This Sunday in far-away Adelaide, Friendly Street’s latest annual anthology Rewired (edited by Gaetano Aiello and Maggie Emmett) will be launched at Adelaide Writers’ Week. (MORE…) Four years ago today was the launch of Another Universe (ed. Steve Evans and Kate Deller-Evans.) I remember this Friendly Street Reader well, (as it was the first to include a poem of mine, on first looking into Chapman’s fritz!)
“After holding more than 300 readings and publishing over 70 books, it’s time for a fresh look at the great record of Friendly Street and its role in Australian poetry.
The long-awaited update on the history of Friendly Street will be launched on Sunday 2nd of March in the West Tent at Writers’ Week. Peter Rose, editor of the Australian Book Review, will usher Best of Friends: the first thirty years of the Friendly Street Poets into the world in the now traditional Friendly Street book launches function during the Adelaide Festival of Arts.” MORE… (Friendly Street Poets)
All the best to editors Kate Deller-Evans & Steve Evans. I know they’ve put a hell of a lot of work into this project over the past couple of years. Wish I could be there!
Kate, Steve & the infamous Clive James launching Friendly Street’s Another Universe in 2004.
I mentioned leaving school at lunchtime in my last post. It’s still haunting me. Apparently it was broadcast on Final Draft, Radio 2SER FM Sydney just before Christmas. Surfing the net I discovered it as a podcast and found myself in bed this morning in Himeji listening to myself from a radio program I hadn’t realised existed on a Going Down Swinging CD originally recorded in my study in Cherry Gardens, South Australia from an idea that came to me one lunchtime in suburbia. But then, life is full of inexplicable synchronicities, isn’t it? I can feel a poem forming… 
Portrait of The Poet by The Artist Himself, Holding His New Cell Phone Backwards
Thanks to the internet and Gaetano Aiello, I’m still able to “perform” my poems at Friendly Street’s monthly readings. Last Tuesday Gaet read my japanese lessons on the bullet train and Inscrutable. Looking back at the archives, I see that I performed A Beginner’s Guide to Postmodernism and Vocabulary of the beach at the 2006 February meeting and leaving school at lunchtime, galahs and A Villanelle on Certain Provisions in Relation to a Bill concerning Anti-Terrorism by the Hon. Phillip Ruddock at the o7 February meeting. I eventually wrote music to accompany leaving school and it was released on the CD Going Down Swinging #25 . The others were published in micromacro. What a great thing it is that Ruddock and his undemocratic ilk have been banished to the backbenches…
More poetry by Adelaide’s Friendly Street Poets now uploaded onto the new site. Archives now include Veronica Shanks’ loneliness, David Adés Circle, Avalanche’s DEFIANCE and Testimonial, Genny Drew’s Fragile liaison, Stephen Lawrence’s Science Haiku, Kerryn Tredrea’s art form., John Rice’s Australian Values and rob walker’s automatonophobia. Have a squiz HERE.