Upcoming Gigs in Utrecht and Montreal!

I’m busting with excitement at the prospect of performing again. After doing just one gig in 2008 (even if it was in London, thus enabling me to tick off a rather large box on my ‘cities-to-read-poetry-in’ list) I’m hoping 2009 will be the year of the Bo Dean when it comes to readings and festivals and even a couple of those little things we speak of in the trade as ‘moments of quiet illumination’. Yep, in case you missed it the first time, I’m a private (as well as public) poet.

Which is all the more reason for me to get excited about performing my first gig in the Netherlands next week (Thursday 29th January, to be exact) at the one-night-only Het Huis van de Poezie festival in Utrecht. While the website’s only in Dutch, the festival amounts to a huge poetry love-in, featuring writers lying in hotel room beds reading their poetry (seriously) as well as a whole bunch of events I don’t know anything about yet. It’s also the first festival I’ve been invited to where my bio has been translated into another language!

Kaigaaf!

The following week I’m off to Montreal, Canada for the bulk ace and fully untold Festival Voix d’Am?©riques, where I will be performing at the Canadian launch of the latest issue of Australian magazine Going Down Swinging on Wednesday February 11. The whole festival will be truly fantastic, I am sure, and I’m looking forward to meeting up again with some of the Canadian poets I first met seven years ago in NYC.

I’m also really looking forward to catching up with post-avant poet Adam Fieled during a stopover in Philadelphia on the way to Montreal. If the truth be told, I’m also hoping that when I get off the aeroplane in Philly I’ll be greeted by a giant 3D-eye picture of President Obama beaming down at me from the wall.

But the other reason why this trip is going to be the complete opposite of a stocktake sale is that Melbourne poets and teen heart throbs alicia sometimes, Sean M. Whelan and Emilie Zoey Baker will also be performing at the FVA! It seems like an eternity ago that I last saw a familiar face (even though it hasn’t been that long, in comparison with the lifespan of Scottish freshwater mussels), but I’m sure getting sick of looking in the mirror.

All of which leaves me so excited I just can’t hide it. I’m about to lose control and I think I like it. Expect kooky photos from Utrecht, live blogging from Montreal and Philadelphia cheese from Philly to appear shortly on this blog.

Until then, then.