[& no, I won't be looking anything like this ... from a booklaunch in 2006]
I've been asked to fill in at Poetry Live (presently based at the Thirsty Dog, K. Rd.) tomorrow - Tuesday 28/6, from 8 pm onwards - as the scheduled poet has had to cancel.
I guess the fact that Bronwyn is away all this week visiting her mother in Christchurch (Chilean ash-cloud willing, that is ...) makes me a bit more prone to drive out into the moody, stormbeaten city of an evening, so I've said 'yes'.
I'm not quite sure what I'm going to be reading yet. One idea was to intone some bits from my version of the Oresteia in an attempt to flog some copies of this innovative and fascinating work ...
I do feel that I should dedicate the evening to Dave Mitchell, though. He died last week, on the 21st June, after a long and protracted illness, and though he could no longer speak or read with any ease, he must been pleased to see Run Away Boy, his selected poems (edited by Martin Edmond and Nigel Young) finally out and getting reviewed.
He was, after all, the guy who started off the whole thing, back in the 80s. It seems truly extraordinary that it's been running ever since ...
Here's a little suite of photos from the last time I saw him, in Sydney last year, sitting to one side of the Poetry Symposium at the University of Technology, and getting a hug from Michele Leggott:
