Audio: “Watch This Space” (featuring Doxent.)
Composition & keyboards by Doxent. Shakuhachi by Rob Walker.
Artwork: Architecture Drawings.

I’ve been pretty sick all this year and haven’t been out much. So it was a pleasure (if exhausting!) to get along to Adelaide Writers Week yesterday to see Mike Ladd chatting with Adam Aitken and a session curated by Peter Goldsworthy featuring perhaps the best of South Australia’s poets: Steve Brock, Cath Kenneally, Jules Leigh Koch, Louise Nicholas, Jan Owen and Dom Symes. All were excellent in their own way. The surprise bonus was that Peter introduced Ali Cobby-Eckermann who has just won the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize and we were treated to a couple of her poems. Coincidentally on the way in I’d been listening to Mike Ladd’s Earshot podcast Inside my Mother about Ali’s life and poetry. So much poetic talent in this state!

A bit of ancient history here – a pioneering podcast from Jan 9, 2007! It was the Inaugural Australian Poetry Show with Maggie Ball on Passionate Internet Voices Talk Radio with Lillian Cauldwell out of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Before most of us had even heard of Skype, Maggie teed up this 3-way VOIP conversation between Adelaide, Newcastle and Ann Arbor, Michigan. I seem to remember that Maggie’s computer wouldn’t cooperate and at the last minute she had to phone in on a landline. But it all worked and my interview – mostly talking about my just-released first full collection micromacro which Maggie had recently reviewed for her website The Compulsive Reader – went relatively smoothly.

I found the mp3 of the show on some old files last week and uploaded it to Soundcloud.

Since that interview Maggie and I have collaborated on a few different poems. Reintarnation appeared in Loud Zoo. Radiology appeared in Policies & Procedures, Medical Journal of Australia and Best Australian Science Writing, 2016. There are also a couple more which haven’t been published yet. All of this despite the fact that we’ve never met face-to-face! It’s all been collaboration by email and mp3. Maggie lives out of Newcastle, NSW. Perhaps one day we’ll actually meet!

Another musical interpretation of my poem Elements first published in Poetry Magazine (US) and my collection tropeland (Five Islands Press.) Damz aka Mo-no-tone specialises in chill electronica and ambient music lives in Brussels.

A collaboration with DJ Robbie Dee from Germany.