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Friday, June 15, 2012
PERTH POETRY CLUB Saturday 16 June: MURRAY JENNINGS + ALLAN PADGETT
Thursday, June 14, 2012
MUDLARK - Never in and never out of print...
An Electronic Journal
of Poetry & Poetics
Never in and never out of print...
MUDLARK POSTERS (Archive)
Sally Van Doren 
from The Sense Series
Plus readings, solo poetry Mudlark Posters, and archives ...
“We mean to present and preserve
accomplished work that locates
itself anywhere on the spectrum
of contemporary practice. Although
we are not innocent, we do imagine
ourselves capable of surprise.”
http://www.unf.edu/mudlark/
Mudlark © 1995-2012
ISSN 1081-3500
Editor: William Slaughter
E-mail: mudlark@unf.edu
accomplished work that locates
itself anywhere on the spectrum
of contemporary practice. Although
we are not innocent, we do imagine
ourselves capable of surprise.”
http://www.unf.edu/mudlark/
Mudlark © 1995-2012
ISSN 1081-3500
Editor: William Slaughter
E-mail: mudlark@unf.edu
Adelaide Cabaret Festival pays tribute to the Velvet Gentleman: eccentric genius, bad pianist.
When Erik Satie died in 1925, those closest to him were shocked to discover that the dapper French composer had lived in a filthy, threadbare room with to which he hadn’t admitted a single visitor in 27 years. Now a museum dedicated to his life and work, the dingy apartment was once strewn with hoarded umbrellas and newspapers that almost completely buried its most striking feature: two grand pianos placed one on top of the other, the upper instrument used as storage for letters and parcels. It was at once a haven and a prison for Satie, a secretive, introverted alcoholic who died from cirrhosis of the liver.
One of many mysteries about his life is how the self-styled “velvet gentleman” managed to keep up appearances, emerging from his squalid hovel so immaculately groomed (always in one of seven identical grey suits purchased in 1895 with part of a small inheritance) for the daily 10km stroll to his favourite cafés and local haunts in Paris.
It’s a subject that fascinates the Australian collective Various People Inc, whose new show for the Adelaide Cabaret Festival playfully draws on Satie’s enigmatic music and character. “Some of it is true,” the poster teases, mirroring one of the composer’s favourite sayings: “Although our information is inaccurate, we do not guarantee it.” Artistic director and soprano Cheryl Pickering says the trio aims to “reflect the mystery and ambiguity surrounding much of what we think we know about Satie – an ambiguity often deliberately fostered by the man himself.”
A habitué of Le Chat Noir, Satie could be seen tickling the ivories at Montmartre’s famous nightclub from 1888 – 1891, a gig he described as “degrading”. Nonetheless, says Pickering, he earned a place in history as “the father of cabaret” and amassed a substantial collection of songs. These will be part of The Velvet Gentleman, a “series of vignettes which look at certain aspects of Satie’s life, such as his childhood years in Honfleur with his eccentric uncle ‘Seabird’ and the time he spent with the occultist Sar Péladan and the Rose+Croix movement.”
Along with pianist Richard Chew and actor Graeme Rose, Pickering has enjoyed “getting to know this fascinating human being a little better, as well as to performing many of our favourite pieces of his music.”
But Satie’s status as a cult figure today goes well beyond the cabaret tunes, the ethereal floating of the Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies and the quirky Cocteau-Picasso ballet Parade. His sonic experiments anticipate those of iconoclast John Cage and the American minimalists almost half a century after the Frenchman’s death: the 841 melodic repetitions of the aptly named Vexations and the tongue-in-cheek Trois Morceaux en forme de poire (Three Pear-shaped Pieces) and Flabby Preludes for a Dog, among others.
“He was a pioneer, not afraid to follow his personal and musical instincts,” says Pickering. “We admire his obstinate and proud sense of his own unique qualities. Like Satie, Various People Inc operates slightly outside the square, and has a healthy irreverence for hierarchy and social convention.”
Five Things You Didn’t Know About Satie
The Velvet Gentleman plays at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival June 15–17. Satie is Composer of the Month in the June issue of Limelight.
Five Things You Didn’t Know About Satie
1) He was a bad pianist
2) Satie founded his own religion
3) Satie had strange eating habits
4) Satie carried a hammer everywhere he went... Just in case
5) Satie had only one love affair (that we know of)
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Lucian Freud's early works ...
From the Ploughshares desk - NOW OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS
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Tuesday, June 12, 2012
CALLING ALL CREATIVE MUSICIANS - $50,000 Prize Money
A NEW CONCERTO COMPETITION TO CELEBRATE MUSICAL VIRTUOSITY AND
CREATIVITY
As a celebration of the concerto
form (but not as we know it), a new concerto competition with a total prize
pool of $50,000 has launched. The International Space-Time Concerto Competition
borrows from our rich musical history, embraces the future and promotes the
present.
The International Space-Time
Concerto competition
encourages the involvement of:
§ Budding virtuoso musicians and
orchestral players who want to play their favourite concerto or work with
composers to perform a new concerto.
§ Unique collaborations and
innovative modes of creativity with composers, performers, digital media
artists, technology buffs, contemporary musicians, experimental musicians,
sound designers and audio engineers working together to produce innovative new
works.
The competition includes two
categories celebrating both the historical form of the
concerto, as well as an innovation category, which will
showcase contemporary interpretations of the form.
Entries are welcomed by any
undergraduate, postgraduate or international student, or alumni of any
Australian tertiary institution, who shares a keen interest in excellent
musicianship and cutting edge creativity.
"Any great art
work...readapts time and space". Leonard Bernstein
The brainchild of the University
of Newcastle, the initiative confirms Australia's identity on the international
map as forward thinkers in music.
The competition will culminate in
the opportunity for 6 finalists to perform with an accompanying orchestra at
the Newcastle Conservatorium of Music Concert Hall in late 2012. Another two finalists
will have the rare opportunity of being accompanied by an international internet-linked
ensemble spanning five countries.
The prize money for this
competition has been generously sponsored by benefactor Jennie Thomas with
further donations from the friends of the University.
Entries for The
International Space-Time Concerto Competition will be accepted
from April 30 until July 1.
Duplicity in politics is not new. Every utterance is tainted by the subtext of scoring points. If it is painful for us to listen, how much worse must it be for the politicians? It is dispiriting to constantly undermine one's own integrity, and the 'dodgy salesman' is no one's ideal of human flourishing.Monday, June 11, 2012
Saturday, June 09, 2012
"Play up! play up! and play the game!" - Cricket Poetry Award 2012 -
Back Street Boys by Joni Dennis
Poetry prize value $2000
You are invited to write and submit a poem that depicts life in and around the game and sport of cricket, in settings of backyard, street, beach, park, village green or social-cricket.
The genre may be narrative, dramatic, satirical, lyrical, elegy or verse fable.
The written and spoken word reflects the emotions and beliefs that influence our thoughts, behaviour and personality. Use a national pastime and global sport – cricket - as the ‘vehicle’ to
unsettle preconceptions, generate new ideas and consider our contemporary culture.
Closing Date Friday 31st August 2012. The Cricket Poetry Award is run in conjunction with the Cricket Art Prize and the winner will be announced at the Cricket Art Prize opening event Members Pavilion - Sydney Cricket Ground, 4th Oct 2012.
Head to the website for more details: http://www.cricketartprize.org/cricket-poetry-award/
Download an entry form at this link: http://www.cricketartprize.org/wp-content/uploads/CPP-2012 EntryForm-v1-copy.pdf
Former winner 2011
Boxing Day Test by Cecilia White won the Cricket Poetry award for 2011.
Her poem powerfully describes the retrospective, compassionate thoughts and feelings we feel when watching a test match on television on a hot summers day…
Her poem powerfully describes the retrospective, compassionate thoughts and feelings we feel when watching a test match on television on a hot summers day…
Boxing Day Test by Cecilia White
twelfth man leaves the field, we tumble back to our places
sitting cross-legged below a semi-circle of lanky shinned uncles.
men, exhausted by another year’s hard labour
and christmas day.
sitting cross-legged below a semi-circle of lanky shinned uncles.
men, exhausted by another year’s hard labour
and christmas day.
our skin sticks to itself on boxing day in new south wales.
the geography of each body is irrigated by sweat
it is impossible to imagine standing outside
for each over, and over again.
the cork and willow clap in the dry summer heat
of another state.
the geography of each body is irrigated by sweat
it is impossible to imagine standing outside
for each over, and over again.
the cork and willow clap in the dry summer heat
of another state.
our uncles lean into the room,
lean forward towards the box, as if they were next bat.
tensing muscles deep in bare redbrowned arms
they are in the memory position,
revisiting lives they dreamed as boys when
they could imagine up a roaring crowd
that would lift them high above the drudgery
of normal men.
lean forward towards the box, as if they were next bat.
tensing muscles deep in bare redbrowned arms
they are in the memory position,
revisiting lives they dreamed as boys when
they could imagine up a roaring crowd
that would lift them high above the drudgery
of normal men.
Thursday, June 07, 2012
from the Kenyon Review newsletter ...
David Baker, Kenyon Review Poetry Editor
I am currently reading two superb, and very different, books about poetry and poetics by two elder giants. M. H. Abrams turns 100 this year, and his The Fourth Dimension of a Poem (Norton) gathers his best essays on poetry from the past thirty years. The prose is lucid and graceful, articulating the stance of a great Romantic humanist. It’s a genuine seminar to follow his extended readings of favorite poets, like Keats and Wordsworth, and his model critics like Kant and especially Hazlitt. He can analyze Foucault alongside Horace, Derrida alongside Goethe, in a book that is generous of mind in ways that current literature departments would be wise to restore. The book’s title comes from Abrams’s reminder of the “dimensions” of a poem: the visible aspect; the sounds of the words “as they are imagined by the reader”; the meaning of the words; and—this is especially important and “almost totally neglected”—the activity of “enunciating the great variety of speech-sounds that constitute the words of a poem.” That is, the important physical, embodied presence of a poem in the act of utterance. This critic loves poetry.
George Steiner, in The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan (New Directions), is another of the great graying critics of our time. His new book wants to remind us of that on every page. Where Abrams’s book is wise, this one is learned, and where Abrams’s prose is clarified, Steiner’s is dense with reference and allusion, an intellectual’s overt architecture of a lifetime of engagement. He out-Blooms the great Harold Bloom: his style here contains aphoristic kickers (like Emerson’s), phrases and citations from many languages, asides within asides, references about references about references, and opinions on seemingly every Western literary, artistic, philosophical, and (often) mathematical writer. The deep thesis is an attempt to locate the necessary poetry, or music, at the heart of the best philosophical writing. That is, great thoughts are great in part because of style, their powerful “poetics of reason.” This critic loves thinking about poetry.
For poetry itself, if you are hungry for intimations of greatness, Jack Gilbert’s Collected Poems (Knopf) is a monument. For all his limitations (for instance, the depictions of women at times), these poems seem chiseled from granite, made of confidence and a grand apathy toward the contortions of contemporary poetry and the po-biz from which Gilbert escaped fifty years ago. He’s much like his figure of Icarus in “Failing and Flying”: “I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, / but just coming to the end of his triumph.”
If you are eager to follow emerging poets, I might point you to recent books by Dan Beachy-Quick (Circle’s Apprentice), Paula Bohince (The Children), Nikky Finney (Head Off and Split), Matt Hart (Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless), Katherine Ossip (The Cold War), or Tracy K. Smith (Life on Mars). It’s a busy time.
George Steiner, in The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan (New Directions), is another of the great graying critics of our time. His new book wants to remind us of that on every page. Where Abrams’s book is wise, this one is learned, and where Abrams’s prose is clarified, Steiner’s is dense with reference and allusion, an intellectual’s overt architecture of a lifetime of engagement. He out-Blooms the great Harold Bloom: his style here contains aphoristic kickers (like Emerson’s), phrases and citations from many languages, asides within asides, references about references about references, and opinions on seemingly every Western literary, artistic, philosophical, and (often) mathematical writer. The deep thesis is an attempt to locate the necessary poetry, or music, at the heart of the best philosophical writing. That is, great thoughts are great in part because of style, their powerful “poetics of reason.” This critic loves thinking about poetry.For poetry itself, if you are hungry for intimations of greatness, Jack Gilbert’s Collected Poems (Knopf) is a monument. For all his limitations (for instance, the depictions of women at times), these poems seem chiseled from granite, made of confidence and a grand apathy toward the contortions of contemporary poetry and the po-biz from which Gilbert escaped fifty years ago. He’s much like his figure of Icarus in “Failing and Flying”: “I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, / but just coming to the end of his triumph.”
If you are eager to follow emerging poets, I might point you to recent books by Dan Beachy-Quick (Circle’s Apprentice), Paula Bohince (The Children), Nikky Finney (Head Off and Split), Matt Hart (Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless), Katherine Ossip (The Cold War), or Tracy K. Smith (Life on Mars). It’s a busy time.
***
There's a mountain of information and a number of links at
Wednesday, June 06, 2012
R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, 91 Years
"My tunes and numbers are here. They have filled my years, the years when I refused to die. And in order to do that I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, at noon or 3:00 A.M.
So as not to be dead."
... from the Introduction to The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
Ad lib ...
Go to the Conditions page here: http://
an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, May 23–September 3, 2012; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., October 14, 2012–January 13, 2013; Tate Modern, London, February 21–May 27, 2013; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, July 3–November 4, 2013
"The heart of the current Lichtenstein exhibition is a large gallery hung with sixteen of his best comic-book paintings of the early Sixties, including my personal favorite, We Rose Up Slowly (1964), which shows an enraptured romance-comic couple submerged underwater and just about to kiss. The square canvas that outlines these improbably gorgeous cartoon blondes is joined at the left to a second panel, one third the width of the first and inscribed with this breathless text against an off-white background …”
Lichtenstein’s propulsive close-up, with the couple’s enormous visages opposed at a dynamic diagonal and engulfed by swirling eddies and effervescent bubbles, brings to mind such upwardly spiraling Baroque constructs as Rubens’s The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (1618), in which the heads of the principal protagonists are almost a mirror image of those in this composition, though in the Pop pastiche the woman offers no resistance to her eager swain."
Read on HERE
Monday, June 04, 2012
Sneak Peak: BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2012
Sneak peak at poems and contents, etc, of Best American Poetry 2012 -
with Guest Editor MARK DOTY
Back down among the Bunyips ...
Sunday, June 03, 2012
First time flying a glider!
After a surprisingly heavy mist all morning, the sun came out!
Clubhouse where the welcome was warm on a cold morning.
Yesterday I went gliding for the very first time. And it was thrill, especially when my friend and neighbour Stewart let me take-over the controls. I sure was chicken with those pedals and joystick! I'd straighten it out and them over correct massively - a glider takes a moment to react to your stick move, so the pilot must anticipate slightly, which is a tricky thing to learn straight off. Reading the landscape and reading the panels and the wind shifts is another fine balancing act, plus enjoying - yes, learning to enjoy - thermals! We only had a couple of gentle ones when I was piloting, and they freaked me out, pulling the nose suddenly up when I was trying to steer straight and steady. Stewart apologised at the end of the flight for the lack of big thermals - but I was happy about as a first timer!
Sarah and Stewart before take off.
Power plane towing the glider up.
Our visiting English friend Sara also flew and took over the controls up there in the wild blue yonder. She saw a different view of Australia than she had in her months here.
While Sara was up and I was watching, two feet firmly planted on terra firma, an urgent call came in to the Eagle's Nest: a power plane had complete engine failure north of Wickepin and was going to land in an open field. The pilot these was thoroughly unflappable, and the Beverley Soaring Society's pilot on duty went up to provide any assistance needed. All was handled calmly and quickly and our towing pilot was back faster than I expected - just minutes away.
The Eagle's Nest control tower
Andrew Burke, high-flyin' poet, ready for take-off
Thanks to Stewart and Anna - fabulous neighbours and friends -
and to Sara for being a good buddy during her stay here.
When you want to go gliding, just phone the ever-helpful
at Beverley Soaring Society, an easy drive from Perth.
Friday, June 01, 2012
Go to Blazes - for International Readings and Writings
for an international collection of poets, creative non-fiction and ... more!
Early Warning: Get submissions ready and send early!
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