SPEEDPOETS feature poets for the rest of the year WILL ALL STAR AT QPF this weekend

SpeedPoets will enjoy the QPF this weekend

and will continue the celebration of great poetry with features from:

 

lesley synge
on september 27

and

zenobia frost
on october 25

and

david stavanger
on november 29

david will also judge the Call Back Poet for 2014,
following features from all those who have been
call back poet of the month during 2014

zenobia’s and david’s new books will be available

SEAN M. WHELAN – FEATURE POET – 23 AUGUST 2014 SPEEDPOETS

Sean M Whelan is a poet, playwright, DJ and wedding celebrant. He has published two books of poetry, Love is the New Hate and Tattooing the Surface of the Moon. He also collaborates extensively with musicians working with Isnod and The Interim Lovers. He is the co-producer of the popular literary cabaret show called Liner Notes, which most recently was performed to a sell out audience at the Byron Bay Writers Festival, Sean was also coproducer of Elemental, a show combining poetry and astronomy at the Melbourne Planetarium.

I AM

I am hot stinking decaying light.

I am the melting ice caps at the bottom of your whiskey glass.

I am the shhhhhhh on the tip of the librarians lips.

I am that small purple bruise on your thigh that you have no recollection of receiving.

I am the dust slowly gathering in the grooves of the record you left on the turntable overnight.

I am the big I am.

I am the 39th second of a New York Minute.

I am that letter you never sent.

I am the recession you had to have.

I am sorry about that.

I want to be your economic recovery.

I want to be MY economic recovery.

I am a grand design, in danger of not being finished and waaaay over budget.

I am the drawer full of Michael Jackson’s unused left handed gloves.

I am the ground control to your major tom.

I am 33 dogs that can’t even handle this right now.

I am grumpy cat’s secret smile, when nobody else is around.

I am very good at opening, terrible at closing.

I am the lipstick you used to write upon your mirror. Here Lies Buried Treasure.

I am this far away, from being this far away from you.

I am the grammar nazi taking apart your status update.

I am concerned at the diminishing effects of the word ‘nazi’ when describing anything harsh.

I am okay. Thanks for asking.

I am a free floating full torso vaporous apparition.

I can’t walk through walls but I can walk through trees. I have no

explanation for that.

I am the painting that the painting of Dorian Grey was painted over.

I am that noise you make in your sleep when you turn over in bed.

I am the jerk photobombing your family holiday snaps.

I am the dick you drew in the Herald Sun.

I am the books you never finish.

I am less than certain but I’m more than unsure.

I am the submarine caught in the seaweed of your subtext.

I am the snow covered pine trees that break your fall when the plane goes down.

I am the cherry stem deftly manipulated by Audrey Horne’s tongue.

I am everything: all the time.

And I am truly grateful.

But I’m not yours.

Not yet.

© Sean M Whelan. 2014.

 

THEY DON’T LOVE BLUE.

Tell me where to stand in the garden.

And I’ll mark the spot.

You’ll find me there every evening at dusk.

Watching the day transmogrify, just like we did.

 

Tell me where the light falls the best upon my face.

I want to be just as handsome as you are supernatural.

Just because I don’t believe in permanence.

Doesn’t mean I want to forget this.

I want to build a theme park to us in the mountains of my mind,

travel there every lonely hour and take all the rides.

Tell me where to stand in the garden.

Where nobody will see us.

Not even Lou Reed’s satellites.

Tell me this shit is real.

Or unreal.

That works too.

 

Show me a species of bird that migrates from Melbourne to Manhattan every year and I’ll tie a love letter around its ankle.

Tell me, do birds even have ankles?

Tell me how somebody so old could still be learning about birds.

And by that I mean actual birds, but the other way works too.

Tell me how you know so much stuff.

I only want this love to have its own Wikipedia entry.

I only want the New York Times to tell me we’re getting married.

I only want to be more famous than your dresses.

I only want to live long enough to know how to die right.

 

Let’s synchronise our watches so we break up at the same time.

Then let’s drown our watches in the kitchen sink in sync, so that we never break up.

I know, we broke up, but for the purpose of this poem, let’s pretend that we didn’t.

Or let’s write up a post-breakup agreement with plenty of day passes.

Then let’s swap shadows, so I can watch your determined walk all the time.

 

Tell me where to stand in the garden.

Light has the highest concentration of magic at dusk.

We can dig in here forever.

We can learn how to grow.

Tell me where the soil is the softest, where the underworld will receive us the quickest.

I have the best of friends in low places.

 

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry the love letter I wrote you was eaten by the sky.

How could I know the future could eat so much?

 

Tarkovsky wrote poems with a camera.

He knew about us.

He knew we would break up.

He knew we didn’t need to worry about this.

And he was right.

When those doe eyed beared boy scouts come at you

With a pocket full of sadsong mixtapes.

Wait and remember

they don’t love blue like I do.

Simon Kindt – the new face and voice of SpeedPoets – the new MC

June 2014 Call-back Poet graciously declines the honour!

Simon Kindt

Hi speedy poets,

With Andrew Phillips disappearing into the thready winter sunset and heading for the warmer shores of California, it’s an honour and a privilege to  be joining the Speedpoets crew as the guy who jumps on stage and says things (read MC). With that said and done, it would be a little odd to be both an MC and a call back for the year so I’m going to respectfully decline my spot at the November showdown and make way for finer poets than me to get up and make noise. Looking forward to seeing you all at the Lucky Duck (bring your friends- all of them!) and thanks for making Speedpoets one of the pillars of culture in Brisbane.

Bio. In collaboration with Chloë Callistemon, Simon co-published the collection air / tide in 2014.  He is currently working on various projects including a verse novel and – as a teacher at a major Brisbane High School- he is working on building a youth slam community in Brisbane to provide opportunities for teenage writers and performers to share their work. Some of his students are going to be onstage at QPF in 2014. And you, well… you should go and see them.
Simon’s writing explores the sublime and the ordinary in the colliding territories of landscape, the body, and the whole human mess. He has an open, gentle performance style, a generous grasp of human emotion, and a willingness to carefully peel back the seemingly ordinary to reveal what lies underneath.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We, such stuff as dreams are made

it’s true sometimes,
a day     will end like this:

the river swelling as the tide
comes in,
the sun slouching down
below the ridgeline,
light unstitching the horizon.

the shadow of a hunting hawk
spiralling a thread of air
above the headland,
waves singing quiet through the water,
golden light    washing your hands.

your daughter carrying
a bucket full of shells she plucked
from the lowtide line,
she’ll spill like jewels
across your palm,

and         you,     for once with no desire
to weight these things with any
meaning but their own,
for once with nothing
in your head but
thank you.

 

some lost and broken thing

the whale, thrown off course,

a compass no doubt spinning in its skull,
came ashore in the night.

its belly, fat and heavy with myth,
bottomed out against a sandbank,
then hauled itself, fat on grief,
into the shallows, and waited
as the tide fell away beneath it.

in stranger days than this we might
have taken to the sand in celebration,
lit a pyre and hauled the beast above high water,
sunk a blade into the flank and carved the fat
in slabs, rendered blubber into lamp oil,
cut and cured the meat, carved totems
into bone and offered up the heart
to old Poseidon.

now we, so thoroughly enlightened,
so insistent on solidity of borders,
hang fences round our necks,
take those who’ve lost their way
or fled from something brute and full of teeth
and say ‘no dear, this is not your place.’

we turn the the lost about,
point them back towards the waves
from which they came
and declare the brace and rope
and chain we used to haul them out
the proof
of our compassion.

when the ocean offers up a metaphor
we look anywhere but inward for meaning,
for the risen scrimshaw guilt,
the bloodied history written
in our bones and all our unpaid rent,
we tell ourselves everything can be forgotten,

that all history is palimpsest

unremembered as words written in sand,
scraped by tide and draining out to the pacific:

“Here some lost and broken thing 
tried to make its way to shore, 
here we hurled it back to sea.”

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.

 

 

Photographs from SpeedPoets first event at The Lucky Duck

Clinton Brett Toghill opens procedings

A ripple of applause

Trudie (and with Bryce and Clayton)

 

Tom (with techno-trouble)

 

Stacey (with Tom D)

 

Shanti

 

Sav is God (OK?)

 

Sav, TBN and Trish

Ron ( two streets down)

 Peter Bakowski (with a snail who wants to know what it’s all about

 

Mother (Vanessa) and son, absorbed

 

 and all the way from Germany, Matheus

 

Lesley, opening her heart

 

JK

 

Bryce

 

Andrew (Pied Hill Prawns).

I didn’t get a shot of his co-MC and the Call Back Poet of the Month (Simon Kindt)

so here is a library photo – congratulations, Simon.

Peter Bakowski Returns to SpeedPoets 28 June 2014

The first feature poet for SpeedPoets at The Lucky Duck Cafe and Bar is Melbourne Poet Peter Bakowski.

Bio:

Peter Bakowski has been writing poems for 31 years, has received the Victorian Premiers Award for Poetry and writer’s residencies in Rome, Paris, Macau and Suzhou. His poems continue to appear in literary journals worldwide. He specializes in presenting poetry in private houses throughout Australia. pbakowski@yahoo.com

Here are some examples of his work:

The paper dolls

Yesterday
we had to dance
for a visitor’s amusement.

Today
we are pinned
to a wall.

Our pencilled eyes
can’t blink away the dust.

Pale, thin,
we grip each other’s hands

and tremble
whenever the door
opens.

City workers during morning rush hour, Collins Street

Perhaps not fully awake, elbowed and bumped, you alight from trams,
Exit Parliament Station, to join the ballet of the brisk.
Rebel by sitting on a park bench. Such a luxury may incite a
Scowl on a passing face. Reading the
Obituaries in The Age, you’ll learn how often a certain
Nuclear scientist was married. This knowledge of a more troubled life may
Allow you to take a break from painting the town grey.
Look at the bird‐borrowed sky. It’s not raining rats and tarantulas.

What a gift is hunger. Because of it your ancestors left their caves,
Explored plains, valleys, rivers, seas. These
Adventures became paintings, songs, tall tales, family legends, headlines.
There’s the story of each person, on the trains, trams and street corners.
How vulnerable you are, how strong you are. I want to reveal your
Essence via the camera of this poem, as you swarm and
Rush in the business district, glancing at your wristwatches.

Self-portrait, Melbourne, 19 September, 2012

I’m many selves, some are intimidated by authority figures.
Disapproval makes them hide in the dark beneath my ribs.
Emergent selves must believe no predators are near, ready to break their spines.
Not too social some of my selves. They get their best thinking done being alone.
Tentative, they observe rather than participate, prefer libraries to dance floors.
Insistent invitations make them grumpy. You can tell by their body language
They’d rather be elsewhere, not politely asking, “And how do you earn a living?”
Yet they can be kind to the shy. “That was me once,” they say to each other.

open mic poetry – music – free poetry zines

SpeedPoets has moved

That’s right. Brisbane open mic event, SpeedPoets, has swum across the river several times in it’s 14 year history.

And on Saturday 28th June we clamber up from the river dripping and cold to deliver our hot open mic words to the crowd and good folk at Lucky Duck cafe, Highgate Hill.

Here’s where it is: 15 Gladstone Rd, Highgate Hill  

I’ll post more about our feature, Melbourne poet Peter Bukowski very soon.

Also, in the spirit of changing winds and river mud and all, we’re slightly changing the format. Running two rounds of open mic. Twice. Yeah, you heard me. Bring along two poems if you’re SpeedPoet enough (whatever that means). Be there at 2pm to sign up and bring along two poems to warm, shiver or knock us all over with your words at

As always, we welcome and love having new voices step up to the open mic.  I hope to see you all there. Can’t wait actually. So get your keyboards sharpened, your pencils finger-tapping and your voice to a finely tuned whiskey-rasp quack. See ya at SpeedPoets at the LuckyDuck.

Vanessa Page – callback poet for (final Hideaway) May

 

 

 

Thank you to everyone who has come along to enjoy SpeedPoets at the Hideaway. To all the open mic’ers, all the new voices, the musicians, the crazies, the hecklers, the pop-in-and-lend-an-ear’ers, thank you. thank you thank you. Thank you Jimmy and The Hideaway for your support and having us perform each month. It’s been a treat.

Went out with a hoot last Saturday. A lively variety at the open mic including the return of a prodigal sausage roll – a bunch of new voices (great to see) –  many regulars throwing their final versed words into the comfy Hideaway atmosphere (including masked-Shanti)  –  Betsy Turcot performing her lyrical journey from ‘hugging the yellow line’ and Kevin Smith delivered a narrative with a spectacular Australian voice – and finally, long time SpeedPoet and award winning poet, Vanessa Page was chosen as Callback poet to feature in the November final.

 

Vanessa Page

Vanessa Page is a Cashmere-based poet who hails from Toowoomba in Queensland. She has published two collections of poetry: ‘Feeding Paper Tigers’ (ALS Press, 2011) and ‘Confessional Box’ (Walleah Press, 2013). Confessional Box was the winner of the Anne Elder Award in 2013. She has twice been named runner-up in the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize for an unpublished manuscript, and in 2013 was runner-up in the John Knight Memorial Prize.

Fossils

You’d brought home a string of coloured lights
and crafted a beautiful mess

a complex frippery
hanging like an imago garland
in the exhausted landscape we’d created

our CD collections had been making love for months
behind a smokescreen of conversation
and the endless scraping of deck chairs

now, only screeching rosellas create the static

our signals have been switched off
and we wait at ten paces, armed with
our own scorched earth policies

wondering, who will keep the strange ceramic bull
on the mantle when it all becomes final?

Congratulations Vanessa.

We hope you all make it along again to SpeedPoets at our new venue across the river at the Lucky Duck cafe, 15 Gladstone Rd, Highgate Hill. I’ll post more about it soon. But here’s a link for now:

 

Last dig at the Hideaway – May 31st – 2pm

The Hideaway is shutting its doors. Forever. SpeedPoets will have a new home for June but for now, come and enjoy the last SpeedPoets in the comfort of the Hideaway.

Bring a poem or two for the Open mic, there’ll be feature poets Betsy Turcot and Kevin Smith, music from Clinton Toghill and Mr Ocean, free zines, giveaways. We’d love to see you there. And love new voices stepping up for the open mic.

Then after SpeedPoets from 7pm are more poets, artists, bands crammed into the final day/night of the Hideaway – it’s Goodbye Jimmy. Hosted by Ghostboy.

Here’s a taste of our May features Betsy Turcot and Kevin Smith:

Betsy Turcot

is a performance poet, workshop facilitator and mother of one. She has featured at Queensland Poetry, Melbourne Overload, Brisbane Emerging Arts, Anywhere Theatre and Woodford Folk festivals. She is author of the verse novella, Hugging the Yellow Line. Betsy is also one of the two parts of the Belles of Hell alongside Eleanor Jackson. The Belles of Hell have co-written three poetic plays which have been performed around Australia as well as in New York City.

One last time in the record’s silence,
you tell me you ache to be wanted,
I tell you I ache to be wanted,
and we don’t say a word.

You tell me you ache to be wanted
until I am spent,
and we don’t say a word?
But the sheets speak in atonement

until I am spent.
I tell you I ache to be wanted,
but the sheets speak in atonement,
one last time in the record’s silence.

Kevin Smith

has found a home at SpeedPoets, a place to come in from the cold and test a handful of poems that feature in his one-person show ‘One Man Through His Sundered Hulks[1]. A work-in-progress, ‘One Man’ will be a mix of expressionism and narrative poetry blended and heightened through multi-media.

Largely autobiographical, the play’s about a boy’s relationship with his father and family, viewed through the unreliable and emotionally creative lens of memory.

An application for professional development of the piece is in the hands of RADF Sunshine Coast.

 

[1] Dylan Thomas, ‘Poem On His Birthday’

 

Bull

As the evening came down
the bull settled his lumbering bulk

into the lap of the paddock,
his monumental ease

nestled between the atmosphere
and the slow curve of the earth.

The flat dam lay encased
in the moist pods of his eyes.

His half-ton head swung
in the gloaming;

horns thick as arms
stirred the darkening air;

mist streamed from his muzzle.
A thunderous bellow

loosed from the plumbed depths of his gut-
that harbourage of draughts and slaughter-

 called the night down.
And the full moon-a wild eye-

came flying over the unfenced fields
of his omnipotence.

 

 

Saturday 31st May  – 2pm

The Hideaway
188 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane

Open mic – Betsy Turcot – Kevin Smith

Clinton Toghill – Mr Ocean – prizes – free SpeedPoet zines

Ever wanted to step up to the open mic?

Jodi Cleghorn did with her poem beginning, We almost had sex.
She won callback poet for the afternoon and wins herself a spot in the November final.

Yet again, a bunch of new poets stepped up to the mic for the first time
as well as regular Brisbane wordsmiths, a visiting poet
who was there at the very first SpeedPoets way back in 2000 and always
Clinton Togghil and Mr Ocean lending their tunes to our ears.

Saturday May 31st is the last SpeedPoets at The Hideaway. It’s the last of the Hideaway altogether. It’s going to biG. There’ll be SpeedPoets from 2pm – 5pm. Grab a bite to eat. Then Goodbye Jimmy: The last Hideaway from 7pm til late hosted by Ghostboy and featuring local artists galore. I’ll post more soon about May SpeedPoets.

Also stay tuned for a new venue announcement for SpeedPoets in June.

Here’s more about Jodi and her winning poem Almost:

JODI CLEGHORN (@jodicleghorn) is an author, editor, small press owner and of late, poet, with a penchant for the dark vein of humanity. With short stories published at home and abroad and an Aurealis short-listed novella (Elyora/River of Bones) behind her, the publication of her first poem, Ambrosia, marks a new beginning in story telling. http://www.jodicleghorn.com
ALMOST

We almost had sex.
Almost broke the lounge
as ‘Blue Velvet’ played to itself on the TV.
The gas radiator filled the room with heat
augmented by our lust.
When you slipped out into the cold night air
your calling card was my body,
almost covered in carpet burn.

I almost fell for you.
The man who parked his car a block away
so the cleaner from work,
who lived around the corner,
had no chance to put two and two together.
But still you huddled into my door,
knocking with an urgency
I mistook for me.

You, who moved your girlfriend in
so you could pretend to be
almost faithful.
You, who hissed, ‘Not here’
when I said ‘hello’ in the bread aisle
and later turned up to seduce me
while you were almost getting ice cream
for the girlfriend-now-fiance.

I almost cried that afternoon
as you drove off without saying goodbye.
When I was almost no longer there
and you had already moved on.
It was easy to regret everything,
rewrite it in the diesel fumes,
when I was almost at the town limits
but still so far away
from arriving.

 

Thank you for supporting the arts. Thank you poets for writing, sharing your words in venues such as these. Thanks to everyone who contributes, reads at the open mic, plays, performs and acts a galah to make SpeedPoets what it is. Thanks Jimmy for hosting us.

Cheers.

Andrew Phillips

(see you all on the 31st)

Jimmy