Finally it is done!

The not really all that secret project I’ve been working on has been released. The 2009 Overload Poetry Festival website is online!

Programme and venue details, as well as performer biographies are all available. Also featured are notes on our Partnered Projects (see what we are doing with the magnificent Bristol Poetry Festival and the incomparable Going Down Swinging) and details on registering for poetry workshops and the Overload Poetry Slam.

Dear readers, apologies for taking so long to update, I’ve been flat out between work (1 x 16-hour day < fun) and other engagements.

Speakers Corner, part of the Emerging Writer’s Festival was an amazing amount of fun. I described it to one person as “Big Day Out for poetry”. Five stages, screaming poetry over the noise of passing trams on one stage, doing the next set sounding like Tom Waits, getting to see a bunch of my favorite local poets perform one after the other, it was a big big pile of fun. Hats off to the curators (amongst whom, Sean M. Whelan and Zöe Barron’s names are listed) and thanks to them for inviting me and making it such an awesome gig.

I really wish I had made it to the other gigs but I seem to be surrounded and buried in busy right now. Partially work and family doing it’s thing, other projects and my own writing get squished in there wherever I can fit it too.

In the mean time, here’s something I’ve actually been working on. It’s a response to an Ian McBryde poem called “Reports From The Palace“. McBryde fans out there will be aware he has several poems by that name, this is in response to the one in his book “Equatorial“.

Reading: This fortnight’s London Review Of Books
Listening: Billy Bragg podcast ep. 14

First off, apologies, dear reader, for being so slack on the updates. I’m focussing my time on the web on another project that will soon be launched. More news as I feel happy talking about it!

The Year of Poetry course is going swimmingly, one of my chief goals was to get myself into a position where I’m writing more than a poem a month on average. Today I had the second of six workshops with Peter Bakowski and really enjoyed it, the group discussions were good and the exercises gave me a pair of decent poems and another pair that need more work but make decent starts.

Don’t forget, I’ll be performing at Speaker’s Corner this coming noon-4pm on Sunday, 24th May as part of the Emerging Writers Festival. It takes place at the Federation Square Atrium. There will be me, Maxine Clark, Cha-Ya Clancy, Santo Cazzatti, Michelle Dabrowski, Dragonfly, Meg Dunn, Crazy Elf, Julez, Anthony O’Sullivan, Marc Testart, it will be made entirely of awesome!

I will be appearing in Speaker’s Corner, an event that is part of the Emerging Writer’s Festival.
It will be held in the Atrium of Federation Square on 24th of May, from 11am to 4pm.

The EWF’s Speakers Corner will be the major free public event for the 2009 Emerging Writers’ festival providing an opportunity for visitors to, and residents of, the City of Melbourne a chance to hear a variety of performance writers, experience and emerging present their works in a free forum. Inspired by the political soap boxing made famous in Hyde Park – London, Speakers Corner will combine spoken word, poetry, monologues, story telling, readings and opinion pieces in an innovative presentation of this work, breaking down the normal performer/ audience divide to a more dynamic blend of street theater and audience browsing.

Five soapboxes (podiums) will be set up within the atrium at Federation Square on the first Sunday of the Emerging Writers’ festival between 11 and 4 within which time the finest of Melbourne’s wordsmiths will take turns presenting their work to the passing public, trying to capture their attention and their imagination with their presentation of ideas, creativity and thoughts through their words. The public will drift between soap boxes either being captured by the performances or moving on to check out the next of the wordsmiths plying their trade.

Over the day up to 40 different writers will get a chance to present their work over five separate soap boxes providing a rare opportunity for these writers to present to new audiences as well as largely increase numbers of audience members they have performed to both outcomes which are core to the mission of the EWF.

So come along and see me and Maxine Clark, Cha-Ya Clancy, Santo Cazzatti, Michelle Dabrowski, Dragonfly, Meg Dunn, Crazy Elf, Julez, Anthony O’Sullivan, Marc Testart perform in public!

Reading: “All Of Us: The Collected Poems of Raymond Carver“
Listening: “Lua” – Amanda Palmer (Bright Eyes cover)
Eating: Pumpkin Lasagne

What: The Spinning Room! Hosted by Jon Garrett and Anthony O’Sullivan.
Who: Me!
Where: ET’s Hotel, 211 High St., Prahran
When: 8pm, Tuesday, 14th April
How: (…much?) Entry is free, but we do encourage the purchase of raffle tickets as the proceeds, as ever, go to the feature. Besides, the raffle prizes are good! There will be books and wine!
Why: Because I have new stuff! Because I have old stuff! Because the open stage is really good! Because the Spinning Room is a fantastic gig!

Reading: “The Yale Anthology of Twentieth Century French Poetry” – edited by Mary Ann Caws
Listening: “The Angels Want To Wear My Red Shoes” – Elvis Costello

Sorry it’s taken me so long to post, dear reader. Many things are on the proverbial boil here and I hope to be a touch more active online. In short, here’s things that have happened in the absence of posting.

1. Work continues apace in organising the Overload Poetry Festival, the line up is looking rather exciting with a sprinkling of interstate and international guests coming to perform. I’m currently hard at work updating the website and hope to have it up and running soon.
2. I clocked in a new record for submitting poetry to a journal. Discovery of submission deadline to angst, selection, more angst, worrying about what to send, final angst and tidying of submission to clicking send in under an hour.
3. On Sunday I attended the first of six workshops in The Year of Poetry, run by Peter Bakowski. As a result, I will be attempting to write one poem per week! Hopefully I’ll have them up here..for better or worse.

Reading: “A Handful of Dust” – Evelyn Waugh
Listening: “Weapon” – Matthew Good Band

I had the good fortune to attend the kick off for 2009 of Wordplay, the monthly gig hosted by Geoff Lemon which has now moved to the more spacious surrounds of the Dan O’Connell in Carlton. Given recent sad events it was also turned into a fundraiser for a poet who had suffered and lost in the recent bushfires.

We were entertained by the spiritual and thoughtful Simon Cox, Joelistics (musician and rap artist with TZU) got us moving, we were blown away by the picturesque story telling of Eleanor Jackson and beguiled at the end by the work of Kevin Brophy.

Go check out their website, listen to the mp3s of previous gigs, download a copy of the Wordplay mag that they’ve just launched. It’s all worth your time.

Well, that was a lot of fun. Thank you to everyone who came along to the gig.

Ozlem, as expected, was amazing, particularly poised for someone who was performing at her debut headline gig.

I was happy with how my new work came out. I had decided to do one of the new ones in response to something I had heard in the open stage, and it felt a lot better than I thought. Needs a bit of work, perhaps, but certainly held it’s own.

This is mostly for my own recording, but my set list was:

1st Set
Thirteen Hours Into Summer; Sad Bleak Sky; That’s Chiroptera To You Mr. Lawrence; Supermarket Queue; In Memory Of Boris Pasternak (by Denise Levertov); Observing Denise Levertov Remember Boris Pasternak; Inauguration; In The Absence
2nd Set
Dr. Frankenstein; Dust Revisited; Ballard Days; Eulogy For The Polaroid; Extracts From The Kama Sutra Of Sleep; Go; 21 – The World

Reading: “District & Circle” – Seamus Heaney
Listening: “Save What You Can” – The Triffids

The bad news is that my rejection notices increased by one.

The good news is that while I was trawling my poetry collection, I found two issues of mod_piece that I had work printed in!

The extra good news is that I seem to have come close to finishing three pieces in a week! I’m not sure that that has happened before, I’m rather thrilled. I dread the idea of not having something new to read, let alone something new to read at a feature. So three poems at once is excellent. I think one may not be a performance piece, but that’s fine.

I hope you are having a decent Australia Day (in whatever way you celebrate it, if applicable). I was traditional, I drank beer and got sunburned at a BBQ. The oldies, it would seem, are the goodies. Meanwhile it’s late here, and I’m close enough to the Showgrounds to hear the Prodigy closing the Big Day Out. It’s also hot enough that sleep isn’t going to happen for a while to come, so it’s not like the noise levels are going to be a problem.

I was delighted to discover that the Indiefeed Performance Poetry podcast is interviewing and featuring work by three Melbourne poets currently in the US. Alicia Sometimes, Emily Zoe Baker and Sean Whelan have all just appeared on the list. If you don’t listen to Indiefeed, I highly recommend it to lovers of poetry. As a podcast it can be handled through programs like iTunes or you can download individual episodes from the Indiefeed website.

More about Alicia, Emily and Sean can be found by following their links here!

Reading: “District And Circle” – Seamus Heaney
Listening: “This Year’s Girl” – Elvis Costello