FSP Featured Poets at Halifax Cafe in November: Peter Goldsworthy and Jessica Alice

Thursday, 28th November, 2019
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM

Halifax Cafe
187 Halifax St, Adelaide.

A stellar duo for our final Featured Poets session for 2019: Peter Goldsworthy and Jessica Alice.

Come early, stay late. The Cafe will be open for food and beverages.

$5 cash at the door to pay the poets.

Click here for the Facebook event.

Peter Goldsworthy‘s first collection of poetry won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1982, the SA Premier’s Prize, and the Anne Elder Award. His second won the Australian Bicentennial Literary Prize for poetry in 1988, jointly with Philip Hodgins. He wrote the libretti for the Richard Mills operas, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and Batavia, the latter winning Mills and Goldsworthy the 2002 Robert Helpmann Award for Best New Australian Work.… Click for more

September Poem of the Month by Rob Ferris

Guerillas by Rob Ferris

Still camouflaged from the air
the guerrillas are dead in a glade.
Birds and conservative creatures
diminish them.
In cocoons of dappled cloth
their bodies pupate backwards
while images crawl away
alive on a cameraman’s back.

In the forest
they fade by fragmentation
their flesh maintaining 
sun drenched birds
rehearsing siren 
trumpet calls:
the music of
historical necessity
that placed them
in this shade.

Ideas swarm and die like bees,
steel wobbles and rushes
through leaves.
Fruit of revolutionary change
falls and dries
in the sun.
In villages, men’s mothers
lie awake
and make them brothers.

October Poem of the Month by Elaine Barker

IN SUMMER’S HEAT by Elaine Barker

Blue Mountains, NSW

Who has taken up this azure veil,
casting it like a mantle
to float silently into the valleys,
to tangle with trees,
to drift over rugged peaks and cliffs,
escarpments and chasms
and then away, away into the distance
as far as the eye can see?
As the vivid mist rises, 
the colour of lapis lazuli,
its earthy opulence carries
the essence of the eucalypt.  
And who, enveloped in summer’s heat,
savouring the heady aroma 
and gazing over these mountains
has not stood, caught in awe,
and wondered at this infinite mystery?

Friendly Street Poets New Poets 20 & Single Poet Books Launch

Monday, 25th November, 2019
6:00pm – 9:00pm

The Box Factory
59 Regent Strett, Adelaide, SA 5000

FSP is proud to launch the latest collections by the winning poets in the New Poets and Single Poet Competitions:

Single Poet winner: Ben Adams‘ first full collection of poetry, A Synonym For Sobriety.

New Poets 20 winners: Alys Jackson‘s Wolf Ghosts, Sharon Foulkes‘ Finding Their Voices and Julia Wakefield‘s Shifting Viewpoints.

Please come along, help celebrate the success by these emerging poets whose names have joined a wonderful list of past winners and hear them read some poems from their successful manuscripts.… Click for more

Message from the convenor…

To the membership of Friendly Street Poets,

On Monday 4th of November, 2019 a reader at the Box Factory Meeting committed a serious breach of accepted standards by reading for about 11 minutes, far longer than the 3 minutes allowed at the Open Mic.

As the Convenor of FSP and the MC of the 2nd Half that evening, I want to apologise to the members who had to endure such behaviour. I chose to not confront the individual when that person passed the 3 minute mark and indicated intention to continue, because I did not want any escalation to ruin what was an otherwise wonderful evening of poetry.… Click for more

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