Sydney Writers' Festival 2

I have read a few 'best of' lists for Sydney Writers' Festival events, but none (that I have seen) focus on poetry. In fact, few include poetry events at all. Which, I guess, is understandable. For Australians of a certain age (mine), the chance to hear Molly Ringwald both talk and sing is bound to block out any other things happening.

Anyway, in an attempt to right the balance, here are the poetry events I am going to try to attend.

Rare Objects Series Launch - Thursday 23 May 10 am

Luke Davies will launch a selection of chapbooks from Australian poets, including David Malouf.

Anis Mojgani - Thursday 23 May 6.30 pm at UNSW

Anis will be performing a solo show at UNSW. I believe it is already booked out (it is a free event), but I have my ticket! There is a waiting list.

Celebrating the Voice Writers' Night - Thursday 23 May 6.30 pm in Wollongong

This regular Sydney Writers' Festival event will launch a collection of poetry written by indigenous inmates at the Junee Correctional Centre. This is sure to be challenging and diverse writing.

Dermot Healy with Luke Davies - Friday 24 May 2.30 pm

Luke Davies' Interferon Psalms was the most challenging book I read last year. During this event, he interviews Irish writer Dermot Healy.

Words and Music - Saturday 25 May 10 am

Facilitated by Luke Davies and featuring musicians, poets and an ABC radio host -  Kate Miller-Heidke, Jeff Lang, Kate Fagan and Andrew Ford - this combines two of my loves: music and poetry. And according to Twitter, Kate Miller-Heidke appreciates the poetry of my predecessor as Australian Poetry Slam champion Omar Musa. Twice the reason to hear her speak about the intersection of music and words.

Marathon Poetry Reading - Saturday 25 May 4 pm

This event will mirror somewhat the Spoken Four event from the Friday night Festival Club, instead this time showcasing the written form of poetry. Eight poets from a variety of backgrounds and countries will present their work.

Finally

While I am posting links to events, I should say that the Sydney Writers' Festival online program is one of the best I have ever seen. If you doubt my suggestions, just checkout swf.org.au. You can browse by day, author, genre or venue.

Some other lists:

ABC's coverage and participation in the festival

Concrete Playground

Crikey's Liticism

Sydney Writers' Festival

Thanks to Word Travels, one of the rewards for winning the Australian Poetry Slam is the opportunity to take part in the Sydney Writers' Festival. Later this week, I will participate in several events during the festival and perform alongside Anis Mojgani from the US and Kate Tempest from the UK.

I have been a fan of Anis Mojgani since I started performing poetry and searching for inspiration on YouTube. I have only just recently discovered Kate Tempest, through the online recommendation of Scroobius Pip, no less.

For my major event, the Festival Club on Friday 24 May, we will be joined onstage by Eleanor Jackson from Brisbane. This is a very diverse lineup of performance poets, which should give a great demonstration of the breadth of spoken word.

These are the Sydney Writers' events I am participating in:

Mouth to Mic - Friday 24 May 4 pm

Miles Merrill from Word Travels will interview Anis, Kate and myself after we each have given a short demonstration of our work to the audience. I dread these sorts of things - I don't particularly like explaining my work and always feel somewhere between pretentious and superficial when providing answers - but I am really looking forward to hearing Anis and Kate talk.

More details can be found here.

Spoken Four as part of the Festival Club - Friday 24 May 7 pm

This is my main event of the festival. Anis, Kate, Eleanor and I will each perform a set within a 90 min poetry feature at the Festival Club. This will be followed by The Chaser and HEDTalks with Max Lavergne, Eddie Sharp and Andrew Denton. My favourite bit: I am up first so I can get my rubbish over with before sitting back and enjoying the rest of this entertaining night.

Details on this event are here.

Troubadours and Minstrels -  Sunday 26 May 12 pm

This creative event will see musicians lead small groups to poets hidden in alcoves through the Rocks. After a short performance, the groups then rotate to another poet. The combination of music, poetry and the architecture and history of Sydney is unique.

I believe this event is already booked out, but details are here.

Q-Poetics - throughout the festival

Curated by Sydney poet and performance artist Skye Loneragan, Q-Poetics will see poets delivering 'literary relief' to festival-goers waiting in queues. I am one of the poets who will be entertaining those waiting and those travelling between venues.

Next post I will list some of the poetry events for the Sydney Writers' Festival which I am not part of, but which I highly recommend nonetheless.

Making Sense

On Saturday 3 May, I performed as part of Sense at the Nishi Gallery in New Acton, a well-curated 'audio journey' from spoken word through classical and jazz to 'intelligent dance music'. The largest drawcard was Max Cooper, a British electronica producer. Sense introduced me to Cooper and I have since become a serious fan. I recommend you listen to Synesthetes Museum, which includes a thoughful spoken word piece in the mix (from around the 55th minute).

Rosie Stevens plays cello on 'Manifesto'
Photo: Adam Thomas

For my set, I linked together four poems into Making Sense, which was very similar to other shows I have done recently. It builds on the themes of questioning my motivations and trying to discover my subtexts (a fruitless process, trust me, but hopefully one that is interesting to the audience).

More importantly, though, I achieved a first and was able to check off one item on my 2013 to-do list.* Rosanna Beatrice Stevens accompanied me on two pieces, on the cello and the piano. Rosie is a talented musician, writer and all-round artsy person.^

I gave Rosie recorded versions of two of my poems: 'Manifesto' and 'The Sound of a Fish Jumping'. She composed music to fit the words, pace and tone of the pieces. I think she did a brilliant job, taking the words to something that was more rounded and fuller.

Tapping out the fags of our white-hot wit
Photo: Adam Thomas

The addition of music had some strange effects on my poems and my performance. The emotions I felt through different passages changed slightly as the music played behind me. Sometimes, I could build on the sounds, riding the rhythms Rosie played - for example, during the 'pash' sequence in 'Fish Jumping'. At other times, I wanted to portray a different, but complementary feeling to what I was hearing in the music. This was tricky, such as when I was trying to go for a resigned, despairing reading while fighting the urge to tap my foot.

But with a few rehearsals and a musician who read my performance very well, the end result was a show I was very happy with.

The set list (with links only to the words at this stage, unfortunately):

Manifesto

This is my Religious Poem

The Sound of a Fish Jumping

Tipping or Rocking May Cause Injury or Death

* Make that half an item. I performed with a musician, but we have not yet recorded those poems. Don't worry, we plan to do that later this year. It was too good an experience not to capture it audibly.

^ Rosie is part of the creative team behind Scissors Paper Pen, a words-based event-producing collective in Canberra. She blogs here.

Laziest poetry performance ever

Here is a performance I did recently at a new variety night in my hometown of Canberra. I cannot thank enough the young woman who accepted my invitation to the stage. She made the whole thing work.

The Silent Poem, or

I love you more than anything, but not enough to hurt you

I am sorry. 

I know when we made love this morning, 

You were thinking of someone else. 

Our hands woke before the birds; 

Sought warmth in each other’s feathered folds; 

Found holds they have always known; 

Fingers tracing familiar lines, 

Homing back with scribbled notes. 

But I know when we made love this morning, 

You were thinking of someone else. 

Morning light snuck peeks past curtains, 

Smoothed creases across uncovered curves; 

The golden flush of each day’s nearing, 

Fresh as that first morning’s glow, 

Reflected in nostalgic lips 

With memories longer than our minds’, 

As we washed over each other’s body, 

Anointing foreheads with kisses 

And were born again 

In grasping hands and arched backs. 

But I know while we made love this morning, 

You were thinking of someone else. 

We kissed with eyes closed: 

Mine shut on the present tense, 

Yours clenched around a memory. 

The worst thing I have ever done 

Is let you make love to the person I was 

Instead of leaving the person 

I’ve become.

Poetry in Motion slam - Wellington, NZ

In a stroke of astrological alignment, I happened to be in Wellington, New Zealand, for work the night of the April Poetry in Motion slam. It turns out Wellington has a strong poetry scene with some dedicated organisers and a bunch of great writers and performers.

Ali Jacs, the current NZ slam champ, is a Wellington local and naturally won the slam on the night. Here is an example of her politically-inspired, image-rich work:



In another hit of coincidence, the feature poet of the night was Laurie May from the Northern Territory. I met Laurie at the Australian Poetry Slam finals last year and was looking forward to a full set of her work. I was not disappointed. Funny, engaging and socially-minded, Laurie's pieces were fantastic.

Here is a taste:

Manifesto

Photo: Adam Thomas

To breathe

To be here

To breathe

To not fuck it up

To forget everything you ever stood for

To climb down into the well and burn the ladder for light to write by

To pin regrets to your collar

To write backwards so you can read the words on your forehead in the mirror

To throw away the first draft

To throw away every draft that follows

To melt the grains of childhood pain into flawed stained glass windows

To laugh at saints – Ha!

To have nothing you can’t live without

To have nothing

To make jewellery from broken promises

To loose the thread from around your wrist and string your bow with it for remembering

To be the gum tree the cockatoos shake from with a startle, wings beating like thigh slaps, hurrumphing at the wind

To give away small pieces of yourself to strangers, verse by verse until, hopefully, one day there is nothing of you left to give

To make wings from confessions

To refuse to fly

To stand beneath lookouts and swallow the shouts

To sing like an echo

To turn to the person next to you and say ‘tell me a story’. How about after the show, we get a kebab and a chocolate milk and sit on the swings in the park near the Polish Club in the mercurial light of the moon? You will tell me how the whole world once fit in the arc of tanbark around a park. On the merry-go-round you chased storms. Descending the slide was a dive to the bottom of the sea. Because only in the eye of a tornado or the cushioned stillness of ocean depths could you block out the other voices and hear yourself sing. And I will swing and tell you I don’t really like chocolate milk. But I’ll be crying when I do. And I’ll say ‘this has been the most marvelous night of my life. So far.’

To swing

To let go the earth

To feel falling when you know that, somehow, you will be caught

To open like a flower two hours before the sun rises, because you just know today is going to be the brightest of days, a great day for growing

To live up to this

To incandesce with intent

To not let yourself down again

To read poetry like church bells before service and after a wedding

To not let these just be words

To stand for everything you forgot

To fuck it up, better than you ever fucked it up before

To breathe

To be here

To breathe

China, Part 2

I think the best part of being at a writer's festival is the chance to meet other creative people. I was lucky enough to meet some fantastic authors and festival organisers while at the Bookworm International Literary Festival, some very well known and others less so. Being at karaoke with a group of these people was a surreal experience.

Here are some of the great writers I met in Beijing.

Justin Torres

Justin is a novelist and short story writer from upstate New York. He is one of the most entertaining interviewees I have seen, simultaneously humble and revelling in the attention. His debut novel, We The Animals, is a gripping story of growing up.

When I saw Justin being interviewed in Beijing, he was asked a question about poetry. He claimed to be terrible at writing poetry and recommended Natalie Diaz, a recommendation I followed up and encourage you to do also.

Despite his denial, I think Justin's work is full of poetry. Take the opening lines from We The Animals:

We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats, we wanted rock. We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight. We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more.

 I wish I could write more poetry like that piece of prose.

You can find links to We Are Animals and other work by Justin on his website.

Karin Tidbeck

Karin (here and here) is a Swedish short story writer and poet. She is a distinctive writer for two reasons: she works with speculative fiction and writes in both English and Swedish. She has work published in fantasy/sci-fi journals such as Weird Tales and Weird Fiction Review.

I didn't get to meet Karin, but heard her speak at a panel on short stories. I immediately read her collection of stories titled Jagannath, an eclectic mix of tales that deal with common human themes in uncommon environments. There are steampunk airships, fairies and personified plants. I was particularly delighted and inspired by the mixture of the familiar with the fantastic.

You can read an excerpt from Jagannath here.

Andrej Blatnik

Andrej is a Slovenian writer and critic. He specialises in very short stories - nano fiction, although I didn't hear him use that term. He writes in Slovenian but has had his work translated into many languages.

His latest collection of stories is titled You Do Understand It is packed with compact hits, each tale as tight and complete as possible. I found it very inspiring, each story containing a whole picture but only enough narrative to make you think. Like a good poem.