What: The Spinning Room feat. Tim Hamilton
When: 8:00pm, 30th March
Where: ET Hotel, High St., Prahran
Why: Because the poetry is good! Because I’ll be featuring! Because poetry in Melbourne needs and loves your support!

The launch was amazing, The Heart Chamber were fantastic.

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

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!

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

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

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.

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

What: Passionate Tongues! Hosted by Michael Reynolds.
Who: Me! I will be headlining with Ozlem Baro. This is her first feature (I believe). I have heard her read at Spinning Room, I suspect this won’t be her last.
Where: The Brunswick Hotel, 140 Sydney Rd, Brunswick (cnr. Weston Rd.)
When: 8pm, Monday, 2nd February
How: (…much?) Entry is free, but we do encourage the sale of raffle tickets as the proceeds get split between the features for the evening. Besides, the raffle prizes are good!
Why: Because I have new stuff! Because I have old stuff! Because Ozlem is really good! Because The Brunswick Hotel has bad album sleeves adorning their walls and good beer adorning their bar!

Reading: “Just Your Everyday Apocalypse” – Amelia Walker (which I got the last time I was at PT!!)
Listening: “Apparitions” – Matthew Good Band

However, it took a conversation with a colleague at work who saw me on the show (I can’t get Ch. 31 where I live), followed with more talking to fellow poets to discover that not only does the show have a website, but the website has video! He recently put up the Candy Stripes gig that I was part of and you can see it there, along with a bunch of others, some of which include me and a plethora of other magnificent poets.

Red Lobster. Channel 31, Thursdays at 11:30pm or see the website!!

Reading: “Cultural Amnesia” – Clive James
Listening: “Strategy” – Something For Kate