"We belong to the even flow of words and
unfinished sentences (abbreviated, to be sure, truncated to speed up the
circulation). We belong to talking, not what talking is about . . . Stop talking - and you are out. Silence equals exclusion." Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love What's this all about? Writing poems as a discursive practice . . . Developing a series of essais, green and poetic, and Bird Nettle Lane Brew  Creating music poems & video poems with John Laidler. Recent videos New Video A new video "In Case of Sudden Stop" has its premiere at The Wrong End of The Kaleidoscope at the Qld Poetry festival, Sunday 29th August, 5pm. Rubber Hands A video about the phenomenology of the human hand. Sure to be a YouTube hit one day. War Play  It’s too easy in this harbour city to forget that this nation is currently fighting a war; and that since World War II, more than 250 major wars have killed over 23 million people, 90% civilians, 3 out of 4 being women and children; or that nearly 40 major conflicts are happening right now.  An eccentric documentary for one of the most influential and eccentric of 20th C composers. A surreal adventure using original footage with John Cage guesting. Recent videos include a documentary on Erik Satie, a look at garden guerillas in Sydney and Myrtle St. Chippendale, where residents are planting fruit, flowers and vegetables in their street. One of our first videos which incorporated an improvised poem about Icarus with a kinetic sculpture by Kozo Nishino (plus local wildlife) from Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi (2008).   
Residency at Bundanon I have a manuscript of poems and a bowerbird experiment. Arthur Boyd's painterly studio having maintained a website in the nineties I then undertook a PhD in poetics. I return to cyberspace with a variety of recent projects.  | September Via Hong Kong and MacauAppearing at the Australian Poetry Festival, Kings Cross first weekend in September. Sneak preview Some weeks ago, standing in the room where Keats died, I saw his death mask and a print of Fournier’s 'The funeral of Shelley'. Flames lick the handsome young man lying on his back on the pyre with his boots on. Byron, Leigh Hunt, Trelawny and others stand by. It’s a cold wintry landscape. Trelawny orchestrated the pagan ritual on a hot August day; the body was badly decomposed and identified by Keats’ latest poems being stuck in a pocket. As soon as they died mythologizing began. In the next room, locks of their hair and Shelley’s jawbone are preserved. Surely relics belong inside the surrounding Catholic churches. . . Poets write poems, they are not priests or prophets. Rimbaud wrote to his friend Paul Demeny denouncing all poetry as rhyming prose, but the voyant ended up gun-running. Tales of genius have come down to us via the lyric, not the verse dramas or conversational landscape meditations. If the three [with Byron] had not died so close and young, perhaps the lyric would not be so fetishised and the canon so slanted away from discursive poetries that address the outside world and encompass science, politics and nature.  August
18 August A haiku might grasp momentarily forever the essence of incoming spring but I’ve just taken a photograph of winter light graphic black on the burnt trees and stuffed my pockets with Cassia seeds. Back home  Suzhou The old canal city of Suzhou is ringed by innumerable apartment blocks with names like ‘Orchard Mansions’, with services like ‘Urban Romance Restaurant’, billboards for luxury labels. We pass through the international expo centre, vast halls, boulevards empty and stop at Modern Plaza for Toys R Us, Casa Zoe – Tex Mex, The Coffee Club, ‘Rise Immersion Subject English’. We carry on down Wangdun Road heading to the Yangtse Delta and Shanghai passing Rolex, Hermes, Mont Blanc, Ralph Lauren, and the ‘Art Soft Outfit Life Bar’.Billboards for the Versace Company Store clutter. China has become one of the most important markets for luxury, at 25% of the world market proportionally way above its income. They are keeping up with the Smiths or the Wangs. Consumerism has gone mad after all those years of Mao suits. When I was last in China 30 years ago, one of the first backpackers in the country, I found one private stall in Shanghai and that only sold one product, busts of Beethoven! How is that entrepreneur doing now?   "Pollution
of the earth, air, and water has been largely ignored in the rush toward material
consumption that has seized...[China] in its haste to emulate our
shallow and problematical Western 'progress.'"
 He was influential in bringing nature to people's attention. When a new species of swan was discovered in Northumberland in 1829, the year after his death, it was named Cygnus bewickii Bewick's Swan.   The British Museum   July   Amersham Hill    June In the Uk in to see my elderly parents.  and of poems written by diamonds:  what the world calls misfortune & afliction . . . 1775  - met up with friends Kit Kelen and Carol Orchard and Chris Somng who is translating my poetry into Chinese for Kit's second volume of Fires Rumoured about the City – Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poets. |
