Ruby Street

For your listening pleasure, take a walk to Jeff Davis’s blog , with a link to an interview and reading Jeff did with the poet Thomas Meyer for the Wordplay radio program. The show itself is a lovely wander through ideas about conversational and poly-vocal poetry, the strange ways of influence, the Dao as a voice speaking – “tell me everything you know” – the lyric as something overheard, of letting the lines get mixed up, composition as a kind of gamelan, and taking a computer print-out for a walk. As well, of course, the poems which are wonderful and moving, poems of loss, endings and letting go.

Check Chris Hamilton-Emery's 'letters from our editor' . They are a treat, indeed a cack, especially for anyone who has ever edited any kind of poetry publication.

Just out - a new anthology of poems and stories about Adelaide , the city where I currently work and live (most of the time).

The pod of poets site is hot off the presses, so to speak, courtesy of ABC Radio National and the Poetica program. It's a series of eleven, 40-minute podcasts of Australian poetry, read by the authors - a mix of established and up-and-coming poets. The poets are: Robert Adamson, Les Murray, Joanne Burns, John Kinsella, Josephine Rowe, Craig Billingham, L.K. Holt, Aidan Coleman, Jayne Fenton Keane, Martin Harrison, Sam Wagan Watson, Kathryn Lomer, Esther Ottaway, John Clarke and Jordie Albiston. I played some part in this one as it's one of the last projects I dreamed up and set in motion before leaving my arts bureaucrat job last year. I won't go into the ins and outs of it, but I do remember talking to Mike Ladd , Adelaide poet and da man at Poetica , about what a poetry podcast site might look like and how it might happen on a very hot March day last year in Adelaide. (Of course, it wasn't for me to decide the poets, but it's a pretty broad mix, as you can see.) ...

crows meet ....... on pine branches summer shade ....... summer long you and I ....... looser now in this slow- ....... finishing twilight

Singer and musician, John Martyn, has left the building . His music was full of Grace and Danger, of Root Love, and his songs accompanied me over many years.

Message from Mark: February may be the shortest month, but that doesn't mean that Otoliths has to follow suit. Issue twelve , the southern summer issue , has just gone live, & it's as large as ever, with its usual wide-ranging selection of prose, poetry & things visual. Included in this issue are David-Baptiste Chirot, Denise Duhamel, Raymond Farr, J. S. Murnet, Tom Taylor, James Sanders, Martin Edmond, Kane X. Faucher, Andrew Taylor, Christopher Major, Forrest Roth, Cath Vidler, Angela Genusa, C.E. Chaffin, John Lowther, Mary Ellen Derwis, Joe Balaz, Mary Ellen Derwis & Joe Balaz, Maria Garcia Teutsch, Felino Soriano, Bobbi Lurie, Bill Drennan, Jeff Harrison, Sheila E. Murphy & John M. Bennett, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen & John M. Bennett, John M. Bennett & various collaborators, John M Bennett, Adam Robinson, Anny Ballardini, Michael Rothenberg, Jared Schickling & John Bloomberg-Rissman, Tom Beckett interviewing John Bloomberg-Rissman, John C. Goodman,...