Poetry and the young today

I meandered down to my first poetry gig for a long while tonight, mainly because good old Tim Hamilton (drzero) was fea­tur­ing at the Spin­ning Room. He was as amaz­ing as he ever was, and pos­sibly even more so, with the new pieces about Paris and some of the Minor Arcana series that I’d heard less fre­quently being stronger than the old favourites.

At the same time I heard some amaz­ing new voices, not least of which were Neil McCarthy, a stun­ning Irish­man with a power­ful way with words who’s fea­tur­ing there next week and Josephine Rowe, a 21-year-old power­house of a bright thing who already knows her work off by heart, speaks with a semi-Amer­ican accent although she’s only ever lived here and whose web site is filled with flash and fabulousness.

I read one ver­sion of the Min­strels and Mis­chief cycle and the poem I wrote for Tim and Jonathan and was very flattered to be called back and then read the pan­toum I wrote for Grandma, which isn’t actu­ally online yet, but is very appro­pri­ate since I’m head­ing to Sydney this week­end for her 90th birth­day bash. Enjoyed hear­ing Cam read again (and thanks for the wine) and meet­ing Ant­oine, yet another guy from Lyons living in Aus­tralia (appar­ently it’s a minor invasion).

I find Josephine intriguing, in a sense my first encounter with this new gen­er­a­tion as adult. What I mean is that Kyle and Alix, Jacinta’s kids, both have slightly Amer­ican accents, partly due to tele­vi­sion and partly due to Mum’s accent, and Tal, Geor­gi­a’s step-son has a semi-Amer­ican accent, acknow­ledged as mostly due to tele­vi­sion, and here is this 21-year-old saying, yes, I think my accent is just from tele­vi­sion. And her clear facil­ity with the web site, in the way that my ease with desktop pub­lish­ing must have frus­trated and amazed those 15 years older than me and still doing paste-up back in 1991… 

So, this is what intim­a­tions of age are…