Poem Phone
INTERIOR: Poem Phone is a dial-a-phone custom designed to feature audio through the selection of tracks via the number selected. Instruction on use is available. Installed inside the Bar and fitted into a foam compartment for an optimum listening experience.
OCTOBER 2024: David Brooks
The Door / The other side of daylight
TRACKS:
00 David Brooks - Introduction part I 6:26
01 David Brooks - Introduction part II 3:00
02 David Brooks - The Peanut Vendour :50
03 David Brooks - 4am :21
04 David Brooks - Parties Ending 1:12
05 David Brooks - One too Many Mornings 1:48
06 David Brooks - An Invasion of Clouds 1:08
07 David Brooks - Invitation :53
08 David Brooks - A Place on Earth 2:53
09 David Brooks - Another Page from the Book of Everything 2:40
Artist statement:
I’ve been known to say in the past that poetry ‘has its back on emptiness’, and that it’s this that gives it its resonance, like an echo-chamber gives resonance to the strings of a violin or cello or guitar. But I don’t think I’d say it that way anymore. For a start I no longer see it as emptiness that poetry has its back to, or at least no longer see emptiness as the only possibility. It could also, for example, be a fullness from which we’ve been holding ourselves back, or allowing ourselves to be held back.
For a great many poets, lyric poets especially, this echo chamber is the unconscious, the deep psyche, a kind of personal, or perhaps universal, underworld. Remember that the Greek ‘god’ of poetry was Orpheus, who visited the underworld to try to bring his dead wife back into the world of light and life, and whose poetry – song – after he failed, was enriched and empowered by his grief at the loss of her. But for many others – and increasingly for me (not that I think we must make a choice) – it’s the World beyond what we might call the human bubble, and all the wonder and strangeness and promise of and in that World beyond, that humans tend to turn their backs on in all their all-consuming busyness. This wonder and strangeness and promise is pretty much what I mean by ‘the other side of daylight’ of my new collection’s title.
And animals, of course – non-human animals, our relationships with them – are one of our entry-points.
Artist bio:
David Brooks has produced numerous works of fiction, literary history and criticism, philosophy, and written increasingly in the service of animal rights and advocacy, but began with, returns to, and lives with poetry. Along with fifty new poems, his recent collection, The Other Side of Daylight: New and Selected Poems (UQP, 2024) contains selections from his previous five volumes, representing the work of almost fifty years. Born in Canberra in 1953, Brooks spent his earliest years in Greece, where his father was an immigration attaché to the Australian embassy, and was subsequently educated at the ANU and the University of Toronto. He has taught Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia, the ANU, and the University of Sydney, where he is now an honorary associate professor. From 1999 to 2013 he ran the university’s graduate writing program, and from 2000 until 2018 was co-editor of the journal Southerly. He lives, and writes full-time, in the Blue Mountains, with rescued sheep, and spends a short time each year in his wife’s native Slovenia. He has edited the poetry of A.D. Hope and R.F. Brissenden and, with Bert Pribac, translated the poetry of Srečko Kosovel (‘the Slovenian Rimbaud’). In 2015/16 he was awarded an Australia Council fellowship for services to Australian and international literature. Amongst works forthcoming in 2024 are Alec, a memoir of A.D. Hope, Ice Storm (a suite of sixteen essays on Slovenian subjects), and Essay on Rights of Non-human Animals.
Shared Dropbox link:
The Knox Street Bar and Poetry Sydney partner for a monthly exhibitions program that provides a platform for media poetry: video poetry, sound poetry, aural recordings of poetry and audio-visual experimentations with launch events on the first Friday of the month.
Poem Phone Booth
Poetry Gallery
EXTERIOR: Poetry Gallery is a small window space accessible 24 hours outside of the Knox Street Bar. Audio can be listened to via QR-code and phone access. A bench seat is positioned along the pathway for you to get a seated screen experience.
Poem Window Gallery
OCTOBER 2024: Julian Dave
Poetic Illuminations in Five Visions
Poetic Illuminations in Five Visions is the retrospective of video art by Julian Dave Young, and a homage to Ashley Chatto. Like a film, Poetic Illuminations in Five Visions screens the comings and goings, designing narratives that rise, build, unravel and dissipate.
Julian Dave Young’s Poetic Illuminations are a visual meditation about transformation of shapes in poetic fruition using feedback effects and an accelerated rhythm. The radiant use of colours flash across the screen, some circular, others rectangular, yet other strips, their colours changing in stochastic ways, enhancing the experience without distracting from it.
Poetic Illuminations in Five Visions is like a blank wall on which the moving pictures come to be inscribed, etched on the surface, changing the very texture of the wall. Screening as a live stream show, the experience is itself a wall of emotion pictures, an assemblage of affects. Consuming the video is to ingest an absorption of images, a visual feast – an oral affair.
Poetic Illuminations in Five Visions are representations of the video art, poetry and music from four productions:
Darlinghurst Nights by Kenneth Slessor, Sydney Writers Festival 2009
Love at the Bar, Australian poets, Sydney Writers Festival 2010
Colouring in the Body Electric, Head to Surry Hills Mardi Gras 2021
Will Do! William Shakespeare Birthday Celebration, The Rocks 2021
Livestreamed by Sydney Underground Streaming Sessions (SUSS) 2021, and still photographs exhibited at intelligent animal in the same year.
Interview with the artist and livestreamed introduction can be viewed:
https://poetrysydney.org/2024/03/20/poetic-illuminations-in-v-visions-3/
Artist Statement:
These images were created to accompany shows produced by Poetry Sydney for more than ten years. To find a discrete part of the wavelength of a poetry show is a fairly tricky business, video tends to demand attention, it must support, not overwhelm, to achieve a positive result.
Artist Bio:
Julian D Young is an avatar of the digital entity dvd2u. He can be found swinging around various devices in pursuit of coherence most of the time. He has done this ever since his friend told him he should buy a computer sometime last century. Video tags: @dvd2u #dvd2u