Verge 2014 - Everything and Nothing - Official Launch at the Melbourne Writers Festival, August 30

OFFICIAL LAUNCH @ MELBOURNE WRITERS FESTIVAL 

AUGUST 30 AT 11:30am 

The Cube 

ACMI Federation Square, Melbourne 

Come help us celebrate the tenth edition of Monash University's creative writing annual, featuring a selection of established and emerging authors from Australia and around the world, including John Tranter, Heiko Julien, Anders Villani and Coral Bracho.

The winning entries of the 2014 Monash Prize awarded by the Emerging Writers Festival are also featured.

All Welcome!

Everything is Poetry: Environmental Poetry, Guerrilla Poetry and Poetry Bombing A public lecture by David Morley

Wednesday 27th August 6-7pm
Lecture Theatre G1.04, Caulfield Campus

Abstract 

'We are putting the world on notice: we are here; we are writing; and we want your attention. If you’re not willing to give us your attention, then we will take it from you. We will be heard. Are you listening?’ – from the Guerrilla Poetry Manifesto

How do we create a poetic form that increases the species-diversity of a habitat? How can we prompt a whole city to read poetry? How do we place poetry at the heart of what we do and who we are? In this guest lecture, the first Alliance Professor of Writing David Morley presents examples and challenges that will surprise and delight. From poetry-bombing a clothes store to poetry-bombing a city, from blending poems into the life-cycle of birds to swimming a poem along a river, David’s own creations are imbued with a high idea content about the dynamics of ecology (he is a trained zoologist as well as a poet). His conceptual works are created from the artistic fusion of poetic and sculptural elements with those of the natural landscape. John Clare declared that he ‘found the p\oems in fields and only wrote them down’. Morley, the poetic biographer of Clare in The Gypsy and the Poet (Carcanet, 2013), takes this process a step sideways by creating poems and folding them back into the natural world. 

Biography 

David Morley was trained as an ecologist and carried out a substantial research project on acid rain before Margaret Thatcher shut down his laboratory. Fortunately David was also writing poetry and won an Eric Gregory Award a few months after losing his job. Morley’s poetry collections include The Gypsy and the Poet (Carcanet, 2013), a PBS Recommendation, and Biographies of Birds and Flowers: Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2014). He published Enchantment (Carcanet 2011), a Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year chosen by Jonathan Bate. The Invisible Kings (Carcanet, 2007) was a PBS Recommendation and TLS Book of the Year chosen by Les Murray. He writes for The Guardian and Poetry Review. He was one of the judges of the 2012 T.S. Eliot Prize and is judging the 2013 Foyle Young Poets of the Year. He has won fourteen writing awards and is Professor of Writing at Warwick University and Alliance Chair of Writing at Monash University.

Poetry Reading - David Morley, Gig Ryan, Will Eaves

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

6 for 6.30pm

Collected Works

35-37 Swanston St

Nicholas Building, Level 1

David Morley’s poetry collections include The Gypsy and the Poet (Carcanet, 2013) and Biographies of Birds and Flowers: Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2014). He published Enchantment (Carcanet 2011), a Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year chosen by Jonathan Bate. The Invisible Kings (Carcanet, 2007) was a PBS Recommendation and TLS Book of the Year chosen by Les Murray. He is Professor of Writing at Warwick University and Alliance Chair of Writing at Monash University.

Will Eaves is the author of three novels, one work of experimental fiction and a volume of poetry. From 1995 to 2011 he was the Arts Editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Warwick, and currently lives in Melbourne, where he is writing a novel about the possibility of artificial intelligence.

Gig Ryan's New and Selected Poems (Giramondo 2011), also published in the UK, collects work from over three decades, and has been shortlisted for both the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and the Prime Minister's Literary Awards. Gig is the author of six previous volumes: The Division of Anger (1981), Manners of an Astronaut (1984), The Last Interior (1986), Excavation (1990), Pure and Applied (1998), and Heroic Money (2001). She has been awarded the C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry in 1999, and the FAW Anne Elder Poetry Award.

For enquiries contact John Hawke (John.Hawke@monash.edu)

The Poetry of Alan Wearne - Monash University, Tuesday August 5

Please join us for a poetry reading by Alan Wearne

Tuesday, August 5, 2014
4pm-5pm

Room E561, Menzies Building, 

Monash University Clayton


Australia’s leading verse-novelist, Alan Wearne emerged from the Monash Poetry Readings of the late-1960s; his work focuses on the outer-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, especially Blackburn South. Alan’s many books include The Nightmarkets, which won the Banjo Award; The Lovemakers, which won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and the Arts Queensland Judith Wright Calanthe Award; and The Lovemakers: Book Two, Money and Nothing, which co-won The Foundation for Australian Literary Studies’ Colin Roderick Award and the H. T. Priestly Medal. His most recent collection, Prepare the Cabin for Landing, appeared with Giramondo press in 2013. Alan will be reading from his new work for this special event.

For enquires, contact John Hawke (John.Hawke@monash.edu)