“The value of the poetry reading (sounding) as a social and cultural form can be partly measured by its resistance, up to this point, to reification or commodification. It is a measure of its significance that it is ignored. That is, the (cultural) invisibility of the poetry reading is what makes its audibility so audacious. Its relative absence as an institution makes the poetry reading the ideal site for the presence of language for listening and being heard, for hearing and for being listened to.”    (Charles Bernstein, 1998)

Wednesday evening, 22nd sees the return to the Sydney "performance poetry" scene of poet/filmmaker Billy Marshall Stoneking. who is the special, invited guest of the evening sponsored by Caravan Sets, produced by Saha Jones. Billy is the author of several books including the best-selling collection of poems, SINGING THE SNAKE, which provides a vivid chronicle of his years living with tribal Aboriginal people in Central Australia.

Together with poets, Pi O, Eric Beach and others, he was a co-founder of the Australian Poets Union in the late 1970s. His poems have been published in little magazines and literary journals throughout Australia and around the world and he is featured in a number of presttigious anthologies including The Oxford Book of Modern Australian Poetry (ed by Les Murray) and The Penguin Book of Contemporary Australian Verse (ed by John Tranter). He was also one of the performance poets whose work was anthologised in the groundbreaking Penguin collection selected by Pi O, Off The Page.

Stoneking is considered to be one of Australia’s best performance poets. He has performed his poetry and been invited to speak of his work at countless venues round the world, including invitations to and readings in Salzburg, Vienna, Florence, London, Paris, Mexico City, New York, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Tehran, Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide, among many others.

A notable manifestation of Australian performance poetry occurred in Sydney in early 1991, when ten poets, including Stoneking, Pi O, Amanda Stewart, Jas H. Duke, Lauren Williams, and others teamed up with jazz musician, Jenny Sheard, to create, direct and produce the first ever, poet-performed/directed and produced, dramatic verse play ever presented. Entitled Call It Poetry / Tonight, the show was made up entirely of the poems of the poets that were performing, and involved unusual presentations of their work, including a kind of cinema noir voice-over rendition of Grant Caldwell’s “famous” letter poem as well as several poems broken up into dialogues between the poets themselves. Rehearsals as well as the actual show were archived on broadcast-quality video, which was later edited and screened - as CALL IT POETRY - round the world. In the television production, several of the performances were presented as “concrete poems”, with video graphic overlays, including Jas H Duke’s legendary DADA Poem.

The night’s line-up also includes:   JADE OLDFIELD,  2EYEC, BLAKE KENDALL, and TREE.

Venue is THE CAFE LOUNGE, 277 Goulburn St, Surry Hills, (02) 9016 3951 Time is Wednesday, August 22, 2012 7:00pm