on The Great Big Show post heading. The work has still not been finalised and obviously does not have an ISBN, but you are more than welcome to buy a draft paperback if you are so inclined. Downloads of the complete story are going for US29c, paperbacks for slightly more, although that is withouth Susie Bower's fantastic cover art. All the same it may fetch a bit on ebay one of these days when paper is truly short. Future of the planet aside, it really is about me now and I would welcome feedback from poets and historians about anything but me (but mostly the book at the post heading).

Writing and Society

The Writing and Society Research Group is pleased to present the first in its 2007 seminar series -

Samar Habib On Female Homosexuality in the Middle East

Friday 9 March2.00-4.00pm

Bankstown campus Building 1, room 1.2.36

Samar Habib, author of the forthcoming book Female Homosexualityin the Middle East: Histories and Representations, discusses the writing and research for, as well as the cultural and political import of, this new work.

Subsequent seminars in the series include:

23 March Ivor Indyk, The awkwardness of Patrick White

20 April Ross Gibson, The idea of repletion in crime-scene photography

4 May Glen McGillivray, The Osama Show: theatrical metaphor resurgent

18 May Paul Sheehan, Thomas Bernhard's art of excess and renunciation.

All on Fridays, 2.00-4.00pm Bankstown, Building 1, room 1.2.36

THREE HOURS

I have been used to adoration

only at night.

The quiet, the soft

places of thought and response,

analysis and even temper.

An extended road where focus is rewarded,

challenge is invited and fulfilled.

But now I have seen you twice.

Two early mornings,

leaving me drained,

a broken clock without function.

I have turned

around

to face the day.

Three hours earlier

and the world is new,

smelling the new smells,

greeting the starkness of green and blue

where before were grey and silver.

Now I can see you

and not be broken.

My hours are open and

I will have patience

for your confusionand your stealth,

the strength of your desire for love

that strangles your ability

to accept it.

I will repeat my offer

with the sun for my sponsor,

disarming you

with sunburned smiles

and strong brown arms

like your own,

easing the transition

from a non-committal twilight

to a fierce noon.

- Jason Monios 2007

Jason Monios lives in Edinburgh. His publications include Acumen, Poetry Scotland, New Writing Scotland, nthposition, Umbrella and The Guardian.

New Poetry by Joel Deane

BOOK OF NUMBERS

Should I find something more
than a number—

a name that might have been;
a word that might remain

once the name has left a scar—
I will whisper it

to a world that will not listen.
A world worn out by words.

I will repeat it for this brevity
the damned call eternity.

I will give it life.

- Joel Deane 2007

MIDTOWN

If you encounter a man
wearing no shoes

selling mini-umbrellas

- six dollars a piece
- ten dollars a pair

Something is falling.

- Joel Deane 2007

Joel is a Melbourne-based poet and novelist whose poetry has been published in magazines such as Antipodes, Australian Book Review, Overland, Quadrant, Meanjin, Cordite and Famous Reporter. His last book was Subterranean Radio Songs (Interactive Press, 2005).

New Poetry by Jane Williams

Churches of the developed world

(a partly found poem)

to light a candle

drop any coin into the slot

(more coins may be required

for longer prayers)

on medical advice

communion is to be made by

receiving the bread only

(salivation is to be kept

to a minimum)

not in use

the alms box owing to recent

forced removal of padlocks

(bag checks now operate

in this church)

under electronic surveillance

you

(and you and you and you ...)

-Jane Williams 2007

Begging the question

who worries over this woman

fingering you are my sunshine

on the piano accordian

squat as an invalid's breakfast tray

above her outsized lap

tack suited against the swank

of the common wealth bank

when she reaches the end

she knows to start over

hour after hour

this music by numbers

this empty chocolate box
open for business

its heart shaped lid

inviting payment for services

and begging the question

- Jane Williams 2007

New Poetry by Wayne H.W. Wolfson

Leviathan

A storm, bad ideas and urges. Lightening, blinding silver-purple flashes.
On the line next to the forgotten laundry, a neighbor’s chimes buffeted by the wind. A novice playing a frantic song too fast.
I hate this too, but would be lost without its familiarity. Buildings sway, the sky darkens further, I join in singing the refrain.
The storm.
Flashes of lightening, the final beating of a dying leviathan’s heart, lights up the sky. Blinding silver, burnt ozone offering. I sweat copper, it makes you happy.
Despite how jumpy the thunder makes you, I can not stay awake.
In my sleep I felt a bite. I know it is just chemical. We were holding hands as if, like Sunday.
The city is all decay and late night secrets. That is mine.
Desire, cash, gloom and retreat. A kingdom whose demise is announced in-between thunder claps.

- Wayne H.W. Wolfson 2007

Call for Submissions

I haven't forgotten my threat to start posting excerpts from my verse novel, so poets and poetry lovers consider yourselves on notice. Just click on the "email me" 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. Probably why I haven't got a girlfriend...Anyway, be that as it may I see no reason for not submitting something. 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.

Seasons Greetings

In keeping with the Christmas spirit, Shane Warne, history's greatest leg-spinner, has given the Test batsmen of the world an early present by announcing his retirement from the game at the end of the Sydney Test Match. To those of you from non-cricketing nations (my condolences), Warney is a kind of antipodean Babe Ruth whose ability to outfox batsmen has enthralled millions of us for the past 14 years. His departure, though premature in my opinion, will at least bring back some equilibrium to a game utterly dominated by the Australians for more than a decade. God bless you, Warney, and thank you, but may no team gain such ascendancy over the Noble Game again.

The Stinging Fly

Some of you may be wondering what I've been doing since my last posting. Well, amongst other things I have been savouring the delights of Irish literary magazine The Stinging Fly. Although it won't interest those who only read things they are in, this admittedly Celto-centric little mag is my find of the year. After a previous issue devoted solely to the fine art of the short story, the current issue returns to the bubbly mix of poetry and prose from many of the leading lights of Irish letters. Special mention needs to be made here of Kevin Barry's story Last Days of the Buffalo, one of the finest pieces of short writing I have read in years. The editors appear to be a lively crew obviously in love with the job who are always hunting around for international contributors (yes, that means you dear reader). Click on the post heading to see how you can get hold of a copy. Subscriptions are ludicrously cheap. I promise you won't be disappointed.

Giramondo Press

Late last year Giramondo published three collections of essays by distinguished Australian authors - Gerald Murnane's Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, Beverley Farmer's The Bone House and Louis Nowra's Chihuahuas, Women and Me. Together with John Hughes' award-winning The Idea of Home: Autobiographical Essays, published the previous year, these four collections form an impressive series.


For this Christmas, they are offering all four titles at a price of $75, including postage. That's a big slice. Or, if that's too big a bite at once, any two titles for $40, or three titles for $60, including postage. That's Nana's sponge plus the sherry!

Either email your order through the links on the post heading (ie click the big words north), or follow whatever nineteenth century prompts they chose to still display.

For information about other Giramondo titles, please click the big words, also. Or not.

We believe you until we doubt you.

New Poetry by Jane Williams

Political poem

this is not a political poem I don't write political poetry
about banda aceh and inappropriate tsunami
aid like boxes of breast implants wigs fur coats
or the fight for east timorese independence the subsequent
donation of buses too wide for the narrow roads of dili
too expensive to run for longer than a joy ride left to rot
this is not a political poem I don't write political poetry
about one size fits all campaign speeches
promises self fulfilling as a five o'clock shadow
suits climbing the ladder corporate or social it doesn't matter
to people wearing next to nothing trying to divine water from rock
this is not a political poem I don't write political poetry
about the price of petrol or a family holiday to alpha centauri
ski slope cheek bones bee sting lips
the colour of poverty the weight of guilt by omission
my enemy's enemy is my friend and what's mine is yours
but don't worry
this is not a political poem I don't write political poetry

- Jane Williams 2006

Jane Williams' most recent collection of poems is 'The Last Tourist' (Five
Islands Press 2006). She lives in Hobart,Tasmania.

New Poetry by Elizabeth Webb

Gifts

The intricate, filigree traceries left by a wave on wet sand
The round, curled, sweet shape of a shell
Filled with the sea's whispers and quiet roaring.
The crisp, new smell of an unopened book
With pages unthumbed and not yet
Softened by the wandering eye.

The satistfying, strong push
Of feet against pedals
And the whirring, zooming,
Flashing world, free-wheeling
And swooping down the beckoning path.

The tang of salt against skin
And cool green water buoying up
Bodies, closing a shimmering
Canopy over dripping heads for a moment
Before they burst back through
To the crash of spray and blue sky.

The brush of long grass against bare feet
And the solid, sweating, rippling, rolling body
Of horse beneath me
A ride along a road overgrown
With wild plants and creeping weeds
In gathering dusk and a pale moon overhead.

Clear voices ringing out old songs
To welcome in the Christ child
The press of hot bare legs together
In faded shorts
The golden smell of flowering silky-oak
A threat of dry, fragrant smoke
And the chortling noisy-friar bird
Black bald head bobbing
In the windy tree-tops.

The comfortable, square shape
Of a wombat trundling along
An early morning walk, unafraid.
A prickling of echidna spines
Potruding from its shallow hiding place
A confusion of mad black choughs
Bustling and pecking and chirring
And chatting softly
As they pick through the fallen leaves.
The high mournful call of currawongs
Circling and landing on a waiting branch
The hard blue of the sky, the sifted dusty soil.

The whistling flash of a wood-duck's wing
A flotilla of black swans with wax-red beaks
Honking like lost souls as they drift into the shore.
The warm wet startle of a dog's lick, the delicate dry
Touch of a bird's feet
As it sidesteps along an arm.

The glimpse of a smile, an uplifted eyebrow
The lowering of lashes, avoiding eyes, outstretched fingers
The fine skin behind an ear
And the secret whiteness of a soft exposed belly
The drying splash of tears, flowing growing lines
Of good talk and full silences
A bubbling spring of laughter
And the lilt of a known voice.

All these things I gather in a box of dreams
And leave it open, quietly
At your waiting feet


- Elizabeth Webb 2006

Elizabeth is an undergraduate student at ANU in Canberra.

Black Inc.

Black Inc. November Events

The Best Australian Essays 2006 edited by Drusilla Modjeska
The Best Australian Stories 2006 edited by Robert Drewe

The Best Australian Essays 2006 contains life and travel stories, explorations of art and politics, that will illuminate and divert. Not only does each essay stand alone as one of the best of 2006, new editor, Drusilla Modjeska has created a collection that maps ‘…something of the rhythm of our concerns and thinking at this moment in time’.

In Best Australian Stories 2006, one of Australia’s most acclaimed authors, Robert Drewe, edits this best-selling series for the first time. Drewe has put together a sparkling, often surprising, collection. This is the perfect book for catching up with the best short work that our fiction writers have to offer.

Celebrate the release of The Best Australian Essays 2006 and The Best Australian Stories 2006 with the editors and contributors to both collections.

Venue: Gleebooks, 9 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe
Date: Thursday 16 November 2006
Time: 6:30pm for 7pm
Cost: $9/$6 conc. gleeclub welcome.
Bookings: Through Gleebooks- please call Ph: 02 9660 2333 or visit www.gleebooks.com.au

For further information on Black Inc. please visit www.blackincbooks.com

New Poetry by Coral Hull

Unified Field Theory


You are my unified field

where a billion flowers

shine like the stars

and turn into butterflies.




I observed your formation,

like an angel, through monitors,

gravity defied by wings

and past theories deconstructed

into a trillion summers.




You are my unified field,

of collapsing wave functions

in years measured by light.

We enter the reality

of each other in particles.




You are my constant evolution.

Your fundamental existance

falling through my senses

into more and more abstractions

until fields lift into flowers.




Systems are only created

to house our dreams.

We are conscious participants

observing our place in a story

with awe and reverence.




The dawn is a point of creation,

in an ocean of potential

where the beginning is a song

where a butterfly wing

becomes a flower petal,

where an atom or a molecule

is the potentiality

of a shared existance

from a single point of love.


- Coral Hull 2006

New Poetry by Libby Hart

Between

Tolstoy walked out into the snow.
Chekhov may or may not have had champagne.
Sylvia Plath neatly folded a dishcloth in the oven for her head.
Tchaikovsky tried drowning himself, only to stand hip deep
in the Moskva River.
Shelley was more successful, heading straight into a storm with a copy
of Keats in his pocket.
Miklós Radnóti buried his poems in his pocket before someone buried him.
Virginia Woolf had faith in the rock that held her down in The Ouse.

* * *

In the silence,
the car has already turned for Sebald
the cancer already taken Brodsky
the ocean already swallowed Hart Crane.

In suffering,
Rimbaud nurses his bad leg
Jane Austen reflects on her illness
Mary Wollstonecraft insists on bravery.

In the darkness,
Henry James writes invisible words over a bedspread
Keats undergoes his long final nights
Eugene O'Neill waits to die in a Boston hotel room.

In rapidity,
Pushkin falls from the bullet
Marlowe bleeds in Deptford
Hemingway places the gun to his head
while the Brontës drop away
like pearls from a broken necklace.


- Libby Hart 2006




Darwin's Walk

Nobody traipses anymore.
No one lingers over a spot
thinking for 20 years about origins or earthworms,
no one bothers to clock up over 20,000 circuits
contemplating the world.

Each grain of sand, a time capsule
mulled over now by gravel for tourists
who stay awhile
and walk the bended edges of Darwin's imaginings,
just past the kitchen garden and the meadow.

I think imagination needs to be curved.
It has to be full and rounded.
There's no point in narrowness,
it is thin-aired and has its limits.

Bending carries laterality
and room for improvement,
an endless cycle of preoccupation.
Circles are for dreamers

Straight lines, on the other hand
are for middle men
for men in suits,
for bitter wives.

Einstein's Theory of Relativity seems doomed for revision
but Darwin's theory still stands up, more or less
160 years after telling his wife to open
the bundle of papers in the event of his death,
binding its shame in ribbon.

Containing it like a toxic secret
until its guilty knowledge flowered from competition,
allowing polite women to utter the word ape
for the first time in relation to ourselves,
speaking in whispers so as not to upset the servants.


Hierarchies climb and crumble like radiation
each set of rules or animal
replaced by another, and another
like time and the notion of substance.

Walking each day
step after step,
one foot in front of the other.
Murmuring the world,
grasping it slowly.

- Libby Hart 2006



Inheritance

Maybe Samuel Beckett was right,
maybe the tears of the world exist
as a silent relay, circling the earth.

I impart.
My next door neighbour follows,
wearing her tears like jewellery.
They are large, misshapen pearls

And like the ancient Greeks
she'll collect them -
each and every one of them,
to bury them deep inside herself.

Each time is different:
small and barely noticeable
pooled at the lid -
blinking, blinking to remove

Or a heavy stream flowing
along the bridge of nose,
crossing the lips
circling, becoming a slick of salt.

And the relay expands into kilometres
through states and borders,
onto atolls and bridges
and dry land.

And again, there is someone
who will follow the line,
who is picked for the flood.
An inheritor, with an urgency for tears.


- Libby Hart 2006


The above poems will appear in Libby's first collection "Fresh News from the Arctic" to be launched in Brisbane on the 5th of November.

The Muse has Sprung

5th Australian Poetry Festival: Between!

September 1-10, 2006

The Australian Poetry Festival (APF) is a significant biennial program of stimulating readings, panel sessions, discussion and debate, organised by the Poets Union to engage poets and the public in poetry and poetics. The program has grown from a largely Sydney-based event to a national program of parallel events.

The Poets Union committee, members and supporters present a diversity of programs in their own states and regional areas. While the national and regional programs are growing steadily, the Sydney base remains as strong as ever with major festival presentations, one-off readings, and a vibrant mix of local, regional and interstate guests.

APF is also a time of celebration for the Poets Union with the announcement of major awards, the release of new publications, the finals of Poetry Slam competitions and more.

APF was first held in 1998. In some years there is a festival theme, for example, Burning Lines in 2001 and Ngara/Listening in 2004. APF was held during National Poetry Week (NPW) in 2004 and this year is presented as a joint Poets Union and NPW initiative, cementing the relationship between these two major events on Australia's poetry calendar.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5TH AUSTRALIAN POETRY FESTIVAL:

BETWEEN!
September 1-10, 2006
Third-time APF Director, Martin Langford, announced in March that the theme of this year's 5th APF is Between! 'The 5th Australian Poetry Festival: Between!, will explore interactions, responses and collaborations.

'5th APF: Between! will build on the successful collaborations component in '4th APF: Ngara, which generated some exhilarating and original cross-art works. We expect the Between! theme to result in a bigger range of interactions and collaborations - between poets, between poets and arts practitioners, between poets and other fields, between communities and between states.'



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Confirmed guests in the major Sydney program include:
John Batts, Judith Beveridge, Margaret Bradstock, Bravo, Colleen Burke, Joanne Burns, Michelle Cahill, John Carey, Jess Cook, Jenni Doherty (Ireland), Stephen Edgar (Tasmania), Dan Eggs (Ireland), Brook Emery, Carolyn Gerrish, Alan Gould (Canberra), Phillip Hammial (Blue Mountains), JS Harry, Gordon Hewitt (Ireland), Rosemary Huisman, Jill Jones, Gorica Jovanovic, Tom Keily, Nora Krouk, Dang Lan, Martin Langford, Kery Leves, Yve Louis (Armidale), Kathryn Lomer (Hobart), David McCooey (Melbourne), Chelley Mclear (Ireland), Chris Mansell (Berry), Gabriella Mehedinteanu, Miles Merrill, Lizz Murphy (Binalong), David Musgrave, Norm Neill, Jenni Nixon, Esther Ottaway (Tasmania), Sheryl Persson, Claire Potter (Perth), Craig Powell, Brendan Ryan, Jaya Savige (Queensland), Michael Sharkey (Armidale), Jutta Sieverding, John Sheppard, Jutta Sieverding, Peter Skrzynecki, George Szirtes (England), Maureen Ten, Tom Thorpe, Helen Turovic, Louise Wakeling, Simon West (Melbourne), Les Wicks, Libby Wong, Fay Zwicky (Perth).

The Loft at 105

Celebrated poet and ethnographer
Nathaniel Tarn
reads from his poetry

Prizewinning novelist
Steven Lang
reads from his fiction

The Performance Space, Room 105
UTS, Bon Marche Building 3
Cnr Harris & Broadway

this Thursday 24th August


Nathaniel Tarn is well known both as a poet and as a translator (most particularly of the work of Pablo Neruda), and as an innovative publisher. He was the founding editor of Cape Editions in London in the 1960s and of Cape Goliard Press. He has taught at the Universities of Chicago, London, SUNY Buffalo and the New Mexico Institute of Amerindian Arts. Till the mid-80s he was Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Rutgers. He lives in New Mexico where he now writes, edits and researches full time. His main books are "The Beautiful Contradictions" (Random House); "A Nowhere for Vallejo" (Random House); "Lyrics for the Bride of God" (New Directions); "The House of Leaves" (Black Sparrow); "Atitlan/Alashka" (Brillig Works Press); "Seeing America First" (Coffee House Press); "Views from the Weaving Mountain: Selected Essays in Poetics & Anthropology" (University of New Mexico Press, 1991). "A Selected Poems 1950-2000" (Wesleyan University Press) came out in 2002. A new collection of poems, "Recollections of Being" (Salt Modern Poets) came out in London in 2004.

Steven Lang's first novel, "An Accidental Terrorist", was released by UQP in October 2005, and awarded the UTS Award for New Writing at the 2006 New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards. It was long-listed for the Miles Franklin Award and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize (for best first book). As a manuscript the novel won the 2004 Queensland Premier's Literary Award for Best Emerging Author. Lang's other work includes a play, "A Strong Brown God", "The Mary River Diary", which was performed at the Metro Arts Theatre in Brisbane in 1996, and several short stories, published in anthologies and literary magazines.

New Poetry by Megan Boyd

the elephant sits


the family hesitates

there's a large dent in the sofa

it's the place where

the

elephant

sits

the young child knows its there

no-one seems to notice


- Megan Boyd 2004

Megan works as a freelancer autocue gal in Adelaide's film/video market and is about to start teaching sandstone sculpture at the WEA. She has also done two bookcovers for UniSA publications, one of which won the 2005 Chancellor's Award. Megan lives outside Adelaide CBD with her young daughter.

Goose Step

Even for the London Sunday Times (which for mine is little more than a tabloid in tights with its legs spread), the report on German poet/novelist/activist Gunter Grass' confession to being a member of the SS in the dying days of WW2 struck this blogger as a little shrill in both tone and take. I have managed to leave the article in question on a peace bus somewhere, but if memory serves me the word "hypocrite" cropped up a number of times. As did the phrase "bleeding heart" once or twice.

I, too, am disappointed to witness an ageing public figure turn on a penny like this, but then once I had clambered out of the spiritual mire otherwise known as the 1980's (and my 20's), I realised I was also greatly disappointed by one of Grass's last great testaments, The Rat. It is a polemic in the worst sense. I flicked through it recently and felt a blush of shame and wry nostalgia, a bit like flicking through an old stack of Playboy magazines.

I agree with the (anonymous) Sunday Times journalist that the crime here is not the renowned author's membership of what was by 1944 a mere shadow of the SS that held all of Europe in thrall for 44 long months, but that Gunter Grass saw fit to become the conscience of post-war Germany without coming clean about his part in the war until he had reached an age (octogenarian) and time (the world has moved on from the suffocating paradigm that drove his writing) where it seemed the only "senisble" thing to do. Once again I sniff book sales and a cynical manipulation of the media by people whose closest brush with a book was their last drink driving charge.

If you live long enough you will be shown up for the joke we all are. That was the central message I took from much of German post-war literature, Tin Drum included. The world was born yesterday, just a little older than our dreams. It is we who are old, because it is we who measure time, who sort the good from the bad, the dead from the dying. Perhaps we are too ready to forget what it must have been like for those born in the time just before us, or perhaps we are tired of hearing about it while the petty criminals of our own time are left to run riot. Whatever the case may be, it is certainly still the case that the noble often die unnoticed while the craven die with an audience.

Where do we go from here?

it is a strange bird
this world

whose habit is
to fight itself

whose left wing
and right wing

tear themselves
bitterly apart

both on the side
of justice and violence

and whose great beak
gobbles the poor

- Michael Dransfield 1972

Boys will be boys

It seems Louise Adler down at MUP has raised the bar a few inches higher (who woulda thunk it after her stroke of editorial genius with Mark Latham's diaries?!!). She must also be visiting the august pages of Bluepepper, heeding comments in my "Light on the Hill" post about her aversion to all things poetic.

In a flash of brilliance, dear old Louise has decided to publish poet John Kinsella's memoirs "Loose beginnings: a memoir of intoxications" (I would have worked on that title a little more, Louise), an excerpt of which I read in the Weekend Australian a few weeks back and thought both twee and ill-advised. I was particularly struck by Kinsella's veiled, preppy innuendos about Dorothy Hewett,particularly as she is no longer here to defend herself. So you took drugs and felt a little put on by a 60 year old woman. Haven't we all? That pretty much sums up my eighties in Darlinghurst and Newtown. Now it looks like Kinsella is finding himself at the sharp end of the stick, being forced to cancel an appearance at the Byron bay Writers' Festival due to some nasty emails from a few of the poets he dissed. Am I the only one who finds this all a bit sad? Apparently down the road from where I live Kinsella once had a punch-up with Anthony Lawrence. Now, I have met both poets. The former has the build of a scarecrow, the latter that of the hill behind it. I fancy "punch-up" actually means a few choice words and a sharp nudge in the foyer,although I could be wrong. The emails themselves are really quite poetic (far moreso, in fact, than most of Kinsella's output). One reads "It is a death-clicking beetle/Can you hear it at work inside the fast-tracking of your emails/inside the cold enamel of your smile?/keep your enemies close at hand/the shroud has no pockets". I wonder what the local constabulary made of that when dear John applied for his AVO against Anthony Lawrence (the author of this email) and the other "offended" party, Robert Adamson?

All in all, I sense these memoirs are another feather in Louise Adler's crooked cap and nothing more. A wiser man would perhaps have kept well clear, the agenda here being quite obviously to feed the fathomless craving for titillation for which the boomer generation is so renowned.

Call for Submissions

I haven't forgotten my threat to start posting excerpts from my verse novel, so poets and poetry lovers consider yourselves on notice. Just click on the "email me" 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. Probably why I haven't got a girlfriend...Anyway, be that as it may I see no reason for not submitting something. 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.

New Poetry by rob walker

a beginner’s guide to postmodernism



don’t say book poem or story

its all just text



don’t talk.

have a

discourse



you may still lecture

in the timehonored way

but call it a

conversation



in the end nothing matters anyway

everyone’s opinion is as good

as anyone else’s



the external world does not exist.



ignore it.


- rob walker 2006

rob walker is a South Australian poet who has poetry in a number of journals and websites in Australia and overseas. This poem will appear in his first full collection micromacro, to be launched Sept 30 in Adelaide.

Midnight Latitudes by Wayne Wolfson

Mars Syndicate is an evolving multimedia collaboration. Visual mediums include video and live performance art.

Auditory mediums include live instrumentation (from one to twenty musicians), and computer music (samplers and sequencers).

Wayne Wolfson is a California based author.

The album is a concept one. It figures around an anti-hero known only as “The Detective”. A lot of things are kept vague, non-linear story line with certain images and words which are constantly looping back and referencing other events taking place within the world of music and story found here. As an example, the very first track you hear someone running to a car in the rain, the radio is fiddled with, a brief melody is heard, then the first piece is about a man leaving a woman. There is a definite story, but did the man already leave the woman and was running to car in the start of the album or is he now on his way to do so. Another example of the constant looping back, the melody he hears on the radio is then hummed by man and woman as “their song” in next piece. Was it really their song, or did his mind just fill in that space with the brief snatch of song heard on radio. There is a definite story, although it is not traditional narrative taking the audience from points A to Z.

I think some of the best modern poets did the same thing. Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) would often have poems which bordered on being short stories, stories where there was a plot but things were left semi-open, semi-opaque. In France some of the creators of the Anti-Novel (Nathalie Sarraute, A l’Aine Robe Grille) were authors who painted pictures with words but left a certain elasticity to the where and when of what was going on with the characters and their world. This is something I think poetry is moving away from, an image standing for something and yet not being rigidly locked into place. I think too, for any work of art where you want people to be able to go back to it again and again, the lion’s share of the tension should not derive from finding out “what happens next”. Largely, we avoided that in the way the story is told.

To purchase your copy just click on the post header and follow the prompts.

New Prose by Eric Kellenbach

ONE

My family

Popular convention, or fiction, asks us to judge a man by his wealth, the beautiful women and dangerous places he has frequented, his handsome features passing through morally tedious landscapes ... and by these measures we would have to discard Andal. He has no layers of angst to be displayed in myriad perversions before a sublime finale. He has not even been intentionally evil: an altogether too ordinary man though with some strange habits.
Andal has always lived his life thoroughly, paying attention to detail. Already as a young man—in times of stress and difficulty especially—he wrote lists: fearlessly delving, crude truths, magical calculations and final decisions. One of those lists compared what he knew of where he lived with what he knew of where he might go. The old country versus the new country. The list leaned towards the new, so he came here.
Then, long after, with some bitterness, I know he made another list: the same comparison of old versus new, and went back to his old country. To die. That was over ten years ago now, and for these ten years he has missed us more than he could bear—I’ve heard it in his voice. No doubt he would have been working this gnawing pain into new lists, but I don’t imagine new lists could have offered him much relief.
His list-thing developed, slowly but continually, from when he was a young man: the first lists were a tool to organise things for practical purposes. As time went on he began trying to find meaning and pattern in his thoughts as revealed in his lists, and this led to him trying to more clearly understand the progression of how things had become as they were. Then eureka: he realised that if he could understand this progression then he might be able to draw them forward and into the future. And if that worked then it is clear he might try applying what he’d learnt to others, especially within his family.
The lists became a way for him to connect his cumulative personal experience—and he could test ideas from other people, or the books and magazines he sometimes read, against them.
After ten or more years of continual attention the word “list” was no longer adequate for what his work entailed. He’d sit, usually at night after work, developing his project through years of loving labour; so that in the end his notebooks produced nothing less than prophecy—a new science of prophecy. It’s not just intuition or some kind of mysticism at work, it is science: it’s based on hard information. Then a dash of intuition is thrown in. Some day he will be recognised for what he is ... a new science has been born and nobody knows it yet.
Before he returned to his old country Andal had already watched his children move from home and into the world. By then he had the comfort of knowing our developing characters and general destiny were written plain for him. This must have served him well, but from the old country our material progress and even our physical appearance become more and more difficult for him to visualise. Two of us moved to live in inner city suburbs he hardly remembered the names of and wouldn’t be able to find without a map.
Four children and only two addresses ... but then we move around a lot, sharing households, changing suburbs, moving out of the city for a time, we keep moving. It doesn’t bother me but half the time I wouldn’t have more than two addresses myself. He’d sit in deep disquiet sometimes, thinking about his children dissolved into a fluid vast space; he said he’d seen Mum’s eyes, fleetingly, glimpsed amongst women’s wild-berry eyes juicy in the village; ‘it’s obvious I’ve come from this earth, and so has your mother’, he would say.
Only two addresses which he couldn’t even be sure were up-to-date and so many millions of people all busy—but Andal had a way of dealing with this consuming swirl of movement: first, make a list, and second, go straight there wherever “there” is according to the list.
I think Andal’s thinking and working through lists kept him linked to us: he was able to chart our growth as human beings—and he was able to touch our spirit. Andal, from what I’ve seen of his last years of life, has contained a quiet happiness and peace which becomes more lucid each day. If going away is what he felt he had to do to meet his needs ... well I’ve always kept my support for him even though some certain others have declared him to be completely crazy.

All these years past he has thought of us every day, Mum especially of course. He knows where she sits to eat her breakfast and dinner, where she does her grocery shopping, most of her friends ... But she wouldn’t go to live with him in the old country, and he couldn’t stay in the new with us. Mum once spoke his language well, she’d heard it from her parents as a child. I’ve heard her speaking myself when I was still very young, with Andal, and I learnt a few words too; but it was obvious it never became her own language, just collections of other ways of saying things.
Mum told me I brought some of those few words to school with me, not really knowing the difference, and that it caused problems. I’ve always wondered how our lives would have been if we’d been more “native” to this country. At the very least people get too curious and try to work out where you’re from by your accent or family name, even if they won’t say it to your face. And then they bring prejudice into the game. That’s just the way it is.
As the years went on eventually Mum didn’t speak his language, not much any more, and his grasp of our language slipped day by day. His letters to me have always been well-written though the language is a bit odd; but writing is different to speaking and unlike many other foreigners who learnt here the hard way, on their own time, his written words remained much stronger than the spoken.
First, years ago, it was the rare foreign word let slip in a preoccupied moment which revealed his mind switching back to its natural tongue. Then he wanted the food he knew from his mother’s table, or in mid sentence he would suddenly pause, empty of some banal word of the new world … and he’d seen them and was terrified: the fortunate ones nursed by resentful family, or flung into nursing homes where nobody spoke the language in awful isolation; others left babbling in the streets waiting for the meanest government institution. Or, to those that can escape capture and remain free comes the final fury-frothing cough which dribbles lung to stain soiled dark jackets and cold street pavements. He left. She stayed.
Sometimes, reflecting back into the distance of the new country, having returned to an old country which in many ways had changed so much that it was also now in a sense new as well; he once said that it all seemed to make his old life, this old life here in the new country which in some ways was his most real life … it all drifted into the unreal, none of it seemed to have much to do with him, it was all just vague and incomplete memory tumbling in a large swirling. The young people there are becoming more like us, he told me. I’m sure even the way people his own age speak and think, the fabric of community, all these have changed but he’d missed the progress and would now be forced to make uncomfortable jumps to catch up.
Deep within the tumble of thought our family would merge into the big swim, sometimes drifting sometimes thrashing, just out of his reach; and though he knows where we are, visibility would continually worsen as the distance of time allows.
There, where his choice of words is quaint and outdated in the changed old country, he’d gone to die.
Death, he thought, if he planned for it, would be easier and more meaningful. But how does one plan for death—with lists comparing the benefits and negative aspects? Probably not.
In fact my father planned meticulously for his death from the day of his return to the old country, and he knew it would all run smoothly. Although there were hiccups: the main one occurring when his cousin, the local funeral company’s head who had been entrusted with the process, became ill, then died. We’re talking about the same cousin that had helped carry my grandfather’s coffin, a grandfather who I never knew, years ago.
So Andal wrote out directions clearly, gave a copy to his neighbours in a sealed envelope, and sent one to Mum. Though for him all this was only superficial and worldly: he desired his walk to the desert to make as little disturbance as possible: footsteps on the soil, then in the sand, he said, soon becoming the merest indentations, and dissolving with the next winds and rain.

- From The Fanatic by Eric Kellenbach 2006

Out to Lunch

We all love a set up and last weekend the Australian Newspaper pulled off an absolute doozy. For those who don't read the Murdoch press, last weekend the Review section of said paper published a story based on a stunt they pulled on fourteen of Australia's top book publishers. Some time ago they were sent chapter three of Patrick White's award winning novel Eye of the Storm. When I say "award winning", I don't mean just any award but the Nobel Prize for Literature, so even an addled dilettante like yours truly thinks he may have smelt a rat. No-one in the world writes like Patrick White. No-on else would really want to, would they? I love his endless samba with the English language, don't get me wrong, but like most Australians it's Voss we're thinking of when we talk about a Patrck White story. Alarm bells should have gone off, but of the fourteen publishers sent the (anonymous) third chapter, only two were smart (or unprofessional) enough not to reply, while the other twelve sent rejections ranging from pithy to downright condescending. One even suggested the author (did I mention he won the Nobel Prize for Literature?) buy a how-to on writing fiction. When said stewards of this parched island's literary culture were confronted with the rather brazen ruse, one reacted along the lines of I never f.....ing liked White anyway. Another that we are supposing there are 400 Patrick Whites out there right now writing. How would he know?

Solitary End

I am deeply sorry to have to announce the untimely death of one of Australia's leading sculptors, Bronwyn Oliver. Along with leading lights such as Fiona Hall, Bronwyn changed the way we look at sculpture in this country. She was an intensenly private person, although my sources tell me she was utterly engaging compan on the rare occassions she could be coaxed out of her Haberfield studio. According to her currator, Roslyn Oxley, she had "her own language: beautiful, refined forms with intricate, sometimes aggressive, sometimes soft structures within the forms." She goes on to say:" The details sort of summed Bronwyn up."

Why Bronwyn chose to take her own life at the age of 47 will no doubt be the subject of much speculation in the weeks ahead. All Bluepepper has to say on the matter is that it is another special life cut short, a resource we should all be taking much greater care with.

Sad Passing

Lisa Marie Bellear from the Noonuccal people of Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island), Queensland.

For those of you who were fortunate to be friends or colleagues with Lisa Marie Bellear, I am very sorry to pass on the news that she died suddenly and unexpectedly in her sleep last night at home in Melbourne.

She was 44 years old and all her friends and family are totally shocked as Miss Lisa was such a larger than life, happy-go-lucky character, absolutely dedicated to her people. Lisa never lost sight of her belief that all people should be treated equally and she was such a supporter of others. She worked as a writer, student activist, Indigenous fighter, poet and artist, and was a very kind and loving friend. We will miss her very much.

A memorial service will be held on Friday, July 14 at 1pm at the Aborigines Advancement League, 2 Watt Street Thornbury.

- Angela Costi

Vale the great of heart.

A Sunburnt Country - Calls for Poetry

Fancy the idea of seeing your poetry translated into Bangla (or Begali)? Well, if so read the post below.



Help Needed on an "Anthology of Australian Poetry" in Bangla


Every year since 1975, an International Book Fair is held in Kolkata, India for two weeks in January-February. And every year the theme of the fair is a different country. In 2006, the theme was Spain. In 2007, the theme will be Australia.

"Patralekha" is a publisher in Kolkata of offbeat and experimental literature in Bangla (or, Bengali) language. It also publishes a monthly Bangla poetry magazine called "Kabi Sammelan", the name literally means "a gathering of poets".

For next year's Book fair, Patralekha will be publishing an anthology of Australian Poetry translated in Bangla. We are in charge of selecting, translating and editing for the collection. And, we need your help.

We would like this collection to feel the pulse of poetry in Australia. We want it to include the beautiful and the ugly, the best and the brightest, the sacred and the profane. We want to reflect what is written at this moment in far corners of Australia as much as we can.

And, that's where we need your help.

Please help us make a representative and intelligent selection of poets and poetry. Please send us poems, magazine, books, book reviews, articles that would help us make the right selections, not just the well-known and the popular ones. Our email addresses are given below.

Any other assistance that you might be able to provide in this project, will be highly appreciated. We are in a time crunch because the material for the book has to be finalized by October 2006.

Contact:

Ankur Saha, California, USA. (ankur.saha@gmail.com)

Subrata Augustine Gomes, NSW, Australia. (AG210022@ncr.com)

Shoumyo Dasgupta, California, USA. (shoumyo@yahoo.com)

Poetry by Barbara Salamon

Vegie Magic On Crown Road


Mum's vegetable garden

was ordered, green and lush.

Sundry shapes fed us and

the lot worked on rotation principles.

New plantings began at middle fence

and rows right angled

a dead centre footpath.



Our garden party atmosphere

Was full of bubbles and balloons

As twice through twenty feet of baby carrots

We cracked and crunched

Munched and chewed.



Quiet dusk arrived with mum

who gazed out on a whirly show

of feathered fronds from carrot tops

sprawling greener brighter layers

of new seasoned light.



- Barbara Peta Salamon 2006

Poetry by Barbara De Franceschi

Origins


I walk through bracken

restless winds take my weeping



I am tinder for billy tea

the grass that feeds merino sheep

how then does thick moss on fallen stone

bring a prickling to my skin

a row of bushes divide my brain

into thorny hedgerows

and every spring

I remember fifty shades of green



time has denied my suffering

roots melt in dirt-veined clay

mountain ranges with granite lips

forbid an utterance

that might transport to heather and sprig



my signature is written

in red desert sand

mine shafts sunken in blistering heat

still … the bitter taste of Guinness

builds a cairn in my throat


- Barbara De Franceschi 2006





Falling into the Vertical


the fan thinks it’s a cat

somewhere a dog barks

a cylinder sound

travelling on hollow heat

lines wriggle before my eyes

unable to decide on shape

some disappear into dark humidity

others explode

so many things pass in & out

love snags on a feeling

yesterday’s freedom

reluctant to let go … & always

I am falling

slanted

towards a window overhung

with pink bougainvillea

a barbed curtain

thorns in a vertical line

to keep the night

straight


- Barbara De Franceschi 2006



Barbara De Franceschi from Broken Hill NSW is a prolific writer of poetry, her works have been published Australia wide and internationally. Barbara is an adventuress writer and is continuously trying to find new ways and forms to present her work. Barbara’s first collection Lavender Blood was published in 2004 and the manuscript for a second collection is well under way, she is a member of the performance group ‘The Silver Tongued Ferals’ and performs at caravan parks, arts festivals, ‘Poets in the Pub’ etc. and has also read her poetry live to air on ABC Radio.



Publications include: Centoria, From the Well, Barrier Daily Truth, The Bunyip, Poetrix, Yellow Moon, Saltlick Quarterly, Famous Reporter, Four W Sixteen, also on line USA via Eclectica and Culture Star Reader, her poetry and an article re ‘What hinges people to poetry in outback Australia’ has appeared on line in Niederngasse, Switzerland.

Poetry by Maggie Ball

Dicky Knees

“You see the folly of trying to contain writers within passports” Salman Rushdie (Imaginary Homelands, 1991, 67)

when in the course of human events
the homeland you once dug deep into your chubby fingernails
more self-evidently true
than life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness
dissipates into a half remembered dream
you can’t return to

you hold out a hand and find
one door open, another closed

in the land of my birth
king and country
already so long dissolved
by olive branch rejection, open rebellion,
dangerous and ill designing men
that it was already quaint
something more gently connected
with bluebells, good rock, and Shakespeare
than any governance

anyway it wasn’t my war
I was already the diaspora class
three generations removed
eastern european
not by accent or language, or even religion
all subsumed into a modernity
so encompassing it wiped out all tradition
except the tilt of my head
and a few wild hand gestures

going “home” to old Blighty
wasn’t a return to anything
migration, rejection, realignment
reconstruction

but what is commonwealth if not postcolonial
complex, multidirectional
slippery as an author
self-defining, autonomous, comforting
under a welcoming umbrella
I wrecked my knees in childbirth
setting roots into a new soil
anchoring myself deep into the human condition

there’s just that little point of allegiance
tricky
with these dicky knees

Bio: Magdalena Ball runs The Compulsive Reader http://www.compulsivereader.com/html. Her short stories, editorials, poetry, reviews and articles have appeared in a wide number of printed anthologies and journals, and have won many awards. Her non-fiction book, The Art of Assessment was published by Mountain Mist Productions in 2002, and her poetry chapbook Quark Soup is due for publication by Picaro Press late in 2006.

Comments

Anyone is free to leave a comment, as long as it's constructive. However, using the comment link to simply post your submissions is not quite in the spirit of things. I think my submission guidelines are pretty straightforward. So please, run your poems by me first and I'll publish them under the bluepepper.

Lemon Shark

In Luke Beesley’s impressive debut, there seems to be an awful lot of two things – rain and cinema. Fitting, perhaps, for a native of Brisbane, to be a little pre-occupied with tropical lows. And the cinematic references (mostly in the form of dedications) strike me as fitting too, considering the vivid, rollicking intellect of this poet. I think I would like Luke Beesley were we to ever meet in person. His is a wry take on life, a little obtuse at times, but that’s OK. The times demand that of we poets to an extent, and anyway Luke Beesley is, as I say, a native of Brisbane where an entire movement is shaping up around a gun with a very crooked barrel.

Soi Modern Poets, an offshoot of Paul Hardacre’s Papertiger franchise, have done a sterling job with this book. It looks smart, and has been meticulously edited, no small thing in these days of the “publisher’s lunch”. It is one of three titles on offer in this first series, and I only chose it above the other two because I am already pretty familiar with the work of Brett Dionysius and Billy Jones, whereas I have until now only glimpsed compelling snatches of Luke Beesley’s work in journals and anthologies and was keen for more. This collection has certainly not disappointed.

The word English is wet. It has rained recently and it works
like a smashed grape; not wine but the lamp-light quality
of its flesh under sunlight. England is the seed.

(From “The Cliffs”)

I can open this book at pretty much any page and such treasures will come tumbling out. There are a few, such as “Milk Teeth” that passed me by somewhat, but often on first reading a poem can seem intended for someone else, an audience of one, and the poem in question possesses enough originality to carry it further, if perhaps read separately from the rest of the collection. This comment should in itself serve as testament to the strength of this debut by a young and promising poet. Visit the Papertiger Media website to snavel your copy and get a smart canvas bag thrown in! Just click on the post header.

Poetic Education

AUSTRALIAN WRITERS AND MUSCIANS FOR EDUCATION

Free Stuff for Northern Territory School Students


It's part of promoting the idea of Free Culture and education in Arts, Ethics and Literature in remote areas like the NT. Students write in and request the book/CD of their choice and I mail it out to them is what happens. :)
So far there is myself, The Cube and James Blundell looks like coming on board as well with his latest CD.

I am asking writers, musicians and bands if they might spare a few copies (say 5-10 or more) of their book, CD or single for this project? Postal Address: The Thylazine Foundation GPO Box 1480 Darwin NT 0801. Thanks!

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The Thylazine Foundation Pty Ltd: http://www.thylazine.org/
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Winners and Losers

As I continue to explore the incredible world of digital technology and the opportunities it opens up to small publishers like myself, it has occured to me that maybe Bluepepper should put out its own little quarterly hardcopy. I envisage its conents adhering to nominated themes and remaining quite separate from the contents of the blog. Let's say here and now the theme for the first (hypothetical) issue is "Winners and Losers" and take it from there. Same submission rules apply as for the blog. Check the guidelines on the top right under the bluepepper.

Call for Submissions

I seem to have to beg for poetry these days. I'm still waiting to hear from Pixi. Just click on the "email me" 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. Probably why I haven't got a girlfriend...Anyway, be that as it may I see no reason for not submitting something. 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.

Calling cards

Peter Alexander at UNSW is in the midst of editing the correspondence of the "Bard from Bunyah", Les Murray and is looking for postcards, letters, old restaurant menus,anything to put in the book. I have already offered up my own little souveneir, but I'm sure many of you out there have far more significant contributions to make to this fine project. If so, feel free to contact Peter at p.alexander@unsw.edu.au

Two Poems by Nikhil Rajoo

Rhea's Court

Hours in the garden
Dandelion, lilacs
the sheaves of daffodils
the fallacy of seasons
easter harvest
My little girl eclipsing
the sun
with her arms full of yellow
her crimson bedroom
the heart's shivered core

- Nikhil Rajoo 2006



Aztec Legend

inching out
along the base of a sheer rock face
with Lake Superior crashing at my back
and on the pink rock
appearing beneath my fingers
the hunger-drunk spirit drawings in
faded red ochre
of two thousand year old medicine men
pictures of fish - canoes - snakes - animals- people
- and horned Misshepezhieu
who only moments before had lashed his tail
and brought the rain

- Nikhil Rajoo 2006


Nikhil lives and works in Vancouver and has been published in the South Ocean Review, Attic Magazine and the Taj Mahal Review to name but a few. "Rhea's Court" is a dedication to the poet's god daughter.

Urban Myth

John Tranter Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected

University of Queensland Press, 2006. 322 pages. ISBN-0-7022-3557-1.

To be launched in Sydney by Pam Brown at Gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Road,
Glebe NSW 2037, on Friday May 19, 2006. Time: 6 for 6.30pm. Cost: Free and
open to all. To reserve a place (or BUY the book!), visit Gleebooks.

http://www.gleebooks.com.au

Urban Myths: 210 Poems brings the best work to date from a poet considered one of the most original of his generation in Australia, together with a generous selection of new work. Smart, wry and very stylish, John Tranter's poems investigate the vagaries of perception and the ability of language to converge life, imagination and art so that we arrive, unexpectedly, at the deepest human mysteries.

Glass Poems

After many delays and fluffing about by editors, I have finally released the definitive collection of my poetry for the 21st century (so far). I decided to run it under my own imprint (ie Bluepepper) so that at least I knew the job would get done and done properly. The results are extremely gratifying, and the blurb by poet MTC Cronin a little humbling for yours truly. I am in the process of stocking it with the following book retailers:

Better Read than Dead (Newtown, NSW)
Gleebooks (Glebe, NSW)
Bookoccino (Avalon, NSW)
Ariel Booksellers (Darlinghurst, NSW)
Collected Works (Melbourne, VIC)

However, ask your nearest boutiquie bookseller for a copy and I'm sure they'll be able to track one down. It should be listed soon at Amazon and Barnes & Noble as well as on the Google Booksearch database. Failing that, contact me at www.bluepepper.blogspot.com and I'll see what I can do. At 135pp you really do get your money's worth.

To purchase on line, simply click the "BUY NOW" button in the right column under the bluepepper logo.