Des Cowley
Des Cowley is former Principal Librarian at State Library Victoria, and author of The World of the Book, published by Melbourne University Press in 2007. He regularly publishes on music for Australian Book Review, Rhythms, Dingo, and other journals.
Wednesday, 3 June
It is a clear sign of a strong festival program when you find yourself wracked with indecision about what to see. Fact is, on this night, I was spoilt for choice. On offer was the première of Paul Grabowsky’s multi-part suite Nyilipidgi, performed by the Monash Art Ensemble, the Australian Art Orchestra, and the Young Wagilak Group from South East Arnhem Land. Previous colla ... (read more)
Thursday, 28 May
It was certainly a canny move to snare Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea for the opening night concert of the 2015 Melbourne International Jazz Festival. Few people interested in music, let alone jazz, would be unfamiliar with these names. Now in their mid-seventies – though both looking sprightly for their age – they have, between them, clocked up more than a century of music- ... (read more)
In the opening pages of his memoir, Herbie Hancock recounts an onstage episode in Stockholm in the mid-1960s, when he was playing with Miles Davis. In a few brief paragraphs, he sums up Davis’s genius as only a musician deeply conversant with his music could. It is this sort of privileged entrée into Hancock’s musical world that makes Possibilities a worthy addition to jazz literature.
... (read more)
Chris Edwards is an enigmatic presence in Australian poetry. Part of a generation of poets who came of age in the 1970s, he co-edited the short-lived Beyond Poetry (1974–76) but then abandoned publication for many years. With the onset of a new millennium, he unexpectedly re-emerged, publishing a series of chapbooks that culminated in his first full-length collection, People of Earth (2011). If ... (read more)
With Axis, his first full-length publication, a.j. carruthers explicitly aligns himself with the lineage of the long poem. It is a bold move, if we consider that the major exponents of the form, from Ezra Pound to Anne Waldman, had invariably produced significant bodies of work prior to embarking on their poetic marathons. But ambition is fundamental to the long poem, and Axis, comprising thirty-o ... (read more)
There was a genuinely celebratory air to this year’s Wangaratta Jazz and Blues Festival, and why not, given that the Festival was marking its twenty-fifth birthday. When the city first hit upon jazz as the basis for a festival back in 1989 – a somewhat arbitrary decision, based on the fact that most other musical forms had already been snapped up – few could have predicted it would attain th ... (read more)
My first encounter with concrete poetry came via Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (1918), specifically his eye-catching poem ‘Il Pleut’. With its gently cascading words falling down the page, it was immediately clear that the typographic arrangement of the poem was of far greater import than its semantic content.
Although the term was not coined until the 1950s, concrete poetry draws upon traditi ... (read more)