A KEN BOLTON DAY - Thursday, 21 June 2012









Room 6, Building 8 (Rotunda), Monash University, Clayton (next to Library)


Symposium celebrating the writings and influences of poet, art critic and publisher Ken Bolton.

Presented with the assistance of the Monash Literary Studies Research Unit and Deakin Centre for Memory, Imagination and Invention.

Ken Bolton has been a leading figure in postmodern Australian poetry since the 1970s. His many volumes include the recent books The Circus, A Whistled Bit of Bop and Sly Mongoose; his collaborative texts with John Jenkins have appeared in numerous editions and also been widely anthologised. As editor of the literary journals Magic Sam and Otis Rush, and through Sea Cruise and Little Esther Books, Bolton has made a significant contribution to small press publishing over several decades. He is also an art critic, based at Adelaide’s Experimental Art Foundation since the early 1980s, where he runs Dark Horsey Bookshop. 
http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/bolton-ken

11.15-11.30:  John Hawke, Introduction

11.30-12:  John Jenkins, “Twenty-Four Years of Collaboration”
John Jenkins has written seventeen books, mostly non-fiction and poetry, and edited anthologies of short fiction. He has worked extensively as a journalist  and arts writer. His most recent books are the poetry collection Growing Up With Mr Menzies; and travel writing, Travelers Tales of Old Cuba. Website: johnjenkins.com.au

12-12.30: Sam Moginie, “Amongst Modernisms: Reading Ken Bolton in the 1970s”
Sam Moginie resides in Marrickville, and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Sydney reading the Australian poetry of the 1970s. He blogs occasionally at moremeteos.tumblr.com.

LUNCH 12.30-1.30

1.30-2: Duncan Hose, “Poetry Hauntologues: Erotics of Influence in Frank O'Hara the Younger”
Duncan Hose is a poet, painter and academic scholar. His latest book of poems, One Under Bacchus, was published in 2011 by Inken Publisch, who also released his first collection, Rathaus, in 2007. In 2010 he was the recipient of the Newcastle Poetry Prize. He is currently completing a thesis at the University of Melbourne on self-mythologising in the poetry of Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes. 

2-2.30: Ann Vickery, “Taking Poetry to the Beach: Ken Bolton and the Coalcliff Years”
Ann Vickery is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at Deakin University in Melbourne. She is the author of Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing (Wesleyan UP, 200), Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Womens Poetry (Salt Publishing, 2007) and co-author with Maryanne Dever and Sally Newman of The Intimate Archive: Journeys through Private Papers (National Library of Australia, 2009).

2.30-3: Tim Wright, “Up Late Thinking: Digressions on a few poems by Ken Bolton”
Tim Wright is a PhD candidate in English/Creative Writing at Monash University. He was winner of the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize in 2008, and edited the anthology Some Sonnets.

3-4.30: Ken Bolton, Poetry Reading and Discussion
A gay, light-hearted bastard, Ken Bolton cuts a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary landscape, his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, lipstick-smeared, grinning cheerfully at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar D-type, El Cid. Born in Sydney in 1949 he works at the AEAF in Adelaide and edits Little Esther Books.

John Jenkins and Ken Bolton will be reading together at Collected Works, Friday 22 June (6pm).