QUEENSLAND POETRY FESTIVAL 2013 23rd – 25th AUGUST, 2013

New Zealand Poet Siobhan Harvey reports

A few weekends ago, I was fortunate enough to be invited to the Queensland Poetry Festival 2013 as an international guest writer. Previous international guests from New Zealand (Hinemoana Baker, James Norcliffe…) had written or spoken of the wonders of this festival. But, after leaving a polar-blasted Auckland behind, little prepared me for the scope of the program, the lively interaction of the audience or the diversity of authorial presentation offered by the Festival.

In addition to me there were 12 international guest writers on the bill, as well as a further 23 Australian poets. Three days; 36 poets and 29 sessions; all free to the audience.

            The Festival venue, the Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary Arts is situated in the wonderfully titled, busy inner-city suburb of Fortitude Valley. It offered various spaces ideal for a Festival of this nature: the grand stage, the more intimate ‘Shopfront Space’, and the foyer for panel discussions, book sale and chats between sessions.         

            The Festival weekend opened with a panel session, ‘Domestic Hardcore’ described engagingly in the Festival brochure as:

Featuring Siobhan Harvey, Jacqueline Turner and Matt Hetherington

The world as inhabited by artists brings the poetic to unearth the beauty within the

seemingly mundane. Join three diverse poets as they talk about the way their work intersects with the trappings of domesticity – backyards, haircuts, parenting, cooking a meal.

The session MC was local publisher, Graham Nunn, who began by asking each poet to

address what the domestic meant to them.  Hetherington, Brisbane based “writer, musician, part-time god-father, humble self-promoter, sky-digger…” spoke of his recent move from Melbourne to Queensland and how domesticity for him related to his present situation sleeping on a friend’s sofa, searching for his own abode and so forth. Canadian poet Turner, the inaugural Arts Queensland Poet in Residence some six years ago, discussed the connection between domesticity – her grown up sons leaving home – and her collection of poems, The Ends of the Earth (ECW Press, 2013 – launched at the Festival). The verse in that collection uses the landscape as motifs for personal journeys, those undertaken by her sons when taking their first independent steps out into the wider world. Then she read a poem from the new collection. For me, I explained when it was my turn, domesticity relates to my poetry in 4 ways: the domestic in writing is a historical entity so often, in the past, seen as a negative label applied to women’s writings, and I write as a contemporary woman writer from and against that tradition; yet, for me as a writer who works from home, the domestic is a place of creativity and one of my major sources of inspiration; as such, the domestic is the language and frame (theme, motif) of my work; this is especially so in relation to my first collection, Lost Relatives in which the domestic is viewed as an important aspect of migration experience, the establishment and assimilation into a new ‘home’ one of the key things migrants use when finding their sense of personal relativity in their new country. Then I read the opening poem, ‘Woman at a Window’ from Lost Relatives.  Thereafter the discussion opened into wider literary terrain such as, were there any subjects associated with the domestic we authors wouldn’t write about and so forth. Each poet read further poems. Buoyed by good coffee and free French pastries, the audience were lively, and helped make for a comfortable start to the weekend.

            The Saturday sessions thereafter were diverse and very thought-provoking. Amongst the highlights was the session ‘Cars, Lightning, Rain’ in which new author Trudie Murrell opened with a reading from her micro collection Women and Cars, a series of poems inspired by the relationships women in her family had with cars, accompanied by a silent doco screening melding images from Murrell’s past with archives from familial road journeys. She was joined by performance poet CJ Bowerbird and dynamic Perth poet and publisher Coral Carter. The other Saturday highlight was ‘Breathe the Shadow’ which saw former New Zealand poet, Jennifer Compton beautifully deliver a set of accomplished poems, some familiar, some new, and Matt Hetherington return to offer a magnificent reading which reminded one of an Australian Glen Colquhoun in performance and content.

Between these two sessions, I did a further reading, ‘Serrated with Light’, in which I was paired with accomplished Australian resident poet, Ian McBryde whose most recent collection, The Adoption Order was shortlisted for the 2010 Victorian Premier’s Prize. McBryde’s reading was understated, yet carefully controlled, his quiet voice lingering for emphasis where it needed to across work which spanned his oeuvre. Deeply powerful. Once again, I read some work from Lost Relatives, but also offered some new work, poems which have recently found their way into Best New Zealand Poems 12, Poetry New Zealand, Meanjin (Aus) and Stand (UK).

What impressed me throughout these sessions was the audience engagement. The Festival has worked hard with a variety of sponsors, including the Queensland Government, Brisbane City and The Australian Council for the Arts to make the event free. In doing so, numbers for each session (and there were often 2 or 3 sessions going on simultaneously, as one might find at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival for instance) were healthily between 50-80. More than this, though, was the audience response to each performance which was extremely vocal, supportive and encouragingt. Warm and extended applause and whoops of joy greeted each reader at the conclusion of their performance.

Such enthusiasm spilled into Sunday where eleven sessions were offered. Here the standouts again included Jennifer Compton in ‘The Spell of Sound’. She was paired very cleverly with migrant Australian writer Justine Clemens (reading from his republished, expanded dystopian poetic novel The Mundiad) and Ian McBryde. While ‘Dancing of the Ants’ introduced me to poet Anna Fern who combined word with “a love of plucking sounds from unlikely objects” in an orchestral medley and unassuming Canadian poet, Paul Vermeersch who work offered great impact in spite of his modest delivery. My Sunday session was entitled ‘Promise of the Sun’ and found me alongside a collaboration of word and image presented by Angela Gardiner (Views of the Hudson, Shearsman Books, 2009) and Nicci Haynes, and Brisbane poet, John Koenig.

What was marvelous about the showcase of local and international poetry and the enthusiastic audience reception was that the Queensland Poetry Festival acts as an introductory stage from the Brisbane Writers Festival. Offering this arts event for free was commendable, but the offering of a feast of poetry as a taster for the wider literary talent on show a few weeks later continues to leave me with the impression of something artistically astute.  

            A free international poetry festival leading into our major literary festival; nearly 30 events on the program; all events free. Once Wellington offered a International Poetry Festival; might it be time to revivify the idea in Auckland, Christchurch, Wellington or Dunedin?

Siobhan Harvey