News
02 December
SPUNC is seeking applications for internships to assist with the following projects in 2010.
• Professional Development Program (assistance required beginning of Jan)
The intern assisting with this project will be working with GM Zoe Dattner to finalise the program for a 10-session Small Press Professional Development Program to occur at the Wheeler Centre for Books Writing and Ideas. Tasks will include, liaising with speakers, confirming event requirements, coordinating bookings and corresponding with delegates. This position runs for the whole of 2010, and would suit someone interested in the ins and outs of the publishing industry as well as publishing event management.
• Small press Roadshow (this is in advance of a grant application due in March, assistance required beginning of Jan, concluding March)
The intern assisting with this project will work with the GM on designing a nationwide Small Press Roadshow and then preparing a grant application for the Australia Council (due in March), as well as other possible funding opportunities. The success of the application may lead to this position being paid, and resuming in June.
• The ABA Conference (assistance required beginning of Feb to establish course of action around this conference)
The intern involved with this project will assist the GM by helping to prepare for SPUNC's attendance at the ABA conference in July 2010. Coordinating members and managing their catalogue information, queries and supplied material will be the main tasks of this project. The position will conclude at the end of July.
• Research Project into digital publishing and copyright as it relates specifically to Small Publishers
In this instance, the applicant will lead a research project into critical areas of digital publishing and copyright as it relates to small press publishing. The outcome of the project will be a number of recommendations for SPUNC to take the small press sector into the future of publishing. This person will be supported by the SPUNC GM and the SPUNC president, and a Masters Graduate who has done much work on this issue already.
The people who fill these positions will also be involved with SPUNC in a number of additional ways. They'll be invited to contribute their ideas and knowledge to the functionality of SPUNC in general, and will be invited to submit articles to the small press blog SPLOG. They will gain a valuable insight into the microcosm of small press publishing, and thus into the publishing industry as a whole. An office at the Wheeler Centre is available for their use, along with a PC and internet (laptops are invited too!). The three internships are expected to take up half a day a week, with perhaps some crucial dates requiring more flexible hours. The applicants must be incredibly well-organised, as well as passionate and curious about publishing. The parameters of the research project will be largely defined by the successful applicant, and that person will be able to work to their own timetable. The SPUNC office at the Wheeler Centre will also be available for use.
Please only apply if you are sure you will have the time and the energy to commit to SPUNC. This is a critical time for the organisation, and the outcomes of the projects described above will determine much of what lies in store for SPUNC and the small press sector. And likewise, your involvement with SPUNC will serve you well if you wish to pursue a career in publishing.
Please forward an expression of interest outlining your skills and career aspirations to info@spunc.com.au by Friday December 18th.
25 November
For a limited time only, Ford Street is offering all SPUNC friends a copy of Sean McMullen's Before the Storm, absolutely free with every purchase of two or more books.
Ford Street publish acclaimed books for young adults (among lots of other things), and boast a hefty catalogue of impressive titles. Check them out today.
Ford Street Publishing
18 November
Following an exciting site redesign, overland.org.au will host a week of festivities from 1–8 December 2009. You can expect guest bloggers, testimonials from supporters of the magazine, and anyone who subscribes – or subscribes someone else – will go in the running for amazing prizes. Subscribe online, by mail or phone.
Overland has been at the interface of progressive culture since 1954 and its continued existence depends on supporters making that commitment to subscribe. If you're a writer, reader, thinker, or you just care about our literary and political culture, then you have a stake in what we do.
If you can subscribe yourself – or take out a gift subscription for some thoughtful person in your life – between 1 and 8 December, you'll be in the draw to win incredible prizes from the likes of Readings, Melbourne University Press, Victorian Opera, RRR and many more. But you'll also be showing your support for one of Australia's best-loved and most radical magazines.
Bookmark the page, tell your friends, and be there at overland.org.au starting 1 December for the First Annual Overland Subscriberthon. For more details email overland@vu.edu.au or call (03) 9919 4163.
Read more about Overland
18 November
Inverse perspectives on the maturing voice
[reviewing Wimmera and Fuel by Andrew Sant]
by Geoffrey Lehmann
(Geoffrey Lehmann is preparing a new anthology of Australian poetry)
The Weekend Australian, 7 November 2009
Why do some poets, like some people, do their best work early, and others continue improving and peak in their late 40s or 50s? While editing an anthology of Australian poetry, this has been on my mind. Kenneth Slessor, Henry Lawson, Christopher Brennan and Banjo Paterson had virtually exhausted themselves as poets by the time they reached 40. But Slessor’s friend, R.D. FitzGerald, matured as a poet only after reaching that age.
Goethe and Yeats continued developing until late. For male poets, at least, it may be necessary to have an argument with oneself if one is to continue developing. Goethe rejected the romantic storm and stress of his youth, and embraced classicism and balance. Yeats rejected the lushness of his early poetry for a language that was stripped back and closer to everyday speech, the famous ‘cold eye’ of his epitaph.
With female poets, a decision to have an argument with oneself may not be needed. Biology may force the issue. When reading the poetry of Elizabeth Riddell, one of our good middle-ranking poets, I was struck by how free her poetry became once she reached her late 40s, as though a burden had been lifted from her. Jennifer Maiden, one of our best contemporary poets, has even written a poem about it, ‘Menopause as a Bee Freed from a Fairy Floss Machine’. The title of this stunningly good poem says it all.
Both books, Fuel and Wimmera, are the work of mature poets. Andrew Sant was born in London in 1950 and came to Australia with his parents in 1962. Homer Rieth was born in Germany of German and Georgian parents in 1947 and came to Australia in 1952. Both poets are published by Black Pepper, founded by the feisty Kevin Pearson, himself a noted poet. Black Pepper is one of the livelier new houses that has sprung up after the large publishers decided to exit poetry publishing.
That’s about where the similarities between Sant and Rieth stop. Sant has a long publishing history, going back to 1980; Fuel is his 11th published volume of poetry. He writes short, mainly domestic poems, and is able to tease significance and a sense of profundity out of everyday things with wit and ingenuity.
Although a few years older than Sant, Rieth has a short publishing history, starting in 2001, and Wimmera is just his second published volume of poetry. In contrast to Sant’s short poems, Wimmera is a single epic of more than 300 pages, a leviathan of a poem, cosmic in its ambition and symphonic in its approach.
In 1983, as editors of an anthology, Robert Gray and I wrote: ‘Sant’s poetry seems very English in its reticence and use of the middle tone of voice. He always deals directly with experience... His strength is his interest in and close observation of other people, combined with a classical openness of style and freedom from affectation.’
These comments about Sant in 1983 are still true, except that his syntax, which was always a bit complex, has become more complex and circuitous, and his poetry is drier in tone; perhaps too dry and sinewy at times.
He has continued to grow and develop as a poet because his poetry thrives on wit and intelligence rather than on hormones.
Take ‘Rock Music’, for example, a poem not about a type of popular music. It’s about ‘the frequencies of stones’, the music of geology. Sant is a poet of precision and imagination. In ‘Given’, after the inaction of listening to the news and hours at a computer, he starts digging in the garden:
Gigantic, the fresh spadefuls
of planet; wrecked worms
like swimmers fighting
incredible turbulence.
His adoption of the worm’s viewpoint and his choice of the word planet are quite remarkable.
Perhaps the pick of the poems in this book is his elegy for a fellow poet, Margaret Scott. ‘The Fires’ also may be a poem of farewell to Tasmania, the island where he has spent much of his life. Flying out of Tasmania over a bushfire, he thinks of Margaret Scott, two of whose houses were incinerated in fires, and who always said to him, in a motherly way between cigarettes, ‘Now tell me what you’ve been doing/and where you’ve been.’ He also remembers how Margaret used to keep herself awake while driving at night by repeatedly shouting, ‘Elephants! Elephants!’
Rieth’s first volume of poetry, The Dining Car Scene, published when he was in his 50s, was an elusive book. The title poem was a virtuoso piece describing with great precision a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. But it was hard to make out what he stood for. Rieth has been a teacher of Greek and Roman literature and the one thing that was clear was his love of language.
Wimmera is an extraordinary poem, comprising 12 books, each of two parts. Rieth moved to Minyip in the Wimmera district of Victoria in 1999. At a basic level the poem reflects Rieth’s feelings for a landscape and people he has come to love.
Each book, we are told in an introductory note by Justin Clemens, ‘moves through the experience of a particular place: discoveries, establishments, characters, events, the contingencies and violence of settlement and the unexpected profusions of the natural environment.’
The poem reaches its climax in part one of Book 12, where Rieth moves from the profusions of drought and flood of the Wimmera and addresses the ‘countless curvatures of space/an atoll of time in an ocean of infinitude/the starry night is no more than time/only space only/the inaudible overheard’.
The long, sinuous sentences of the poem have passages of bravura language. This is how Rieth summarises the life and death of poet Adam Lindsay Gordon: ‘trooper Gordon... between poignant poems/... had seen how over the jumps a horse instinctively picks up a/certain tempo/by the time it covers the distance the tempo has become a heartbeat/the grace of its motion almost supernatural/and yet he shot himself as if the shot ringing out might make for/the sound of a caesura’.
This technically brilliant passage reveals one of the weaknesses of Wimmera. Gordon’s tragic suicide is treated almost flippantly. The consistently heroic tone of the poem, although it knits it together musically, sometimes places too great a distance between the reader and details that might have engaged our sympathy.
My second grouch is the deliberate use of cliche, such as ‘drunk as skunks’, ‘back of beyond’.
I realise that the father of European poetry, Homer, also used cliches such as ‘wine-dark sea’ but that does not justify their use here.
Notwithstanding these faults, Wimmera is quite extraordinary: it reads like a young man’s poem, with its ebullience, panache, occasional passages of juddering bathos, and its hormonal music.
Read more about Black Pepper Publishing
13 November
I am pleased to announce (and some of you will already know) that in the past week Giramondo authors have won three major literary prizes.
On Wednesday this week Gerald Murnane won the 2009 Melbourne Prize for Literature for a Victorian author who has made an outstanding contribution to Australian Literature. Giramondo has just published his new work of fiction Barley Patch, and also has his wonderful first novel Tamarisk Row and his collection of essays Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs in print.
On the weekend Beverley Farmer won the 2009 Patrick White Award for a writer who has made a substantial contribution to Australian literature. Her most recent book is The Bone House, a literary mosaic composed of myth, poetry, fable and personal observation, published by Giramondo in 2005.
Last week Evelyn Juers' collective biography House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann was joint-winner of the 2009 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Non-Fiction.
In addition poet Robert Gray's memoir The Land I Came Through Last has been shortlisted for the 2009 CAL Waverley Library Award for Literature. The winner will be announed on 25 November.
If you can't find any of these titles in the bookshop, they can be purchased online, at the Giramondo website, with postage included in the price.
They're all excellent reads!
21 October
The Unguarded Word
Installation with Sound, Listening Room, Spoken Word.
Since 1999 - 12 CDs; around 300 pieces of aural poetry, spoken word, sound art and storytelling; that's some 900 minutes of the story in audio, from 5 continents. Going Down Swinging is one of only a handful of journals on the planet anthologising spoken word, and the only one still doing it every issue. To celebrate 10 years of the spoken word CDs, Going Down Swinging invites you into our listening lounge. Lay back and immerse yourself in a world of aural poetry and storytelling drawn from a decade of Going Down Swinging.
Installation & Performances
INSTALLATION OPEN DAILY - Melbourne
Saturday 31st October - Monday 8th November
Between 8am - 8pm weekdays and 11am - 8pm weekends
Venue: 1000 £ Bend - 361 Lt Lonsdale St Melbourne
Free entry before 5pm daily
INSTALLATION OPEN DAILY - Sydney
Friday 20th November - Monday 23rd November
Between 3pm - 8pm daily
Venue: Walter Burley Griffin Incinerator - Forsyth St Glebe, Sydney
Free entry daily
PERFORMANCE - Sydney
Saturday 21st November
8pm - Midnight
Josephine Rowe with cellist Judith Hannan - performing a new Going Down Swinging-commissioned spoken word and music collaborative work at the Anode2009 Sydney Performance Night.
Venue: Paddington Town Hall
Tickets: on sale soon
Read more about Going Down Swinging
21 October
Kent MacCarter is a Melbourne poet whose collection The Hungry Middle of Here was published by small press Transit Lounge earlier this year. Now considered to be one 'Australia's Best', Kent's work has been selected for Black Inc's 2009 edition of Best Australian Poetry. Congratulations to Kent and Transit Lounge.
Also included in the collection is Susan Hawthorne, from Spinifex Press. Her poem, "Climate change: yugantameghaha" is from her recent book Earth's Breath.
Read more about Transit Lounge
Read more about Spinifex Press
24 September
Small presses are frequently being heralded as a fine source for new talent, and each year this is proven with Black Inc's annual collection The Best Australian Stories selecting work from small press publications. This year Meanjin and Sleepers have had some authors selected. Congratulations to Georgia Blain and Brenda Walker, whose stories ‘Intelligence Quotient’ (Vol 68/3) and ‘That Vain Word No’ (Vol 66/4-67/1) respectively have been selected from Meanjin, and to Steven Amsterdam, who's story 'Dry Land' was selected from this year's Age Book of the Year winner Things We Didn't See Coming (from Sleepers).
Previous contributors to the anthology include David Malouf, Kate Grenville, Nam Le, Frank Moorhouse, Peter Goldsworthy, Cate Kennedy and many others.
Read more about Meanjin and Sleepers Publishing
18 September
With guest writers and commentators logging in with their thoughts and ideas on the small press sector in Australia and beyond, SPLOG promises to be a lively blog full of super interesting discussion on the industry, and more.
Splog
16 September
Short and Twisted is the annual anthology from Celapene Press, and for the next couple of months, they're looking for your submissions.
For details and guidelines head to
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