Spoken Word

The 2018 Melbourne Spoken Word and Poetry Festival is a wide ranging event over three weeks, featuring both performance poets, more literary page poets, and lots more besides. Santo Cazzati speaks with Melbourne Spoken Word founder Benjamin Solah about this new festival. We hear recordings of three out of the many featured artists.

Save these dates! Tuesday 15th May is the 3CR On-air Spoken Word fundraiser for 3CR Community Radio, and 17th May - 3rd June is the Melbourne Spoken Word & Poetry Festival.In this program, we talk about these events and hear from some of the performers, Jennifer Compton, Kylie Supski, Tariro Mavondo, Tenda McFly, Tim Evans and Alan Pentland.

Poet and past President of the Melbourne Poets Union, Wendy Fleming reads new poems.Wendy is the author of 'Backyard Lemon'.

Renowned Melbourne sound poets, Sjaak de Jong and Shane Van Den Akker, join us in the studio to talk about the Fluxus art movement and its influence in Australia. With live recordings from their recent Fluxus Lives! event at the Melbourne City Library, as well as performances from Ania Walwicz, Eddy Burger, Anna Fern, Razor Hope, Jeltje Fanoy, Sjaak de Jong, Shane Van Den Akker and Peter Murphy.Do not adjust your set!!

Poet Judith Rodriguez reads new, unpublished poems. Photo by Di Cousens

Australian Poetry Slam Victorian winner, Sharifa A Tartoussi, shares her epic love poem, talks about her recent publication, "ColourBlind", the experience of performing poetry at the Sydney Opera House, convening GriffinSpeak, her childhood and parents, the poets that inspire her, and much more!

Recording of Hamish Danks Brown featuring for Westword at Dancing Dog Cafe, Footscray.

Three of the team of presenters of the Spoken Word programme, Carmen Main, Ela Fornalska and Santo Cazzati, present a freestyle programme in which they read and talk about some of their favourite poems by poets other than themselves.

Grace de las Nieves reads poetry from he debut collection, "La Gracia de las Nieves". The book is published in Spanish, with English translations. Presenter, Brendan Bonsack, reads the English versions. Grace chats about coming to Melbourne from Chile, women's power and poetry as a language of revolution, the translation process, and the untranslatable concept of "saudade". She also discusses the monthly Spanish poetry gig run by Avoz Limpia in Melbourne.Music by Los Jaivas and Elena Papandreou

This was an outdoor recording in Castlemaine of poets reading the working of refugee poets, most of whom are in detention offshore, on Manus Island and Nauru. The readers of the poems were Andy Jackson, Klare Lanson, Adam Ford, Margot Feast, Ann de Hugard, Catherine Ryan, Paola Bilbrough, Kent McCarter and Janet Galbraith. The reading was an activity of the Free Poetry Project, affiliated to Writing Through Fences.