forward slash launch in Melbourne

forward slash will be launched by Corey Wakeling and will feature readings by contributors Michael Farrell and Duncan Hose. The launch is part of The Poetry Symposium 2012, this year titled The Political Imagination: Contemporary Postcolonial and Diasporic Poetries.

The Political Imagination is a symposium that brings together some of Australia’s leading poets and poetry scholars to investigate the state of contemporary postcolonial and diasporic poetries. It aims to explore the contentious, at times controversial, issues surrounding the production and discussion of poetry and poetics in work that engages with the politics of the postcolonial, the transnational and the diasporic.

Edited by Matthew Hall and Jeremy Balius, the first edition features:

Duncan Hose
Michael Farrell
a.rawlings
Louis Armand
Kemeny Babineau
Astrid Lorange
Jay MillAr

“In showcasing seven of the most exciting writers either side of the Pacific, this collection demonstrates just how strikingly resonant Australian and Canadian contemporary poetries are in challenging pretexts of language, nation, and the interior.  Here we have undressed affect, meddlesome crossings of intimate and ideological landscapes, and ebullient spurs against aesthetic and political complacency.  It is, in short, redactive iridescence.” – Ann Vickery

Volumes of forward slash will be available for purchase at the event for 10 smackers.

Thanks to Ann, Ali, Lyn and Corey for making this happen.

When: 4:30pm, Thursday 12 April 2012
Where: Deakin Prime, Level 3, 550 Bourke Street, Melbourne

Visible Ink & my Confession; or, Saint Mathilda & the 69th Psalm

The cool kids’ kindness abounds over at Visible Ink, having included a li’l something of mine in their 22nd edition. It’s a story-as-letter called Confession; or, Saint Mathilda and the 69th Psalm.

It may or may not be about lots of things like Fantastical Realism and ish like that in Regensburg Germany and Wien Austria.

I think it’s been out for ages and I think I missed the party by a month, but my copy arrived in the post today.

It’s available for acquisition in Melbourney-type places I presume.

Pulsatin’ to the back beat… It’s page seventeen!

hey ho, let’s go!
hey ho, let’s go!

They’re formin’ in a straight line
It’s page seventeen!

Melbourne’s annual literary mag covered in leaves features my poem ‘tempest, steal me away’.

& who else is pilin’ in the backseat? Oh, only AS Patric, Graham Nunn, Matthew Hall, Allison Browning, Matt Hetherington & a revival of all kinds of other hepcats!

It can be bought.

Hi-fives to Tiggy Johnson & Ashley Capes.

This issue whooshes as much as the ipad Eric Yoshiaki Dando made out of leaves!

Inducted into the Deutsches Literaturarchiv

The Deutsches Literaturarchiv (German Literature Archive) recently contacted English-language / German (and occasionally Spanish) multi-lingual online literary and art journal regal 8 // shelf 8 with a proposal to permanently and independently archive the journal for its literary and artistic merit.

The process of induction into the archive has commenced.  Christoph Lebies will not be happy when he finds out.

Located in Marbach am Neckar in Baden-Württemberg, the Deutsches Literaturarchiv awesomely describes itself as:

Das Deutsche Literaturarchiv Marbach ist eine der bedeutendsten Literaturinstitutionen weltweit. In seinen Sammlungen vereinigt und bewahrt es eine Fülle kostbarster Quellen der Literatur- und Geistesgeschichte. Es dient der Literatur, der Bildung und der Forschung.

_______________________________________________

The German Literature Archive Marbach is the most important literary institution in the world.  Its collections bring together and store a wealth of the most valuable wells of literary and cultural history.   Its purpose is for literature, research and development.

Note: Geistesgeschichte is untranslatable.  It’s a branch of study on the undercurrents of cultural manifestations, within a people’s history, that are specific to a period of time.  Blam!  So awesome.

The best in the world!  A wealth of wells!  These guys don’t mess around.  And neither should we.

Stylus Poetry Journal Issue 37 – Street/Life

Another Lost Shark, aka Graham Nunn, aka the G.Nunn, aka mystic journeyman on a slow train, guest edited the thirty-seventh issue of Stylus Poetry Journal.

Boldly defying technical difficulties, this edition appears burnt onto the cedars of the Another Lost Shark website while/until Stylus recuperates.

Themed Street/Life, G.Nunn explains the background forewording with:

In 2004, I traveled to Bali for the inaugural Ubud Readers and Writers Festival. It was a life changing experience for me. A question that has resonated deep in the cavity of my chest since returning from that trip was asked of me at the airport as I waited to board the plane home: “Why in your country do you not see people out talking on the street?”

G.Nunn knocked on the doors of Amanda Joy, Andy Jackson, Ashley Capes, Emily XYZ, Hinemoana Baker, Jacqueline Turner, Jessika Tong, Matt Rader, Max Ryan, Steve Kilbey, Suzanne Jackson and myself for poems that

stepped out from behind the eyes of the onlooker and inhabited the street, poems that blended the high and low cultural registers that the street has to offer, poems that captured the voice of street life.And each poet has answered the call…

When G.Nunn came a-knockin’. I wrote We’re the William St Brigade for him, as well as dusted off a 7 year old poem from my Berlin days called Oh Weary Night (in response to Bob Dylan’s liner notes in Highway 61 Revisited) that had no home until now.

G.Nunn aptly sums up this Stylus edition with:

These streets are living, breathing organisms possessed by a spirit of their own. I welcome you to suspend reality for a while and take a walk with me, to open yourself to Street/Life, to experience the elegance and decay, the beauty and the slaughter… you never know, you might come back changed.

Go drink a heart-felt sip of darkly-felt truth from the Stylus Poetry Journal #37 – Street/Life.

Paint the leaves red, these cats hold hands

The cats who hold it down for the English-language / Japanese translation bi-lingual literary scene are one brazen gang of rowdies and ruffians led by a Battlecat-riding He-Man of a master of the universe, come down to us from Eternia pulsing from power granted by Grayskull.

I’m talkin’ ’bout editor and author Mississippi Kirk A.C. Marshall, of course.

With Australia’s first (and only) English-language / Japanese translation bilingual literary journal Red Leaves/ Koyo about to ignite the passions of young and fiesty men and sending fair women across two countrysides into a swoon, Mississippi croaked into my ear-piece demanding urgent lyrics for promotional purposes.  (A story of mine appears in the journal.)

Thus was born(e) I don’t hurry overnight, birthed onto a Red Leaves bookmark, demarcating words of mine translated into Japanese for the first time.

I don’t hurry

Way out past the ship masts
that look like fakirs’ beds
of needles in the harbour,

ship lights blink like Christmas lights
on the gutter of the sea.

Whoever hung those lights did a sh*tty job.

I would not be proud of my house
if my Christmas lights looked like that.

If we tried to swim out there, I’d say
There they go who know; they might not
have a dollar to their names,
but they sure got a lot of sense.

And everybody’d chuckle.

Let’s swim out into the night with
one stroke for the lonely-hearted,
one stroke for the left-behinds.

I’ll keep watch
to see if we make headway,
occasionally shout directions,
but my goodness, will they listen,
those fools?

Sweep me up wind and carry me within earshot.

I don’t hurry for heaven.
So what?  I don’t hurry.

Bush Jelly, WA

Early Western Australian settlers used to boil a type of red seaweed (Betaphycus speciosum) to make jelly.  They called it bush jelly.  You can find a recipe in a Bush Book called Marine Plants of the Perth Region, though I don’t recommend trying to eat it.  Or so I hear…

Unrelated, although also totally related, there’s a current debate in WA’s Wheatbelt regarding the increasing salinity in the soil.  Some farmers are proposing converting wheat farms into seaweed farms, which thrive in high saline areas.  Seaweed is a multi-billion dollar global industry.

The idea of seaweed in the Wheatbelt is so fabulously outrageous, that I wrote about it.

Bush Jelly, WA found a home in the equally fabulously-titled journal “Landscapes Vol 3 Issue 2 Summer 2009 ‘Hydrobotanica’ – The Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language at Edith Cowan University”.

Here’s Bush Jelly, WA