Joel Deane

2009-06-10T12:40:00.002+10:00

Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature

Sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling has some interesting thoughts on literature and technology on Wired, some of which I agree with, some of which betray his prejudices (ie. "18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast." Excuse me?). Well worth a look.

Read the article.

2009-06-07T22:05:00.002+10:00

Should Australia have a poet laureate?

The Age published a piece by Fiona Gruber on the topic on Saturday, June 6. Personally, I'm all for anything that gets poetry into the public.

"Should Australia have a poet laureate? Is it good for poetry, for the poet chosen, for the public? It's seen by some as a symbol of queasy nationalism and parochial pride, by others as a useful way of promoting poetry, an ambassadorship of verse." Read the full article.

2009-05-18T17:05:00.002+10:00

Cordite review of Magisterium

"Magisterium is the second collection by Joel Deane, following on from his debut collection Subterranean Radio Songs and his debut novel Another. In an interview with Cordite in 2006, when asked about the interplay between his work as speechwriter for the Premier of Victoria and his other life as a poet, Deane cited American poet Eleanor Wilner, who said of poets that, “We need to take back the rhetorical high ground from the politicians who degrade it”. Deane went on express the hope that the poems contained in his next book might approach “the kind of apocalyptic public language” hinted at by Wilner. Such ambitions can sound a little lofty, but Magisterium would seem to be a successful achievement of that goal." - Adam Ford, Cordite

Read the full review

2009-05-15T15:33:00.000+10:00

2009-05-11T17:12:00.002+10:00

Poetry Workshop

I'll be taking a poetry workshop at the Australian Poetry Centre on Sunday, May 24.

The workshop, "Poetry and Politics", runs from 1pm until 3pm. I'll also be a featured reader at a poetry salon afterwards, from 4pm to 5.30pm, with Lisa Gorton and David Reiter.

For more information go to the APC website.

2009-05-04T21:40:00.000+10:00

2009-05-04T17:04:00.003+10:00

Poetry Salon at Australian Poetry Centre

I'll be a featured reader at APC's next poetry salon, on Sunday, May 24, from 4pm to 5.30pm.

I'll be reading from my two poetry collections, Subterranean Radio Songs (Interactive Press) and Magisterium (Australian Scholarly Publishing). I also intend to read "Bushfire Elegy", the poem I was commissioned to write for the National Day of Mourning after the Black Saturday fires.

The other featured reader will be the poet-publisher David Reiter, who published Subterranean Radio Songs.

Go here for the Australian Poetry Centre.

2009-03-31T20:07:00.002+11:00

Review of Magisterium

"Magisterium is an intricate collection. There is a subtlety to this poetry that defies any crude attempt to label it ‘political’, while politics remains a deep and orienting awareness in all of Deane’s verse. ...

"This volume, as with his last, is haunted by Deane’s children lost in childbirth, yet one of its last poems, dedicated to his daughter allows a note of healing, however difficult: ‘When, in that perfect moment, I first hold you, / and golden light refracts the lens / of this obsidian heart.’ Obsidian or not, it is clear that there is a fierce, real heart driving Deane’s poetry and like [Judith] Wright’s, it attempts to span this whole country. He is also a poet who cares about how Australia is represented in poetry. ‘Duyken 1606’, which traces the landing of the Dutch East India ship on Cape York Peninsula, is possibly one of our best poems about the first foreign encounters with this continent, written with a courageous sparseness that reveals yet another dimension of this fascinating poet."

- Natalie Owen-Jones, Stylus Poetry Journal

Read the full review.

2009-03-31T19:55:00.003+11:00

Review of £10 Poems

'This latest collection has a dark tone. Deane’s world is one in which he is witness to the despairs and joys which is life. Provocation, not subtlety, is the writer’s special effect. He demonstrates this in two poems: “Sea Lake” and “Prehistoric”. “Sea Lake” plays on the anxieties we feel in the age of global warming: “This land / is a drowning land. // Red chalk earth / stirred by // a desert northerly, / choking you,” while “Prehistoric” has the flavor of a cautionary tale:

I dreamt
I died
and,
in the compression,
became a seam
of brown coal

'These sentiments mess with a reader’s head. It is the compression and the feeling of being buried alive that both repel and attract us, and around which the poet navigates his thoughts. ...

'Sweet, sour, comic, cosmic, Deane’s wisdom lies in its fidelity: to the fox that strikes suddenly, and to the lamb that escapes to the “stolen field.” Deane bears witness, and we relish the confirmation of his testimony.'

- Patricia Prime, Stylus Poetry Journal

Read the full review.

2009-03-22T00:40:00.000+11:00

2009-03-19T16:26:00.002+11:00

2009-03-04T13:25:00.004+11:00

2008-12-24T12:23:00.001+11:00

2008-12-18T00:01:00.002+11:00

2008-12-14T00:14:00.006+11:00

2008-12-11T12:13:00.004+11:00

Blog review of Another

Nice to see people are still reading my first novel. (The new one, by the way, is finished and looking for a publisher.)

"This is a sour, sometimes shocking book. One scene, in which Toby breaks into a house to find a baby left alone for hours in a crib, is particularly moving. Toby bludgeons a service station attendant half to death for $45, and later remembers how good it felt to wreak violence on another person. This is harsh, unapologetic, and grim. I suspect that people who aren’t as addicted to tales of destruction and dissolution as I am might find it difficult to enjoy reading this. But enjoy it I did. ...

"And yet a sensitive reading of Another can’t but notice Deane’s cool rejection of much of the material here. It is a subtle art to write so candidly about such horrific matters, without anything but the merest hint of authorial disapproval, and expect the reader to interpret the novel ‘correctly’. (If I am interpreting it correctly.) But here I found Another to be a success. This is literature without needing to be Literature. I respect Deane for being able to write as clearly and as candidly as he does." -- Guy Salvidge
Read the full review here.

2008-12-01T11:26:00.004+11:00

Best Australian Poems 2008
Peter Rose (ed) hosts the launch of The Best Australian Poems 2008 (Black Inc.) at Readings in Melbourne. He introduces several contributors to read from their work in the anthology: Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Joel Deane, Lisa Gorton, Nguyen Tien Hoang and Maria Takolander.

2008-11-20T17:19:00.000+11:00

Michael Gurr's speech to launch Magisterium

When Joel asked me along to welcome his new book tonight, I’d already heard one of the poems in it.

It’s a poem called “Hansard” and he read it during a speech he gave at a seminar for public servants. They’d been given a day off from their various departments to come along and do a bit of what’s known as ‘professional development’.

Now this group was expecting solid, practical tips on speechwriting. That’s why the Premier’s speechwriter had been asked along.

They were ready for the Five Rules of Successful Speeches.

They were ready for the PowerPoint presentation.

They got a poem.

I was sitting on one side – and half watching the audience during Joel’s speech. Watching – while they didn’t quite get what they were expecting.

They were sitting there – dutifully along for their professional development seminar – with their pens hovering over their notebooks. And an interesting sequence of things happened when Joel got to the poem.

First, there was a little of puzzlement and irritation. Why’s this bloke reading us a poem?

It was as if the waiter had brought something to their table that they hadn’t actually ordered. I mean: What’s this doing here? Nobody ordered poetry.

But then – because the poem starts out funny – they started to enjoy it.

Still not quite sure, but going along with it. Sort of.

And then – because the poem gets serious – well, blistering, really – you could see something else happen to this audience.

I wouldn’t call it thinking. I’d call it absorbing. It was like watching the pores of peoples’ skin open up a little bit and watching something sink in.

It’s how good poetry works on you. Not through a series of logical arguments through the brain. But through sensation.

People always compare poetry to music – and they do that for a good reason.

It works on your nerve-endings – or it squeezes parts of you that other kinds of writing doesn’t. At its best, poetry is like having someone name and describe your middle-of-the-night thoughts. Or your walking-down-the-street thoughts.

The things that have the fierceness of argument in them, but don’t have argument’s structure.

There is a lot of the middle-of-the-night and a lot of walking-down-the-street in this book. The middle-of-the-night is everything personal. The walking-down-the-street is everything public and political. The best of this book is when you can’t tell the difference between the two.

This book is also full of lines that had me calling out to the person in the other room: Hey – listen to this.

At one point I phoned a friend and said: You know that thing you were trying to describe the other day? Here’s the gospel on it.

The man in this book has a yearning in him, I reckon – a longing. There is anger too – for a world that refuses to be put to rights. But also the particular resigned tenderness of someone who wouldn’t be anywhere else.

It’s a voice I know from down the other end of the phone. Calling Joel during the last state election campaign: How’s it going in there, Joel?

The answer comes back in a sigh so deep it nearly blows you over: Oh, you know.

But then, out of the sigh, an immediate determination to get good Labor ideas into the centre of public life.

A wrestle with a phrase. Gnawing on a bit of policy. Putting life on the bones of those dry departmental drafts.

The speechwriter is the most paradoxical position in a politician’s office. Because you’re simultaneously naked and invisible. Wrap your head around that.

I don’t see a big disconnect between Joel’s work as a speechwriter and his work as a poet. Just like that theatre full of public servants found out a couple of months ago – clarity and heart will carry an idea a long way down the messy river.

It’s also very physical writing. You don’t feel most of Joel’s stuff through your head – you feel it through your body.

Writers always envy musicians and painters for the direct connections they can make. Poetry is the closest we can get.

My favourite playwright in the world is the American Wallace Shawn. His plays don’t get performed much – they’re difficult and very confronting.

Wally Shawn says he loves the poets. He loves them because they don’t much care about how many people read them. He says that this gives the poets a wonderful freedom.

Playwrights fret about numbers in the audience. Novelists fret about their sales. But the poets are somehow wonderfully free.

There’s a sort of comforting melancholy in that idea that might be partly bullshit, but I’m happy to hold to it.

That isn’t meant to be pre-emptory consolation for sales figures – just that I think Wally Shawn might be right: that the poets put their stress into where it matters – the work.

Let me tell you what I felt when I read this book.

Three things.

Someone who’s really in charge of his language.

Someone who knows how to throw a rope between the emotional and the political.

And someone who knows how to mess up your mind.

You can’t ask much more from a book of poems.

Let’s wish Joel’s book well.

June 25, 2008. Collected Works Bookstore.

2008-10-30T13:14:00.000+11:00

5.

Inside
my mother’s
car

outside
your parents’
place:

your darkness
swallowed
your face.

This is a poem taken from my new chapbook, £10 poems (Picaro Press).

2008-10-24T09:24:00.000+11:00

New poetry chapbook

Picaro Press has just brought out £10 poems -- a chapbook of my work that's kind of the poetic equivalent of a collection of B-sides and rarities. £10 poems is an assortment of poems, both new and very old, that didn't make it into my first two collections, Subterranean Radio Songs and Magisterium. There's 38 poems in the chapbook and it's available from the publisher for $5.

If you're after a copy of any of my books, be they poetry or fiction, and you can't find them, drop me an email at joeldeane [at] hotmail [dot] com and I'll get you sorted.

2008-10-17T11:49:00.000+11:00

Art for Humanity: Dialogue Among Civilisations

I've been asked to contribute to an exciting international art/poetry project run out of South Africa by Art for Humanity.

The project, 'Dialogue Among Civilisations', is all about the "a need for us all to be able to live in harmony without xenophobic attacks on refugees".

I'm collaborating with the American-Australian artist, William Kelly, and thoroughly enjoying the process. Can't wait to see the final work, which will be launched in South Africa in 2010.

2008-09-25T11:35:00.000+10:00

The Compulsive Reader radio show

Karen Knight, a very talented Tasmanian poet, and I were interviewed today on Magdelana Ball's web radio show.

If you'd like to check it out, follow the link.

2008-09-23T09:49:00.000+10:00

Feature reading at Passionate Tongues, Brunswick Hotel. June 16, 2008.

Picture: Michael Reynolds.

2008-09-22T09:29:00.000+10:00

Feature reading at the Dan O'Connell Hotel. August 30, 2008.

Pictures by Michael Reynolds.

2008-09-17T20:18:00.000+10:00

Review of Magisterium

The Compulsive Reader has kindly reviewed my new collection of poetry. Here's an excerpt:

"This is a sure-footed and powerful collection which not only points a finger at governmental posturing, and the tragedies that humans create, but also provides a kind of solution and mythology to replace those that have failed us. It isn’t always easy to read, and best read slowly, so the impact of each poem can be allowed to unfold. This is poetry written at the limits of what our language can do; without sacrificing accessibility. It speaks to everyman; as conspirator; perpetrator; and fellow seeker." -- Read the full review.