Davey Dreamnation

Tasmanian indie lit journal Famous Reporter has received a nice write-up/review in the pages of Wet Ink. Editor Ralph Wessman, who has been running the mag forever, has now certainly received at least one minute of his allotted fifteen in fame terms - let’s see what we can do about the other fourteen.

I’ve been flat out digging through the online archives of the Chris de Burgh website, in particular the vast wealth of information contained within the Man On the Line (MOtL) section, wherein Chris personally responds to questions and queries from ‘fans’. One such fan asked:
“… any chance you’d release some of those haunting lyrics as [...]

“I have always been very polite to my fans as long as they understand that there are public moments and private moments. Even on tour I demand my privacy, particularly if I am tired. And I can’t be available to all people all of the time. But I never forget my manners and so far [...]

**UPDATE**
Cordite Poetry Review is now back online!
The good news is that I’ve now narrowed down over 700 pages of submissions for Cordite 28: Secret Cities to just 50. The process was both fun and exhausting, although there’s a couple of pieces in there that (if I were the writer) I’d really want to change, or [...]

Texel, Noord Holland (Lente 2008)

As if the excitement of reaching 1000 posts wasn’t enough, now I’ve gone and got myself all shook up over what I calculate will soon by the 500th comment on this site (or the agglomeration of sites which is now [d/dn]). At a ratio of approximately 2:1, you’re obviously happy for me to crap on, [...]

What better way to bring up my one thousand and first post than to reflect upon my first two weeks in the Netherlands! Yes, as Sting so memorably sang in “Englishman In New York”, I’m an alien. In fact, I’m now an alien who’s waiting to receive notification of becoming a resident, but more on [...]

After 1,000 posts some might be tempted to rest on their laurels. But not I. In fact, I’m looking forward to the next 1,000 posts and planning ways to make them better. After all, my readers matter more to me than I matter to myself.
Ehm … apologies to Derek for riffing off his [...]

It’s hard to believe but this is my 999th post on daveydreamnation.com - a seemingly meaningless milestone if you will; and yet it’s also a chance to reflect, for a nanosecond, on everything that has happened since I first started blogging in 2001/2002. I’ll spare you the trip down memory/amnesia lane that often seems mandatory [...]

The news may well be out of the bag but in any case, I’m very excited to say that I’ve been successful in obtaining funding from Arts Victoria to develop a new collection of poems, based on correspondence between Australian poet Bernard O’Dowd and American bard Walt Whitman.
The correspondence (which has been preserved in [...]

In an effort to break the world procrastination record, I’ve spent most of today re-vamping this site’s design, mostly by riffing off a neat three column Wordpress theme originally created by refueled.net that is, according to their website, “perfect for churches or other non-profits”. You can see why I was immediately interested. In other news, [...]

My conversation with John Tranter at the Melbourne Writers Festival was a surprisingly pleasant and interesting affair. I say surprisingly because I was nervous as all get-up beforehand - due mostly to the fact that for me, John Tranter has always been a somewhat larger-than-life figure. I studied his work in the early 1990s, at [...]

0600 - godawful paranoid about life in general (as secure as it gets)
0660 - probably all you need
0666 - allows anyone to read and write files in the $FILES directory
0755 - probably insecure
0777 - shooting yourself in the foot insecure

UPDATE: JUST FREE WATER IS NOW ON MYSPACE!
Patrick Jones is a conundrum: installationist, artist, provocateur, former bookshop owner and - yes, let’s say it - poet. Readers of Cordite would be familiar with Patrick’s contributions to the magazine over a period of years, including his cover image for Issue #11 (Pandora archive link) way [...]

In a nice piece of synchronicity, UK poetry website Metaroar has posted an article by Angela Meyer in which Jill Jones (who testimonialised my book), Paul Hardacre (who is publishing my book) and myself (who, ehm, wrote my book) are interviewed on the subject of our poetic practices and other burning issues including nationalism, the [...]