world clock

jet-lagged

wide awake

in the city

that never sleeps

it's still too early

to locate the mood

for saturday

martin place and

wildlife

TINA

TINA has arrived and again fulfilled its promise as a festival of enticing thought and creativity. For those who mightn’t know it (after 13 years?), THIS IS NOT ART is an Arts Festival, an “Independent, Emerging and Experimental Arts Festival” according to the Official Program Guide, held annually in Newcastle, across a range of interesting city sites.

One thing to like about the Festival, from a local angle, is that it introduces even the locals to the city they live in. You attend the festival, alongside the many others coming in from Sydney, Melbourne and everywhere else, as a “tourist”, exploring the city's surprising potential, feeling that, no matter how insular old Castelnuovo might seem, you’ll never really know it. TINA’s also resourceful, making imaginative use of the many otherwise disused buildings scattered around the place. And there’s the feeling of a general relaxing of civic regulation in the number of smaller temporary licensed venues operating as part of the festival, and nurturing in their own way the kind of spirit that any successful festival of this kind requires.

If these things are important at all, they’re incidental to the real appeal of the festival: an experimental arts focus. The festival guide promotes the experimental as a priority; the first pages of the guide tell you, “independent” “innovative”, talk of “experimental art practices”, “exploratory practitioners”, “thinkers”! In the end this seems a fair description, of the festival’s intentions and of the things it delivers.

I went to four presentations over a couple of days. The first was, “Late Night at the Gun Bar: Poet’s Guide to Philosophy” which was held at the United Services Club on Watt Street, a venue I didn’t know existed but am very happy to have found. The presentation was truly terrific - seven young poets and thinkers talking about poetry and philosophy and the relationships the two might share – for three hours! and everyone glued to their seats (a grand final atmosphere). Melbourne poet and editor Tim Wright introduced the evening with a reading of John Forbes’ “Ode to Karl Marx”, a poem which, in a summative sense I guess, explores ideas of theory and practice, cause and effect, consciousness, body, mind and so on. This then led into some illuminating discussion. Jessica Wilkinson said that reading philosophy can be about the personal breakthroughs we make, the little bits you take away and what that means to you (which is one of the little bits I now take away from the three hours’ discussion). The panel was Jal Nicholl, Keri Glastonbury, Nick Keys, Jessica Wilkinson, Harriet Johnson, Tim Wright, Stu Hatton and Sam Langer. I place my order now for more of the same next year please.

The second presentation I attended was a talk on coterie in the arts. This again was an engaging discussion. It looked at the range of factors that might lead to the forming of a coterie, political intellectual or social, online networking as a support mechanism for young and independent artists, the problem of dominant paradigms in arts culture, and lots more. Aden Rolfe, Keri Glastonbury, Mike Rosenthal and Ben Byrne are very easy to listen to and like.

At once an acknowledgement of the inherent complexities of philosophical enquiry and a repudiation of the myth of philosophy’s impenetrability, Tom Lee’s presentation on the cosmology and metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, was another “paper session” I thoroughly enjoyed. Tom was joined by Jennifer Hamilton who spoke on the significances of meteorological references in King Lear. Neatly-timed, intelligent questions from facilitator Ella O’Keefe were also helpful. I should mention I was late coming in (nicked out to check the grand final score) and missed a video link-up that featured Sydney poet Astrid Lorange. Something I would have liked to see. Hi Astrid if, by chance, you’re reading this.

Saturday night saw a return to the Services Club (Gun Bar) for an event titled “The Poetics of Intoxication”, led by Melbourne poet and author of the forthcoming, How to be Hungry. The subject matter varied enormously. Readings in French. Impressive live translation by Jal Nicholl. Deleuze on Fitzgerald. For a while gender hijacked the whole thing. Dust and nebulae. Rimbaud appeared and re-appeared, though, unlike an irrepressible audience member, knew when to sit down. Something about a super-poet. Of course, lots and lots more to think about and enjoy. Poetics and Intoxication was with Stu Hatton, Tom Lee, Bella Li, Sam Langer, Corey Wakeling, Josh Comyn and Jal Nicholl.

teacup

polling

light street

house

offering so much inspect bustle investment upstairs home suit arrange of buyers
handy to school and WC minutes away and garden city 575m2 downstairs is a “den”
for dad plus to in-ground spacious carport but this inground C.B.D presented MUST!
meet julian million dollar air con carpet & lino pleasant 5 mins to shops potential
shed won’t last too good loads second pool block walk & Beaumont teenage ideal
screened be quick bring back the sparkle street suburban A MUST! of the ensuite
on site guaranteed 439 000 O’Toole Street paradise of land two living area’s won’t
last & lovingly paved the pool .com.au 4th renovate later back 1st time Waratah out
standing a special panoramic agreement jump to the golf course workshop lifestyle
fantastic Medowie Charm & rent kitchen a kitchen be quick to transport wood fire
warm and boasts in-law open house as new caesar overlooking the sporting areas
on a lounge rumpus Mt Sugarloaf a study this property in robe & walk dble with all
1300m2 average 9ft ceilings is finished remote and child friendly L/up garage open today!

yacaba

lines for a long weekend

the stair bridge
to platform two

offers a view
to the industrial island

-

steel hangars
date palms silver cylinders in rows

leafy glare on the water
& too much light in the photo

-

the colliery line
lies embedded there

this heritage orders
going nowhere

-

car enthusiasts
patrol the foreshore

world cup patriots
prefer bright convertibles

-

...by winters
only patrolled beach.

no vacanacies
at the lighthouse hotel

-

the plaza
belongs to crown

memorial drives
a black spot.

-

she was embarrassed
when she

forgot the words
to the anthem

-

down hill cardboarding
counting the waves

tango-ing again
in new ceramic hips

-

live musics
coming in from across the water

& a ferry to that place
we call overseas

-

haiku (counting poem)

forty two days and forty
two nights and sixteen hours it pours
oil in the Gulf

aerial view

stormy weather

poems!

mascara otoliths snorkel

george street/central

lambton pool

There Will Be Blood

Last week we missed the Film Society season opener, The Great Dictator, but this week we got to There Will Be Blood. It was so different to the other two films I've seen this week (the class and A Serious Man); it's an epic about the discovery of oil in California. Its characters inhabit an extraordinary world where, with the oil boom and the motor-car, everything's rapidly changing. The remotest parts of the U.S. are now linked to the big industrial centres and, with the cash and the desire, a hundred mile oil pipeline running all the way to the Pacific seems perfectly feasible. What makes it interesting is, in telling the evolution of America, it captures much of the rapacious spirit of modern capitalism, this brought out beautifully in the much-talked-about ending which reminds me stylistically of a 1930's political cartoon where isms were often drawn as evil and beastly - in this case it's Daniel Day Lewis, embodiment of greed, standing over the prostrate form of religion.

the class

I'd been wanting to see this film for a while. It's about a teacher of French who works in a school in Paris. It's shot in an objective/documentary style with lots of quick editing suggesting multiple points of view and an emphasis on diegetic sound - scraping of chairs, kids yelling in the yard, tense exchanges between the teachers and their pupils. The characters are interesting - the main character, the teacher, particularly so. He seems to care about his pupils but can't seem to help making inflammatory comments; he doesn't always respect the students' honesty and doesn't really understand them culturally. (Somehow this doesn't make him any less likeable.) The school seems super-strict and the penalties for misbehaviour excessive. What it does well though is describe the problem most schools face of making and enforcing rules while ensuring individual fairness; this becomes the focus of the last half of the film where the teacher, Francois, acts against an African-born student who then faces the school disciplinary panel and, more dauntingly, the wrath of his parents. The ending's very effective; the narrative moves on from its main problem, and never returns, but leaves the viewer to ponder it all - which seemed a gesture towards the idea of individual regard/collective disregard. It wasn't as good as I'd hoped but not bad. It'd be a great resource for teachers of pedagogy.

A Serious Man

There seem to be a number of things the Coen Brothers got just right in their recent film, A Serious Man. The first thing I noticed about it was the pace was right – for a film that tells the story of an ordinary life, the narrative ambles, with extended scenes (longer than they need to be) made up of everyday dialogue. It’s deliberately slow to go anywhere which entirely suits its subject matter. When it does appear to venture out beyond the ordinary, like when Larry’s depressed brother crosses the border into Canada, we find that Larry’s only dreaming. So we come back to Larry’s plethora of problems. This is where it works. Too many films purport to tell stories of the everyday only to lose sight of that intention, developing an ending that seems altogether extraordinary, or at least out there and beyond any of the experiences most of us have had living in suburbia. Sure these things happen but…So this Coen film is about control. As a film whose topic is ordinary things, it insists on its own ordinariness, which paradoxically lifts it out of the ordinary. It’s slow, a bit ponderous, but never banal. It got mainly middling reviews, the grounds for which I can’t remember. It’s worth a look.

Last Day of Term

Get among

that rusty filing cabinet's unruly drawers.

Half a class

Says the holidays have begun.

Video filler.

Heath Ledger's Lord Ulrich

(von Liechtenstein)

cashing in

at the armoury exchange

all talk's in florins.

shades of Ned Kelly

behind the visor

his Saxon blood

the 'modern' soundtrack

surprises with Golden Years

Noone knows Bowie's

an exaggeration -

Brandon does.

sport

the sun wouldn’t look out of place
here but doesn’t show & leaves the beach

cold. this side of a window streaked with rain
the lifesaver finishes her Reflections trilogy.

new southerly

The new issue of Southerly is out; it features poetry by Pam Brown, Peter Dawncy, John Tranter, Keri Glastonbury, Ken Bolton, Laurie Duggan, Kate Lilley, Gig Ryan, Kerry Leves, Ali Jane smith, Connie Barber, Rae Desmond Jones, Lucy Dougan, myself, and many others. It also contains some compelling critical work including a piece by John Tranter in which he examines his many, varied approaches to writing poetry (worth it for this item alone).

venerdi

foam:e

The new foam:e (7) is online. This issue's editor, Louise Waller, did a great job - correspondence was prompt and I thought it was a good idea that she posted a test site which accommodated any late changes contributors wanted to make. The current issue features work by KJ, Iain Britton, Jena Woodhouse, Stu Hatton, Lyn Reeves, Michael Aiken, Natalie Knight and others including me. (A link to my two poems.)

programming

"i couldnt help but notice

in your powerpoint

presentation a typo

graphical world war eleven"


the way the girls

in the middle row

custom those circles

& hearts over their eyes


or pock-marked walls

wear posters as masks

note passing? verbal detour

with eyes like these eyes fore


see the next blind consensus

call this kind of rhyme coincidence?

school bell/e & siren alike

to your minimalist shoelaces -


know nothing eludes me

out of the box

Last Friday night I attended the Sydney launch of the Puncher and Wattman poetry anthology, Out of the Box. Comprised of ninety-seven poems by thirty-three gay and lesbian poets from around Australia, it's edited by leading poets Michael Farrell and Jill Jones. There were some memorable readings on the night, and beyond the event of the launch itself, it's been a delight making my way through the anthology. Great stuff Jill and Michael, and Puncher and Wattman.

away

Ralph Wessmann at Walleah Press recently accepted a poem of mine for his journal, famous reporter, to be published in print this July. Meanwhile, if you like, you can read the poem ('away from home') online - here.

saturday

Styx Creek

hello again

revised

letter (late fall)

late fall if i can call it that

not that the weather cares

making a mess of main park


know you’re not at home

at the streetcar stop wear the effects

of the snowplough’s bow wave


ottawa-coteau-?-montreal

in a bilingual province

i know half the language


a bottle spins

its own translation

the juice from Florida is 100% & pure


the diary says

if the island prison

library’s an escape


writing the air letter was

taking my homesickness tablets

or you write i wait


but it’s not us just the mail

the more prescient of beginnings

dear j, hope this letter finds you…

hello

myall river

skipping south

drumming

over bridges


this side

of brooklyn


what’s left of the tin fleet

leans into paperbark


at this hour

our waves protected


successive coves

laid open like geodes


and a tide-line measured

i imagine in divisions


of soft/hard sand

parcels of damp weed


exit the F3 for the M2, 7

attract electronic toll


industrial has nothing

to do with making it


even with the nav-man

he was hopeless with directions


black slashes

in the trees


do i take the call

while at the wheel?


"keep an eye out

for the turn off


if you get to ulladulla

you’ve gone too far

the much-needed break

At the moment I'm enjoying a break from work - spending most days reading and lazing around of a morning before heading out a little later for a swim at Newcastle Beach. The weather (mainly grey) has been ideal for doing things outside - riding, swimming, walking. I've been writing whenever I can; I'm tidying up a couple of poems that have been lying around for a while and trying to push on with new ones. As far as work goes, I'll be going back to the same job this year - teaching English to high school students - but hope to take up an exchange teaching position in the UK for 2011. To readers, friends, family, all best for a great year, wherever you might be.

tuesday reading

beyond an invisible gauze 
literally steps from here
your focus   at that point 
everything the day offers -
 

young and grey a magpie 
kazoos in a patch of ‘garden’ 
the wet lawn like f troop by default
on nine signals a lengthy delay
  

in play   while thought lists 
that vapor trail of foot prints  
leading back to your reading -
so little one can do   one does it all
   

within the hour   no closer to what 
to call this our new cryptonymous decade 

newcastle baths