Adam Aitken

Hi, I'll be active in this community in the near future.

Adam Aitken is a poet and non-fiction writer born in London and now lives in Sydney. He spent his early childhood in Thailand and Malaysia, and has worked for extensive periods teaching English in Indonesia. He is the author of five full length collections of poetry and a PhD thesis on the Asian Imaginary in Australian literature. He was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Hawaii, and Poet in Residence at the Cité Internationale des Artes, Paris. He co-edited the Contemporary Asian Australian Poets anthology (Puncher & Wattmann) in 2013, with poetry and essays appearing in Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, Arc, Best Australian Poems, Transnational Literature, and Poetryinternational.org. His memoir One Hundred Letters Home (Vagabond Press) was published in 2016. Archipelago, his latest collection of poetry, was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Award and the Prime Minister’s Literature Prize in 2018.

 

Archipelago (Vagabond Press 2017) 

Contemporary Asian Australian Poets

Magdalena's response to "Is this the Azure Kingfisher"

Azure

Białowieża Forest, primeval

weaving dark foliage 

through her dreams.

There were no words for the smell

or feel of soft moss on a fallen trunk.

It lived nowhere now

except her childhood

which was not a place

or even a time anymore

lost in a humectant bubble

timewarp.

Nothing could be more permanent

than something lost

the Azure Tit she once found

its tiny white belly

still warm

the soft blue of the wings.

They don’t make blue like that anymore

The ghosts of bison and elk,

wild boar, hovered in her memory

like the emperor oak, fallen

damp bark beneath her feet.

Here there was no bark, no soft crunch,

only concrete. 

The high pitched dee dee dee

of the Tit’s song

replaced by tram clank and train rumble

children yelling

a continuous murmur

through the urgent motion 

of present tense

like a small bird, drawing her back. 

is this the Azure Kingfisher?

 

poor little fellah, beak still straight

 

the kingfisher dead outside

at the foot of the window

has made another world

Today (Feb 2) is World Wetlands day 

In response to your comment yesterday Kit, I was down among the mangroves early, and could hear the Great Egret's feet sucking on the sand/mud at each step.

FYI. Your beauty (a credit to Grinling Gibbons' limewood work) is a Double Drummer, our largest and loudest (earplugs needed up here on that 7 year cycle, the loudest insect in the world). The large ones all 'strafe the ear' - wonderful phrase. 

Accuracy? Cognitive Naturalism (Allen Carlson) can take things a little far. Gary Snyder begins the poem ‘What You Should Know to be a Poet’ with: ‘all you can about animals as persons / the names of trees and flowers and weeds / names of stars, and the movements of the planets / and the moon . . .’ . 

I'm writing letters this arvo, re logging. As Suzi Gablik writes in The Reenchantment of Art, ‘The great collective project has, in fact, presented itself. It is that of saving the earth - at this point, nothing else really matters.’ 

cicada summer in the sunny south -- Kit Kelen's response to John Bennett's 'Acoustemology'

 

cicada summer in the sunny south

 

it is a wooded tinnitus

and cast eyes down

 

or grey

how do they see?

 

Black Prince

with tymbals

as to masque

or tournament

 

thinking's all apocalyptic

you bucket it out like a miser

 

to float through the garden

like a veil of wing flung

 

just these few weeks

to joust and mate

 

so armoured for the fray

because a stutter flown

 

stim music

 

strafe the ear

 

and perched

and cling

 

grim for

 

must feed on sap

as royals do

 

all chorus

(that's to say, refrain)

 

song of the Magicicada cassini

head banging?

no, techno

 

and this one who was never king

but good for burning, ravaging

on all flanks and utterly

so here's much booty brought

 

in the Jurassic were mega-cicadas

 

shall we feed the birds this challenge of flight?

 

in a certain stillness struck

can you hear the alien whirr of we're here

 

lion gorged with three parts argent

 

we serve the nymphs deep fried

 

this must be the seventh year

 

Acoustemology

                             for J.L. (and Necks fans everywhere)

Looking out into a forest of flowering Pink Bloodwoods
and peeling Blackbutts, I hear Vertigo for the first time.

Two decades after Sex the usual groove is bushwhacked
by a tinker’s percussion and electronics out of the blue,
cicadas work an industrial background accompanied
by woodwind from the Miners, a piping King Parrot and
Lorikeets improvising avant-garde, high-register shrieks.

Then, through the cover of trees, the neighbours join in.
Norm is drilling metal, forcing a basketball hoop onto the frame
of his hand-made palm house assembled from scaffolding.
In the west, Graeme is on his chainsaw demolishing
a bamboo forest planted by the previous owners.

The origins of cosmic music are not always attributable.
Tomorrow, I will go down to the estuary at first light and listen.

 

Flying Islands Sydney Booklaunch (of the new pocket poets) on Sunday 21st, February, 2021

 

https://whatson.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/events/flying-islands-pocket-poets-book-launch