It was/is a wonderful and quite unique event. Trevor Joyce has further plans
- some insanely ambitious - which will see Soundeye evolving in all sorts of
interesting ways. I look forward to seeing what happens next.
Anna Glasnova was a bit of a revelation for me - extraordinary poetry,
language wound tight and spun hard. Michael Smith's translations of Lorca
and the early Andalusian poetry that inspired him reminded me just why I
love that poet, and why I must read him again. And I too enjoyed Geoff
Squires, a poet of keen, humane sensibility (Lines is downloadable as an
e-book on Tony Frazer's Shearsman site, and well worth the trouble). Some
amazingly powerful lyric sequences too read by Fergal Gaynor and David
Lloyd. Myself, I found the ecopoetry of Jonathan Skinner insanely tedious,
linguistically speaking, and rather naive - but I do come from a place with
sophisticated takes on ecological approaches to poetry - John Kinsella, for
instance, or Peter Minter (whose new book, Blue Glass, is just out from Salt
and well worth the purchase) just to name two deeply concerned with these
issues. I thought Tim Atkins talented, but his "translations" of Horace
struck me too as too self-consciously hip, and therefore not hip enough -
rather reminiscent to an Australian ear of Peter Rose's versions of Catullus
or Laurie Duggan's of Martial. Not, to be fair, that I like them much either
- I suppose I want such things to be more like Pound's Sextius Propertius...
Much more to my taste was the magnificenty-named American visual artist
Jeremiah (alas, I cannot remember his surname) who did a dynamic
presentation of slides of photos taken of the closed Vietnam memorial in
Washington. Much more to say, since I enjoyed so much of it, but thought I'd
add these hurried notes to the conversation.
(Just to save my pride, several others tell me that my reading was clear as
a bell, especially at the cabaret, where I could avail myself of a
microphone.)
All best
Alison
--
Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
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