Reading from Scratchland
I’m doing a reading (on Zoom) with fellow poet Rozanna Lilley this Monday evening, 14 December at Canberra’s That Poetry Thing.
I’ll be reading from my collection Scratchland (UWA Publishing Poetry Series, 2020).
I’m interested in the performance-poetry nexus. I don’t mean performance poetry—which is its own thing—but rather those places where performance and poetry overlap or rub up against each other. Writing which is poetry and also, in part at least, a performance text—live or audio.
The monologue is an obvious connection. According to English critic Alan Sinfield, the dramatic monologue ‘lurks provocatively’ between the first person lyric and the third person narrative. It offers a shifting and uncertain balance between the voice of the poet and the voice/s of her created speaker/s.
So, not surprisingly then, Scratchland is poetry with a performative tilt. It’s a topography of voices, of casual and perhaps not so casual encounters. A car park attendant, a neglected child, a crow with a mordant sense of humour … a possible crime or series of crimes. Creatures and plants scratching an existence (and occasionally flourishing) in the urban margins. People struggling to make their lives into stories and make those stories known to others.
A collection in two parts, Scratchland is about wild frontiers—the wild frontiers of our cities (Scenarios & solos from a mixed landscape) and the wild frontiers of our TV viewing (True crimers).
‘Doors’ open 6:30 pm and the readings start at 7:00 pm.
Hope you can drop in.
Noëlle Janaczewska 