Ruby Street

Mark Young of pelican dreaming has some nice words to say about the 'impermanent tenses' hay(na)ku I posted last week. Thanks, Mark. I like reading your hay(na)ku and other poems, long and short, which appear on the pelican dreaming site. Always worth a visit. Hay(na)ku is a form that helps me focus, I've found. I've never been fussed on writing minimalist kinds of forms but this one works for me.

our staggering stuff in nested containers excess looking back while going forward silent or sung too little being graffiti creaking rail the hissing pneumos volcanoes sound lava from old women cradled in their mouths and lyrics quilts culture above the minimalist abyss voices dolcissimo marzipan a little more dreamt of original bliss letting the pleasure go 'way out' signs past

many ways to talk through pulp glass the skin mistakes of language talking within each other in pursuit our own best and holy season still singing in the gloaming gut and hung beating rivvim the reflection I give up in the stroke the body fails even its excuses I watch myself lost inside myself self's changing ratio letterbox pan widescreen hear little stings from phones redundant testing situation with the real/ word life takes place on planets sleek smoky we travel our uncertain seats cheeky corners render moments of disappearance

Speaking of birds (see below), you might also want to check out Mark Weiss's new e-book . It's called 'Different Birds' and is based on his recent visit to Australia. It was a great pleasure to meet Mark while he was here and a few of us Australian poets made some suggestions about his text, some of that along ornithological lines.

three crested pigeons a butcher bird a magpie many noisy mynahs diving aggressively two rosellas and their squabble tone the hovering hawk's wing-tip twitch a galah in the bird-bath nine horses in the paddock under the trees peewee on a horse's back another twitch crane and ducks on the dam two cockatiels screeching currawongs liquid song three people and a little black dog crossing the paddock buzz of a small plane a rabbit running a gutter in the evening possum blinking in the nightlight ... the sad land song they fly over the spike grass and the muddied snake, creek snake death snake, money venom everything but rain ... Visiting my mother yesterday. She will now have to move. They will be building a new suburb in the paddocks next to where she lives. Goodbye birds, goodbye horses, goodbye sky. The drought has dried out everything.

Volume 5 of SALT-LICK New Poetry will be launched, as part of the Melbourne Writers' Festival, by respected Australian poet Barry Hill. Free wine and general conversation will follow readings by contributors Joel Deane, Jen Jewel Brown, Grant Caldwell and Jill Jones (bios below). Saturday 28 August, 4.00 pm at The Tower, CUB Malthouse, South Melbourne. A sample of the cover can be seen in the NEWS section of the new Salt-lick website . Barry Hill is the Poetry Editor of the Australian. His long narrative poem, Ghosting William Buckley, won the NSW Premier’s Award for Poetry and his labour history, Sitting In, won the same award for Non-Fiction. His short fiction has been widely anthologised and translated. He appeared in the Best Essays and the Best Poems of 2003, and his first libretto, Love Strong as Death was performed at The Studio the Sydney Opera House in May this year. His most recent poetry is The Inland Sea (Salt Publishing). Broken Song, his biography...

There's a lovely picture of Ruby Street up on Chris Murray's blog (scroll down a ways). My Ruby Street is a little quieter than that one (though it's had its moments). I wonder how many other Ruby Streets there are in the world. Anyway, when it's party-time in the street, I'll put on my little ruby slippers and dance (dodging the traffic all the while).

Here, courtesy of Tom Payne of the London Daily Telegraph (as opposed to Sydney's own Daily Terror ) is a list of literary reviewese. Oh dear, I do think I've used one or three of these phrases. Note: These are Mr Payne's lists and comments, not my own unless signalled. achingly beautiful anything-fuelled – narratives of a new, edgy type of fiction sometimes called Britfic tend to be fuelled by a range of uppers – amphetamines, caffeine, cocaine, Robbie Williams as good as any novel – why should writers of fact [or poetry - JJ] aspire to the standards of novelists? Cf the truth is often stranger than fiction, infra at its core, **** is a deeply moral work – a handy way for a critic to say that those who don't like the shocking book under review simply don't understand it breakneck speed – no successful thriller will go any slower bursting to get out – of novellas in vast, sprawling epics by this stage, I was ready to hurl the book ac...

The Tasmanian literary blog North of the latte line has just had a classy make-over. Much easier to read and full of good news and info about poetry, especially Australian and even more especially Tasmanian, but with universal appeal. Anne Kellas looks after it along with a posse of Taswegians and ex-Taswegians including Ivy Alvarez and Ralph Wessman of the long-running and excellent mag, The Famous Reporter .

Here is an eclectic list, to say the least, at Third Factory of what folks mainly in the USofA are reading at the moment. Great food for thought for one's own reading list.

Chris Murray has given my new chapbook Struggle and Radiance a neat rap. Jill Jones, Struggle and radiance: ten commentaries, Wild Honey Press, 2004. A beautifully made, hand sewn chapbook. Stunning artwork on cover, a rectangle of splashes, dashes, swirls of color, which might best be described with a fragment of the poetry as "beyond the difference/ trapped in vision" ("I. A Vision"). The poems fairly take off from there, each with Jones customary precision and care for word and deed in life experience. This is a poet with not only ear and eye fully committed to work together in/on the poem, but the entire body of being is ever present, fully an art, then, not only committing distinctly differing parts to the whole, but of engaged commitment to the larger social body of ideas, not least of which that of self-reflective questions of temporal presence, transcendence and influenced by cultural habituation: ... But still a consumer the constant captu...

Hmm, there's something in this remark from Janet Holmes : She says: "Spurred on by Jordan's and John's blogs, I started reading Ben Friedlander's Simulcast, which feels like I'm reading the study guide to an in-joke, given all the name-dropping of Poetics List regulars. Not to say that it isn't great fun! (The alt.fan.silliman fake Usenet group, based upon the alt.fan.madonna messages, is coffee-snortingly funny.) But it just reinforces my belief that male poets are very often pack animals, carefully delineating their territories and eagerly pointing out the unforgiveable differences among their aesthetics (which activities Friedlander satirizes, but also participates in). Women poets exist only if they're solidly related to schools (in both senses of the word)--thus, Friedlander can say that nobody was writing poetry influenced by rock/rock criticism until Joshua Clover came along, when Denise Riley already was quite well established doing it, albei...

What you're doing with the flask gives you morpheus and a little sickness that you've interviewed for the lost world, the falling one. You've marked your nerve built a roof over it left your heart on the kitchen table and something high has flown out the window. Just like you, to unwrap the drug an animal in foil and loosed left of centre packet strewn with all the other scripts for pain in the side. And when you wake and beg, full of life still even that's the tablets inscribed with half-words and formulas. Off with the headphones clap your hands for the funk and blues scrap the flack and forget your heart can be stilled Just in a second in the beat-between silence some old Gaelic cry in a valley something northern anyway But talking and sickness all to much spruiking too much flack to handle. Let rip - let sit in some echt silence. Then press the button. It's not a roar but a pattern you bear waking and sleeping ...

Just received a copy of Chris Murray ’s wonderful and bright-covered chap, Meme Me Up Scotty . I'm loving its music, its sonic play, its fluidity. I read a lot of books where the poems don't sing to me, but Chris's sure do. It’s funny and serious, it’s “shining as a satellite”. fur in slow winter turning the air softer saying “now” - from Jump Phasing 1 In fact, the words ‘yes’ and ‘now’ mean a lot in this book which turns the world’s noise into vibrations, sympathies and conversations. It’s mindful and full of wonder and play - and of the poetry in things, in all our ‘stuff’, the “pollen electricity”. Chris has one of the best, jumpingest blogs I know and this book is both cool and jumping, thinking and loving sounds of poetry. Thanks for sending it to me, Chris, even though it took its time making it down here. ladoremi fababylala ... ( La La Ism )

Submissions are now being called for the next edition of the terrific on-line mag, foam:e . The details are here and the deadline is the end of August. The first edition is available here .

I have just found an absolute treasure. A database of images by the great New Zealand artist, Colin McCahon . I saw an exhibition of McCahon's work last year, A Question of Faith , and it was mindblowing. The way McCahon worked with text, the power of the painted word, so to speak. Anyway, this discovery is thanks to Martin Edmond. Check out his blog, luca antara .

This day is clouds and earth in our crisp bitter bodies not our usual knowledge here journeyed from mountains to city plain snowish wind and rain virga a torn drape from cumulus moist and dry meeting evanescing into the halfway what we need is blown we see this wispy precipitant virgin thought of rain not arriving any time soon ... I learnt a new word today - virga which more or less means the light floaty kind of rain that evaporates before it reaches the ground (especially when the lower reaches of the air are low in humidity). I do lots of 'weather' poems. I always recall, inaccurately probably, that John Ashbery once said there are three great themes in poetry: love, death and the weather. When I tell people this they often laugh but I don't really understand why. Seems pretty obvious to me.