What a feast of poetry performances, book launches and readings over the past few months. (See what I'm doing here? Heading towards the excuse 'I've been too busy to update my website' which, as we all know, is just that: an excuse.)
Alison Flett and I had great fun as guest readers - of the celtic kind - at Poets' Corner in January.
I went to the moving launch of the book
Too afraid to cry by Ali Cobby Eckermann.
One great performance at the Adelaide Fringe Festival was
Anthropoetry by Ben Mellor. Ben was also a guest at Friendly Street earlier this week.
'Breathing spaces' was an interesting performance at Greenaway Art Gallery by poets Cecilia White, Mike Ladd, Jill Jones, Juan Garrido-Salgado, Jude Aquilina and Andre Lawrence who were accompanied by musician Nick Tsavios and projected landscape images by Annette Willis.
This week we're in the thick of Adelaide Writers' Week. Yesterday I went to see/hear five poets read: Cath Kenneally, Karen Solie, Kurt Heinzelman, Harry Ricketts and John Tranter.
It's also been a sad time, with the unexpected passing in January of a fine poet and friend, John Pfitzner, RIP. The evening before, he had been at the Poets' Corner event at which Alison and I were reading. At the end of the evening, I touched his arm lightly and said 'See you at such-and-such'. With a big grin he replied that he was looking forward to it. Later I wondered why these final words were not weighted with the gravitas of 'adieu' rather than the light certainty of 'see you later'. You can read a lovely tribute to him
here.
I haven't been writing very much lately, but this will change as I start to schedule my days to incorporate writing and research. I intend to post more poems here soon, so keep revisiting, okay?
Posted by Jennifer Liston
