Saturday, August 28, 2021
Monday, August 02, 2021
launch of CONSTELLATIONS by Deanne Leber at Perth Poetry Club, Moon Café, Northbridge, WA
I will start with a pertinent quote
from Yeats: Out of the quarrel with
ourselves, we make rhetoric, but poetry is born of the quarrel with ourselves.
Welcome to this book launch of
CONSTELLATIONS by Deanne Leber – a very important book in the contemporary west
coast literary scene of Australia. This poetry community has a long history
that is described and illustrated by various anthologies still available today,
the latest being John Kinsella’s Fremantle
Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry. But there’s no Deanne Lieber included
… and no L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E Poetry. I guarantee there will be in the next
anthology: There will be quotes from this book and its influences. It is a
breath of fresh air in the local poetry scene – it progresses both in its
composition and its writing.
I mention composition because this is
very physical writerature – an intellectual architecture, still tactile but
with deep theory behind it. The basic element is the words but grouped together
they associate, contradict, waylay connotations, expose and whistle their own
tunes. They are all from Deanne’s lexicon of all her life until now. The form
is realized by human techniques but the highlight of the form is the reading of
the constellations by the writer. The ‘Author’ may be dead, as Roland Barthes
wrote, but the Reader is ever more important in the CONSTELLATIONS.
As reader and writer, Deanne Leber is
influenced fundamentally by Gertrude Stein and Lyn Hejinian – but you can trace
her creative impulses back to the earliest known drawing by human hand, five
strokes of clay in a South African cave. The nearest link to Deanne’s prose
poems would be Ania Walwicz in Australian poetry. And maybe Michelle Leggett in
NZ.
How to read CONSTELLATIONS is a very
personal thing. Each reader experiences a different universe. There are
constellations illustrated, one at a time – followed by a prose poem of one
page with a different kaleidoscopic theme each time, then an emergent poem on
an entirely different theme with its own page … and finally the verbal bones of
the theme positioned on the page as dictated to by the apexes of that
individual Constellation. The obvious way to read them is one constellation at
a time, but I read some prose poems one day and marveled over the emergent
poems on another. The spiky visual poems I read as sculptures. You can do what
you like, read it in large gulps or small breaks but it will last you a long time
to exhaust its multi-dimensional layers.
As Lyn Hejinian says, The process is more composition than
writing. But let’s zero in on the writing, the words Deanne chose at one
stage or another. Here’s a couple of quotes from her prose poems: notice how
age-old images come to life by juxtaposition -
Deanne Leber quote: A
plastic rose and a feather duster caressed. A dirty knee’d angel with the words
of a poet stuck in throat. Hum of song stuck in note. Stars sucking tongue.
Undone. Crawling to begin again.
DL quote: Skin closes moments made new
by colour. Longing to be your slow sad ballerina. Dancing my heel got caught in
the gutter. Threaded to your skin to your heart. When writing replaces words
you can’t say.
DL: Waiting for a tongue to begin.
Love hearts and wings against skin. He etched feathers on walls as the train
linked each track to a new word. Breaking their
umbilical shells. Born into shapes caressed with pen.
I love ‘words breaking their umbilical shells.’
I haven’t finished CONSTELLATIONS yet
– I’ve only had the text a week - and I will never exhaust this book. It’ll be
like Finnegan’s Wake for me, an
endless delight. Buy it now before they run out.
-
Andrew Burke (MA, PhD)
Tuesday, June 22, 2021
Saturday, June 19, 2021
Thursday, June 17, 2021
from the State Library of Western Australia
Congratulations to everyone on the shortlist for the 2020 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards!
The Awards support, develop and recognise excellence in writing. At $60,000, the Western Australian Writer’s Fellowship is one of the most valuable awards in Australian arts and open to writers of any style, medium or genre. Other than the Daisy Utemorrah Award, all the awards are open to Western Australian authors.
The Daisy Utemorrah Award for Unpublished Indigenous Junior and Young Adult Fiction is open to Indigenous writers from across Australia. This award is administered by Broome-based Indigenous publisher Magabala Books with support from the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries.
The shortlists:
The Premier’s Prize for an Emerging Writer ($15,000)
- Father of the Lost Boys by Yuot A. Alaak (Fremantle Press)
- Fathoms: The World in the Whale by Rebecca Giggs (Scribe Publications)
- A Question of Colour by Pattie Lees and Adam C. Lees (Magabala Books)
- We Can't Say We Didn't Know by Sophie McNeill (ABC Books: An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers)
- The Salt Madonna by Catherine Noske (Pan Macmillan Australia)
The Premier’s Prize for Writing for Children ($15,000)
- How to Make a Bird - Written by Meg McKinlay and Illustrated by Matt Ottley (Walker Books Australia)
- Littlelight by Kelly Canby (Fremantle Press)
- Shirley Purdie: My Story, Ngaginybe Jarragbe by Shirley Purdie (Magabala Books)
- Across The Risen Sea by Bren MacDibble (Allen & Unwin)
- Willy-willy Wagtail: Tales from the Bush Mob by Helen Milroy (Magabala Books)
The Daisy Utemorrah Award for Unpublished Indigenous Junior and YA ($15,000 and a publishing contract with Magabala Books)
- Home is Calling - Natasha Leslie
- Dirran - Carl Merrison and Hakea Hustler
The Western Australian Writer’s Fellowship ($60,000)
- Amanda Bridgeman
- Donna Mazza
- Jon Doust
- Madelaine Dickie
- Sisonke Msimang
Monday, June 14, 2021
Tuesday, June 08, 2021
Poems come first ...
AUTUMN LEAVES
There are fallen leaves
at the backdoor
but I won’t sweep them.
I have more important
poetry matters to attend to.
Saturday, May 15, 2021
Simic Poem
On This Very Street in Belgrade
Your mother carried you
Out of the smoking ruins of a building
And set you down on this sidewalk
Like a doll bundled in burnt rags,
Where you now stood years later
Talking to a homeless dog,
Half-hidden behind a parked car,
His eyes brimming with hope
As he inched forward, ready for the worst.
-- Charles Simic (born May 9, 1938).
Monday, May 03, 2021
Sunday, May 02, 2021
Recent Poem
SUBURBAN FROG
I
stopped to stand
on a
stone bridge
in the
wetlands
I
stopped to listen to
a
frog’s monologue donk donk
but as
I stopped he stopped –
all I heard
was a handyman
thumping
and sawing
to my
left and to my right
space
invaders in a backyard.
I
stood and waited to
catch
my breath and as I
waited
frog started again donk
closer
seemingly donk donk
under
the bridge – and his throaty song
lightened
my load donk donk
and I
smiled as I looked up
to the
top of the tallest gum donk
ANDREW BURKE
burkeandre@gmail.com
Saturday, May 01, 2021
I DON'T OFTEN QUOTE CHARLES BUKOVSKI BUT HERE I DO
"...poetry is survival, sir. it throws some of the stink bombs out of my room. if it comes as rhythm fine or physic, fine, any old way. I think of it more as a loaf of bread, a long fat hot loaf, sliced half down the middle, spread with pickles, onions, meats, garlic, chilies, old fingernails...add ice beer and a shot of scotch, ram it down under electric light, forget the mountains of faces and eyes and wrinkles and bombs and rent and graves, get it in, warm, smelling, filling, light a cigar, blow the whole room paint the whole room blue with smoke, play the radio, think of the bones of Chopin's left foot---that to me, is poetry, or zingplay, or the rays." Bukowski,
SCREAMS FROM THE BALCONY - [To Allen DeLoach] February, 1967
PAPER! PAPER! READ ALL ABOUT IT
Can I suggest you back Australian poetry by buying The SATURDAY PAPER and reading three poems by Chilian poet JUAN GARRIDO-SALGADO ? That's this week's issue - but the paper has a literary creative page each week which is worth reading - as they are scarce!
Friday, April 23, 2021
Monday, April 19, 2021
Thursday, April 15, 2021
DOMESTIC POEM
everyday
i’m going to write
a poem
about how my wife
does the washing
everyday
but i am too busy
hanging out the washing
as i peg
her knickers
to the frayed line
i think of robert frost
he said re free verse
to hang the washing out
without pegs you’d
have to tie shirt arms
to each other …
my brother colour codes
the pegs a line of red
and a line of green
and a line of blue
and a line of yellow
and a line of white
birds have pecked
this line for its
underlining for
their nests …
in autumn wispy curls
reflect my aged beard
my wife interrupts:
“what a lovely drying day!”
as she is wont to say
everyday
Monday, April 12, 2021
Tupelo's Own Elvis Presley DVD Promo Trailer
Friday, April 02, 2021
3 Poems in PERIODICITY Journal
Here are three recent poems by myself that have just appeared at https://periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2021/04/andrew-burke-three-poems.html
Thank you, rob mcclennan, editor in chief.
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
PSST ...
One of my best books - and now a rarity - 'PUSHING AT SILENCE' going cheap athttps://rochfordstreetreview.com/about-rochford-street-review/rochford-street-press/rochford-street-press-bookshop/
If that doesn't work, go to Rochford Street Review and look for their bookshop.
