Last Tuesday I had the exciting opportunity to co-host the Percy Shelley Poetry Slam alongside Santo Cazzati and Dexter’s in Clifton Hill. As part of that, I performed the above poem inspired by free speech activist, Mario Savio.
The night was amazing, full of left-wing political poetry in front of a packed and excited audience. We also launched a dual EP, Duel Power with tracks by both me and Santo Cazzati. Both the slam and the CD were part of a fundraiser for the Marxism 2012 conference taking place this Easter, where Santo will be performing the poetry of Pablo Neruda.
The next gig I’m doing is for the first ever Keep Left, a new left-wing arts event. That’ll be at the Noise Bar, Brunswick, on March 24 from 6pm.
Last night I performed my poem ‘Egypt’ in the open mic section of Passionate Tongues Poetry at the Brunswick Hotel, which happens every fortnight. I only memorised it the other week and it’s the second time I’ve performed it without paper after performing it at Occupy Friday last week.
I’ve been getting better at memorising my poems, and with new pieces, it helps to edit and refine my work. When I keep getting stuck on a bit, because it doesn’t flow right or is not memorable enough, it prompts me to edit, refining both the poem and the performance.
Last month, at my favourite poetry venue in Melbourne, I was very lucky to join Amanda Anastasi on stage during her featured performance. Both Amanda and I discuss the issue of refugees in our poetry and so it was a special honour for us to combine our poems – Amanda’s “Christmas Island” and my poem, “They Kill Them” – and present “Christmas Island/They Kill Them” at Passionate Tongues at the Brunswick Hotel. Big thanks to Randall Stephens, another great Melbourne poet, for providing the footage so I could edit it and upload it to share it with you all.
Over the weekend, I was part of a series of protests in Sydney outside the Labor Party’s National Conference. Left-wingers came from across the country as the Labor Party debated important issues such as same-sex marriage, refugee rights and uranium mining. With Gillard pushing Labor’s right-wing agenda, it was crucial to have thousands outside pressure the party to take decent positions, because it’s clear the ALP won’t do so willingly.
Even the Labor ‘Left’, I’d argue, have dragged their feet on same-sex marriage and putting up a decent fight to the Malaysian solution and offshore processing. Putting faith in those inside the party to change things really holds back social movements. Despite the biggest gay rights protest in Australian history, and the ongoing movement pressuring the ALP to change the Labor Party platform in favour of equal marriage rights, a deal with the Right inside the party for a conscience vote railroads the policy toward failure.
Whilst some of the Left have made excuses for why the Labor Left are too gutless to cross the floor over offshore processing, the Right threatened to cross the floor over same-sex marriage before the conscience vote deal was made. The Left, begging for credibility, yet again fail to fight for principle whilst the Right of the party do what they like. The likes of Garret prove again that the Labor Party is nothing but a graveyard for principled left-wing activists, and putting faith in them is suicide.
Though the Left, in this instance, did seem to vote in the right way on most policies on the floor of conference, I’d argue it was due to pressure from outside the party. Prior to the conference, and in previous years, deals and capitulations meant that often motions didn’t even make it to the floor.
So I took it at great offence that some were chanting ‘Thank you Labor’ on the Saturday’s Equal Marriage demo and Labor Party speakers used the opportunity to congratulate themselves and further promote the project of social democracy, so discredited at the moment, when it has been such an impediment to progressive change such as same-sex marriage. Support for Equal rights in Australia has been in the majority for some time now, but it took until this weekend for the Left to move to change the party platform.
The victories have only ever come from pressure from ordinary people, ordinary workers pressuring their union leadership, or left-wing movements outside the party forcing the party to change the position or risk irrelevance.
So there is still a fight to win same-sex marriage, to make it law, and I’d argue that it won’t be through pressuring Abbott and the Liberals, but the party in government. And the Malaysian Solution is far from dead so it will require renewed effort amongst refugee activists to bury it again and keep it that way.
Poetry, especially performance poetry or ‘spoken word’ is admittedly not the most popular medium, even amongst the limited crowd interested in the arts. And Melbourne, despite its creative reputation probably doesn’t have the biggest poetry scene in the world, though probably the biggest in Australia.
That said, us poets are usually pretty happy reading to small crowds, even to a few drunk people at a bar on the tail end of an open mic, and it kind of makes each person who listens, reads or comments on a poem all the more gratifying in a really non-corny way. We do like the occasional big crowd, big slam, or something never before seen like the International Slam last Friday, but we’re not expecting arenas. We reach out with our poetry any way we can.
Which brings me to poetry videos. Sometimes it can be hard to convince even friends to come out on a cold Monday night to see some poetry, or when slams conflict with bigger more flashy forms of entertainment. I’m working on the pyro for my next show, but for now, we kind of need an ‘in’ to get people interested, to help them see that it’s not quite they might have expected.
Often after seeing spoken word, slam poetry, even ‘normal’ performance poetry, friends comment that they didn’t expect that, that it’s not all old style rhyming poems about gum trees, and good performance poets bring words to life and don’t just read off the page (some of us read off iPhones.)
So what if we could bring performance poetry, spoken word or whatever you want to call it to people instead of needing to convince them to come to a gig? People spend a lot of time on Facebook, Twitter and the Internet in general, and people are more likely to watch a video than read a longer piece of writing. If you can make it snappy, perhaps add some images etc. than we might convince some people that it’s worth seeing a whole gig of us.
After all, many people came to see Shane Koyczan on Friday night after seeing all of his heart-wrenching poems on YouTube. And those videos prove, so long as the poetry is good and clear, the videos don’t have to be that fancy anyway.
Cameras aren’t massively expensive nowadays, nor is editing software, especially when you get iMovie free with your Mac. And most smartphones have decent cameras. My first video of a poetry reading I did was done off my iPhone. Most videos I’ve seen are simple videos from actual gigs. Randall Stephens has been posting a heap of videos from his tour of South-East Asia.
You can even use a webcam. Steve Smart’s ‘vlogged’ some poems via a webcam. It works, mostly because Steve is an awesome poet. The poems are already special and double so because people can hear you read them. Steve’s ‘vlogged’ poems inspired me to do a simple video myself, put together in perhaps an hour, reading a brand spanking new poem out and whacking it straight on YouTube. The piece, Teşekkür, is included at the bottom of this post.
But videos can do more. Before I had come across others doing their own poetry videos, my first thought was that it would be emulating music videos. You could do some kind of story with the poem being read over the top, perhaps mixed in with shots of you reading it. I’ve got some ideas to do it like that, but by myself, this requires a lot of work, probably needing other actors, and multiple shots, perhaps in multiple locations.
The cheaper way around this perhaps is animation. You would of course need to know how to animate, but things like stop-motion Lego animation, flash animation and simple stuff like that might be within reach to the more technically minded people. Or, like the music video, storyesque video, teaming up with others, perhaps an animator, might be a good option. I’m looking at this now or simple ‘South Park’ style animation.
Mentioning Randall Stephens again, his video in conjunction with Alex Scott, I Statements is an excellent use of animation to bring a poem to life.
I have done a bit of video, They Kill Them, being the one I’m proud of the most, but for now, it’s been by myself. Those that have worked with others seem to pull out some really special stuff. Both Alia Gabres and Joel McKerrow have produced extremely professional videos that are an attractive introduction to spoken word via video.
These videos and others are worth checking out and sharing around, helping out the poets that made them, by making us perhaps a little less obscure. I’m curious to see how this evolves and am always excited when new poets try it out. If only there was a ‘Video Hits’ of the Melbourne poetry scene. I’ve begun collating them on a YouTube playlist, but it’d be cool to have a poetry night of poetry videos perhaps. I just came up with that idea mid-paragraph. What say you video poets?
Nothing makes Max Brenner’s connection to Israel and the IDF clearer than a bunch of right-wingers and Zionists staging a ‘drink in’ at the QV store yesterday. Young Liberals, prominent Zionists, nut job commentators like Ted Lapkin and yes, even fascists all banded together to support the ‘poor’ chocolate shop that’s been the target of boycott actions over the last few months.
Nut job commentor Ted Lapkin was there, also seen holding up a Bush-Cheney t-shirt
They seem to have abandoned the defence that it’s ‘just a chocolate shop,’ with a crowd waving Israeli and Australian flags that for some reason managed to attract a lot of media attention, which might happen to have something to do with the whole Australian establishment, including right-wing rags such as The Australian, going hysterical over our campaign to highlight the war crimes and human rights abuses of Israel and its military.
We, supporters of Palestine and the BDS campaign, of course, couldn’t let them have all the media and get away without being challenged, so some of us turned up to counter their media stunt that refuses to answer to what we’re actually protesting about, Israeli war crimes.
I’ve included a video below. Their media stunt preferred to slander us with ridiculous claims of anti-Semitism and parallels to Nazis, than actually try and defend anything Israel does, such as the siege on Gaza, the racism towards Arabs and Palestinians in Israel proper and the occupied territories.
And we responded with ‘Max Brenner, you can’t hide, you’ve got fascists on your side,’ which refers to the fact that the real fascists, like the Australian Defence League (related to the English Defence League) have been seen in Brisbane marching side by side with the pro-Israeli counter protests. The Zionists are happy to have these Islamophobic thugs on their side, speaking on their platforms. And there’s a good chance the fascists will be there next time in Melbourne, which makes it even more important to come out and oppose them.
Tim Ferguson? Not sure what side he was on...
As I said at the start, their hysterical response sponsored by Murdoch’s Australian, has done us a favour, making the connection to Israel and the IDF clearer than we ever could. It’s clear BDS is working in further isolating Israel and highlighting their crimes. Those seen drinking hot chocolate are the same people that cheered when the bombs were dropping on Gaza in 2009, and yesterday were seen shaking hands with the police or berating them for not clearing us off the State Library lawn.
With the attacks on our right to protest, such as 19 of us getting arrested in July, and the fascists lining up with the other side, we need more people to come out and oppose Max Brenner and its support for murdering Palestinians behind the gloss of a chocolate shop.
This Friday, meet at the State Library at 5.30pm, before we march on Max Brenner again. Check the event out on Facebook, invite your friends, share it and tweet it.
On Saturday, I went to a rally I helped to organise with the Refugee Action Collective (Victoria) calling for all children to be released from detention, holding the government to account for breaking a promise they made last year.
The rally was full of young and old, students, families, activists and all walks of life. And as usual, I went with my camera and caught all the colour and noise we brought to the Broadmeadows area, letting people locally know that this horrible place existed and raising our voices so the 50 or so teenagers locked inside could hear us and know that there are people on the outside that support them.
‘I wish I was a pro wrestler’ from my spoken word show ‘Farewell to the Cubicle’ on the 4th of July at The Brunswick Hotel as part of the regular poetry night, Passionate Tongues.
I’m pretty excited to be performing at not one, but two, poetry events in Melbourne as the ‘feature’ poet in the next little while. One, this Saturday at the Dan O’Connell Hotel and then on July 4, at The Brunswick Hotel.
Spoken word is something I’ve been putting a lot of effort into over the last year or so. It’s been really fulfilling and I’ve found something that I can do that I can’t do on the page, that is express myself in another dimension. So I am very excited (and nervous) to be doing these feature gigs. I’m hoping for some friendly faces in the audience.
This Saturday, I’ll be doing my feature at the Dan O’Connell, which is one of Melbourne’s longest running poetry gigs. It starts at 2pm, and finishes at around 5pm. I’ll be doing two 15 minute sets around the usual open mic over the afternoon, reading a range of my work that touches on refugees, class, my (now ex)-job, and a few other things. You can check out the Facebook event as well to invite friends and help get the word out.
And then on Monday, the 4th of July, I’ll be performing my spoken word show ‘Farewell to the Cubicle’ from 8.30pm at The Brunswick Hotel as part of the fortnightly poetry night, Passionate Tongues run by the ‘Mother Theresa’ of the poetry scene, Michael Reynolds. It will feature all my poems about work, offices, bosses and being fired as a farewell to my shitty job. Again, two 15 minute sets as well as an open mic. I’m hoping people will use it as a chance to read their own poems about shitty jobs, offices, and bosses. Again, there’s a Facebook event for all your sharing, inviting and RSVPing needs (my needs, mostly).
Hope to see some friendly faces there! And below is a little taste from the open mic last night.
Last night’s Speculative Fiction panel as part of the Emerging Writers’ Festival is already my highlight of the whole festival, even though I’m meant to see many others. As I said in my picks the other week, I was expecting this to be great. And I felt, as an emerging speculative fiction writer I had to turn up to represent my genre. And so when I got there, I wanted the audience to be bigger, to see faces we didn’t usually see.
Perhaps that’s something for next year, to get the speculative fiction writers out in force.
The session was amazing but I was left with wanting more: more time, more writers, more questions, more spec fic.
We got to sit there and listen to Rjurik Davidson ask three amazing writers about spec fic and their own writing: Alison Croggon, Paul Haines and Kirstyn McDermott.
One of the issues that came up in the discussion, that I’ve talked about before and am curious about, is to do with crossing lines, defying taboos and writing bad guys. Paul Haines talked about the concern had when writing Wives that people would think he was a misogynist rather than just writing about misogyny with the point of highlighting what a problem it was.
I don’t think a writer necessarily advocates everything in the content of their work. Indeed, I often write bad guys from the perspective of being able to condemn them. Now often I agree it can get murky and I’ve read many a horror novel or watched a horror movie that left me questioning whether or not the creator was advocating or condemning the horrible events in the movie. By that, I don’t just mean violence because I think you can do horror where the obvious good guy is the meant to be the bad guy, and we’re meant to be rooting for the ‘villain’ getting his revenge.
But I’ve found this murkiness with the darker parts of speculative fiction especially horror to be a barrier to friends reading or watching it. They don’t get why I would want to watch or read about ‘fucked up things’ but they would happily argue the need to watch the news or know about real world events that are ten times as horrific just because they’re real. I think fiction can do the same because it often reflects reality.
It was refreshing to hear that this issue is something others in the genre come across as well. And I was glad Rjurik Davidson stepped into the political sphere with the discussion.
The discussion about taboos leads me to tonight’s session, Dirty Words, on erotica, where I tend to think sex and erotica is much more of a taboo in today’s society than violence and gore.
I managed to corner two audience members who are big spec fic fans to tell me why they love the genre or why they think it’s the best:
Benjamin Solah 