is this the Azure Kingfisher?
poor little fellah, beak still straight
the kingfisher dead outside
at the foot of the window
has made another world
is this the Azure Kingfisher? Read More »
These Flying Islands Blog
cicada summer in the sunny south — Kit Kelen’s response to John Bennett’s ‘Acoustemology’
cicada
summer in the sunny south
it is a wooded tinnitus
and cast eyes down
or grey
how do they see?
Black
Prince
with tymbals
as to masque
or tournament
thinking’s all apocalyptic
you bucket it out like a miser
to float through the garden
like a veil of wing flung
just these few weeks
to joust and mate
so armoured for the fray
because a stutter flown
stim music
strafe the ear
and perched
and cling
grim for
must feed on sap
as royals do
all chorus
(that’s to say, refrain)
song of the Magicicada cassini
head banging?
no, techno
and this one who was never king
but good for burning, ravaging
on all flanks and utterly
so here’s much booty brought
in the Jurassic were mega-cicadas
shall we feed the birds this challenge of flight?
in a certain stillness struck
can you hear the alien whirr of we’re here
lion gorged with three parts argent
we serve the nymphs deep fried
this must be the seventh year
Today (Feb 2) is World Wetlands day
Today (Feb 2) is World Wetlands day
In response to your comment yesterday Kit, I was down among the mangroves early, and could hear the Great Egret’s feet sucking on the sand/mud at each step.
FYI. Your beauty (a credit to Grinling Gibbons’ limewood work) is a Double Drummer, our largest and loudest (earplugs needed up here on that 7 year cycle, the loudest insect in the world). The large ones all ‘strafe the ear’ – wonderful phrase.
Accuracy? Cognitive Naturalism (Allen Carlson) can take things a little far. Gary Snyder begins the poem ‘What You Should Know to be a Poet’ with: ‘all you can about animals as persons / the names of trees and flowers and weeds / names of stars, and the movements of the planets / and the moon . . .’ .
I’m writing letters this arvo, re logging. As Suzi Gablik writes in The Reenchantment of Art, ‘The great collective project has, in fact, presented itself. It is that of saving the earth – at this point, nothing else really matters.’
Today (Feb 2) is World Wetlands day Read More »
Acoustemology
Acoustemology
for J.L. (and Necks fans everywhere)Looking out into a forest of flowering Pink Bloodwoods
and peeling Blackbutts, I hear Vertigo for the first time.
Two decades after Sex the usual groove is bushwhacked
by a tinker’s percussion and electronics out of the blue,
cicadas work an industrial background accompanied
by woodwind from the Miners, a piping King Parrot and
Lorikeets improvising avant-garde, high-register shrieks.
Then, through the cover of trees, the neighbours join in.
Norm is drilling metal, forcing a basketball hoop onto the frame
of his hand-made palm house assembled from scaffolding.
In the west, Graeme is on his chainsaw demolishing
a bamboo forest planted by the previous owners.
The origins of cosmic music are not always attributable.
Tomorrow, I will go down to the estuary at first light and listen.
Richard Tipping
Richard Tipping’s Instant History is a treasure trove of uncollected and new work, in two parts. The Postcard Life brings intense responses to travel in fifteen countries in the 1970s and 1980s. From a meeting with the Empress of Iran, to sailing along the coast of Mexico; from tongue-twists in Tipperary to Vipassana meditation in the Sierras; from ancient sex in Luxor to the visual collisions of Tokyo and quietitudes in Kyoto; from drug-shattered New York to being lost in the Louvre. In the second half of the book, Rush Hour in the Poetry Library, socially pointed but affectionate poems from Tipping’s adopted home in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales mix with a sardonic politics, humorous social observation, and pictures from a philosophical writing life. Best known as a visual poet and word artist these days, Tipping brings a fresh and energetic voice to the page.
Biographical note
Richard Kelly Tipping was born in Adelaide, South Australia and studied in humanities at Flinders University. He has lived in the USA (1974/75), and the UK and Europe (1984/86). While lecturing in media arts at the University of Newcastle he completed a doctorate at the University of Technology Sydney titled Word Art Works: visual poetry and textual objects (2007). Tipping has published eight books of poetry, and is known internationally as an artist working with sign language and typographic concrete. He is strongly represented in the print collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the British Museum, London; and is collected in depth by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Tipping lives
between gigs in Newcastle and Maitland, NSW.
www.richardtipping.com
Three poems from Instant History
Writing Class
The poet presents himself as a dichotomy.
Whatever is apparent becomes obscured,
and all the luscious facts wither into hard statistics.
Born here, did that, intended something else
but I forget what. The intruding ‘I’.
The breakneck speed on machines of make-believe
which finally slow motion curve into the cemetery.
Alibis salute the endless proud moments
passing in formal parade. I returns to me and
assumes him. The biography keeps breaking in
to the picture, looking for safety pins or paper clips or
a staple gun, anything to fence out
layers of advice peeling from public walls:
reality is for people who can’t cope with art.
Written words line up like bright pills in a glass case,
your fingers turning the key.
Time is for people who can’t stop.
Rigor mortis keeps looking at the clock.
Tipperary
These cont-pink faithful churches in stone-walled Tipperary
raising both armed pulpits up to rectify divided Heaven
coughing out red barns and slate-tight cottages
for slurring rain to barricade, tipping thatched tweed caps
in all the wheeling, run-down towns
to the budding eyes of mud-faced potatoes,
black and white cows chewing saturated greens
and tourist butter pats in squares of gold
ending the rainbow in a pint of real Guinness
coal-black as the castle-burning barons of Yawn.
The roads are running sore with unfinished yarns
where the truth is history trying to awake
on signs in languages both half unused
and Ireland stuck between the water and the wafer
there’s no way around the priests but a faithful daughter
with a smiling paddywhack clinging to the steeple
the North’s the gold harp stolen from the people.
Earth Heart
Blood, sap, rain and sea –
Earth’s heart is sweet water
Flowing in spirals of gravity.
Vast clouds sail past, reflecting
In a rippling blue lake of sky
Their endless ideas for change.
You can feel each slow tree
By the green shore breathing
Time’s dappled shadows in.
Fresh weather. Swallows’ wings
Near pebble edges lapped by tide
Quick dancing in the rising wind.
Note: This poem was written for Hear the Art (Earth Heart) 1996. a typographic visual poem made of bricks, 26 metres in diameter, permanently installed in the grounds of Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, NSW, Australia. Hear the Art was the winner of theinaugural acquisitive Sculpture Park Prize
See a review of Instant History by Jean Kent at Rochford St Review.
Some publications by Richard Tipping
Soft Riots (poems)
Domestic Hardcore (poems)
Word Works – Airpoet (visual poems – folio)
Signs of Australia (photographs)
Diverse Voice (visual poems)
Nearer by Far (poems)
Headlines to the Heart (poems)
Five O’clock Shadows (poems)
The Sydney Morning (visual poems – four print folios)
Multiple Pleasures (postcard catalogue)
Public Works (visual poems – art catalogue)
Multiple Choice (art catalogue)
Lovepoem (visual poems– folio)
Subvert I Sing (visual poems)
Off the Page & back again (visual poems)
Love Cuts (photos & poems, with Chris Mansell)
Tommy Ruff: Adelaide Poems
Instant History (poems)
Gillian Swain
Gillian Swain My Skin its own Sky (Flying Islands Press 2019) is Gillian Swain’s first book, following the chap-book Sang Up (Picaro Press, 2001). Gillian’s poetry is published in various anthologies including A Slow Combusting Hymn (ASM & Cerberus Press, 2014), The Grieve Anthology (Hunter Writers Centre, 2014; 2019) and some journals including Burrow #1 (Old Water Rat Publishing, 2020), and the Australian Poetry Collaboration (2019). Gillian shared equal first place with Magdalena Ball for the Maclean’s Booksellers Award, in the Grieve Project 2019. She has been a feature poet at several events around the east coast of NSW, holds poetry workshops for adults and children and is the curator of poetry and related events at the Indie Writers Festival ‘IF Maitland’, plus other poetry events. Gillian spent her childhood exploring the waterfront of Lake Macquarie and has lived in Newcastle, Northern NSW, the UK and Ghana, after finishing studies at the University of Newcastle. She lives in East Maitland NSW with her husband and their four children, where they run their successful coffee roasting business, River Roast.
The cover picture on My Skin its own sky is an extract from Girl on a swing in blue on blue by John Maitland. Look up his work, it’s wonderful.
Poems from My skin its own sky
Summer Holidays
After “Fair Haired Girls End of Summer Holidays” by John Maitland.
Broom-straw grass whispers to our shins
as we wade toward the end
of summer holidays.
Our hair fair and sun-bleached
scruffy clusters like
broom-straw grass.
We have played, these days.
We have moved stridently
across the endlessness of summer
have understood the sky
and have become the dry, bending
hush of broom straw-grass.
Our longish white dresses breathe.
We look forward and completely
occupy each step and have nowhere
except the heat-hazed horizon to reach.
Nothing is everywhere. Nothing
fills our days solidly.
Summer sweeps us forward as we
are every last delicate chance of magic
we sweep through, ethereal.
We don’t know how beautiful we are.
All we know is floating
and sweeping
through summer parched paddocks
and broom-straw grass.
Ambulance
They took you this morning.
The lamp turned like a red light-house
one way.
You’re on rocky ground
I balance
for now
on love’s groundswell of stillness.
This too will pass.
Renovators hints and tips
No crimes are hidden
in the white bathroom
of one who washes often
and cleans rarely.
My Skin, its own sky
and how did the storm treat you
Sheets lit
sky bright
skin electric
took me up
gave a good thrashing.
how did the ground reply
Grass leant
back to let it
in happy for the return
of wild.
Familiar wind hurl of rain
slid like syrup down
soft blades
to earth.
were you hungry in the cold
Not cold.
Warm air wet every
pore swam and I gave it
salt my skin its own sky
my tongue
fresh with the landscape of night.
Hunger only for more.
was it deafening
All I could hear
was everything,
flicked and billowed out
crowds of spirit answerings
there for the listener
in time with always.
was the room big enough
A storm needs no manners
treats as it pleases
and what lush treat it is.
You wonder at the space an altar
inhabits hear this
the gods laughed when you asked
these questions
thunder has no walls.
