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Showing posts from April, 2007

ekphrasing

Of course, next month is the Sydney Writers Festival , and as part of it there's Poets Paint Words , which is curated by Peter Minter and Lisa Slade, who commissioned a number of Australian poets to write a poem inspired by a painting in the Newcastle Region Art Gallery collection. Their choice, not ours. Poets involved include Luke Davies, Martin Harrison, Keri Glastonbury, Kate Fagan, Jaya Savige, Les Murray, Dorothy Porter, John Tranter, Judith Beveridge, Jill Jones, Peter Minter, John Kinsella, Robert Adamson. The exhibition runs until 17 June and during the Writers Festival there will be readings by a number of the poets.

up the junction

Finally Mark Weiss's Junction Press has got itself a website. Now you can order lots of good poetry books online including New and Selected Poems 1961-1996 by Rochelle Owens, Stet: Selected Poems by Jose Kozer, and Mark's own excellent Fieldnotes .

new e-mag

The first edition of Mascara , an Australasian-based poetry zine went on-line recently, featuring poetry by Chris Kelen, Ouyang Yu, Yi Tang, Libby Hart, Cyril Wong, Keri Glastonbury, Agnes Vong, Cath Vidler, Nathan Curnow, Jan Owen and others ... It was launched last weekend to time in with the International Love Poetry Hate Racism Weekend which featured transnational and multicultural poetry readings around the world.

life

A lot has been going on in my world for some while so I haven't been able to get near the blog. Thanks to Meredith and Ivy and others for good wishes. Things seem to be working out. However, along with everything else, my main computer decided to fade in a major way three weeks ago. I think the fan has karked it. Oh well, it was nearly seven years old. I'm limping along with the not-so-young laptop. Anyway, I'm hoping that next week will be clearer for me. I'm having a little bit of down time and intend to do some veging as well as some writing and reading. In the meantime I will note some things I've been meaning to mention for a while.

today, in the midst

‘Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood …’ Dante, Canto 1, The Divine Comedy - Inferno ‘I was doing all right, and now I’m in the midst of it’ My mother, 6/4/07, a hospital, Sydney

dew

evening’s quiet land lowers a crystal blind look at this surface thin as dew dreaming where I am foam that damps tomorrow that shines up crowds and swims the river a terrifying lucidity making us whiter than hair

frost and iron

In the slow dark this frost basin is written, a bright month of home’s dream-matter enhancing the white freezing bed of mine We’re allowed daybreak and the monkey’s cry but cloud remains along us folds the mountain and 10,000 river banks a boat where we are small Autumn constellations rise on astringent gardens that eternal life is bitter while the country runs with the moon of war the desert situation encampments of silk and iron

That no-one will recall

Wind starts its function, and its sadness. The compass staggers around edges. The coast waits along its whipping walls. My thoughts delay horizons. The reef is sorry, the sand extravagant. Other times are now confused. Your laughter and its refreshment, o those matrices! There’s no holding to account. Is this my method that hammers the distant rectangle of the separated? These facts disturbing coolness, exaggerating a certain way that does not make more. Movement marries the smoky dolor of the gyre, the extremity of years. In sad inquest, tonight clusters thought. Whale surface, south wind, a rogue swell. That no-one will recall again these rocks those times, the tides and agitation of crevices and wings, the stretched jouissance. What unravels the remain.