SEPTEMBER SPEEDPOETS FEATURE

lesley synge
on september 27

 

 

 

 

 

one of the great things about the move to the Lucky Duck is that some of our prodigals (and prodiguys) have returned to SpeedPoets more regularly
Lesley Synge is one of these, and we are so pleased to have her dropping in so often that we asked her to do a feature

I missed out on a copy of ‘Organic Sister’, but have long owned and cherished her book ‘Mountains Belong to the People who Love Them: Slow Journeys in South Korea and Eastern Australia’.  Grab a copy at SpeedPoets this Saturday.  You will not regret it.

 

  There is         © Lesley Synge

 There is evil in the world:
I’ve seen it glow.
I have looked into its furnace
and seen it blow.

 There is love in the world:
I’ve eased its flow.
I’ve dived beneath its surface
and felt its tow.

 There’s emptiness in this world:
emptiness to know.
I’ve slipped into its nothingness
haha hee hee
……………………ho ho

 

Lesley Synge documents life with eyes wide open. She turns her gaze with equal intensity to all before her, whether the wrongs of contemporary society or the serendipity of passing clouds.  She is widely published in prose as well as poetry and is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. Lesley Synge’s first collection of poetry Organic Sister has gone out of print and her most recent book is Mountains Belong to the People who Love Them: Slow Journeys in South Korea and Eastern Australia. For sale at the special price of $20.

My Hairdresser

Don’t even think about
spending more than two seconds
bleating about your broken heart
in her salon
because she’ll tell ya straight –
men are only good for one thing.
After a hair appointment with Terry
you’d come out feeling like
you’d danced all night at a disco
steada having the dead cells on top of your head
tizzed up.
Know what I mean?

Bit on the loud side, our Terry
a bit … OTT.
Every time you booked in
she’d have redecorated
and be swirling around in a weird teenage outfit
running a hand through the latest
colour in her hair
or through the tinsel wig she wore
after illness struck.

She hated it when she couldn’t work any more
drove her husband nuts as she
ran up her bankcard
on rows of lights across the lounge-room ceiling
and huge mirrors.

I saw this jazz when I came to stay the night.
She was wearing slinky tight black pants
and a sexy pink T-shirt
and I was in my fake leopard fur
to help her feel as if we’d returned
from drinking cocktails
and not about to spend the evening
lounging on the double bed she could hardly leave
now her bones had started to shatter.
She told her husband
Darl, you gotta get me to the hospital
for a decent shot of morphine.
The poor bugger was so sleep-deprived
he could hardly summon the ambos.
When they came, she refused
to utter the word pain
but when they heard the name of her condition
they knew she wasn’t faking it.

She chirped away
as if some spunk was tempting her
into the back of his panel van
to zoom her to his favourite midnight beach
instead of the Emergency Department.
Hey haven’t I seen you guys somewhere before?
That naked ambos calendar?
These boys are spunky she winked at me.
And they laughed back
Lady, you belong in that TV show
Absolutely Fabulous.
And before they closed the ambo doors
her husband tucked a basket under the high-tech stretcher –
whenever she went to hospital she knitted psychedelic scarves
for the homeless –
and said Darl! you won’t believe the number plate!
it’s 124 LUV
and she said
I’d like to give these spunks 124 love.
The ambos eased away like they had celebrity cargo
while we stood in the empty driveway
and punched the air
and cried 124 LUV!
as if we’d discovered
the meaning of life.

Down Here, our Terry’s not cutting hair
anymore, making her clientele look good
for weddings, parties, divorces, new lovers.
But we all know what’s happenin Up There.
In her black miniskirt and stilettoes
brandishing her scissors
she’s chasing God around
from cloud to cloud shrieking:
You’d look spunky with a bleached crewcut!
Why the hell do ya wanna look like a hippie?
I’m gonna texturize the crap outa that beard of yours.
Have ya seen how cool the angels look with purple streaks?
God, we have ta brighten This Place up.

Lesley Synge 

For Terry Windred 1951-2012

SPEEDPOETS MAGAZINE SUBMISSIONS

 

Submissions for the July edition of SpeedPoets Magazine will close on Wednesday 23 July 2014. Please email submissions to speedpoetszine@gmail.com,
preferably as word documents attached to the e-mail, or in the body.

Life is easier if the poems are short – say up to 25 lines.

And here is a word document of the June SpeedPoets Zine = 201406 . Thank you all for your contributions.  It was very well received.

SpeedPoets will next gather at The Lucky Duck on Saturday 26 July, starting at 2pm.  Bring some poems.

 

 

final for 2013 – Saturday Nov 30th

9ine

take to the mic

30th

November

for

Speedpoets champion

&

fame and ca$h, hootin’ and glory

&nd

Eleanor Jackson

&

Open mic

(so pack a poem)

it’s on

at 2pm

the

HIDEAWAY

188 Brunswick St Brisbane

hope you’re

there

Pascalle Burton & Tylea live at SpeedPoets this Saturday

I cannot begin to tell you how excited I am about the ‘SpeedPoets Only’ collaboration between Pascalle Burton & Tylea that will envelop one and all at the Hideaway (188 Brunswick St) this Saturday, August 31. Anyone who saw them together on the stage at QPF 2012, will, I am sure, share my excitement.

To get you buzzing, here’s the film that won Pascalle Burton the 2013 QPF Filmmaker’s Challenge and an absolute gem from Tylea’s former band, Gota Cola. Now imagine the combined adventurous spirit of these two ladies on stage… good times ahead!

And of course, there will be bountiful open mic opportunities, free zines, raffles and the guitar roar of Sheish Money. Be there to experience something special!

Date: Saturday August 31
Venue: The Hideaway, 188 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley
Time: Doors at 1:30pm for a 2pm Open Mic Start until 5pm
Entry: Gold Coin Donation

August SpeedPoets featuring Pascalle Burton & Tylea

August is a massive month of poetry here in Brisbane – it’s QLD Poetry Festival time – so it seems right that SpeedPoets brings it to a close when it returns to The Hideaway (188 Brunswick St) on Saturday August 31. The lineup for August is another stunner, with solo feature sets from Pascalle Burton and Tylea, as well as a special collaborative performance.

Singer songwriter Tylea’s ethereal music has been resonating for the past two decades in either her solo work or in Gota Cola. She will be featuring at the next Speedpoets alongside performance poet Pascalle Burton. Tylea’s recent show, featuring the music of the Twin Peaks soundtrack at the Brisbane Powerhouse, was astonishing and her otherworldly yet unpretentious music has the ability to trigger emotion in virtually any audience. Pascalle and Tylea collaborated on a Yoko Ono based piece at QPF last year. For this year’s QPF, Pascalle has been working on the Letter.Box.Stamp.Collect. installation as well as a new performance work based on the idea of conceptual poetry called Poems by Telephone. By request, Pascalle and Tylea will collaborate again on some new pieces especially for Speedpoets. Both artists continue to be inspired by the work of Yoko Ono and promise to bring ample amounts of light and dark.

And as always, there will be plenty of space in the Open Mic Section with all readers in the running to be named Call-Back-Poet for the month. Each of the Call-Back-Poets will earn themselves a feature spot at the November event where they will have the opportunity to take home cash prizes, be crowned SpeedPoets Open Mic Champion. There will also be free zines, raffles and the guitar roar of Sheish Money! What more could one want?

Ink it in your diary people!

Date: Saturday August 31
Venue: The Hideaway, 188 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley
Time: Doors at 1:30pm for a 2pm Open Mic Start until 5pm
Entry: Gold Coin Donation

July SpeedPoets featuring Shane Rhodes, Ghostboy & Cindy Keong

SpeedPoets returns to The Hideaway (188 Brunswick St) in July with an all-star lineup featuring the 2013 Arts QLD Poet-in-Residence, Shane Rhodes, Ghostboy and his co-conspirator Sir Richard Grantham and the launch of Cindy Keong’s debut collection, Same Sky.

Shane Rhodes is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Wireless Room, Holding Pattern, The Bindery, and most recently, Err. His poetry has won an Alberta Book Award, two Lampman Awards, the P. K. Page Founder’s Award for Poetry, and the National Magazine Gold Award for Poetry in 2010. His latest collection, Err, was a finalist for the 2012 City of Ottawa Book Award. Shane’s poetry has also been featured in national and international anthologies such as Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012, 2011 and 2008, Breathing Fire II, How the Light Gets In and Seminal: Canada’s Gay Male Poets.

Ghostboy is one of Australia’s foremost spoken word & performance artists. A live hybrid of performance poetry, absurdist comedy and “spoken weird” theatre, Ghostboy has featured at numerous major writing and poetry festivals. In 2011 Ghostboy created a two-man neo-cabaret comedy – ‘We Love You!’ – with multi- instrumentalist Richard Grantham (Deep Blue Orchestra). The two team up again this July to perform some of the pieces from We Love You, but don’t get complacent, they also threaten to unleash some new work!

Cindy Keong is a Brisbane based photographer, poet and teacher.  Her poetry has been published in Page Seventeen, paper wasp, SpeedPoets, QLD Poetry Festival Anthology 2011 and the Third Australian Haiku Anthology. Her short films have been highly commended at the Overload Poetry Festival and shortlisted for the Queensland Poetry Festival Filmakers Award. Cindy was recently commissioned by if:Book Australia and Queensland Poetry Festival to take a series of photographs for the enhanced e-book, “The City We Build’. Her photography was also featured on the cover of Page Seventeen issue 10.  Cindy has performed her poetry at Queensland Poetry Festival, Blackall Heartland Festival and many local events.  Same Sky is her debut collection and this will be her first Brisbane reading from the book.

And as always, there will be plenty of space in the Open Mic Section with all readers in the running to be named Call-Back-Poet for the month. Each of the Call-Back-Poets will earn themselves a feature spot at the November event where they will have the opportunity to take home cash prizes, be crowned SpeedPoets Open Mic Champion, and thanks to Phillip Ellis, have a chapbook length zine of their work published ready to launch at the February 2014 event.

Ink it in your diary people! And don’t be shy… here’s the facebook invite, so spread the word! https://www.facebook.com/events/531096176940148

Date: Saturday July 27
Venue: The Hideaway, 188 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley
Time: Doors at 1:30pm for a 2pm Open Mic Start
Entry: Gold Coin Donation

June SpeedPoets features Santo Cazzati and Kellie Lloyd

The month of June sees SpeedPoets return to The Hideaway (188 Brunswick St) with feature sets from one of this country’s spoken word innovators, Santo Cazzati (Melbourne) and Brisbane rock legend, Kellie Lloyd.

Son of Italian immigrants to Australia, Santo Cazzati emerged from past lives as a classical concert pianist and avant garde jazz musician to teach at an elite Melbourne private school which must remain anonymous in order to protect those concerned. He performs in a range of styles, from fast rhythmical delivery to slow atmospheric meditation, with a strong music influence and critical ironic distance. A fixture on Melbourne’s grass roots poetry scene, his feature performances have included Melbourne Writers Festival, Queensland Poetry Festival, Overload Poetry Festival and La Mama Theatre. He is a presenter of the Spoken Word radio programme on 3CR and the PJ (‘poetry jockey’) of the House of Bricks Spoken Word gig. He appears on Going Down Swinging and Voiceprints CDs as well as the Melbourne Poetry Map website. He is a winner of the Overload Shelton Lea Award for Best Solo Performance.

Kellie Lloyd grew up playing bass in beloved Brisbane band Screamfeeder. Now she’s out on her own playing what she likes to call Dark Pop. It’s guitar driven, sometimes with a band, sometimes with just a drummer, but one thing is for sure… it’s loud and it’s dark and it’s dreamy. Rolling Stone described her solo debut, Magnetic North as “peppered with haunting hooks, sentimentality and otherworldliness.”

And as always, there will be plenty of space in the Open Mic Section with all readers in the running to be named Call-Back-Poet for the month. Each of the Call-Back-Poets will earn themselves a feature spot at the November event where they will have the opportunity to take home cash prizes, be crowned SpeedPoets Open Mic Champion, and thanks to Phillip Ellis, have a chapbook length zine of their work published ready to launch at the February 2014 event.

Ink it in your diary people!

Date: Saturday June 29
Venue: The Hideaway, 188 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley
Time: Doors at 1:30pm for a 2pm Open Mic Start
Entry: Gold Coin Donation

Betsy Turcot live at SpeedPoets this Saturday

The end of the month is closing in, which means SpeedPoets is ready to light up The Hideaway (188 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley) this Saturday, May 25 with the launch of B.R. Dionysius’s seventh collection, Bowra, the guitar roar of Sheish Money, three rounds of  Open Mic and the sublime spoken stylings of Betsy Turcot.

Fresh from a series of sell-out ‘Chosen Family’ shows at the Anywhere Theatre Festival with Eleanor Jackson, Betsy is bringing her solo show to the SpeedPoets stage. For anyone who has seen her weave her tapestry of words on stage, I am sure you will be knocking the door down to get in, and if you have not yet had the pleasure, then you are in for a treat!

Remember, doors open at 1:30pm and sign on for Open Mic is open from 1:30pm – 2pm.

Entry is a gold coin donation, but the more you give the easier it is to keep this event running.

It’s been 13 years… and there’s no sign of slowing down!

Here’s a poem from Betsy to send keep you satiated til Saturday.

See you then,

*****

Campfire

The purple sky breathes shooting stars,
makes good excuses for holding hands
as she slowly inches her fingertips over my knuckles.

Her eyes, focused on the fire, hide my blush.

I wear the thickness of mystery
veiled in a middle name she doesn’t know.

But she wants to know my hands.
I can feel the tremble in her touch.
I pause, my lips mid-sip.

Bubbles rest on my tongue.
You can’t always trust what you feel.
You can’t always feel what you touch.

But I’ll let her take a chisel to my marbled skin.
Let her carve her kisses into my cuts.

© Betsy Turcot

*****

Betsy Turcot has featured at Queensland Poetry, Melbourne Overload, Brisbane Emerging Arts, Anywhere Theatre and Woodford Folk festivals. She is a guest MC, curator and feature at Brisbane’s spoken word poetry event, Words or Whatever, and has contributed to the Melbourne Poetry Map.

Betsy was co-author of the poetic play, She Stole My Every Rock and Roll with fellow poet, Eleanor Jackson and has been a member of The Broken Records Collective with Doubting Thomas and Darkwing Dubs. She is the author of the chapbook Blister and is currently writing a poetic play, Chosen Family, for the Anywhere Theatre Festival with The Belles of Hell.

 

SpeedPoets Launches Bowra by B.R. Dionysius

SpeedPoets lights up The Hideaway (188 Brunswick St) and the month of May with its third book launch for the year, Bowra by B.R. Dionysius and well as some red hot spoken word from Betsy Turcot.

And let’s not forget the red hot Open Mic Section. All readers  are automatically in the running to be named Call-Back-Poet for the month. What does this mean?

Each of the Call-Back-Poets will earn themselves a feature spot at the November event where they will have the opportunity to take home cash prizes, be crowned SpeedPoets Open Mic Champion, and thanks to Phillip Ellis, have a chapbook length zine of their work published ready to launch at the February 2014 event. A great prize indeed!

Sound like the perfect way to finish the month of May? We’d love to see you there!

Date: Saturday May 25
Venue: The Hideaway, 188 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley
Time: Doors at 1:30pm for a 2pm Open Mic Start
Entry: Gold Coin Donation

Here’s a poem from B.R. Dionysius to help you through the week!

Café Bohemia

(i)

Winter; & he stole away from his Highgate Hill flat
Every Wednesday night with a vague return time &
A cheap bottle of tawny port cupped under his armpit
Like a bully’s captured head. His long green trench
Coat gave his mahogany boots a shine as he swished
Along the length of Dornoch Terrace; past the royal
Queenslander on his left, that three years from now
Would be rented by his friends, but for the present,
Was inhabited by band members from Powderfinger.
Where three years later, they’d all gather to celebrate
The marital fallout of his mission to Café Bohemia.
His ears burnt like a deposed General’s epaulettes
As he marched on like a man possessed, her call
To him more powerful than any ancient siren.

(ii)

He wanted to arrive first. To secure a coveted table
Within the tight margins of the coffee shop, for her
& her two friends; to demonstrate his thoughtfulness.
Otherwise, it was standing room only as street poets
& hipsters channelling Kerouac & his wine dark prose
Filled up the dining space like blue cigarette smoke.
He greeted fellow writers with a wave & a nod, as he
Was lousy at small talk & good at reading big poems.
They were the Bohemian poets of Hardgrave Road.
90s poets like black bearded Francis & his perennial
Leather coat that he never ever took off, until twenty
Years of listening to poetry; to the millions of words
Crooned about death, love & loss, had polished his
Mind’s animal hide, until his face shone like a god.

(iii)

She entered the café wearing her friend’s teal velvet
Coat; auburn hair gleamed like a burnished table top.
Candle stumps burnt down their short lives in front
Of them; they spread their wax wings down the wine
Bottle’s stem, then dried their delicate delta shapes in
The port breath of poets as the reading warmed up.
They read poems about West End & Daniel Yock.
About Murri protests in Charlotte Street, landlords &
Gentrification & how all the boarding houses were lost.
How the family house where that Go Betweens singer
Grew up, had been pulled down for the Greek Club.
How the police raided Musgrave Park & how Tracey
Wigginton lapped up blood like a mangrove sucks mud.
By the time it was his turn; his tawny was half drunk.

(iv)

At the interval Henk, the bespeckled Dutch organiser
Whose most memorable line was about how he often
Awoke to find his cock still rigid inside his girlfriend;
Would disappear into the kitchen with an assortment of
Followers, where Mira’s goulash threatened to burn itself,
Tasty, but mad in its pot. Here, in the wooden floorboards
There lived a small trapdoor, which led from the galley to
A secret lower deck: the café’s oubliette. Here, poets fuelled
Up on gunja, the smoke siphoned away by an invisible vent.
Some though, still wafted through the café’s warped cracks;
Like a sailor’s last breath as they drown in an Eliot poem.
Others snuck round the back, where they lawn-sprawled
Like they’d been in a shipwreck. Here, they met in piratical
Bliss; until her friends drove her off, so he sculled his port.

(v)

She thought he was silent, a bit mysterious; a poet from
The country who tried to loom over her like Ted Hughes.
The regulars didn’t disappoint. Brentley, whose themes
Were a shade darker than the dirtiest black hole; his muse
Went to star on TV as a masterchef. Or Adam, the epitome
Of beat; who published for a decade, then like Rimbaud
Gave it all up to run guns metaphorically. Or Lidija & her
Serbian mystique, who trailed lovers around her neck like
Threads in a shawl. Or Rebecca, the poet of bones & mishap,
Who shaved her head so everyone could see her new world.
Or Fakie, who read from industrial-sized post-paks he stole
From the factory where he worked. Or the Great Jeffro,
Whose mad blue eyes blazed forth Shakespeare’s wild surmise;
If poetry is the soul of cafes: then coffee is its blood.

*****

B. R. Dionysius was founding Director of the Queensland Poetry Festival. His poetry has been widely published in literary journals, anthologies, newspapers and online. His seventh poetry collection, Bowra was released in April 2013. He lives in Ipswich, Queensland where he watches birds, teaches English and writes sonnets.

SpeedPoets Saturday April 27, 2013

This month, SpeedPoets is a swirl of sound! We are excited to be featuring local songstress, Kate Jacobson and poet, film maker and sound artist, Thomas Day.

Kate Jacobson is one half of popular Brisbane indie-country/folk duo, Texas Tea. She is revered as one of Queensland’s up-and-coming song writing talents and her solo show has been described as enchanting, evocative and unique, incorporating voice, guitar and foot percussion.

Thomas Day utilises words, sound and drone, collage, film and photography with live performances often combining these elements to create immersive interdisciplinary works. He won the 2011 Nimbin Performance Poetry World Cup with a satirical work deconstructing the nature of charity under Capitalism; and once lost a Slam for failing to vomit up a poem he had just swallowed.

And of course, there will be the red hot Open Mic Section with all readers in the running to be named Call-Back-Poet for the month and earn themselves a feature spot at the final gig of the year in November and the opportunity to win cash prizes and be named SpeedPoets Open Mic Champion. And as always Sheish Money will also be out front of Moveable Feast, playing with that blues swagger that drives the SpeedPoets’ engine.

Sound like the perfect way to close out your April? See you there…

Date: Saturday April 27
Venue: The Hideaway, 188 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley
Time: Doors at 1:30pm for a 2pm Open Mic Start
Entry: Gold Coin Donation