PoetryOutLoud Events - in Hong Kong, first Wednesday of every month - 8pm in the downstairs bar

Click ARCHIVE for next month's and other future events

Subscribe to RSS feed

Proverse Prize Reception and Book launch Tuesday 23rd November 2010

Sunday, November 21, 2010 3:07:03 AM

ANNOUNCEMENT and INVITATION

TO A RECEPTION

THE PROVERSE LITERARY PRIZE


Gillian and Verner Bickley, Founders of the annual international Proverse Prize for unpublished writing and Proverse Hong Kong, Publishers of Prose and Verse, are pleased to announce the publication of the inaugural Proverse Prize winning works (2009).



Laura Solomon's novella, "Instant Messages" and Rebecca Tomasis' novel, "Mishpacha – Family" will be launched in Hong Kong on Tuesday, 23 November, 7-9pm, at the Helena May, 35 Garden Road, Central.



If you will be in Hong Kong then, you are warmly invited to register to attend The Proverse Reception and inaugural Proverse Prize Winners' Launch, to congratulate the winners and also to congratulate four other writers whose books will also be given their Hong Kong launch: Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming's Immortelle and Bhandaaraa Poems, Jason Polley's short stories in verse, refrain, Akin Jeje's Smoked Pearl: Poems of Hong Kong and Beyond and Olga Walló's autobiographical novel, Tightrope! A Bohemian Tale, translated from the Czech.



To add to the excitement, the names of the Shortlisted Writers for the Proverse Prize for unpublished writing (2010) will be announced.



Please take a look at the detailed information at the website links below and please let us know if you plan to come.



If, unfortunately, you will not be able to attend, please do nevertheless take the time to read about the books and the Proverse Prize. If you are interested in books, we are sure you will be impressed. As a group, the books are unusual, entertaining, compassionate, humorous, exciting and trend-setting. They are intimate and confessional and also have wisdom and breadth of approach. Written in widely separate parts of the world – the Bahamas, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong and New Zealand – by writers with international backgrounds or experience (Canada, Columbia, Ecuador, India, Kenya, Nigeria, PRC, Trinidad, Turkey, UAE, UK, USA), they combine special local knowledge with an international and transnational view. It is a privilege to have access to such different experiences, mind-sets and talents.


To attend the event on 23 November, online registration is available from the Proverse website and so is a registration form. You can advance order the books, using either form, whether you can attend on 23 November or not. In either case, we believe you will share our enthusiasm!



All best wishes,

Gillian and Verner Bickley



ON-LINE REGISTRATION: http://www.proversepublishing.com/eventreg/regform.html

REGISTRATION FORM:

http://proversepublishing.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/23_Nov_2010_Flyer_simple.308172428.pdf

No comments

Poetry Outloud Wednesday 3rd November 2010 - Eddie Tay's "The Mental Life of Cities"

Sunday, October 31, 2010 3:18:04 AM

Announcing the Launch of Eddie Tay’s The Mental Life of Cities at Poetry OutLoud

Venue: Fringe Club
Date: 3 Nov 2010 (Wed)
Time: 8pm

About The Mental Life of Cities
This collection is a meditation on the modern city and the creative life. The bilingual poems featured here are inspired by the ways in which the English and the Chinese languages intertwine and take root in the Asian cities of Hong Kong and Singapore.

Such a thick forest of words
we’re passing through –
is it possible to read from cover to cover?
The leaves are trembling in these hands,
waiting for a city to happen.

Born in Singapore, Eddie Tay is a long time resident of Hong Kong. He is an assistant professor at the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he teaches courses on creative writing and poetry. He is also the reviews editor of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, an online journal based in Hong Kong. This is his third collection of poetry.

Praise for Tay’s previous work:
“One finds ... many powerful and surprising effects ...”
—Wong Phui Nam in The Straits Times, Singapore

“... his poems are economical, full of evocative detail, and both ironic
and impassioned at one and the same time. I read them over and over
again.” —Bradley Winterton in The Taipei Times

“... a balance of definition and lyricism.”
—Annabel Walker in The South China Morning Post, Hong Kong

No comments

October Outloud featuring Madeleine Marie Slavick, Lenny Kwok, Xu Xi and more!

Wednesday, September 29, 2010 1:22:56 PM

Wednesday 6th October, 8pm onwards, Fringe Club Bar

featuring

readings from new works:

“TWO BIRDS”
by Lenny Kwok (郭達年) and Madeleine Marie Slavick (思樂維)

Original poems and songs
by Patti Smith and Christopher Logue

HABIT OF A FOREIGN SKY
by Xu Xi 許素細

and other original works from HK poets. Adam Radford will MC.

Madeleine will also be performing in Taipei on 8th October - see here for details:

http://atonal.artivist.org/

No comments

Poetry OutLoud - 1st September 2010

Monday, August 30, 2010 3:49:08 AM

Come to Poetry OutLoud!!!

First Wednesday of the Month

at 8pm at Fringe Studio, Hong Kong Fringe Club

Our next session is on the 1st of September 2010

The MC is Eddie Tay

If you would like to read, please contact us very soon at the address below.


________________________________

Poetry OutLoud meets on the first Wednesday of every month at 8pm - usually at the fringe Club, though the Fringe Club may be undergoing renovations, so please check emials for changes of venue!
Write to PoetryOutloud@GMail.Com if you'd like to read, MC an event, or be added to or deleted from the mailing list.
Click on the link for further details:
http://my.opera.com/PoetryOutLoud/blog

No comments

SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL MIGHT HAPPEN

Wednesday, August 18, 2010 1:21:13 PM

BOOK PUBLICATION
Something Beautiful Might Happen

Poems / Madeleine Marie Slavick
Photographs of Hong Kong / Shimao Shinzo

SHIMAO SHINZO
As a photographer, Shimao Shinzo has exhibited internationally, with solo shows at museums and galleries. He also writes, sometimes essays, sometimes poetic
passages. His books include 'Monsoon', 'Living' and 'Wandering in China'.

MADELEINE MARIE SLAVICK
Madeleine also writes and photographs. Her book projects include 'delicate access', 'Round - Poems and Photographs of Asia', Thus Cuba', and two books with Oxfam Hong Kong: 'My Favourite Thing' and 'China Voices'. She has been an organiser of OUTLOUD for many years.

SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL MIGHT HAPPEN
Tokyo: Usimaoda Books, 2010
140 pages

The book is available:
--in Hong Kong at Kubrick (Yaumatei) and The Bookshop (Hong Kong Arts Centre) / HK$150
--worldwide through www.catnet.ne.jp/usimaoda

No comments

OutLoud Presents Mani Rao's new book, 'Ghostmasters'

Sunday, May 30, 2010 8:35:41 AM

Reading from Ghostmasters by Mani Rao
Wed 2 June 2010 at 8 pm | OutLoud, Fringe Club

Ghostmasters is Mani Rao’s eighth book of poetry, published by Chameleon Press and launching at the Hong Kong Book Fair in July 2010.

The book brings together a selection of Mani’s poems from the last seven years of writing. Poems in Ghostmasters have featured in literary journals in the USA, UK, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and India – Wasafiri, Washington Square, Meanjin, Tinfish, XCP, How2journal, 91st Meridian, Fourth River, Quay Journal, Filling Station, Oxford Magazine, Papertiger, In Posse Review, Almost Island, Softblow, Cha, Asia Literary Review, Indian Literature, Kavya Bharati, Chandrabhaga, Caravan magazine, Atlas and Zoland Poetry.

A co-founder of OutLoud readings in Hong Kong, Mani’s poetry has featured in anthologies by Penguin, Bloodaxe, and in WW Norton’s Language for a New Century anthology. She has performed at literary festivals in Melbourne, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Singapore, Chicago and at New York PEN World Voices. Translations of her poems have been published in Chinese, French, Arabic, Korean, German, Italian and Latin. She was a Visiting Fellow at the Iowa International Writing Program in 2005 and 2009, and held the 2006 University of Iowa International Programs writer-in-residence fellowship. Rao’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita will be released in 2010/2011 in USA and India.

Advance praise for Ghostmasters:

"There's an uncanny lightness in Mani Rao's poetry, a buoyancy that lifts the reader weightlessly to a safer place. Again and again in this wonderful book, I'm moved and gratified by the effortlessness of Rao's obedience, even as she attends the language with devoted attention. If you believe that reverence is a grave matter, this isn't the book for you. For those who understand that the contingent is our truest place on earth--start shouting "I love you Mani Rao!" -- Claudia Keelan

"Mani Rao is an endlessly interesting poet, and in Ghostmasters the full range of her talent is on display, in poems that pluck and probe the various worlds of her imagination. "Maybe the highway robbers will have a special smile for me," she writes, and indeed the people, places, and things that haunt this book have their own special expressions, which reveal dark and delightful truths from "the ledge of knowing." Watch your step!" -- Christopher Merrill

"Mani’s poems are death-defying acts of language, more daring than love-poems because they are unafraid to let love go, to release the self from itself. Lost to rediscovered words, miscommunications, fading memories, frogs and natural forces are arranged and rearranged here into new and devastating ways of seeing and thinking about our lives." -- Cyril Wong

"Mani Rao’s poetry is entirely genuine in a way that I can’t help knowing from line to line. That is its risk and its vulnerability. The poems are not games but seem to draw from offstage but direct, lived experience, a close attention to the momentary and an acute awareness of both self and reader. This is no rudderless, fashionable disjunction: for several years, she has been cutting her own fiercely singular path through the thickets of our language; with each new book her compositional values become both more light and more precise, and her gestures—for this is a poetry of intense ellipsis—more sure, more instantaneous, more stunning."-- Vivek Narayanan

Press enquiries and photos contact emailmanirao@gmail.com
For more information on Mani Rao’s publications, see www.manirao.com

No comments

February OutLoud - At The Langham Hotel, TST

Friday, January 15, 2010 1:17:01 AM

The Fringe Club, after ten years as an extraordinarily generous host to OutLoud, is closing soon for extensive renovations, and won't open again for around six months.

In the meantime, we are looking for alternatives and are delighted to announce that The Langham Hotel, which is just a short walk from the Star Ferry Pier, has offered to host our February event on Wednesday 3rd, from 8-10pm.

(Click on the links in the paragraph above for the hotel's website and a map. Please note that The Langham Hotel is NOT in the big shopping mall! The address is 8 Peking Road, Tsimshatsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong. Tel: (852) 2375 1133.)

We want to keep the spirit and atmosphere of our regular OutLoud sessions, but we'll also have an opportunity to introduce a new audience to what OutLoud has to offer.

Our event will take place in the Bostonian restaurant in the basement, and a large section will be cleared and set aside for the OutLoud reading - to match fairly closely (but rather more grandly!) the familiar venue of the Fringe.

There will be three readings of about half an hour each, with 15 minute breaks for chat, food and drink. The hotel will provide some small nibbles to start, and there will be reasonably priced food and drink available at a cash bar.

We'll circulate a list of readers nearer the date, and both OutLoud and The Langham will give potential readers for the third section an opportunity to register.

1 comment

EVERY

Saturday, December 12, 2009 10:20:57 AM

There were two major literary events in town in November / December:

International Writers Workshop
and
International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong.

OUTLOUD, Kubrick Poetry and Arabic Nadwah each co-hosted events.

Here is a write-up.



EVERY
By Madeleine Marie Slavick


Every day for fourteen days, I have been holding onto voices. Twenty-two writers have been in town, talking, reciting, singing.

On the first day, we meet in a hotel, their consular generals or assistants sending them off to the public. We hear sounds from Okinawa, Mandarin from Hualien and Jiangsu, and a variety of English – which one writer calls ‘the second language of the world’ – from a Filipino, Hawai’an, Korean, New Zealander and Singaporean.

We meet a prizewinner. ‘Life is fully different now.’ The first novel comes out next year, in more than ten languages, more than fifteen countries.

We share coffee, food held by the finger, then rum.

At dinner, we meet another prizewinner. Ditto. Yet, more: ‘In truth, winning a prize is a bit like a lottery, the judges changing every year, entrants too. This time, I was picked.’

I invite them all to hear live blues. We have dumplings, wine, and after midnight, a tender island song. There is guitar, mandolin, erhu, harmonica, flute, drum and a woman who always sings with closed eyes. Later, I give my melancholy.

Thank-you emails in the morning inbox: ‘I was happy,’ the unscripted singing beautiful, the atmosphere extraordinary. ‘The night resembles night in my hometown.’

In the bar of an arts center, we talk about what keeps us writing, what supports us. Living by the ocean, a Taiwanese writer says, showing us his double-page-spread photograph of a wet horizon. (I think we saw the image three times in the fortnight.) Another writer says living by Victoria Park, for the solidarity. A Jiangsu writer is paid by the government every month. A Singaporean writer says film and theatre rights bring in the best cash.

One writer with eight books has only given one interview in her life. I listen to it at lunchtime, at the desk. The voice delicate, crisp, curled, ecstatic, on KCRW, my radio station from about twenty-five years ago, which was about when the translator discovered the writer’s work in a corner shop of a sleepy, bookstore-less town. Her book of ‘sensual landscapes’ with ‘exciting syntax’ was next to bottled drinks and Supermacho Comics.

In the ladies room, I wait behind a writer I had not had the chance to talk to. I tell her I liked the story she had just told everyone, that it was warm, kind, felt. We smile. I never see her again. Later, her translator in Beijing tells me that she herself had been in line in the ladies room with an outrider poet once, and she too loves that memory.

For an evening or two, handfuls of writers sit on piles of books as stools, light projected on a screen behind them, and as they walk to the microphone to recite, their shadows do too.

I hear, I hold onto voices from Albania, China, Egypt, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, Taiwan and the United States.

I hold onto: Në familjen time / lutjet bëheshin fshehtas / me zë të ulët, me një hundë të skuqur nën jorgan, / gati mërmëritje, / me një psherëtimë në fillim dhe fund / të hollë, e të pastër si një garzë… / Në shtëpinë time / lutha ishte një dobësi, / që nuk përflitej kurrë, / si të bërit dashuri / pasohej nga nata e frkshme e trupit. / In my family / prayers were said secretly, / softly, murmured through sore noses / beneath blankets, / a sigh before and a sigh after / thin and sterile as a bandage… In my house praying was considered a weakness / like making love. / And like making love / it was followed by a long / cold night of the body.

Another piece opens: ‘Leicht fällt das Jahr in den Schnee / und langsam sinkt auch das Licht / Lightly the year falls into snow / and slowly the light sinks too’.

And this one ends: ‘– Agua nutria, agua pez. Agua / de medusas, agua láctea, sinuosa; Aqua, / Otter water, fish water. Water of jellyfish, lacteal, sinuous water, Water,’

‘This poem is really an essay,’ the writer says as a preface: the beliefs of the Lacandons, of the forests of Chiapas. The only piece he recites, it stands well alone.

‘If you dream of a jaguar, people are coming. If the jaguar bites you, they are not people… If you dream of a mirror, you will see white stones. If you dream of your tongue, beware… If you dream of a radio, you will see a wild boar. If you dream of a poet, someone will cry… If you dream of a lake, it is nothing. If you dream of a frog, it is nothing. If you dream of a flower, it is nothing…’

One afternoon, we sit in circles, inner, outer, like the UN, with simultaneous interpretation, a personal microphone and switch. The topic: translation. In Mexico, almost every poet translates. An Albanian writer credits eleven people as translators on the title page of her book. Translation is good for young writers, a poet-professor from Hong Kong says, they can get in, concentrate, have control, and not be egotistic. About seventy per cent of foreign literature in China is from the United States, a Chinese writer says, and I add that translations from the Chinese are what sell best at the oldest poetry bookshop in USA: the Grolier.

One writer from ‘the mother of the world’ says few people can read his language correctly, he insists he be one to do so. As he recites in a favorite bookstore, he almost sings, and he says his voice used to be more beautiful fifty years ago, when his first book was published. He answers our questions in his language, holding our eyes throughout. Do we understand? The moderator says she has been trembling sitting beside him, sees him as a ‘giant mountain… like Tai Mo Shan’. How does she see herself?

In a lecture room for a recitation, the speaker wants to close the upright monitor bolted to the lectern. He seems to dislike the computer, tries to ignore it, tells us to ignore it.

In his eighty years, he has lived with mountains, with sea, with shamans, with professors, with wives, with friends, with word, with the pre-verbal; and it seems we can live with this voice, for days, for years, for humor, for the many connections.

He says good (fiction) writing is like good storytelling, good (poetry) writing is like good singing, and that it is best to let writing sit for a year before publication. He says so many things, that poetry gives ‘soul to history… strengthens the community… intensifies human bonds, and heightens the life of the spirit… It has done the world much good…’

He hopes we all have the chance to be out on the open sea, that very large space, ‘we all need that once in a while’. He still has his papers as a seaman.

Another dinner. Afterwards, we talk about the Pacific: most of us live near the edges of this many-named body of water. One writer now believes what his mother said: that they can walk from Canada to Manila if there are enough days. Another threw up food, then bile, then blood, the first time he was out at sea. He then repeated this,
spiritually, to write his first best work. Two writers think of Keats: ‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken’.

One writer took up fishing, at age four, to get away from eating any more canned corned hash. Another, also living in North America, says, To jump from the Golden Gate Bridge, one has to decide: landward or seaward?

We hear a new short story, of meeting a man trapped in sand, of not freeing him, of telling this to his wife, who then says he does not love her.

We meet a guqin-playing mathematician man, hear him play the seven strings, fingers lifting at the tip, watch him leave the stage the same self-assured way he came: qin under arm. Now he moves his chopsticks from hand to fluttering hand.

After a closing dinner in a fourteenth-floor club, I take a bus home, the three-hundred-page memento book ‘The Other Voice’ in my hands, in my body. On page fifteen, the editor explains: ‘Between revolution and religion, poetry is the other voice… heretical and devout, innocent and perverted…’

I walk past palm, bougainvillea, a gun shop, three 7-Elevens.
I forget to close the door to my home when I sleep.


5 December 2009


Madeleine Marie Slavick, a writer living in Hong Kong, joined various events hosted by INTERNATIONAL WRITERS WORKSHOP, since 2004, an annual series by Hong Kong Baptist University, November - December 2009, www.iww.hkbu.edu.hk / INTERNATIONAL POETRY NIGHTS IN HONG KONG, organized by Chinese University of Hong Kong, 26-29 November 2009, http://chinesestudies.cuhk.edu.hk/cuhk-portal/html/poetry2009 / OUTLOUD, since 1999, a monthly poetry reading, http://my.opera.com/PoetryOutLoud/blog / ARABIC NADWAH, since 2004, a monthly poetry meeting, www.arabicnadwah.com / KUBRICK POETRY, since 2006, a monthly poetry event, http://kubrickpoems.blogspot.com/

No comments

Hong Kong Poetry Nights - 2009

Saturday, October 17, 2009 8:54:05 AM

“International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong”, a gala in celebration of poetry and poets, will be held from 26 to 29 November 2009. Famous poets from all around the globe will participate in the event, including Gary Snyder, the doyen of American poetry; Eliot Weinberger, the American essayist, poet and translator; Ahmad Abdul Muti Hijaji of Egypt, the leading poet of the Arabic world; Takahashi Mutsuo, the foremost Japanese poet of the post-war period; Luljeta Lleshanaku, the Albanian poetess; Kurt Drawert of Germany; and Carol Bracho, the famous Mexican poetess. Joining this stellar cast will be Zhai Yongming and Ouyang Jianghe from Mainland China, Hung Hung from Taiwan, and Hong Kong’s Yesi, Wu Yin-ching, Liu Wai Tong and Bei Dao.

Read more...

No comments

Peng Chau Festival

Saturday, August 29, 2009 3:34:49 AM

First Peng Chau Island Cultural Carnival - Saturday 29th and Sunday 30th September, 2009

Read more...

No comments

1 2 3 4 5 Next »

February 2012
S M T W T F S
January 2012March 2012
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29

OutLoud poets and poems

Other sites

  • Asia Literary Review

    Asia's foremost literary journal - Seamus Heaney is among recent contributors

  • The Fringe Club

    Home of OutLoud

  • MAN Hong Kong International Literary Festival

    With links to previous festivals and details of next year's event

  • Arabic Nadwah, Hong Kong

    Last Thursday of every month - discussion and readings, in English, of Arabic poetry, its contribution to world literature, and our common humanity

  • Chameleon Books

    Hong Kong's foremost publisher of poetry - authors include Martin Alexander, Kavita Jindals, TIm Kaiser, Dave McKirdy Mani Rao and Jennifer Wong - as well as Nury Vittachi, Xu Xi and Elsie Tu

  • PaddyField.Com

    Hong Kong's terrific online bookstore

  • The Wondering Minstrels

    A terrific poetry website - subscribe and get a good poem e-mailed to you every couple of days

  • Sixth FInger Press

    Sixth Finger Press is a publisher of Chinese, English, and bilingual books of poetry and literary translations. Authors include, Zheng Danyi, Eddie Tay, Madeleine Marie Slavick and Alan Jefferies

  • Haven Books

    Haven Books is a new Hong Kong publisher, with work by Mani Rao, Xu Xi Ilyas Khan, Celia Gamst Berg and more

  • Joyce is not here.

    Bar, gallery, wine, food, performance, poetry, beautiful things

  • Seren Books

    Wales' leading literary publisher - featuring Viki Holmes

  • Tammy Ho's poetry page

    Widely published poet and editor of HKU Writing (2006)

  • Ubud Writers and Readers Festival

    Bali's international literary festival

  • Free Poetry - 2003

    Poems in English and Chinese, handed out the Hong Kong Star Ferry terminal for the 2003 Festival

  • The Vodka Bar

    Vodka and events bar in Old Bailey Street - home of the Hong Kong Poetry Slam

  • The Hong Kong Writers' Circle

    Long-established writers' group in Hong Kong

  • Proverse Books

    A Hong Kong publisher - Gillian Bickley

Literary Journals, Poetry Reviews

More photos

Viki Holmes

  • Chameleon Press

    miss moon's class by viki holmes available at chameleon press