on 4/7/01 2:18 AM, Douglas Barbour at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> I'm intrigued by Jill's talk of no place to read in Sydney now. A few years
> ago (well last time I was down there was 1996) there seemed to be a few.
> Stephen Scobie & I (as Re: Sounding) were at one tavern reading arranged by
> one of the poetry societies, with other readers.
Douglas, You were probably at a Poets Union reading but in 1996 can't quite
remember where that would be - it was way part the Evil (sorry, Evening)
Star days. I was exaggerating slightly but it seems to amount to the same
thing. The Poets Union now has a *monthly* reading in the Brett Whitely
Gallery. Nice surroundings but a bit too nice in a hushed kind of way and
not a place where we can linger (unlike a pub). There are one or two monthly
readings across Sydney but the rest, unless someone's done something
recently, are primarily performance oriented.
Sydney is a town that is notoriously short of venues for anything and now
that pubs prefer to install poker machine instead of hire live bands etc it
is hard now to find a place to read as poets are even lower on the
evolutionary scale than live bands in the eyes of pubs. Do other cities
suffer from this scourge?
Cheers,
Jill
_________________________________
Jill Jones
50 Ruby Street
Marrickville NSW 2204
AUSTRALIA
[log in to unmask]
http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~jpjones
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