c-side

Jane and I were fortunate enough to spend two weeks traveling around Tasmania over Xmas 08/09, with our first week spent with my extended family (namely our relatives from Switzerland), the rest on our own. For the second week, Jane and I were based mainly in North Western Tasmania. That’s when a cold front swept in from the Southern Ocean, resulting in bitterly cold conditions, especially in the alpine regions, including a summer snowstorm (!) as we trekked around Cradle Mountain on New Year’s Day.

Sadly, a “I haven’t used a film camera in over a year” accident when trying to remove my first film of the trip means all the photos from Freycinet and some from Strahan have been lost, hence the lack of other people in any of the photos.

All photos taken with a Nikon F3 using 400 or 100 ISO film and a 28mm Nikkor lens. I think. I couldn’t be bothered checking the specs. Nor have I sorted them into chronological order.

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Browsing through the Electronic Literature Organisation’s website today, I was stunned to find the following piece of news:

British Arts and Humanities Research Council has awarded a major grant (£440,000 over 2 years) to ‘Poetry Beyond Text,’ which will include investigations into “digital poetry, books of poetry and photography, artists’ books and concrete and pattern poetry.”

This grant marks another sign of international interest and national arts investment in the exploration of electronic literature.

This is a major investment in exploring the interface of art, poetry and new production technologies, as well as user/reader interaction - the research is cross-disciplinary and will draw upon the field of psychology as well more traditional literary areas. The research is a collaboration between the Universities of Dundee and Kent.

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From March to July 2008, I was fortunate enough to be the Bookworm’s first writer-in-residence, based in the Sichuan capital of Chengdu, China. This was enabled by an Asialink Literature Residency, funded jointly by Arts NSW and the Australia Council for the Arts.

Apart from a number of new poems, some of which have been published in Cordite alongside an account of my time Chengdu, my principal project was Conversions, an exhibition of poetry in translation.

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Jane has introduced me to the wonders of American poet Louise Glück through her collected First Five Books of Poems (Carcanet), which as the title suggests collects in their entirety her first five books.

There is such a marvelous sense of control and understatement at play in these works, especially the earlier pieces. My favourite of the collection is her 1975 book, The House on Marshland, where she reduces her poetry to long flowing sentences that are both evocative and elusive at the same time.

I trawled the web and found one of my favourites:

All Hallows

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence
and the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

– Louise Glück

SOURCE: Poemhunter.com

Well, here it is, the first step of a new look c-side - well same look really but with a few more bits and pieces and hopefully regular updates.

Some pictures from my recent trip to China.

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