The Australian Poetry Centre
Coming up to its first birthday this June, the Australian Poetry Centre (APC) is feeling excited about its future, even though it is really only funded to the end of this calendar year, as part of a 2 year start up grant from CAL.
The Centre grew out of the vision of Ron Pretty and CAL (Copyright Agency Limited) and aims to be a national information and advocacy centre for the support of the art form of poetry.
In its first year it has developed a program that aims to support poets, poetry audiences, poetry publishers and poetry teachers. It aims to provide information for those coming from overseas and Australia about what is happening in poetry in Australia – where one could go for a reading, for poetry assessments and dialogue about poetry.
It’s Patron John Clarke, and Chair Professor Chris Wallace-Crabbe are committed to demystifying poetry and bringing it to a wider audience. One of the key programs the centre has is its upcoming national poetry festival to be held in Castlemaine this Anzac weekend. The festival brings acclaimed international poets, regional poets and poets from every state in Australia together to read discuss and breathe poetry. International poets this year include Sam Hammil and Lorna Crozier. The town itself will come alive over three days with travelling pedlar poets, Leonard Cohen films, late night troubadour’s crooning over cocktails, poetry readings at the dawn service, Poetry tattoos and the installation that the centre created at the last Melbourne Writers Festival – The House of the Tragic Poet - will be placed in the centre of town.
Apart from this festival, which will move to a regional town in a different state next year, the centre will be hosting the Festival Franco-anglais de poesie in October 2008 - for the first time in 30 years outside of Paris - along with a poetry publishers market.
The APC has developed publishing, residential and workshop programs with Varuna and Bundanon. It also publishes the leading Australian poetry journal, Blue Dog; Australian Poetry.
For more information on these or other APC programs see
http://www.australianpoetrycentre.org.au
