New Poetry by Mark O'Flynn

PEASOUP

Fog is a cloud that has lost the will to fly.
Bill Bryson


After the downpour - a peasouper.
Fog so thick it is like glaucoma. The spirits
are said to be let loose in such a fog as this.

I wanted to go to the centre of the oval
where even the dark silhouette
of the treeline disappears and you
can imagine the world evaporated.

Out there I found a bunch
of cricketers camouflaged in the mist
waiting for their blindness to lift
and the contest to resume. It felt distinctly odd
meeting them like steamed ghosts,
part cloud, part will’o’th’wisp standing
with the drowned worms in the grass.


- Mark O'Flynn 2007

Mark O'Flynn is a widely-acclaimed poet, novelist and playright who has just returned from a three month writing residency in Ireland. He has had seven plays produced, published a novella and three books of poetry. His novel "Grassdogs" was released last year through HarperCollins and his third book of poetry "What Can Be Proven" was released last week through Interactive Press. He also has the dubious of honour of being my neighbour.

New Poetry by Jo McInerney

Returned

I remember ceasing to exist.
Not a near-death experience, no extra-corporality,
I simply lost my definition, went out of focus.
I could look in a mirror to see no one I knew.
I understood it would be useless to try to talk.
The words would not emerge or, if they did,
the hard syllables would crack and fall,
broken pieces of a dialect no one ever spoke.
I could still see. People moved around me
like square dancers treading the pattern,
smiling, laughing. They did not realise they, we
were about to lose our grip, release our toes,
demagnetise and drift off into nothingness.

I don't remember how I came back.
Did the Martians unload me, did I find God,
did I love someone or they me? I'd like to know.
I'm afraid that last encounter was only the first.

- Jo McInerney 2007


Jo McInerney spent the first twenty years of her life in Melbourne. She
has lived in Gippsland for the last thirty years and has been writing
obsessively for the last two.

Shameless

An interview I did with Maggie Ball is posted up at Blogtalk Radio (the tab to your immediate right). You can also find her review of the book in question, The Great Big Show, at a number of sites including The Compulsive Reader.

The Monthly reaches out

THE MONTHLY FOR AUSTRALIANS ABROAD

The Monthly is now available online.

'The Online Monthly' will be published simultaneously with the print edition. It will contain the full text of the current issue, plus every article ever published in the magazine.

We have decided to publish this online edition so that we reach the local 'internet generation' and give Australian expatriates easy access to the magazine.

Believe it or not, there are currently an estimated 860,000 Australians living and working overseas. If you know any of them, and think that they might enjoy The Monthly, please forward this email to them. They can consider subscribing via the link below.

This is a logical step for The Monthly following the incredible success of the printed edition, which is here to stay.

For more information see www.themonthly.com.au

New Poetry by Steven Balters

Rattus Norvegicus

It was afternoon, but you had to stay behind with all the people
Who grew tired of the sun caked windows that inspired sleepwalking.

The grey circuitry boxes tucked inside of the white concrete
Exploded. He knew, yes he knew and he warned of it,
And he sent everyone out the door, following fumes from an electrical fire.

Night was beginning to flood the gymnasium anyways.

Fire consumed and burned and spread to every last classroom.

Now you wonder how he knew the wiring was flawed and self destructive,
Or how he knew rats were gnawing at the motherboard, the system board,
The system. The system was feeding generations of rats by the time the
Roof gave way to the stars, and he only looked oblivious.

Now you wonder this.
As you stand with your best friend
In the slicing sun,
With a school in ashes behind you.


- Steven Balters 2007


Steven Balters is an 18 year old first year student at Seattle University. He was born and raised in Omaha on the plains of Nebraska.

Saint Max

It was the poet Margie Cronin who first drew my attention to Melbourne's The Monthly magazine in one of her frequent circulars. As relatively young writers we had both been hungering for a new voice in the Australian mainstream print media, and The Monthly seemed to be it. It seldom disappoints. But as we head down that slippery slope towards another Federal election, it seems even such young luminaries as The Monthly can't resist the temptation of dragging their colours through the mud of Australian party politics. Mungo MacCallum I will excuse because he has never been anything else but partisan, and his writing is wry and insightful and fed by a rich tradition of Australian political writing stretching back well into the 19th century. His labelling of all swinging voters as "nongs" says a little more about where his politics are stuck than the true state of the Australian polis, but sadly he is not alone in this issue. Atavism remains a plague on this country, and The Monthly is far from immune.

I will begin and end with the cover story of The Monthly September 2007 because I believe it encapsulates all that is wrong with the current editorial approach of what promised not so long ago to be a clean break from the beigists. I know very well why it is the cover story, because it promises to appeal to the most general readership, part human-interest, part political commentary, and because its subject is the universally respected retired ABC journalist Maxine Mckew and her tilt at John Howard's seat of Bennelong (where I am currently jotting down these notes in my boss' carpark after a 90 minute drive to a low-paid job, but more of that later). My problem is not with Maxine Mckew, whom I greatly admire, nor with the intentions of both writer and editor. Maxine will probably fail in her challenge, but she doesn't need me to tell her that. I think what she is doing is bringing the values of the Australian Labor Party to an area of Sydney that has not had much direct exposure to them since the decades between the wars, a thoughtful, charming and beguilingly self-effacing advocate for what, after all, aren't a bad set of core values for what still touts itself as an egalitarian society. My problem is with the tone of the piece. It is one of almost breathless adulation that repeatedly renders the journalist, Judith Brett, immobile when a chance beckons to dig a little deeper. For instance, early in the piece she accuses McKew of a slightly bloodless consensual brand of politics so beloved of marketing types, then all but claps her hands when caught in the trap.

And when I ask her (McKew) about the ALP's position on old-growth logging, and Rudd's, in my view, disgraceful courting of the Tasmanian logging industry, she simply smiles.

Really? And what do you expect her to do, Judith, a journalist of her experience hearing a reporter from The Monthly couch her own opinions within a question? Is this the Big Issue? I can imagine the ever-graceful Maxine feeling for a 2-dollar coin in her pocket.

The journalist then spends two paragraphs on a rather breezy analysis of recent Federal parliamentary history, highlighting a cycle of sorts between consensus (the Hawke years) and the head-butting of Keating and beyond. I'm told it all rates very well on New York cable. She confuses history with short-term trends, however, a chronic distemper among journalists who refuse to read books thicker than a tabloid. Bob Hawke's consensus was a successful ploy to placate Moody's and win back the triple A rating, but it was also a successful attempt to bury the hatchet of the old class war that had been picked up by middle-class students in the 60's and poked and prodded until it was almost unrecognisable. By which I mean Whitlam.

Of course Rudd is very different from Bob Hawke, he doesn't have Whitlam and a faux class-war to bury. He just has Paul Keating and his volumes of visceral bon-mots to bury ("conga line of arseholes" has become the national favourite, I think). History never really repeats itself, not really, that's just a stick our imaginations hold over us whenever the winds of change blow the map clean out of our hands. But saints do not good politicians make, and Kevin Rudd is a very good politician. The likes of Judith Brett would do well to remember that the next time they consider committing twaddle such as this to paper

So if Rudd were to win, the times would suit McKew's style of politics and her gift for listening to people. All the courtesy and charm that made her such a persuasive interviewer are being brought to her new role as a candidate, as are her skills in intelligent listening. When she's talking to you, you have her whole attention: her wide eyes are attentive, she smiles and nods, she reaches out and touches you.....

And so on.....

In fact, while I was typing out this dire excerpt I was thinking to myself I should inspect more closely the funding streams for The Monthly, because this piece is beginning to feel more and more like paid advertising. But then I considered the subject, a truly sincere and honourable woman....But then I thought of the party she is representing, one of the oldest and toughest political outfits in the Westminster system, and then I thought, slow down Justin, one step at a time, and anyway, these are your knees.

At street level, right under McKew's office, the Liberals have rented a shopfront which is plastered, inside and out, with posters of a smiling John Howard, Australian flags and the Liberal insignia. The door is open and inside a man is sitting at a desk. I'll go in and talk to him later, I think.........

This is good thinking, Judith, you are a journalist, and the man you have set in so sinister a setting is, for better or worse, a small part of the other side of the story.

One of the posters of Howard had been graffitied...."One of your lot did this, I suppose." He (from across the street) is about 70, trim and fit, with a buzzed head and a muscle bound walk. Our embarrassed protestations that we know nothing about it....are met with scornful insults. I don't feel like going to talk with him after that.....

Great journo's instinct there, Judith! Just what this country needs, another half-told tale!

This is palliative journalism for an ageing generation whose habitual posturing sounds increasingly creaky.

To Judith Brett's eventual credit, she does feel out the opinions of the older Chinese community in Benelong who have not forgotten John Howard's infamous anti-Asian rant in the late 1980's. But once again she fails to ask them the question even your humble poet-blogger has managed to ask them here in this very car park - why only now has the local Asian community turned against John Howard? Instead we get a self-proclaimed "eureka moment"

My eureka moment came when she was talking about the Liberals' attack on the unions. "When Howard is attacking unionists, he is attacking all the essential-service workers, the nurses, the police, the transport workers. And the teachers. I am sick of teachers being insulted and beaten up on. I am appalled. I want to be a champion for teachers."

You're not alone there, Maxine. But all these are state issues. The TWU aside, the Federal government has no say over the fate of any of them, and the last time I checked Benelong was a Federal seat. At least one woman at the interview knew that.

So what is my point after this heartless harangue? Well, I would have hoped many of you could by now sing along at least half the chorus with me.

Firstly, I abhor the fossilisation of Australian written culture in the bitter aspic of 1975. The banks got to Jack Lang in NSW in 1933, and they got to Whitlam in Canberra in 1975, as they have got to so many others more and less worthy than these two. Forget it, move on. Both sides had very good reasons for what they did and anyway all are history now.

Secondly, I am tired of lazy journalism fobbed off under some Wolfeian banner taking up precious real estate along the ever-diminishing print highway of this island. These are cramped, complex, terrifying times that no amount of courtesy and charm are going to see us through (as anyone who walked the police gauntlet out of Hyde Park on APEC Saturday will shakily attest). This is no longer a world populated by ideals, international jihad aside. We all have to look squarely at things as they are, at the world we have inherited, try to steady that roller coaster that has been going wild for the best part of a hundred years. It is, after all, the credo Maxine McKew has never stopped living by.

New Poetry by Kevin Gillam

one bulb

a pillar of cloud rests
above your room of one
bulb on a string, breaths in
their many, thoughts stunted,
too few, where you lie, curled
and clammy, hands and arms
splayed as if on a clock
at a quarter to ache

you've done this before, half
gone and left this constell-
ation, half gift and stayed,
as moon for one bulb. floor-
boards won't whisper, stars blink,
don't see. you kiss cirrus


- Kevin Gillam 2007


his numbers

for him, numbers were his plug, as
sometimes (and he'd read this, man of
reason that he was),
he felt the bath-water spiral
(didn't everyone?) towards madness,
inviting the sweet collapse, gifts of
meander, violent shake, up/down
in/out of jigsaw box

some numbers looped, spun in this man of
reason, and, fully given over, he
didn't fight, didn't kick, couldn't, just
invited, in from the cold, hot
meal, fire and time, in,
in from the cold came his numbers


- Kevin Gillam 2007

Degrees of Insanity

The Writing and Society Research Group
at the University of Western Sydney presents

James Ley (essayist, critic, and UWS postgrad)
on "A degree of insanity: Samuel Johnson's moral criticism and the
biographical essay."

Friday 31 August
2.00-4.00pm

University of Western Sydney, Bankstown campus
Building 23, conference room 2
(via the Henry Lawson Drive exit of the M5)

James Ley is an essayist and critic whose work has appeared in numerous
publications, including The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, Australian
Book Review, HEAT, The Australian Literary Review and the Times Literary
Supplement.

All welcome.

RSVP/info writing@uws.edu.au
www.uws.edu.au/research/writingandsociety

phobiaphobia

phobiaphobia


'… the only thing we have to fear is fear itself –
nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses…'
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

'I would like to see an Australian nation that feels comfortable and relaxed...'
- Prime Minister John Howard, 1996

rob's latest chapbook phobiaphobia is a collection on the theme of fear and anxiety. As well as favourites from his previous books sparrow in an airport (from Friendly Street's New Poets Ten) and micromacro, there are new poems on the fear of glass, knees, long words, the figure 8, death, the USA and all the other anxieties that go hand-in-hand with life in the 21st Century...

orders

Australia:

For a personally signed copy to anywhere in Australia within 7 days, send A$6.50 cheque or money order to

rob walker
RMB 481 Cherry Gardens Rd
CHERRY GARDENS
SA 5157

International:

Sorry- personally signed copies not available to overseas readers. Ask Rob Riel for postage rates outside of Australia. email: jandr@hunterlink.net.au

Neighbours

Since I launched this blog in October of 2005 I have frequently eyed off that "next blog" button at the top of the page, but for some reason never got around to clicking it until today. It is always a good idea to check out your neighbours. Mine one blog up happens to be a young kid from Singapore, I think, with an interest in photography, violent weather systems and himself. He seems harmless enough, a little nerdy, perhaps, but then I run a poetry blog. The guy after that seems to be obsessed with motorcars and tits and not much else. One of those places where a bogus "your computer may be infected!!" sign pops up the instant you happen on it. He seems to have managed to remove his "next blog" button, the guy at the end of the street with the two rottweilers and the ten foot fence emblazoned with "my home is my shooting gallery".

All you happy bloggers out there should try the same thing. As I say, it's always good to know who your neighbours are, and it may help give you some idea what the decade's grand pariah, Andrew Keen, is really on about (beyond sour grapes and that odd English petulance borne of the class system and the weather masking itself with intellectual airs and graces).

He really is an antsy little so and so, but does he have a point about this blogger world of ours with its lack of checks and balances, of editorial protocol and the self-censorship of the market? Before answering, I refer you to my previous post headed "The Chains Tighten".

The Chains Tighten

As though further proof were needed as to the parlous state of our local publishing industry, tucked away on page 3 of the SMH yesterday was a report that Angus&Robertson, who control 20% of the local market, has written to a host of small publishers and distributors (such as Giramondo and Black Inc.) demanding an upfront payment of anywhere between $2500 and $20000 by August 17 or they will "have no option but to remove you from our list of authorised suppliers." Needless to say the targetted companies do not have this sort of money, but nor can they afford to be denied access to A&R's 182 bookstores. This is truly a red letter day for Australian publishing.

As a writer with a small but loyal following, I can attest to the great spirit that abounds out there among independent booksellers. Over the years stores such as Better Read than Dead and Gleebooks, not to mention the saintly Kris Hemmensley of Collected Works in Melbourne, have been tireless in their support of writers such as myself. I feel for them right now as they continue to battle against the enormous cut-price chains and can only suggest to all you book lovers out there to walk into your local independent bookstore today and not only voice your disgust for the corporate bullies but maybe even BUY A BOOK! Without the independents, publishers like Black Inc. and Giramondo will probably be faced with extinction, and that would be a tragedy of collosal proportions for not only Australian letters but for any prospect of an informed and reasoning polis. But please, something else besides Harry Potter. Contrary to popular belief, Potter-mania is actually driving up the corporate obsession with margins, not filtering the money down to the grass roots.

Poetry Without Borders

Poetry Without Borders

National Poetry Week Event
Sunday 2 September

Be part of a poetry reading with Chris Wallace Crabbe, Ouyang Yu, Judith Beveridge and Boey Kim Cheng

Poetry Without Borders reading celebrates our cultural diversity during

National Poetry Week. The proposed date will be 2/9/07 at 1.30 for 2pm and the venue will be Customs House Library.

If you feel inspired by this theme send us your expressions of interest.

We are looking for another 5 poets or so to complete the line-up.

Submit 3-5 poems with a short bio to the Poets Union, PO Box 91 Balmain NSW 2041 or email to poetsunion@optusnet.com.au by August 10

Please include all contact details including your email address.

This event is sponsored by

Poets Union Inc. Mascara Poetry Zine


A new monthly poetry gig in Sydney!!!!

Jack Peck has started up WordinHand at The Friend in Hand.

Should be a fun night so bring your friends along and nibble some new words...

WordinHand at The Friend in Hand
58 Cowper St Glebe 9960 2326 $5 Donation
Tuesday August 7 - 7:30 for 8:00 pm

This month WordinHand is delighted to feature two of Sydney's foremost Spoken Word performers...

Tom Jack of Hearts and Bravo Child
Thomas and Bravo have an international reputation for lyrical, rhythmic and wincingly beautiful performance poetry and storytelling.
Working in a tandem set, Tom and Bravo combine their creative strengths to deliver new delights! Plus, a Mystery Guest!

Open Mike

Have you written something and want it out there?
This month and most months from now on, WordinHand has several opportunities for new work to be presented.
Signup at the door.
Supportive environment for new as well as experienced poets.

SLAM

The evening closes with a high-energy SLAM, led by Tom Jack of Hearts.
Audience participation (and how!)
Signup at the door.
First Prize: Bottle of wine PLUS a 5 minute set of your own next month! Second Prize: $20.

You are cordially invited to the launch of

Uncommon Light

By Brook Emery

To be launched by Martin Langford

At

Gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Road, Glebe

On

Saturday 11 August, 2.30 for 3 pm

All Welcome Refreshments provided

Island Press PO Box 1015 Carlton 3053 Email: rpretty@unimelb.edu.au or phone 03 8344 8713

PLAN TO BE PUBLISHED — POETRY WORKSHOP WITH LES WICKS

Saturdays 18 and 25 August, 10am - 4pm NSW Writers’ Centre, Rozelle
NSWWC Members $132, Members' Concession $110, Non-Members $198. GST inclusive. Bring multiple copies of three poems, writing materials and lunch. Morning and afternoon tea are provided.

Of past such workshops given by Poets Union member Les Wicks, participants have commented:
Exceptional, supporting yet challenging, showing (and earning) respect, a privilege to attend this leader’s workshop;
As advertised ­ now ­ threatening, now encouraging but with a great deal of experience and insight ­ which he shared generously; There was also a really good mix of participants ­
serendipity but fabulous; contributed very generously ­ great value for money;
I got more from two days with Les’ workshop than I did over a postgraduate year at university

LES WICKS is widely published both in Australia and overseas, an accessible poet with seven collections to his name. He's been involved in dozens of editing projects over his 30 years as a writer and has done his popular workshops from Hobart to Byron Bay to Broken Hill.

Enquiries ring 9555 9757

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.



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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.'



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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.