Ralph Hotere 1931-2013

The great New Zealand artist Ralph Hotere has died. Read Gregory O'Brien's obituary along with other items on Hotere in the New Zealand Listener.

Southbank, February

policy change

I’ve decided to stop posting regular reports of readings attended. I’ve been doing it regularly since March 2008, taking photos and making often brief comments on the readers. Naturally a certain sameness starts to creep in, especially with the photos, often taken in the same pub rooms (with décor that defies interesting composition!). Instead I’ll make occasional reports of one-off events. I do have an archive of images and am thinking about putting the bulk of them up on dropbox so that anyone who wishes can see them. I’ll post an address for this site when it’s sorted out.

Cendrars

It's the centenary of the first French edition of Blaise Cendrars’ La prose du Transsiberien et de la Petite Jehanne de France. West House books have put online Tony Baker’s translation (with graphic interventions by Alan Halsey) here.

genre bending

At The Lamb on Tuesday Elizabeth Guthrie read poems of notable wit. Jeff Hilson delivered more excerpts from his ongoing ‘organ’ series. These pieces, at once roistering and self-deprecating went down a storm. David Miller and Ken White played clarinet and guitar mixing improvisation with standard charts. Miller's performance belied what he's said about being a little rusty. It powerfully combines legacies from Coltrane to traditional musics. White is a subtle accompanist and a fine singer, delivering 'Nature Boy' with a light voice reminiscent of Chet Baker. Needless to say a good evening was had by the crowd.

Langdon Court Farm, February

Gig Ryan

Gig Ryan read at Darwin College, University of Kent on the 12th (above) and then on the 13th at King's College in London. In the next day or two she'll be reading in Cambridge. I've seen Gig on several occasions in the last few years but haven't heard her read for some time, so it was a pleasure to catch the first two of these readings. She read from her recent New and Selected Poems, published in Australia by Giramondo and in the UK by Bloodaxe.

ETZ. 4

With four issues now out ETZ. is a kind of low-overhead little magazine that refuses to die. It's stapled in A4 format with (in each issue) a removable insert on heavier card. This one includes Francesca Sasnaitis, Rae Desmond Jones, Chris Edwards, Matvei Yankelevich, Ann Vickery, Corey Wakeling, Sheila Murphy, Pam Brown, Lewis Warsh, Kent Naccarter, Toby Fitch, Jill Jones, Cameron lowe, Joseph Carmel Checuti, Michael Farrell, Oscar Schwartz, Duncan White, Toby Fitch and yours truly. Copies are available from Donnithorne Street Press. Though international it has a certain larrikin streak. Witness Duncan White:

Michael McClure Reads to the Lions
They just want to eat you
Michael

Provender Wood, February

Adelaide, an interview and a reading

For anyone interested, there's a recording of a short interview with me conducted by Cath Kenneally on 101.5FM, Adelaide (24 November 2012) plus part of a reading I gave at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation a couple of nights later at:

http://writersradioprogram.com/tag/laurie-duggan-poet/

 

Culbone Wood

Sometime in the making, Tom Lowenstein’s From Culbone Wood – In Xanadu (subtitled ‘notebooks and fantasias’) was launched last night at Swedenborg Hall. This prose work takes off from Coleridge and ‘Kubla Khan’. It is written in a late eighteenth century manner and incorporates items in Somerset dialect, yet it also involves imaginative excursions into texts and voices of whose existence Coleridge would almost certainly not have been aware.