Alan Jefferies was born in Brisbane and grew up in Cleveland. He lived in Sydney and Coalcliff throughout much of the 1980′s and 90′s and completed degrees in Communication and Writing.

In 1998 he moved to Hong Kong where he co-founded OutLoud, Hong Kong’s longest running spoken-word event. He has published five books of poetry.  His latest book Seem, is a bilingual edition ( Chinese translation by Iris Fan Xing), published by ASM in Macao, China.

Here’s a poem from the collection and a link to a review:

Reading

as the poet finished reading
her penultimate poem
the guy in the front row
leant forward &
thud
hit his head
with cupped hand
like he didn’t want that  particular
idea to take root in there

then pop
he was back, upright
(like a buoy rights itself, by itself)
after being knocked askance
by the silky wake of a passing ocean liner.

*****

Seem launches this Saturday June 2 at SpeedPoets alongside a premiere reading by Julie Beveridge from her forthcoming book, home{sic}.

Date: Saturday June 2
Location: Brew (Lower Burnett Lane, Brisbane City)
Time: 2pm – 5:30pm
Entry: Gold Coin Donation

The June gig will also deliver the regular delights of free zines, raffles, the guitar roar of Sheish Money and Brisbane’s hottest Open Mic Section. And remember… don’t just bring one poem, you never know, you may be named Call Back Poet for the month!

The Call Back Poet is selected by the monthly features and given the opportunity to perform a mini-feature to close the event (2-3 poems) as well as win the right to perform at the last gig of 2012 and be in the running for cash prizes and the title SpeedPoets Open Mic Champion for 2012.

Call Back Poets for the year to date are Jo Brooks, Carmen Leigh Keates and Marisa Allen.

So come along and enjoy the SpeedPoets experience… we’ve been keeping poetry fast in Brisbane for more than a decade!

Date: Saturday June 2
Location: Brew (Lower Burnett Lane, Brisbane City)
Time: 2pm – 5:30pm
Entry: Gold Coin Donation

For a bird that sings
Such a song as this
Should not be silenced

Her puffed chest
Bursting with a thousand universes
Should not cave

Not for her shadowlands
algebraic complexity
Or the weight of a worn and musty ancient oilskin hanging from the hook ,on the back of
the kitchen door, of the thousands of lovelorn

though she sings but one song
on one moonless night
on one rainy day
on one lonely street
in one hollow trunked tree

It is truest
It is beautifulest
It is the only song she knows
And so it must be sung

*****

Marisa is a multi disciplinary artist working in words, sound and visuals who has performed nationally and abroad. Her sublime and visually illustrative poetry performances have appeared at the ‘07 and ‘09 Queensland Poetry Festival with current invitations to perform at the 2011 QPF and for the 2011 Brisbane Festival Under the Radar, combining experimental sound works with spoken word.

Her chapbook ‘Fire in the Head selected works 1995 – 2006’ is published through Outsiders press, edited by David ‘Ghostboy’ Stavanger. She has appeared as part of the Riverbend Poetry series readings (’10) in Brisbane. Published in Going Down Swinging, Cottonmouth, Speedpoets Zine and Outsiders and regular readings at Speedpoets and Outsiders she was a Woodford Wordfood Slam finalist (‘07/08) and also performed at the Village Festival in Yeppoon QLD (’08).

Along with poetry she has collaborated in live spoken word and recordings with violin for Shane Koyczan (QPF ‘07). Marisa is the front woman for the Qmusic award nominated avant folk, experimental blues act Bremen Town Musician as violinist, vocalist and songwriter and the band performed at QPF 2009. She has toured throughout the United States as violinist to American/ Icelandic country folk act The Foghorns (’07) and has performed solo at Speedpoets, Outsiders and various venues throughout Queensland since 2005..

One of those poets is Rowan Donovan… and tonight, he is restless with excitement. Here’s what he had to say when I asked him what he was most looking forward to about the gig tomorrow.

RD: What am I most looking forward to about this upcoming event?

You mean after my chauffeured train trip down? The excitement of discovering my way to a new venue? The smell of roasted coffee beans? The rare chance to meet up with friends and poets who, for a serial recluse like me, are all part of my extended family? Not to mention the joy of sharing the bill with Nathan Shepherdson. Or the fact I haven’t read at SpeedPoets now for some three years and hell, after all, I am the oldest surviving original SpeedP!? And what about the show pony in me that’s just a repressed exhibitionist? Hey?! Gotta factor that one in. Course I am hoping that there will be lots of new faces there as well so I can recite some of my golden oldie standards without boring the poetical pants off people and maybe even slip a couple of new rants in just to mix it up a bit and break the mold of being typecast as Barry Manilow meets James Blunt! But all that aside, really, just the privilege of briefly being in that special moment on stage when there is only you, your words and the audience.

Osu.

**********

RD: Ahh the early days, Graham. January twenty six, two thousand and two seems a long time ago when looked back on from here. That night. That gathering on the front porch deck of Fakie Wilde’s little house. Him with his feet in a kid’s paddling pool and a yellow plastic duck to boot. How did we all end up there? You, me, Fakie, Steph, Brentley, Adam, Robert and later on, the wonderfully late Paul Sanderson.

As I’m writing this I’m listening to one of the few existing taped recordings of that night. John Coltrane and Miles Davis playing the kind of jazz Fakie so loved, there in the background. And it being the perfect sound track. The perfect backdrop to what we were trying to give birth to. Trying to achieve without really knowing it.

What a special night that was. It was Fakie’s baby. His vision. He wanted players who could read their own work over music and keep it all under two minutes. He reasoned audiences in this age of instant self gratification get bored quickly. So keep it snappy. Keep it punchy. Keep each reading short. Keep revolving poets, one poet after the other and never letting go of the audience. Already we were in essence, Speed Poets, although we didn’t know it then. That name came quickly later when we needed flyers to advertise our arrival and a venue to celebrate the birth.

And what a venue we landed Graham? Belushi’s on the corner of Brunswick and Ann. You walk past it now you would never know we had been there. They have wrecked the place. All pastel coloured neon lights reflected in chrome and music pumping to a feral beat that is a long way away from Brian Eno’s ambient sounds we later read to, that night, on Fakie’s deck. Or Icon’s iconic sounds when they backed us in the pool room downstairs.

SpeedPoets became for me a collective of people with a need for writing and performing. Of belonging to a group of like minded people who, when you heard them read, just made you want to go home and stay up all night, every night, writing your heart out so you had something half decent to read when next month came around and it was your turn to front up to the mic and spruik your spoken word. Didn’t want to let anybody down with a piece that didn’t cut it.

God I loved it! Lived for it! Let myself be all consumed by it.  We were such a wonderfully matched mismatch of wannabe eclectic talent. I look back and don’t regret a moment of all the insane, unslept hours I spent scribbling and scribbling and obsessively writing and shaping and reworking and rolling the words I had penned off my drunken tongue until I had found my voice and found I had something to say. All I needed was an audience.

And SpeedPoets did that too. First Sunday every month. Provided a ready made audience who were as supportive in their understanding as they were enthusiastic in their appreciation. Every month, getting up and trialing a poem or two over a live sound track and in doing so, you were honing your craft. Finding your voice. Putting together a body of credible work. If you couldn’t have been in San Francisco when the Beats did their first reading. Allen on stage and Jack handing around cheap jugs of wine and whooping the audience participation up, then downstairs at Belushi’s was the next best place to be!

And what a first time venue it proved to be. How that downstairs pub shaped the event. It was like walking down narrow stairs back in time. The place had atmosphere to die for. People crowded in and around over sized pool tables that took up so much of the space. A band of great musicians. At one time a DJ. A manned bar just outside of the door and another one upstairs. Chalked footpath blackboards to advertise the gig. And always good people. Very good people. It was the right mix. Words, poems, music, people and wine.

You know somewhere, someplace, there are video recordings of all of this. What a joy when those basement tapes get released. People will finally get to see what a seminal moment in Brisbane’s literary history SpeedPoets defined and propagated. I remember it all well now. It’s just like yesterday.

clouds in another’s blood is a collaboration between Nathan Shepherdson and printmaker, Julie Barratt and is published in a strictly limited edition of 50 elegantly designed art books by light-trap press.

The May gig will also serve up the regular delights of free zines, raffles, the guitar wail of Sheish Money and Brisbane’s hottest Open Mic Section. And don’t just bring one poem, you never know… you may just be named Call Back Poet for the month!

The Call Back Poet is selected by the monthly features and given the opportunity to perform a mini-feature to close the event (2-3 poems) as well as win the right to perform at the last gig of 2012 and be in the running for cash prizes and the title SpeedPoets Open Mic Champion for 2012.

So come along and take in the SpeedPoets experience… we’ve been keeping poetry fast in Brisbane for more than a decade!

Date: Saturday May 5
Location: Brew (Lower Burnett Lane, Brisbane City)
Time: 2pm – 5:30pm
Entry: Gold Coin Donation

Carmen’s debut micro-collection, One Broken Knife is part of Brisbane New Voices III which is being launched at Riverbend Books this Tuesday, April 24 at 6:30pm alongside readings and performances from Tessa Leon, Brett Dionysius & Andy White, so come on out and support local talent!

**********

NATURE RESERVE

We were in a nature reserve
owned by the airport,
filming a corporate video
on environmental responsibility.
The unseen vertical extension of the runway
cut again and again up our backs
as we hiked through the salt-addled straw
with our tripod, camera and esky,
trying to see how we could make
a greenie video
out of a petrol-covered death.

The three boys and me.
I stayed quiet, wanting them
to just do their thing. To roam
like bears or chimps,
peer at a map and use a sextant,
and to then plan space travel and disappear
as I stood there loving them and keeping quiet.

One of them, I think
it was Steve A, had a little
magazine of German porn.
They were all happy
that I didn’t get angry.
I just sipped from my bottle
of thawing orange cordial.
There was no winning a fight out here.

The land was so white
it was like peering out
of a space-rocket’s louvre
at a neighbouring hot star .
Or like a death transition.
Straight from the operating table
to the yellow deserts of Mexico
where you’re met by ancestors who help you
cross the burning border to heaven.
But this was Australia
and in the middle of a clearing of hay
we sat in the car with the boot
and all the doors open
like a wasp trying to dry.

This was on the coast of Moreton Bay.
The sea foam so pre-settlement
but land so dry and
invisibly irradiated, like a fresh divorcee.
Home only now to the slyest
insects and sparrows

and King Brown snakes.
And the Red-Belly Black. We saw them
stretched on the road like the road
meant nothing. To us the road was
a punctuation mark, a signal to say drive here.
To the snakes it was just a warmer bit.
A failed stone.

Steve B sat in the car,
cleaning the camera lenses.
Kaine went for a piss in the grass
then bounded back, sure he was stalked
by another snake. He smoked
by himself to calm down.

The boys were now in a triangle,
uneven distances from me at the middle.
Over there was Steve A,
newly without his wife, and tense
with the serious girlfriend
he’d jumped straight in with—
her text messages pinged all day
like a depleting smoke alarm.

We wandered.
The creeks were shallow
and rainbowed with fuel.
Stunted toadfish nosed about
in the slime-coated sandy beds.

We loved to hate what the airport
had done. The boys held
that we were convicts, not settlers.

We walked to the remains of a jetty.
Just five uneven cement pylons
holding up the air
like a hand gesturing
that nothing can be done.

Philip has published five collections of poetry – the most recent being Without an Alibi (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2008). He has also written five novels or novellas for young adults and children and his short stories have been widely anthologised.  Philip edited the anthologies The Penguin Book of Australian Satirical Verse and The Sting in the Wattle (UQP) and he has just co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing with the distinguished UK poet David Morley. He is now working on a sixth poetry collection, while teaching at QUT as professor of creative writing.

Here’s a new poem from Philip that will also be published in the April SpeedPoets Zine.

**********

Fishing for Eels

A creek divided the Council horse pound,
flaky paperbarks and seven year wattles,
creeping Casuarinas, a buzzing silence

except when a mob of horses filled
the narrow path with rumbling gallop
and I had to jump aside.

Crawling through the bracken
my own species grew fins, feathers,
the sun weedy on my face.

And I became the hours at a pond
of lily pads, dragon flies and turtles,
grass snakes that climbed the air.

Twisting through that bubble shine
were the sharp tooth eels, black and brown,
mouthing at my line.

The first eel I carried home
to my mother’s praise.
My father buried it in the garden.

The second I brought
she condemned as a dirty thing,
ordered me to take it back.

I walked dizzy to the paddocks
threw it at the water,
into its reflection it sank gaping

how quickly the water changed.

**********

So here’s the details one last time.

Date: Saturday April 14 (Note: Second Saturday of the month in April only)
Featuring: Ella Jeffery, Philip Neilsen & Sean M. Whelan
Location: Brew (Lower Burnett Lane, Brisbane City)
Time: 2pm – 5:30pm
Entry: Gold Coin Donation

**********

They Don’t Love Blue

Tell me where to stand in the garden.
And I’ll mark the spot.
You’ll find me there every evening at dusk.
Watching the day transmogrify, just like we did.

Tell me where the light falls the best upon my face.
I want to be just as handsome as you are supernatural.
Just because I don’t believe in permanence.
Doesn’t mean I want to forget this.
I want to build a theme park to us in the mountains of my mind,
travel there every lonely hour and take all the rides.
Tell me where to stand in the garden.
Where nobody will see us.
Not even those gossip leaking satellites.
Tell me this shit is real.
Or unreal.
That works too.

Show me a species of bird that migrates from Melbourne to Manhattan every year
and I’ll tie a love letter around it’s ankle.
Tell me, do birds even have ankles?
Tell me how somebody so old could still be learning about birds.
And by that I mean actual birds, but the other way works too.
Tell me how you know so much stuff.
I only want this love to have its own Wikipedia entry.
I only want the New York Times to tell me we’re getting married.
I only want to be more famous than your dresses.
I only want to live long enough to know how to die right.

Let’s synchronise our watches so we break up at the same time.
Then let’s drown our watches in the kitchen sink in sync, so that we never break up.
I know, we broke up, but for the purpose of this poem, let’s pretend that we didn’t.
Or let’s write up a postbreakup agreement with plenty of day passes.
Let’s swap shadows, so I can watch your determined walk all the time.

Tell me where to stand in the garden.
Light has the highest concentration of magic at dusk.
Fact.
We can dig in here forever.
We can learn how to grow.
Tell me where the soil is the softest, where the underworld will receive us the quickest.
I have the best of friends in low places.

I’m sorry.
I’m sorry the love letter I wrote you was eaten by the sky.
How could I know the future could eat so much?

Tarkovsky wrote poems with a camera.
He knew about us.
He knew we would break up.
He knew we didn’t need to worry about this.
And he was right.
When those doe-eyed bearded boy scouts come at you
With a pocket full of sadsong mixtapes
as they surely will.
Wait and remember
they don’t love blue like I do.

(To listen to a recording of this poem by Sean M Whelan & Isnod visit here -  http://m.soundcloud.com/isnod/they-dont-love-blue-like-i-do)

**********

One of the feature poets for the month of April is emerging voice, Ella Jeffery. Ella’s poetry and short fiction have appeared in literary journals Stilts and Rex, and QUTE magazine. She was born on the far north coast of New South Wales, moved to Brisbane in 2009 and then to San Diego, California, in 2010. She is now back in Brisbane and studies creative writing at QUT. As a taste of what’s to come, here’s a new poem from Ella.

**********

Clean

I make a cup of tea, while you
sleep on the veranda.
The ants are wild over plates
still sitting there from last night’s meal.

It’s late. I take a teaspoon
from the wire rack
and run it under cold water
to wash off the three or four ants
which are climbing it.

I hope
the water bears their bodies
kindly through the dark passages
under this house, the one
we’ve always shared.

**********

Date: Saturday April 14 (Note: Second Saturday of the month in April only)
Location: Brew (Lower Burnett Lane, Brisbane City)
Time: 2pm – 5:30pm
Entry: Gold Coin Donation