 The BRWF 2012 (BRWF) has finished - a long, exhausting weekend of great writers, great weather – great feedback already: "The Bellingen festival surpassed all expectations. it was warm, with a wide welcome, a great variety of inventive, enjoyable, and meaningful opportunities to listen and speak. thanks so much for the opportunity to participate." debbie rose "The scale and spirit of your festival, not to mention the intelligence of everything about it and the wonder of that scenery you've got up there, made your festival, for me, one of the loveliest I've attended." Mark Tredinnick “I just wanted to congratulate you all on a great festival weekend, and to thank you for the opportunity to be involved. It was a pleasure – stimulating, cruisy, interesting and fun.” Laurel Cohn"I have been meaning to be in touch to thank and congratulate you on a most surprisingly wonderful festival ! I bet you have been getting smashed with letters of praise and adulation. We truly had a great time of it, especially the breakfast event that was blessed by sun, waves and community interest." Taylor Miller  We had a wonderful range of writers and a slew of poets: Mark Tredinnick, Peter Boyle, Alan Gould, Bronwyn Lea, Martin Harrison, Kit Kelen and Michael Sharkey - locals Brian Hawkins, Liz Routledge, Gumabynggirr elder Auntie Emily Walker and slam poets from Brisbane and around. My highlight as a poet was paddling down the Bellinger. See Advocate article.  BRWF 2011
Winner of the inaugural Jack Iggulden Award for Indigenous Writing,
Aunty Bea Ballangarry, with festival artistic director, John Bennett
(left) and festival founder, Brain Purcell. Photo, Ute Schulenberg, Coffs Coast Advocate November project - poem/s & image/s each day Nov 14
Our way to the beach is baulked by two roos, a young male and small female. They pose in a tableau, granting us full attention, We turn our backs, pretend to look for a Spotted Pardolote singing an exquisite triad the last two high notes repeated as if that’s that, then they repeat the whole song like a mantra. The roos resume cropping the track. They are made of fur and instinct, objects of wonder and love, but we slowly resume moving towards the sea abandoning any hope of that unobtainable state of grace, of meaning no harm ever, of utter generosity.  The ground repays attention, its rough marquetry lavishes quality elements of form and colour in various versions designer’s inventiveness anywhere you look, but all the creations are foxed, stained, with small tears and creases (bitten).  The forest ends onto slender dunes and the amazing sequence of colours and blocks of materials endlessly rearranged as beach, both ends illegible, sea-mist stalling colour and hiding the world.  The seas skips in, tongues licking up the slope, gilding the sand as they retreat triggering a series of dainty entropic fountains, replicating the jeu d'eau of Italian Renaissance gardens at crab scale, a bubbling beach with air forced back up into circulation, breathing in the ozone rumour, in reality the fresh scent of dimethyl sulphide, haphazard release by
nervous plankton and bacteria  and the exhalations of whales still passing south to Antarctica for summer and the eagle that drifted over yesterday, and momentarily silicon is suggestive of glass, a liquid capturing light and energy.
Seawashed shells pool lustrous diffusions formal delights the eye evolves with. and simple forms wrapping a surprise to delight the human eye has evolved with.  Nov 4  Breakfast News Theories for Liz Keen, Nov 4 2011 1 This slice of horizon is a knife edge of sunspill, a physicist’s theory of light skimming below bulk shadows ‘not visible on the radar’. The weather is happening right now with the koel’s insistent yelp piercing the double-glazed picture windows.
There is so much more to this moment than interest rates and cricket fixing - I’ve turned to music, the thin sound of a violin stretches the room's natural amplitude the way the best Sung ceramics start afresh from the behaviour of clay on the wheel.
Last night, the stars wheeled across the sky the spokes of the universe appeared through cloud.
2 Online marginalia reads ‘Lohan jailed for 30 days’, was this one of Buddha’s 18 disciples entrusted to uphold the Law? They were worshipped for an ability to pacify wild animals and meditate so deeply that trees grew up around them.
Is that a mutant form of anorexia, or form of loving? For some, 15 minutes of fame lingers a little longer, 30 days is nothing for a Lohan, but what could cause an invasion of police? Bodily needs, excessive envy, unfamiliarity with empathy
or separation from the animals we co-evolved with but who are losing their grip on existence? It
is risky releasing a poem into the world quickly (in this case 20
minutes) - many need to hibernate for weeks or months before the poet
listens to the poem again, with fresh ears. I mean to link poems and theory more closely to images - just came across the blog of Cherise Asmah and remembered she had requested some writing - I sent her a piece on ecopoetics and natural sculptures with images. Valla Beach scene the morning after  My Camp Creative course (Jan 9) now complete: 'Writing Nature Poetry – renewing the tradition' Comments on my previous course: "Wonderful +++++ . . . such a generous teacher." "I have done 7 courses, 4 of them writing and this was by far the best. I was the most productive and learnt so much." "Excellent course. John was a very good teacher. Highly creative and mind expanding." Note - 2008. After an online hiatus of nearly ten years
having maintained a website in the nineties I then undertook a PhD in poetics. I return to cyberspace with a variety of recent projects.   |  Aut insanit homo, aut versus facit. Horace MAY Coffs Council have been conducting an online forum, now closed, on the cultural opportunities and potential of the Coffs Coast region. Clearly there are major opportunities Council can facilitate - and major infrastructure needs, for example: a new art gallery and a performance space, that in the current financial climate are problematic. Today Thursday May 24 “Women on the move . . . with the emphasis on a good time . . . Bus trip to Coffs Harbour visiting Buddha’s garden and Op shops in the area.”Monday 21st – the first Humpback was spotted off Sydney.  In June and July up to 200 whales pass by Letter Box Beach every day heading to Queensland for winter and calving.   http://www.getup.org.au/campaigns one of their latest is to stop mining export projects currently planned along the Great Barrier Reef already under threat from run off (nutrients, fertilisers, pesticides, toxic chemicals, sewage, rubbish, detergents, heavy metals and oil) and global warming.  Woman hit with stick 13 May 2012 “If you can hold on to and repeat to yourself the simplest fact of existence—atoms and void and nothing else, atoms and void and nothing else—your life will change.” Stephen Greenblatt summarising Lucretius A Lewins chuckles from the screen of Banksias launching the forest and the radio tells you there’s no turning back. The taps and lights are de rigueur, like the Sunday roast - lamb, potatoes and pumpkin just picked from the garden with the local headline ‘Woman hit with stick’. It’s a Sabbath, just another waltz around our star for the planets, plants and animals, roos graze the slope towards the sea slumped into glow. I thank Wyn and the dead sheep and the marvellous taste and solidity of sticks and stones and love and flesh, the way things don't change and the way things don't last. Bron's wonderful 'Mary White's Waterfall' is a finalist in the inaugural    Letter Box Beach   For your diary Bron is giving a reading and talk on e-publishing at Coffs Library this Wednesday 9th, 6pm Monday Garden theory - Hugh Possingham on the radio today talked of “an extinction crisis in some sense.” In any sense I would have thought. He suggests that National Parks can’t do the job of protecting all species and habitats given economic realities and concludes that “not all the conservation of Australia’s wildlife needs to be done not by the Government.”[i] There must be more support by governments who proclaim national parks as media release then don’t provide resources to manage them. On the other hand, we should all be responsible, and gardens are one part of an overall conservation strategy. The oldest garden in the archaeological record (The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were 100 years earlier) is Persian from 500BC. One can still see remains of the geometric plan, its white columns, can trace pavilions and the archaeologists have revealed waterwheels. We know where Cyrus the Great used to sit on his throne. They grew some bulbs, tulips and hyacinths, but mainly figs, palms, and pomegranates. The ideal Garden in the classical tradition is benevolent and generous and grants a dynamic variety of enjoyable perceptions and sensations. Poets from Ovid and before had established an ideal landscape of gentle hills, streams, shading trees, cool fragrant breezes, birdsong and blooms Milton’s Eden is an English Arcadia in the classical tradition with flowery banks, shaded bowers and ‘‘pleasant walks’’ under magnificent trees and yet this garden remains wild. A Wilderness of sweets; for Nature here John Dixon Hunt believed Milton was recalling the Italian Renaissance gardens he visited with their variety of landscape features and mixing formal with the informal and the boschetti (wild woods).[iii] How does that affect us gardeners here? Jane Drakard comments, “Italy itself has often been compared to a garden paradise, and the major European gardening styles have all been influenced, at least in part, by the great Italian Renaissance gardens, which were themselves conceived as a return to classical ideals. This influence finds expression even in contemporary Australian suburban gardens with their turn to formality and to what are often described as ‘Italianate’ styles. . . In this respect the current vogue for Italian gardens is nothing new.”[iv] Drakard quotes Edna Walling (1895–1973) who wrote: “There is little doubt that as we advance in the designing of our garden in Australia, we shall derive more and more inspiration from the old gardens of Italy [...]. The chief elements of the Italian garden – stone, water and trees – are most appropriate to the conditions governing the construction of gardens in Australia.” This is on the wrong track if gardens are to become an important part of conserving Australian flora and fauna. Last year I visited Villa d’Este and heard or saw only two species of birds. It is a very formal garden, the world’s preeminent water garden and a marvellous visual experience, but one that lacks the variety that Milton celebrated and that our flora and fauna needs. [i] Tom Nightingale, The World Today, ABC RN Monday, May 7, 2012 [ii] Very different to the slopes below Eden where Satan finds ‘‘a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides / With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild, / Access deni’d’’ (4.135–37). [iii] John Dixon Hunt, ‘‘Milton and the Making of the English Landscape Garden,’’ Milton Studies 15 (1981): 81–105. [iv] Jane Drakard, ‘Elusive landscapes: Australians and ‘the Italian garden’’, in Australians in Italy : contemporary lives and impressions, Ed Bill Kent, Ros Pesman and Cynthia Troup, Monash University ePress, 2008. The English garden (giardino inglese) became popular in Italy in the early 19th C from Como in the north down to Sicily, it’s main them being naturalistic, no geometry. Sunday Full Perigee Moon Day Started very early with a pretty good FA Cup final, then a walk at Bonville Creek.  Then on to the wonderful Coff's Botanic Gardens (much under utlised) to the bird hide:  and for the Japanese Children's festival:    the drumming group from the Gold Coast   Deep Creek, a distracting osprey circled overhead as I took this.  Full moon creature  "This presumptive anchorage of the photograph to the real provides an opportunity for photographic fakers to take advantage of us . . . much as sixteenth-century entrepreneurs manufactured specimens of mermen and mermaids, furry fish, sea bishops, unicorn horns, and griffin claws and their nineteenth-century counterparts produced grotesque "medieval" torture devices and sinister-looking chastity belts to satisfy expectations aroused by gothic tales. (Conversely, when a specimen of the unlikely looking platypus was first carried back to Europe, it was widely suspected of being an assembled fake. Nobody thought that anything would look like that!) . . . These sorts of images function as pseudo-acheiropoietoi--ersatz relics used to create belief that something existed on earth." William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), Chapter Nine, ‘How to Do Things with Pictures’. Saturday - big moon tonight (99%)    at 1pm  an unusually low tide  Poetry is so much more important than sport in Arabic and Muslim counties. Journalist David Rohde, who was held hostage by a Taliban faction for
more than seven months, said poetry was part of his captors' daily lives.
"They would sing and recite poems every night after dinner," he said,
who is now a commentator for the Reuters news agency. "Privately they
would sing love poems, but when their commanders were around, they would only
sing war poems. " Friday. Power off today - forgot to get the car out - so were locked in - read, weeded the garden, read a wonderful pamphlet by Ross Macleay questioning the genre of nature writing, wrote a poem and imagined life without electricity - quieter, more difficult especially at night - and now we are bound to technology, even though it distances us from our natural environments. (Georges
Bataille thought technology is the cause for our dissatisfaction, for our searching
for ‘a lost intimacy’). Dusk Friday from our top deck  The weekend moon coincides with the moon's perigee - its closest approach to Earth (356,955 ks away) as 14% bigger and 30% brighter than usual and likely to lead to coastal erosion from a two-metre high tide.  I am scoping a book on natural aesthetics - attention to the world around us and creatively working/playing with it is rewarding/ important.  Attention to the patterns, the seasons, the fauna and flora - now is fungus time - but why were the mosquitoes today the worst ever experienced in the forest? Saw more Fan-tailed Cuckoos, singing a single note with tremelo, not their downward trilling.  Three overlapping parasol mushrooms (Macrolepiota procera) thanks Mick). Sunday morning - Robert Wyatt is singing to me; a Pied Butcher bird is calling – I hear it as music, but it is not music to the roos below, or the lorikeets or probably to the Butchers themselves. Music is universal in cultures (at level of rhythm anyway) and deeply moves most of us – but we don’t know why – is it: 1. a biological adaptation – in which case surely not simply for sexual advantage as Darwin reduced adaption to (alternatives are social or familial bonding) , or 2. a cultural evolution – a bricolage using existing skills and abilities such as language, pattern perception and emotion? A wet miserable Saturday - Happiness is so topical with Depression now an epidemic - a Perfect Day will not suffice - see John Holmstrom's wonderful (5 page) cartoon. Four kangaroos browned by the rain in our garden - perfect - (not The 5-HTT gene which regulates serotonin). Thomas Jefferson made a mistake in emphasising the “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of
Independence, now conflated with the "pursuit of pleasure' - happiness comes to you. Autumn is here: starry nights, cold mornings, plenty of fungi about and Fan-tailed Cuckoos.  Cortinarius australiensis, a meaty forest mushroom, apparently inedible and with no common name. It should have a name - any suggestions? From a poem of mine from Sydney): We are now in the middle of bana’murrai’yung when the tiger quoll seeks a mate and we haul down the doona. The Maguurr light is immaculate:   Start the week with a fish  at Deep Creek  Built in obsolescence has become ridiculously pervasive: watches, cameras, and even a hand windscreen wiper-washer I bought this morning – no way of changing the sponge pad. Thanks to the Capitalist move from production (Fordism) to consumerism - with serious repercussions for the health of our planet and our psyches. Charles Kettering of General Motors should be remembered , not for the
starter motor, but for arguing in the 1920s that ‘The key to economic
prosperity is the organised creation of dissatisfaction.’ General Motors began
to introduce new model lines every year and ran advertising campaigns designed
to make people discontented with the cars they owned. The emphasis on
production now turned to the consumerism and vast marketing empires. Out with the Bello Birders - 73 species - very close views of ospreys (on a farm - and a parent bringing a large mullet to the nest over the Highway - by the speed camera)  Volunteer Wrap for the BRWF - congratulations to Roby for getting 8 out of 10 in my lit quiz including: Richard Glover in Desperate
Husbands wrote: “During the
1970s, I spent most of my leisure time trying to summon up: a) Satan, b) a
decent pair of sideburns, c) the courage to ask the girl next door to go for an
ice cream, d) a single chest hair.  Photographs from 18 April - Jagun forest - and flooded bridge I was reading Rimbaud, who I find mostly too rich, too boisterous to appreciate, then read about his life. He gave up poetry at 19 and roamed - he claimed to have visited "Palmerston", now Darwin in 1876 - ended up in Ethiopia attempting to become a rich colonialist- finally ending up back in France in agony on one leg. He left what little he had to his boy, none to his mistress. His Voyant period ended with A Season in Hell: I! I called myself a magician, an angel, free from all moral constraint.... I am sent back to the soil to seek some obligation, to wrap gnarled reality in my arms. A peasant! 'Farewell' I used to believe in every kind of magic. 'Second Delirium: The Alchemy Of The Word' My kind of poet knows the soil and the reality of the soil and its destruction - John Clare. ‘Soil is the mother of all things’ – Old Chinese proverb 
I missed my 'Pocket Diary' launch in Sydney over the weekend - along with the other poets in Kit's Pocket Series. Rae Desmond Jones read from my 'Easter Songs': I wake early, put on the radio, Neddy Seegoon is constructing a ladder to save the world with buckets of water. He’s just heard the news – the sun is on fire. I look. It’s hiding under the sea’s skin. Ra’s resurrection is an engineering triumph with another six billion years of performance. I hurry to shore for the bleed, only the brightest planets are sticking to this rubbery darkness. We had guests from overseas. The weather held for walks, fishing, swimming and a barbecue - the most natural activities.  Nambucca  More than 3200 species of lichen occur in Austalia and its islands in around 400 genera from about 100 families. . Wednesday  Tuesday  Easter Monday  Easter Sunday This is Paradise, but Paradise doesn't exist - we were on North Beach - henceforth reverting to its name Postbox Beach, from when a postbox was nailed to a tree and the postie rode along the beach delivering mail. Unknown to us, as we sat watching a rough dirty green sea, a young local man drowned off Deep Creek, just the other side of the headland; a wave swept him off his kayak. There is no resurrection, not even today. Do we indeed desire the dead Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H. Should still be bear us at our side? Is there no baseness we would hide No inner vileness that we dread? It took him 17 years to write (the final spurt probably due to reading Chambers' Vestiges, which suggests evolution progresses from simple forms to Homo sapiens). Queen Victoria told him that the poem had helped her deal with Prince Albert's sudden death more than anything apart from the Bible. And by coincidence, an old uni friend sent me his most moving eulogy for his mother and used the Dylan Thomas poem know for such occasions - grief is hard to assuage, but somehow poetry assists. These guys stuck to the ground:   Easter Saturday   The tiny Leek Lily Warning Urunga      Female Golden Orb Weaver Spider, Nephila (Tetragnathidae) with her larder and male (above her back left leg). He gives her a back massage to try and calm her and avoid being eaten. We saw more species of spider in our small Marrickville garden (about 15) than we have in our much larger one here. Nambucca Storm - it quickly came and quickly went  A walk to Coachwood Falls, Dorrigo    One Red-necked pademelon, one thrush, one April Fool's tick, one leech, hundreds of tadpoles, lyrbirds singing, and the white song of the Never Never for much of the track. Our C'tte wrap party began on Valla Beach  Alice Pung was a lovely guest of the festival – but what
is a Pung MORRIS GLIETZMAN sold
his first story to which magazine?  How would you have done in my literary quiz at BRWF's Saturday Night Live? 8. This festival sits beside the Bellinger River, which one
of the following lines come from Robert Gray’s poem ‘A Day at Bellingen’, (the others come from a
poem of mine about canoeing down the
river) a) Now the reflected water becomes, momentarily, white b) over shadowy
fish, submerged forests and rippling grass beds, c) Like hippos, black bulls stand their ground on shifting gravel beds, d) Mountains
veer in and out of view, green as ‘in the beginning green’? 9. Charlotte Wood keeps a blog called? a) How to kill a
lobster, b) how to shuck an Oyster, c) How to Bombe Alaska, d) How to cook your
Goose, e) How to eat and read and be happy?    Derek Hynd modelling – futuristic surf wear. Riding a finless surfboard, he is the star of Jack McCoy's new surf film, Deeper Shade of Blue – which by wonderful synchronicity opened at our local cinema The Majestic, the same day!
Photos of the morning's surfing here. I rarely catch Jennifer Byrne's First Tuesday Book Club on ABC TV, but caught a few minutes of her blockbuster special with Lee Child’s totally ignorant of why many writers write, spouting nonsense that all writers secretly want to write bestsellers to become millionaires and provide for their families. Mathew Reilly responded more reasonably (though never responded to a few requests to be a guest at BRWF) I am interested in writing poetry, not publishing and no publishing best sellers. However Kit Kelen who is a prodigious energy is Australian and Australian <> Chinese poetry is publishing my Pocket Diary – the series to be launched at the BRWF festival Sunday lunchtime in the Talking Tent. My first book for a decade, comprising all dated poems for each year since my book Field Notes.    Coming up !!! Marathon Reading of Peter Carey's Oscar & Lucinda - kicking off the BRWF this Sunday 18 March, 7am to 9pm Glennifer Hall in the Promised Land. A charity event for Life without Barriers that help with care and protection for those with disability, mental health, homelessness, youth justice and immigration issues. Glennifer Hall next to the small church Peter Carey helped save and which inspired the book. Peter Carey is the Festival patron and his response to the idea was 'wow' if you would like to read and be sponsored email info@bellingenwritersfestival.com.au subject Marathon.  Unknown bird In slow motion on the ocean at a discrete distance . . . the impulse of the eye is to force itself on the form
lines, keel, bow, rigging the skeleton of an engine constructed from accumulated ideas that swallow oil
drilled out of the Carboniferous Period, with batteries topped up with vitriol. The effort to leave behind
the current and move and manipulate is an imperfection of kings, dictators, lawmakers, institutions, careless
followers and our day-to-day disregard for language. The world opens and closes on this small pale craft. Reading: March 10, 3pm Coffs Regional Art Gallery, 'The Poetry of Art and the Art of Poetry' - see details. I rose from my sick bed with a high temperature, some microbe from the plateau. Just back from a reading in Armidale, a quiet place now . . .    The ground I stand on, buffed hard as nails and dry enough to burn, is the northern aspect facing Ebor Falls just wet enough to fall . . .
a driz-a-bone making an honest living engrossed in a paperback.
meandering the last of the long paddock, the worst drought in faded memory. Wollomombi Falls (believed to be the tallest in Australia at one time).  So busy with the festival and the modem dies, a new modem arrives - wrong one. Agggh!!! How did Rome conquer half the world without mobile phones or the net? With less distractions - "As our attentional skills are squandered, we are plunging into a culture of mistrust, skimming and a dehumanising merger between man and machine.” Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. |
