my first commercially produced book of poems since 2008 will now be launched on Wednesday 6 May, 6pm, at Collected Works Bookshop, 1st floor, Nicholas Building, Swanston St, Melbourne - it will share billing with 3 other books, all part of a new venture of poetry book publishing by Cordite Books Inc, publishers also of the online magazine Cordite - the launch will be done by Justin Clemens, and poems will be read from all four books - I will read from Crankhandle, John Hawke from his Aurelia, Tony Birch from Natalie Harkin's Dirty Words, and Lisa Gorton from Ross Gibson's Stone Grown Cold - I understand the latter 'substitutions' are because those poets don't live in Victoria, and won't be present at the Melbourne event -
because this blog is also bookish in other senses, I'll quote here from Crankhandle, which is subtitled 'Notebooks', two bits quoted from others in the text -
Dan Carr : 'the process of craft - the transformation
of materials - is a process of discovery of
previously unknown or unseen aspects of
existence'
Kathy Walkup : 'the book is a public place'
and while I'm at it, here's the epigraph to the work, a gritty reminder of the sheer fact of historical forgetting occasioned by the advent of the computer & its masking of the means of its operation, from Rochelle Altman -
in antiquity, people knew the meaning and relevance
of every component of a writing system
