JAAP BLONK LECTURE/PERFORMANCE AND DISCUSSION

Monday, March 18, 2pm
Elizabeth Burchill Room, Building 68 (Performing Arts), G38
Clayton Campus, Monash University












Jaap Blonk is one of the world’s leading performers and practitioners of sound poetry, exploring the common ground between poetry and music without abandoning the semantics of language. His compositions and performances make use of words and phonetic snippets, as well as clicks, hisses, and other vocal manipulations. As a vocalist, Blonk is unique for his powerful stage presence and almost childlike freedom of improvisation, combined with a keen grasp of structure. His celebrated renditions of works by Dadaist pioneers such as Hugo Ball, as well as other major works of sound art including those of the Fluxus movement, have been presented throughout the world. One of his earliest influences was Kurt Schwitters, whose Ursonate he first heard in 1979; he memorized the entire work, and has recited portions of the piece hundreds of times. He works as a solo performer, in collaboration with avant garde musicians such as John Tchicai, Tristan Honsiger, and Mats Gustafsson, and with his own ensembles Splinks and BRAAXTAAL. This is his first visit to Australia.

 “Jaap Blonk is a remarkable self-taught composer, performer, visual artist and poet. To see him on-stage is to be dumb-struck at first by the seeming oddity of his work – the presentation of abstract vocal sounds and extraordinary facial and bodily gyrations; if one can get past that, one marvels at the sheer inventiveness of his art. He is funny, serious and virtuosic at the same time. He is part sound poet, part sound technology artist, part experimental theatre performer, and he uses improvisation within a structure, or to shape the structure, in many of these modes. He takes his voice and body far beyond the normal range of expression which the rest of us use in daily communication.” – Boulderpavement

Anthology of Monash Student Poems 2012

Please find below links to poems by Monash ECPS undergraduate students from this year's creative writing classes:


Caitlin Murphy

Joel Lazar

Urvi Majumdar

Sarah Holley

Nicholas Robinson

Kristen Richards

Marissa Lee

Lynsey Swan

Jarryd Redwood

Christopher Bryant

Madeline Thornton-Smith

Hannah Clinton

Gavin Yates

Corinne Van den Hoek

Edwina Sleigh

Alexandra van Schildt

Anna Duve

Oscar Schwartz on the poetry of Chris Mann

Monday, September 17, 3pm, Menzies N702 (Monash Clayton)

                      Yr stuffed. Not coz yr wrong but coz yr looking in the wrong direction.
                        – Chris Mann

Chris Mann’s poetry is complicated to the point of breathlessness. When engaging with a Mann poem for the first time it is as if one has suddenly become dyslexic: the words are there, but their construction resists meaning. The complex façade of a Chris Mann poem is intimidating for any reader, so his readership is limited almost exclusively to the domain of the international avant-garde - more exclusively, to an international community of experimental composers.

This seminar will provide a point of entry into Mann’s work, and his exploration of cybernetics, linguistics, poetics and composition. Then comes the revelation: to read Chris Mann requires a new conception of what reading can be - as performance.

Gig Ryan - A Reading from New and Selected Poems



Monday, 10th September 2012, 2pm – 4pm

Elizabeth Burchill Rooms,
Building 68  (Performing Arts Centre), Clayton Campus


To celebrate the publication of her long-awaited New and Selected Poems (Giramondo 2011), Gig Ryan will be reading from and discussing her poetry. Her most recent book, 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 Ryan 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.

As the critic Owen Richardson has written, her widely anthologised and influential poetry is,
‘the product of a thoroughgoing research into language where the materials, the data, are displayed, denaturalised: skidding jolting precipitate diction, counterpoints of stateliness and trashiness kept from incoherence by tightly organised sound and rhythmic systems, synaesthesia, catachresis, collage — it’s all absolutely modern….she may even have invented or at any rate done the best R&D on a whole new affect, elegiac sarcasm.’
Gig Ryan has been the poetry editor of The Age since 1998; she also works as freelance reviewer, and has written extended articles on Les Murray, Judith Wright, and Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer.





John Hand, "Lyrical Fabrications: An Adornian analysis of John Forbes' poetry"


Monday August 6, 3pm, Menzies N702 (Monash, Clayton)

Theodor Adorno's most famous statement of literary criticism is his assertion that "[t]o write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric". But he also said that silence is not an option: "literature must...not surrender to cynicism merely by existing after Auschwitz". It is argued that the coherently strange/strangely coherent poetry of John Forbes, under Adornian analysis, embodies and rises above this dilemma, albeit negatively. Each lyrical fabrication is a "tailored lightsail" designed to carry the possibility of literature through to a world - hopefully waiting - in which the possibility of a recurrence of Auschwitz has been dissolved.

Either that, or we will "sit and write & / smoke, thumbing through Adorno like New Idea".

Papers from Ken Bolton Day


Please find below links to draft versions of papers presented at the Ken Bolton day.

Many thanks to everyone who participated.


Tim Wright

Duncan Hose

Sam Moginie

John Jenkins

Ken Bolton, "The Kirkman Guide to the Bars of Europe" (courtesy of foam:e 8)

A KEN BOLTON DAY - Thursday, 21 June 2012









Room 6, Building 8 (Rotunda), Monash University, Clayton (next to Library)


Symposium celebrating the writings and influences of poet, art critic and publisher Ken Bolton.

Presented with the assistance of the Monash Literary Studies Research Unit and Deakin Centre for Memory, Imagination and Invention.

Ken Bolton has been a leading figure in postmodern Australian poetry since the 1970s. His many volumes include the recent books The Circus, A Whistled Bit of Bop and Sly Mongoose; his collaborative texts with John Jenkins have appeared in numerous editions and also been widely anthologised. As editor of the literary journals Magic Sam and Otis Rush, and through Sea Cruise and Little Esther Books, Bolton has made a significant contribution to small press publishing over several decades. He is also an art critic, based at Adelaide’s Experimental Art Foundation since the early 1980s, where he runs Dark Horsey Bookshop. 
http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/bolton-ken

11.15-11.30:  John Hawke, Introduction

11.30-12:  John Jenkins, “Twenty-Four Years of Collaboration”
John Jenkins has written seventeen books, mostly non-fiction and poetry, and edited anthologies of short fiction. He has worked extensively as a journalist  and arts writer. His most recent books are the poetry collection Growing Up With Mr Menzies; and travel writing, Traveler’s Tales of Old Cuba. Website: johnjenkins.com.au

12-12.30: Sam Moginie, “Amongst Modernisms: Reading Ken Bolton in the 1970s”
Sam Moginie resides in Marrickville, and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Sydney reading the Australian poetry of the 1970s. He blogs occasionally at moremeteos.tumblr.com.

LUNCH 12.30-1.30

1.30-2: Duncan Hose, “Poetry Hauntologues: Erotics of Influence in Frank O'Hara the Younger”
Duncan Hose is a poet, painter and academic scholar. His latest book of poems, One Under Bacchus, was published in 2011 by Inken Publisch, who also released his first collection, Rathaus, in 2007. In 2010 he was the recipient of the Newcastle Poetry Prize. He is currently completing a thesis at the University of Melbourne on self-mythologising in the poetry of Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes. 

2-2.30: Ann Vickery, “Taking Poetry to the Beach: Ken Bolton and the Coalcliff Years”
Ann Vickery is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at Deakin University in Melbourne. She is the author of Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing (Wesleyan UP, 200), Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry (Salt Publishing, 2007) and co-author with Maryanne Dever and Sally Newman of The Intimate Archive: Journeys through Private Papers (National Library of Australia, 2009).

2.30-3: Tim Wright, “Up Late Thinking: Digressions on a few poems by Ken Bolton”
Tim Wright is a PhD candidate in English/Creative Writing at Monash University. He was winner of the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize in 2008, and edited the anthology Some Sonnets.

3-4.30: Ken Bolton, Poetry Reading and Discussion
A gay, light-hearted bastard, Ken Bolton cuts a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary landscape, his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, lipstick-smeared, grinning cheerfully at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar D-type, El Cid. Born in Sydney in 1949 he works at the AEAF in Adelaide and edits Little Esther Books.

John Jenkins and Ken Bolton will be reading together at Collected Works, Friday 22 June (6pm).

Contact: john.hawke@monash.edu

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)