Ken Taylor, 1930-2014

I didn’t ever meet Ken Taylor, nor did I hear him read his work. But I have two of his books: At Valentines, published in 1975 (a faded image above), and Africa, published in 2000 (I was probably in the wrong place when A Secret Australia came out in 1985). I would certainly have seen some of his work with the Natural History Unit of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation though I may not have been aware that he was responsible for it. Taylor was involved with the poets who grouped around Melbourne’s La Mama theatre in the late sixties. I was just beginning to write at the time and Monash University in Clayton where I studied (and lived with my parents) was twelve miles away from the action in inner-city Carlton. Much has been made of the antagonisms between the Carlton and Clayton poets and that mere twelve miles seemed like a giant step at the time, but there were many commonalities (my first book was published by Ken Taylor’s friend Robert Kenny a year after At Valentines appeared). Taylor’s poems were influenced by those of AR Ammons and Gary Snyder among others, but they have a sparseness and sureness of their own. It would be a good thing if all of the poems were to appear in a single collection though Australian poetry publishers tend to divide into the scholarly presses who deal with canonically approved poets and the smaller presses who generally prefer their authors to be alive. Kris Hemensley has posted a good deal more about Taylor here.

a new oystercatcher

Peter Hughes's wonderful Oystercatcher Press has just issued a new book by Michael Farrell, packed with this poet's wit and joie de vivre. It joins a now longish list of Oystercatcher titles well worth investigating.

A different matter: I've just revisited this blog's list of other sites, knocked out a couple of long-silent ones and added several others that should have been up there long ago if it weren't for the doings of the goddess Inertia.

Sheldwich, 28/03, 11.06

Pimlico, 24/03, 17.36

welcome to tate britain

an occasion

Editor Mark Roberts says he‘d figured at some stage in the early 1990s that his magazine p76 was of its nature occasional. Thirty-one years after the magazine began issue 7 appears, and it is a tribute to a single person: poet and visual artist Cornelis Vleeskens, who was born in the Netherlands in 1948, moved to Australia in 1958 and died in 2012. Pete Spence curates the issue which contains samples of artwork, poems and an essay together with tributes and memoirs by Scott Bugbird, Jenni Mitchell and Mark Roberts plus a start on a bibliography. One of Vleeskens’ earliest books was Hong Kong Suicide, published by Makar press in 1976. Another book, The Day the River, appeared from University of Queensland Press but most of the later works listed here over three pages came out with much smaller presses or under the author’s own imprint (and Vleeskens was not, for the most part, anthologised). p76, by the way, was named after a car produced by British Leyland for sale in the Australian market. It was a turkey that sold badly but later became a collector’s item.

Bruges