Joanne Burns
Joanne Burns Poems
i) i trawled through an inner-city newsletter and assembled various phrases and fragments, 'renovating' them fairly often -
ii) added my own images and phrases as they made their
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the wall smashing ceremony via legislation stops rats running right through the last mass grab a pollution project with a rehearsal space and win a double pass extra roads completed inside parliament for pets on exit journeys you find
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when the martians moved in
to alaska boulevarde they
levelled the heritage dwellings
and built homes in the shape
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it’s still the same, signs on the grass
say don’t feed the fish, instead of
don’t eat them, still the same tired old
sports star tropes, failed golfer falls
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under the house in the soft
brown soil you lean
against bleached wash
tubs wringing parrot
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under a canvas awning, a few
metres above sea level, with backs
to the harbour the poets are reading —
their audience reclines on smooth fresh
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from our deep cool verandah we spy on the world passing by. we both wear glasses in order to pick out the details. even as children we noticed all.
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in order to upgrade the community's appreciation of poetry during the international year of cultural enrichment stage 2, members of the state's library progress committee decided to establish a small library of t-shirts on which would be printed quality verse in vivid, bold colours and lettering.
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there were so many books. she had to separate them to avoid being overwhelmed by the excessive implications of their words. she kept hundreds in a series of boxes inside a wire cage in a warehouse. and hundreds more on the shelves of her various rooms.
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the astroturf blisters, bubbles in the hollywood hills,
the forests of the world become landfill, no bushes
left to burn, to illustrate those gutsy gods
of fire, old deities grown senile on donuts
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war is a noun and so is peace. uranium is a noun like armchair. plutonium and
perspiration are both nouns and each has four syllables. bliss and terror are also
nouns.
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his body a paradigm
of tattoo husbandry he
glowers on the street dreaming
himself to be an award
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dressed down in designer
loin cloth nipples perked up
alert to the beep of her
mobile phone her johnny
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if you can stand at the right angle on the front steps of santiago central library on a hot and sunny day when you are protesting against state torture;
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it's hard to give up the biscuits
so tightly sealed in their shiny
white packets, the cryptic
glyphs of saos and jatz: cunieform
of the antipodes; can you hear
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the voice of the qawwali singer
lifts off your wig of poor listening
habits you meet with a stack
of ice cubes in an exploding
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the burden of dreaming, the bed a huge net dragging the monster octopus of story that lunges through the head at night: the corpulence of the drowning psyche. who, what, are these people, these shades, these feelings, places, likenesses, that tangle one up like a bad load of washing. this shamozzle of the long night.
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the first week of the new year and
indolence drops in as usual uninvited:
here’s lassitude like flat champagne flatter
than sorrow flat as the image of the year
...
Joanne Burns Biography
Joanne Burns was born in Sydney in 1945 and has lived there for most of her life, never far from the shores of Sydney Harbour. Over a dozen collections of her writing have been published. Her first poetry collection Snatch was published by The Strange Faeces Press, Notting Hill Gate, London in 1972. In addition to writing in the conventional poetic line break form she has written extensively in the prose poem/microfiction form. She has been particularly interested in the blurring of distinctions between poetry and prose. The use of the monologue form is another distinctive feature of her work. Satiric, ironic perspectives are prominent in her poetry; sometimes she is ludic, parodic. She has a keen eye for the absurd aspects of contemporary living and culture. Her poetry also engages with the esoteric, the cryptic, and the surreal - in a quirky (as opposed to the solemn) manner. Burns has written in the lower case for over thirty years, eschewing capitalisation, which she believes imposes a 'preordained' significance on certain words in the text. She prefers a 'level playing field'. A polished and well known reader/performer of her poetry in Australia, she first read at The Troubadour, Earls Court in 1972 - having been galvanised by the vibrant poetry reading scene in London where she lived between 1970 and 1972. Her audio recording shows how she sets up a theatre of words, easing the audience into a satisfying space between following her and cogitating on where they might possibly go. These are cogent lessons on how to exercise the imagination. In 1985 she visited the United States and Canada as a member of the Four Australian Poets Reading Tour. Her work has been produced for theatre, radio, television. She is represented in numerous poetry anthologies, for example - The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry, The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, The Oxford Book of Australian Women's Verse. Her poetry has been published in school poetry text books, and her book on a clear day has been, and is currently, one of the poetry texts listed for study in the New South Wales Higher School Certificate English Syllabus. Her work has been translated into German, French, Spanish, Serbo-Croatian. In 2003, along with nine other Australian poets, she participated in translation workshops at the Berlin Poetry Festival, organised by literaturWERKstatt Berlin, and supported by the Australia Council for the Arts. She has received a number of writing grants from the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts. A detailed literary biography of joanne burns (written by Australian poet Margaret Bradstock) appears in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol 289 (Gale, 2004). The audio poems were recorded on August 2007 in Sydney, Australia for the River Road Poetry Series )Producer: Carol Jenkins))
The Best Poem Of Joanne Burns
Composition Method
i) i trawled through an inner-city newsletter and assembled various phrases and fragments, 'renovating' them fairly often -
ii) added my own images and phrases as they made their presences felt -
iii) used a line from arnold's 'the scholar gypsy' -
iii.a) & a slessorian gesture -
iv) referenced a billboard ad from the kings cross underground railway station -
v) took particles from articles and ads in a business magazine or two -
vi) and that scam email [at last put to work - tho haven't had one of those for ages] -
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4/28/2024 6:26:06 AM # 1.0.0.1119
