This time tomorrow I’ll be getting ready to read at the Charles Bukowski-themed SPOKEN at the State Library Cafe. It runs from 5.30 till 7.30pm, and features Sommer Tothill, Kevin Spink, Dan Eady, as well as yours truly. There will also be live body art by The Pillow Book Girls, music by Bernard Houston and band, an open mic, and the raffling off of one of the very last copies of The Voyage, my first chapbook. All that for free!
News
Tales from the Gutter
It’s going to be a busy year. I’ve penciled in a nana nap in for November—so you know now not to disturb me then. Preferably for the whole month. Until then, a lot of black tea is going to pass these lips. And words.
On February 10th I’ll be reading some Bukowski-inspired poems at Spoken: Tales of a Dirty Old Man. This is a gig seriously outside of my comfort zone, and I’m researching, reading and writing this week. Who knows what might happen! Come along and find out. Here’s the poster: SPOKEN.
I’m delighted to announce I’ll be joining co-poetry editor Jessica Alice on the editorial committee of Voiceworks Magazine as something of a Brisbane representative. Express Media have supported my poetry for years, and I’ve always wanted an opportunity to help out–but Melbourne is even Down Underer than here is. Now we have the Internets and Skype and magic!
So far I’m sticking to my resolutions: write often, submit often (to journals and stuff, that is!), and read more. (I’m reading Damon Galgut’s In A Strange Room, Tom Robbins’ Skinny Legs and All, and Krissy Kneen’s sensual and touching Affection. Oh, and Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs for funzies.)
Otherwise, I’m hermited away in my office writing grant applications and working away at freelance projects. This weather transforms our lower storey (i.e. where I exist) into a damp, chilly cabin in the woods, and “home office” comes to mean “in bed with hot water bottle, laptop, and giant octopus plushie.” But it works, and I have the company of Delirium and Sigmund, betta fish who determinedly blow bubbles at me when they’re happy.
2012: One Week In
One week in and 2012 is already miles better than 2011. I spent NYE in good company, and started the year with a clean house and an organised office. Let’s see how long that lasts. Anyhow, I’ve decided that 2012 will be a year of writing. Today I emailed in the first poetry submissions of the year, along with another poetry-related application. And there are more to come this week; I’ll be working hard to meet a crowd of deadlines!
I should also cut 2011 a little slack: the year ended well, in poetry at least. I was thrilled to be awarded third place in the John Marsden Awards for Young Writers for a poem called auf wiedersehen spiegeltent. It should be up on the Express Media website soon if you’d like to read it, otherwise I’ll plonk it here at some point. And that poet I live with, Jeremy Thompson, had a well-deserved success at UQ: he won the Ford Memorial Prize for Poetry. Just to bring it all full circle, both of us had pieces published in the latest issue of Voiceworks (#87 Play).
My new year’s resolutions are to blog more frequently, write a poem a week (at least!), submit more writing and apply for more opportunities, and start a dream journal. (Seriously, weird things go on in my brain at night. I shouldn’t let those ideas slide!) So far I’ve used Freedom a lot to keep focused and I’ve blocked most of the silly blogs I read regularly, with the exception of Sex is not the Enemy and Oglaf.
As a final note, I’ve been listening to Flap! all week, and I recommend that you check out their album. They produce ear-to-ear grins and bounciness. Oh, and I saw The Dresden Dolls a few days ago at The Tivoli. It was amazing! I’ve seen Amanda a few times, but Brian’s incredible drumming creates a sound that’s quite different — and really rich. And loud. Hooray!
Happy new year, readers. I hope 2012 is the year it all falls into place.
Winding Down
It’s 3am again; there’s been a lot of sleeplessness during and post-festival. Queensland Poetry Festival filled my head with so much stuff it’s like there are ants crawling around under my skull: Sawako Nakayasu, Chloe Wilson, Kevin Gillam, Helen Avery, Jacob Polley, and (of course) Jeremy Thompson were highlights. So was the bookstore, though my wallet will disagree. I previewed some gravepoems on the Sunday, including what we’ve decided is a love letter to Govenor Sam Blackall; thank you to everyone who came along.
This year, QPF published a limited-edition anthology containing a poem by every poet on the program. There were 100 copies available on Friday…and five left on Sunday evening, so rather a successful little venture! Here’s my poem from the collection, in case you weren’t one of the lucky 95. (It’s 5/7 of a sonnet, and was published in Overland last year as part of a collaborative poetry mash-up.)
Before the Funeral
You find her in the kitchen and your lungs empty.
This is the room where they cornered the fox,
the fox that panicked through the hall in the storm,
that your brothers crushed into unsealed wood:
that stain there. The window is open.
Evergreens are all puffed up. Nothing grows
from the bones of the fox. Dishcloths are stiff
on the rail where she split her head; the blood
has frozen before it could stain. Your legs try
to turn you. The volta catches in your throat.
My first collaboration with Jeremy Thompson, Petrichor, also disappeared quickly from the bookstore. Thank you kind souls! There’s only one left of the print run — perhaps we will get crafty and put together a second edition in time for our trip to Victoria later this year. I’ll be appearing at Passionate Tongues, at Melbourne’s Brunswick Hotel, on September 26.
This post-festival winding down is only an illusion. Brisbane Festival launches this week, so if you are looking for me, I’ll be in the Spiegeltent all month, madly scrambling across tightropes, balancing deadlines. For now, the John Marsden Prize closes at 5pm, so my last task for tonight/this morning is to choose a poem. Me?! Make my mind up about something?! Bah!
Countdown to QPF
Suddenly it is August. I’m not quite sure how that happened, but here we are.
Queensland Poetry Festival is this weekend (August 26–28). I’ve just spent two weeks on the couch entertaining the EKKA flu with six seasons of Red Dwarf and a little bit of The X Files. I’ll be emceeing opening night, Of Rhythm and Rapture, so I’m coaxing my voice back with pot after pot of lemon and ginger tea.
You mustn’t miss:
- Of Rhythm and Rapture: Friday, 7.30 pm — Sandra Thibodeaux, Sawako Nakayasu, Jacob Polley
- A Babble of Skywalkers: Saturday, 10.30 am — Jeremy Thompson, Red Room
- Filled with Ink: Saturday, 1.30 pm — Ron Pretty, Jaya Savige, Jacob Polley
- A Tattoo of Light: Saturday, 4 pm — Joanne Featherstone, Matt Hetherington, Zenobia Frost
- All is Roar and Crash: Saturday, 4 pm — Kevin Gillam, Andy White, Marisa Allen
- A Million Bright Things: Saturday, 8 pm — A short set from every poet on the program
- That Profound Machine: Sunday, 5pm — QPF Filmmakers showcase
- Onwards to Infinity: Sunday, 7pm — Closing night, with encore performances
In other QPF-related news, I will have a new chapbook available at the QPF: a handmade, limited-edition collaboration with poet Jeremy Thompson. Look out for it at the bookstore — it’s called Petrichor: Two Poets, and it sports gorgeous cover art by Bettina Walsh (The Voyage). Petrichor contains new work, including some co-written bits and pieces, and revisits a few old friends. Reward us for a whole weekend spent folding and stapling by grabbing one — there are only 20 in existence! And they have magic semicolons on the back!
In less-QPF-related news, Head over to the Australian Women’s Book Review to read my review of Pam Schlinder’s debut collection, A Sky You Could Fall Into. Then go and do yourself a favour by reading Pam’s book (Post Pressed, 2010).
Personally, I’m looking forward to a festival weekend. And losing the cough means getting back to the theatre: Animal Farm (QPAC) this week and The Hamlet Apocalypse (La Boite) next week. Fortunately Cabaret kept me happy — and thoroughly earwormed — in between episodes of Red Dwarf, curries, and lager milkshakes.
Imaginary Ruby Fizz Tea Parties
I miss Ruby Fizz. She’s been on an extended holiday for over a year now, and though RFS events have never been a regular fixture in Brisbane’s arts-world, I think it will soon be time for another one. The Gentlemen’s Tea Parties were a success. Superb performers lit up georgous audiences at the Woolloongabba Antique Centre.
But this time we need a different system — something new. A brilliant hall or lounge with comfy chairs and bright teapots. Homemade cakes. Space and light and wonderful sound. Brisbane is a funny place for venues, especially with the loss of The Troubadour, so I need a little help to make this happen (funding applications aside — there’s a holiday project for me).
There are two roads we can go down, I think: informal and unticketed (e.g. BYO picnic food–something like this could even be held in a library) or structured, ticketed and fancier. Both can be fun; the latter is better, because performers gets paid — but I don’t want to make tickets expensive. Superior People come from all walks, after all.
Anyhow, just some thoughts. If you are interested or have any ideas, please comment away. Ruby Fizz would be so delighted to have you all for tea again.
Boy Girl Wall Accordion
It has been the kind of month that invites adventure in and won’t let it leave till it’s properly sloshed—by which stage it’s difficult to ever get rid of. I’ve been to see some outrageously good shows, rambled around cemeteries, written lots, and re-manifested myself as the love child (imagine that) of Tank Girl and Delirium. Hullo, April—where did March go?! This is where:
Jason Webley @ The Zoo
Early last week, Jason Webley arrived in Queensland to finish the Down Under leg of 2011’s epic world tour. Finally seeing him perform, after four and a half years of waiting, was a singular joy. Webley’s Brisbane show at The Zoo on March 23 attracted around 200 punters, all very ready to stomp and sing and become his makeshift orchestra.
When he’s on stage, the slogan on promo posters, “post-apocalyptic fun,” makes perfect sense. I can imagine Webley—in his beloved, battered dancing hat—as the kind of musician that would get us through the apocalypse and still have us dancing even after the sky had long since crashed down.
Those who came along to Webley’s farewell house party (/hosts’ housewarming) were in for an extra treat. The night turned into one long, glorious jam session. (I even got out my trumpet! And toyed with an unsuspecting ukelele!) You’ll find a garage-full of people playing Eleven Saints floating around on YouTube, no doubt.
Jason Webley @ The Zoo—photo by Zen’s dodgy phone
Poetry & Graveyards
Earlier in the week, I was very pleased to be able to drag Mr Webley and a RagTag group of Brisbanites around my favourite of haunts, Toowong Cemetery—an adventure in itself. After several months of guilty neglect, I’ve been visiting the graveyard much more often. (I don’t know how I manage to forget the necropolis down the road–inside the gates it is always cooler and quieter than it could ever get in our sweltering house.)
More gravewalks means more grave poems—a good thing, since last year’s ramblings are beginning to see the light. Issue 35 of Cordite Poetry Review, Oz-Ko (Envoy) is online as of today, and I’m super excited to say that there you’ll find Warning. Consider it the introduction to that forthcoming cemetery collection I so often talk about (see! bits of it exist!).
And in extra shiny, super-duper rad breaking news, our own Jeremy Thompson is one of three poets commended by judge Peter Minter in 2010’s Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize, rising above over 1000 entries into the realm of Awesome. Whee!
boy girl wall @ La Boite
Bear with me, because my segues for this blog are about to get worse. In fact, non-existent. Run with it. You might remember me raving away last year about a wonderful little Brisbane show called boy girl wall. Well, it’s back on this year at La Boite, and last night’s opening performance proved its just as marvellous as we thought the first time around. Maybe a bit more marvellous.
Lucas Stibbard in boy girl wall—photo by Al Caeiro
In 2010, The Escapists’ one-man show, performed by Lucas Stibbard—with live music from Neridah Waters—relied on the walls of the Sue Benner Theatre at Metro Arts (the set was literally drawn on with chalk), so I was interested to see how they’d handle La Boite’s in-the-round set-up. Fortunately, The Escapists have made something gorgeous out of a potential problem: a chalk-board green stage hits the horizon line and becomes a collage of blackboards rising into the rafters. In the vast La Boite space, Keith Clark’s lighting really helps to hold everything together (I only wish he could use his lighting powers to rig up a more powerful OHT).
Beyond the venue, not too much has changed, and it was lovely to visit the 20-something characters again (especially dear Power Box and the lovely, but somewhat gothic library assistant). The script is clever, life-affirming, and above all, maddeningly funny. Seeing boy girl wall again, the influence of Under Milk Wood (which Stibbard and I chatted about recently in Rave Magazine) becomes delightfully clear. If you enjoy being happy, you should grab tickets before the rest of the season sells out.
Nuns, Punks, and Iggy Pop dressed as 007
The other day I was passing through Queen St Mall and observed the following:
- A young boy in a home-made cardboard top hat with a big orange flower attached on a spring.
- A man who, from the neck up, looked like Iggy Pop on a bad day but, from the neck down, looked like James Bond in a perfect black formal suit and bow-tie.
- A punk asking a flock of querulous nuns in blue questions about Jesus.
This is irrelevant. I think all low-fat milk tastes like it’s gone off. I am having treacle cake and a glass of milk for brunch.
If you like poems, you can find something called I Dreamt You Were Dead and It Was Grand (A Love Poem) by me, over at Black Rider Press (come along with the Black Riders, etc.). Even if you don’t like poems, it will still be there. Even if you don’t like treacle cake, I will still be eating it.
No one in my house likes treacle. I would like to find someone else who likes treacle, and give them a hug. But I won’t give them any of my treacle. It’s English, don’t you know.
In other news, I’ll be doing performing at a poetry event called ‘Not Aloud in the Library’ at the Brisbane Square Library on the 16th of April. I will be reading other people’s erotica. Fuzzy-tingle times are not allowed aloud in the library, unless you are one of my housemates. Darkwing Dubs will also be performing, along with burlesque and circus acts.
In other other news, that same weekend I’ll be a busy bee at the state library on the 18th, doing a poetry workshop as part of Express Media’s Mini Publication Ride. It’s so awesome to have an Express Media thing happening up here in Queensland. If you don’t know them and their 
publication, Voiceworks, you ought to. Anyhoo, this is a four-week series of workshops. They will be on short stories (Chris Somerville), poetry (me), opinion (Benjamin Law) and zine making (Tiara the Merch Girl) – and if you do all four you’ll have your own zine at the end of it. You can book here if you want to come, which you really ought to. If you don’t, I’ll still be eating treacle cake, though I might be sick of it by then and have moved onto a different kind of cake.
Happy Easter. Avoid invoking the fertility gods today unless you really want to. Eat a lot of chocolate, though. Food babies are safer.
Aaaarrggh 2010!
Everything that could possibly be crammed into a month has been, dear readers. I’ve moved house (down the road), kicked off a new job at Rave Magazine (whee!), and orchestrated not one but two Gentlemen’s Tea Parties at the Woolloongabba Tea Parties (with the help of a number of seriously Superior people).
The first Gentlemen’s Tea Party at the WAC was a raging success, with Absolute Tits (and their very special guests); The Ragtag Review Band (pictured–thank you, Seb), poets Graham Nunn, John Knight and Ross Clark; Evelyn Hartogh; The Coin-Operated Boy; The Merch Girl; and burlesque darlings Bertie Page and Rita Fontaine (as Johnny Castrati). I had such a great time! Thank you so much to Tiara, Tim, Wayne and JT, all of whom kept me sane during the week and made the event run smoothly.
Next week’s event welcomes the addition of Miss BB le Buff and Phoebe Manning, and we can expect it to be an even more wondrous and gentlemanly day. There are fewer than ten tickets left, so contact Tiara at rubyfizz@gmail.com if you’d like to book.
In other news, I have a poem in the new publication The Tangled Bank, details below. Hurrah!
____________________________________________________________
The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder, & Evolution has launched!
The anthology, which marks the 150th anniversary of Origin of Species, features over 100,000 words of speculative fiction, poetry, artwork, and essays about evolution.
An international line-up of nearly 50 contributors includes Sean Williams, Brian Stableford, Patricia Russo, and Carlos Hernandez.
Just US$4.99, The Tangled Bank is now available for download as a PDF at http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/the-tangled-bank-love-wonder-and-evolution/8340048
Check out “Darwin’s Daughter” by Christopher Green (a free short story from the anthology)
http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/darwins-daughter/8339953
For more information, visit the website, or our Facebook or Twitter pages.
Why I Should Remember to Check the Mail
So, I was whinging to mr oCean just the other day about The Belonging Quartet not yet finding a home when I should have been checking the mailbox. Instead, I only noticed the orange envelope waiting in the box by my front gate today (Sunday, on my way back from a heritage walk at the cemetery), and whatdoyaknow, that gosh-darned suite of poems has won the UQ Ford Memorial Prize.
Hurrah! I know I was up against some mean competition, so I’m a lucky duck, and very grateful.
Anyhoo, here’s the suite of poems:
Belonging Quartet
1 House-sitting in the old suburbs
I try not to hunt for skeletons
in other people’s closets, but here
they wrap their bones
in wood and wallpaper,
and come to find me.
I don’t go out for days.
Clocks mean nothing.
I lie in the clawfoot,
reading the ceiling’s pine calligraphy.
I eat, I sleep, I talk to possums
who won’t talk back. I climb the hill
to the antique shops; later,
clean the house in a burlesque
frock, pillbox hat and 1940s
dance slingbacks—keep my last ten cents
in my snake-skin bag. Who loved
these things before me?
/
2 Hoping at the city’s edge
I escape for one last night
to my lover’s and fold myself
into white sheets like a secret letter.
My skin is a palimpsest of his touch.
I sleep without hesitation.
Early sun welcomes winter in
through the window, bakes
the wooden walls sweet, illuminates
notes written in lemon juice
on paper flesh.
Later, I sit on the back steps in yesterday’s
dress and watch the sun take slow,
blue gulps of time to make its light.
/
3 Biding time in the new suburbs
My ghosts come to collect me.
In the place that I must call Home, the bricks
are slick with paint not yet infused
with memories. There hasn’t been time
in all these hurried years to store them away;
they drift like dust through empty space.
I see things in the shadows. I am still afraid
of what darkness might hold
in its questioning clutches. In sullen corners,
things linger that I said goodbye to
long ago.
/
4 Growing a museum from seedlings
Here we have the stone I found
by the road in the shape
of a teardrop; a box of poems
and love-letters (mostly unsent, one or two
received); and on a shoelace, a key
that offers only the promise of opening.
Black-and-white postcards
line muted plum walls. I type
on an Adler at a desk
with hidden drawers.
I unpack bags in my burlesque
frock, strip myself of what-if thoughts,
and lie down blank to listen
to the hum of history
winding up and then uncoiling
at the foot of my bed.
We try to burrow into sleep,
but with tomorrow dragging restless claws
against the door, we must lie awake
and wait for it to remember
to come in through the window.
Zenobia Frost 