Ruby Street

Miles of reviews now up at the latest Galatea Resurrects . Head resurrectionist and gal with the keys to the cellar of poetry, Ms Eileen Tabios, has pulled poetry reviews together from all over. And has kind words to say about my own not-so-slim volume, Broken/Open . "A radiant lightness stubbornly permeates the poems in Jill Jones’ Broken/Open ". Apparently and appropriately, the writing of the review was accompanied by a glass of wine. I can only approve, but want to know what the tipple was.

We are alive with the times with sounds that gather between mountains, cold and black dim plumes of willows between mismatched feelings and unknown climates clothing of birds, ash-coloured nearly calm, almost quiet. We agree we need silence but like everyone else we walk to clear water without sight. Under sun and rain the entrails of language torn between animals and stones not calm, not quiet.

... I was looking up at the red of the blood moon . Some people weren't looking but I stopped to talk to one of my neighbours about it. She watched the whole eclipse. It may not have been as spectacular as seeing it away from city lights, but it was still weirdly strange and beautiful to see a three dimensional moon rather than a flat disc in the sky. eclipse early heat this red in sky talk love brief filled with time

something drops through air the silvereyes work of birds where money never lands

chlorophyll wind beat vegetable spring growth wages of distance to the crumbling ground

the material gathers flocks premises degrees of flux vibrant and plastic bruised easily

clouds make sky into other spaces glad for clearness? remember the birds particulars

Sitting in a Korean restaurant tonight - the usual 'everything with kimchi ' - and they were playing 'Light My Fire' . Not that remarkable, but it was the original long, album version where Ray Manzarek goes for it on the organ. OK, maybe it's just me. They played 'More Than Feeling' later, which I guess evens things out. The meal was perfectly good, by the way. Narukorean in Elizabeth Street just opposite the orifice.

Thanks to all who've sent me and my family sympathies and kind wishes (and hugs), either via the blog, email, or in other ways. It means a lot. We've had a house full of flowers. My mother would have liked that.

I have been away from the blog and other things for a while. My mother died on 9 August and finally we said goodbye today at a small family and friends gathering. dark hides nothing travelled all these years winged leaf, stone life to ground breath the material returned light Norah 1918-2007

Salt magazine has moved from print to online. John Kinsella has just recently put together the first new issue . It features a wide variety of works from writers such as Mary Jo Bang, Simin Behbahani, Alireza Behnam, Javant Biarujia, Judith Bishop, Michael Brennan, David Brooks, John Burnside, Alison Croggon, Keki Daruwalla, Regina Derieva, Laurie Duggan, Gerard Greenway, Paul Hardacre, Jessica Harkins, Dennis Haskell, Jill Jones, Katia Kapovich, Peter Larkin, Tim Liardet, John Matthias, Janet McAdams, David McCooey, Luska Mengham, Peter Middleton, Peter Minter, Philip Nikolayev, Tom Nolan, Geoffrey O'Brien, Sean O'Brien, Amir Or, Alvin Pang, James Quinton, Mark Rudman, Gig Ryan, Tracy Ryan, Tahereh Saffarzadeh, Philip Salom, Fiona Sampson, Vivian Smith, Susan Stewart, Robert Sullivan, Maria Takolander, Alf Taylor,Jeet Thayil, John Tranter, Geoff Ward, John Wilkinson, Robert Wrigley, and others.

Annette has an new photography exhibition, Wallworx, currently in Newtown, if anyone is around and about until 19 August. Wallworx engages with the work of stencil street artists from urban centres around Australia between 2002 and 2005 and explores her interest in the visual dialogue that exists between artists and genres as well as the effects generated by street ephemera in Australian cities. The venue is the New View Gallery, 277 Australia Street, Newtown. Opening hours are Tuesdays and Thursday from 5pm-9pm, and Saturday and Sunday from 11am - 6pm. The gallery is about 50 metres from Newtown Station and is located next to the highly popular Oscillate Wildly restaurant (yes, named after The Smiths song) on one side and directly across from the local court and Newtown cop shop.

From Sina Queryras' Lemon Hound blog: Does nature insist on line breaks, for instance? How does form fit in nature poetry? “Our hearts took on the shape of the stream,” [Juliana] Spahr writes, they “took on the shape of whirligigs swirling across the water,” our “hearts took on many things.” And poetry is perhaps how we carry that. And maybe language poetry, whatever or however one might try to contain that, is a similar place of wild, a place of things not immediately named, a place of remaining open. And when the lyric impulse, that honest voice, that vulnerable stretto meshes with language, with intention, with procedure—then whatever side of the border or gender, or political spectrum the project may originate, it knocks this reader out.

THE MATERIAL POEM an e-anthology of text-based art & inter-media writing The Material Poem is a new e-anthology, edited by James Stuart and published by non-generic productions. It features the work of some 28 Australian poets, artists and critics, all of whom are engaged with poetry, and more broadly language, as a material form. This body of work is inter-disciplinary, inter-media and often collaborative, spanning a wide variety of formal contexts – page, screen, canvas, space, book, performance and more. The Material Poem showcases the vibrancy of experimental writing in Australia, demonstrating how writing functions as a practice that is never purely literary. Available now as a free download NOW. CONTRIBUTORS ALEX SELENITSCH | AMANDA STEWART | CHRIS EDWARDS | ELENA KNOX | FRANZ EHMANN | GARETH JENKINS |HAZEL SMITH | JAMES STUART | JILL JONES & ANNETTE WILLIS | JOHANNA FEATHERSTONE | KLARE LANSON | KOMNINOS ZERVOS | KRISTIN HANNAFORD | LINDA CARROLI | LINDA MARIE WALK...

how long a line before it breaks how a line fills or empties to contain a line - or it contains you, in that moment the page, the line where does the push come from? see the line before you read it

The newly established Australian Poetry Centre currently has an e-mag blog, called zest , which is publishing news and features on poetry. It is a sign of the changes that are happening. One of the features is a short piece by me responding to some well-known words by Ezra Pound. I had to do this article quickly so it recycles some other things I've written, and develops some thoughts I've been working on for a while, about the poem on the page, about how the line works. I have been influenced by reading Rosemary Huisman's book, The Written Poem: Semiotic Conventions from Old to Modern English (Cassell, 1998) , which is well worth your time. There is much to quote in her book: "The interrelating of sound pattern and visual line is so well established that modern poetry, even when without traditional metrical regularity or rhyme scheme, may encourage us to read in a certain way according to the line breaks."