Meanjin/Brisbane Launch of A Beginner’s Guide: 23 August 2023. A conversation on old & new beginnings with Bronwyn Lea.
I NOTICE these words on the website for ECHO & BOUNCE, the indie record store and bar where I’m giving my book A Beginner’s Guide a northern launch on Wednesday 23 August:
We're always down with the deep and obscure, without forgetting what's bubbling to the surface too.
That’s what they say they do with their record collection, and it might fairly describe what I reckon good poetry does, too. As I put it in “Before the Day,” a poem that has poetry’s ancient and urgent work, and both Australia and China, both here and elsewhere, in mind:
We live downriver from the past; we fish
Our phrases from the stream. They are not ours.
We finish stanzas long ago begun…
I’ll talk about that, and many things lyric and political and artistic, with Bronwyn Lea, who’s going to chat with me on stage upstairs in the Loft room at the very cool Echo & Bounce in Woolloongabba, Meanjin/ Brisbane.
Bronwyn is a favourite poet of mine, one of our best, the author of many books and the editor of even more; she’s also a professor of poetry at the University of Queensland. She’ll share some of poems and thoughts about the poems she loves and what she loves about poetry; I’ll read a couple from A Beginner’s Guide. I might say a word or two about my latest book, too, House of Thieves, a selection of a hundred poems from across my five books, published in Chinese translation by Guangxi Normal University Press as part of the Golden Tibetan Antelope International Poetry Prize I was awarded in June in Qinghai.
I’m in Meanjin/Brisbane at the invitation of ethicist, intensive care specialist, and poet, Dr Melanie Jansen, who’s organised a fantastic panel of philosophers, lawyers, doctors and poets to talk about the uses of poetry, ethics, and philosophy in the practice of healthcare. That event is on Thursday 24 August at the University of Queensland, a UQ Critical Thinking Project, at UQ St Lucia, 5:30 to 7:30. See my separate note on that event.
The launch event with Bronwyn Lea at Echo & Bounce is on at 6:00 for 6:30. I’ll have some of my books there for sale. I’m sure Bronwyn will too.
The event is free, but please register at Eventbrite:
Echo & Bounce is at 596 Stanley Street, Woolloongabba. Looking forward to seeing you there.
