Kangara Waters Performance

Being both irreverent and civic minded, I took my poetry, anecdotes and puns along to Kangara Waters, a retirement village hidden in the outer-northern-but-soon-to-be-central-if-we-dont-stop-urban-sprawl-and-build-more-medium-density-housing district of Belco.

I managed to escape car-jacking or a brutal knife fight with the local denizens by pulling into the bully-proof named street "Joy Cummings Place".

Interestingly, Kangara Waters was ungated. Curious considering its location near Lake Ginnindera College and the bowling alley. Perhaps it was the overwhelmingly manicured setting, the building's "modern retiree" stylings, the permanent autumn feeling, the crushing ennui and the impression  the sky had transformed into a colossal stop watch that was held in expectant hands that protected it from the depredation of the teenaged.

The place was like the start of Edward Scissorhands or Blue Velvet. I'm sure it appeals to people who have run out of serotonin. everywhere you look you say gosh, that's interesting.

I parked at the entrance and was immediately lost.

The staff were very helpful and soon had herded a crowd together.

I performed for half an hour. Afterwards I lunched with several of the more attentive residents and we spoke of the funny threads of life, their stories and the impact that a stroke or dementia and the banality of existence, and how that half hour of poetry was an injection of colour on a beige canvas.

It made me glad that I chose my pieces a little more wisely than usual.

Stroke

I have lain here since yesterday

on the cold tiled floor

the refrigerator door is open, and chill

the pot on the stove top boiled dry

I cannot answer the phone,

or call for help

I cannot feed my dog

or fight him off.

As I was leaving, the director spoke with me about the Try To Remember program in the UK, which had success blending poetry and caring with dementia patients. I agreed to come back, if only to perform, but my head was filling with ideas.

walking out I realised that Kangara Waters was an exceptional facility, with wonderful, caring staff and not just a place to dispose of the olds. More of a place to dispose of them thoughtfully.

To pull this post back from irreverence, and maybe my soul from the hell-fires, and give myself a hollywood ending;  Dementia is a fearful loss of one's history, perhaps through poetry I can help readdress this. I wouldn't mind being involved in a Try To Remember-esque project.

Like all good stories, the character goes on a journey. I drove home.

D Day

Well, actually, bin day.  but that didnt seem as dramatic.

Friday is the day you get things done that you should have done on a more convenient day earlier in the week.

Due to this procrastination, I'm gunna overload you, dear readers.

you were warned.

Canberra Poetry Slam Farewell to 2012

Not going to Corinbank until Saturday?

well we want you! Come along to the last front Slam for 2012!

The theme is "Undecided between Blues or Valhalla."

The night opens with the open mic at 7:30 followed by the slam at 8
Join the slam and compete for cash prizes!

The features will be Steve Smart & Kim Jeffs from MELBOURNE!

The Slam will include the music of beauty and passion from
THE NIGHT CAFE, a latin/gypsy/jazz ensemble who will improvise intro/outro music for slammers and melt your nerves with their sultry sound.

Bios:

Over the past fifteen years Steve has performed his work and that of others thousands of times in hundreds of venues across the world. He's more famous than most people you know, but much less famous than Ryan Moloney who plays Toady in Neighbours.

Career highlights include 'Mouth Off' at the Sydney Opera House; the one man show 'Wild Optimist: rises and falls of a performance poet' (Brisbane Festival Under The Radar); performing at Bar Open's 10th Birthday celebration (Fitzroy); winning the audience award for 24 Hour Fix (short theatre competition); and co-featuring at the Berkeley Slam in California. Upcoming events include feature performances at the 2012 WA Poetry Festival and the Queensland Poetry Festival.

Kim Jeffs’ writing began as a response to the Black Saturday fires – as therapy. She set out to create a small book of memories for her children. Instead, she found poetry. Or perhaps, says Jennifer Compton, poetry sent a wildfire to chase Kim to its arms.

Epicormic growth is the new shoots thrust out by trees burnt by inferno. It is the tree’s desperate attempt to remain alive – for without leaves for photosynthesis the tree will assuredly die. After catastrophe, we must grow. To remain static is to invite death. Kim’s poetry mirrors her recovery – intense, painful, bleakly humorous, but not without moments of joy.


I first met Steve Smart at This Is Not Art in 2009, I met Kim on my tour to Melbourne in June and became acquainted with The Night Cafe through Schmooze,  and can say each are an extraordinary act in their own right and we have all three of them at the one place, throw in your regular host the Flying V, who'll no doubt be ready to improvise with The Night Cafe (is ready to improvise the same as planned spontaneity?) and its going to be a complete corker of a show!

7:30 at the Front Gallery and Cafe in Lyneham, 30th of November.

This Is Not Art is over. for 2012.

Another Labour Day long weekend has come and gone and with it Australia's leading emerging and experimental arts festival, This Is Not Art (TINA). and were TINA a person, they'd be intellectual, irreverent, inspiring, bright, sunny, humid, intoxicating and alarming thinner than before.

2010 was my favourite of the TINAs i have attended, even though the year before the Tragic Troubadours were in the program. Since 2010, the program has grabbed less of my attention, and less of my heart. The change has come due to funding changes, no doubt, and two of the five constituent festivals have splintered off (the People's Popular Front of Judea - SPLITTERS!).  you can measure the decline in the number of aisles of tables at the traditional Sunday Zine Fair, dropping from four in 2010 to two in 2012.  The budget cuts, or the loss of Sound Summit, robbed the Zine Fair of live music and forced the music-thirsty zinesters to overlook the blues guitarist thrashing away outside the Odditorium from the King Street Carpark's Fence.

The cuts in 2011 had forced the TINA Festival Clubhouse to move from its location on church street and into the Great Northern Hotel,  which previously had formed a venue in its own right. This de-centralised the festival, making a lazy person like me less likely to attend events on the western side of the city.

TINA's not the only thing to have changed in those four years, I'm older, less employed, more emergent. I'm no longer single, a little more sane and not so focused on being entertained as being educated, and here TINA shines.

TINA may have lost me from its twirling majorette of experimental theater, new musical sounds or cutting edge digital arts but it has caught me in it's cerebral net woven from panels, talks and reviews. I'm speaking about two of the remaining festivals, Critical Animals and National Young Writers Festival.

From the Critical Animals i listened to great talks such as Eva Bujalka's talk on George Bataille and how his references sublimates his writing from pornography to literature or the panels at the NYWF which featured successful writers like the panel on biography when young (Ben law, Marieke Hardy, Micheala Maguire) or translating cultures through poetry with Stuart Cooke and Eileen Chong.

These events (and not limited to just those mentioned, mind you) were gold.  Even better, the events were often podcasted, and are available here. if you are an artsy person, or on the periphery, and are thinking about funding, listen to the podcast "Who's getting Grants (and how)?".  Thats the sort of bread-and-butter knowledge writers, musicians, visual artists, artistic collectives need. AND ITS FREE!.
superfluous full stop for emphasis.

TINA 2012 had a lacing of JC in it too. Each year I have gone I have found a way to get some of my poems heard. 2009 was with the troubadours, 2010 i wrote and performed Human Caviar at the "Non-erotic Erotica", 2011 i wrote and performed My Breakfast Had A Face for "Oh Nigella, We Love Thee".

"I was a sol-ja, a revolutionary..."

My Breakfast Had A Face was served up again on thursday night's World Hurl Anti Slam, a slam without scores, with 2 awesome feature acts, and where i was selected by the feature judge to have performed the best on a night where the competition was so strong!

That crowd darkly in my mind.

The two feature acts were Vincent Gates and Amelia Walker, the latter donating her latest book Sound and Bundy* as first (and only) prize.

* Sound and Bundy has been a corker so far, inspired by the Ern Malley affair, 3 made up poets invent another poet. A surreal blurring of verse novel and a (or several) poetic anthology. Fabulous!

Following World Hurl, I had a weekend of booze related brain damage, and mental stimulation. I began to realise that TINA wasnt a remnant of past glories, but vibrant, and interesting. That maybe it was me that had grown stolid, phlegmatic and interacted with the festival in a way that made it seem like Critical Animals and NYWF had subsumed all other avenues of interest, and then limped on like cephalopagic twin.

Perhaps what was missing from this TINA was more JC? I attended the World Hurl on the thursday night and felt like I had achieved everything I came to do. Next year, i'd want to be more involved.
I left Newcastle feeling creatively recharged, inspired.

TINA 2013, Sharpen your pitchforks, I'm coming.

Success with Poetry In Motion

National Poetry Week 2012 featured what regular readers would know as the Poetry Train,  An event coordinated by Fiona McIlroy, a Cafe Poet, between CountryLink Rail and Australian Poetry Limited.

20 Canberran poets boarded and frenetically scribbled poetry as the train chugged towards Sydney. these poems were read on the hour to the poets and passengers who shared the journey. This were then read at Sydney's Central Station, and Australian Poetry had organised another reading at the NSW State Library and we formed the heart of a special slam at the Friend In Hand pub in Glebe.

The poems were collected to be published within a chapbook, and each was entered into the Countrylink Poetry Prize.

My poem, 'Upon Looking Back' was chosen by noted poet Charlotte Clutterbuck to be the recipient of the Countrylink Poetry Prize.

You can read the AP Poetry In Motion article here.

Upon Looking Back

I sat backwards as the train took off

it felt like

coming home/not leaving

the trees moved backward

the clouds rolled backward

rushing towards Canberra

not Sydney

The passengers looked forward to what was ahead

I mulled the past

The sign:

LARENEG

GNITIAW

MOOR

What else moved in reverse?

I thought perhaps/that just maybe/possibly/seems weird

But I was travelling backwards

through time?

things seemed less

modern.

strange and older.

I had no watch to test the theory

No. No I was not.

just the next stop was

NAYEBNAEUQ

September Schmooze

Good morning Dyslexiconians

Just a short note spruiking Schmooze's September Schmooze , the innovative networking company at which I have my artist residency.  I'm performing there for the aschmoozement of the members and their guests.

As the event is hosted by Hindmarsh Living, I might wheel out [pun intended] some old but themed poems such as
Your Grandfather
Grandad!
(De)Escalators At The Food Court
and one of my favourites, Stroke.

Hopefully aschmoozing enough to make the guests laugh at inopportune times, spraying their co-members with soylent green.

I'll be there performing A La Carte Blanche from menu of poems, some mushy, some sweet, some with a little spice, and some straight up hard like the tipple of whiskey Gran takes to make it between bingo and the endless hours of solitaire waiting beside the phone.

I'm going to finish this link-filled post on a highly referential note with this  little scone.

JC.

Book Launch Tonight (OMFGOFABAASAPSOIA)*

Tonight, 6 pm at Paperchain Bookstore, Triptych Poets Issue 3 is launched.

This is my first book of poetry, so of course i'm as excitable as a depolarising neuron (look it up).
Actually, rather than your regular book of poetry, its 3 suites in one, a hybrid, a demogorgon that features Canberra's P.S. Cottier, Geelong's Joan Kerr and Myself.

The night will be officiated by poet Paul Hetherington.

i feel like a party.
I'll be there to eat cheese and drink wine
and do some lines (...of poetry)

Come along!

Love
JC

PS: All my thanks to Blemish Books. If I've forgotten someone, I'm sorry but I've just gave away the last of my thanks.

*OMFGOFABAASAPSIOA is Oh My Fucking God Of Amaze-Balls And Anal Sex And Public Service Or Internet Acronyms