JV Birch

Speaker 1
This is a Vision Australia Radio podcast.

Speaker 2
On Vision Australia Radio, welcome to our conversations on the work and experiences of emerging writers. I'm Kate Cooper. Last week, we brought you the first in our series of live recordings from the No Wave poetry readings at the Wheat Sheaf Hotel. We spoke last week with Jennifer Liston and our guest this week is J.V. Birch. J.V. Birch is a British-born Australian poet living on Kaurna land whose works are featured in journals, magazines and a number of anthologies. She's a three -time winner in the poetry category of mindshares, creative writing awards and a prize winner in the Molotov Cocktail Shadow Award.

J.V. Birch's poems have appeared on City Streets in the reigning poetry in Adelaide Festival. She's four chapbooks published by Ginanderra Press. They are Smashed Glass at midnight in their Pigaro Poet series and What the Water and Moon Gave Me, A Belly Full of Roses and Venus in their Pocket Poet series, as well as her first full -length collection, More Than Here. J.V. Birch's collection Ice Cream and Tar was a winner in the James Tate International Poetry Prize 2022 and is published by SirVision Books. Details of all JV Birch's poetry and collections, as well as a reading, can be found on her website, JVBirch.com.

We begin with readings by J.V. Birch of her poetry in the No Wave series, which in September of this year was curated by the poet Jill Jones. And just a gentle note that those of you who live under a flight path will recognise the metaphor.

Speaker 3
Thanks, Jill, for inviting me here to read tonight. I'd just like to start by acknowledging the lands that I'm reading on today, the traditional lands of the Kaurna people, and we respect their heritage and cultural beliefs today and in the future. So, yes, I was going to read some poems from my new collection, Ice Cream and Tar. It's basically a collection of poems focusing on a surrealist take of climate change, because sometimes I think the only way to deal with all the madness that's happening out there is through metaphor.
And don't be alarmed by the amount of tabs along the top. My poems are notoriously short because I've got the attention span of a goldfish. So, hopefully they'll keep you entertained. And I think I'm not going to do much of an introduction to each poem.

I think they're pretty self-explanatory. I'm probably going to read them in the order of the book as well. And interestingly, the cover image I made myself, so that's basically some ice cream melting, not on tar, it's actually on melted chocolate. But of course, it took quite a few takes to do, so I spent a lot of my Saturday afternoon eating ice cream and melted chocolate.

2049. You don't remember bees? I draw one for you. Filigree, the wings in silver. Snow is something the freezer does when you don't close the door properly. Blue skies are daily and the moon's lost its face. Sea levels have risen. No more treks to the tide collecting shells. You giggle at photos of me in tights and long sleeves. Gloves are displayed in museums like aliens. Ice cream shares have shot through the roof. You ask me how many flavours I can name. Another skin treatment's launched to make it harder to burn. I'll never confess my sunbed hours.

Swimming is law, treading water, the new gym. You joke your kids will have webbed feet. Moon, moon sits down at the end of the day, pulls on its boots and zips up its jacket to meet the dark in the bar, shouts the first round and slags off the sun. Downs whiskies, sings songs, flirts with some stars. Any damn thing to help it forget it's gradually leaving. So I'll read the Kykelpoem ice cream and tell. How fast the summers go. They used to seem endless when the ice cream van with its music box music bought us running, our pockets full of pence, handing them over in sweaty fists to cool palms with ice lullies.

When we knocked on doors to ask friends out to play, tag chasing, ice racing, anything to spend the energy we had. When we kicked a ball with care, Mr. Wilson's front garden, the goal we tried not to score. A weeping rose, a broken branch, rained down his wrath as we tried to look sorry. When being girl or boy, never mattered, chasing nap clouds, bare skinned under naked skies. When the light refused to leave, argued with the moon as it appeared like a smirk to see who could last longer.

When we picked tar from our sandals after new road had been laid, careful not to get it on our clothes because it was a bugger to get off. And when school leaned closer, we played harder, round faster.

So this next poem is actually all one sentence, but because I need to breathe, there will be some natural pauses in there. Otherwise I'll make Max's mouth. The Tap.

The Tap is one of those pushed down ones, but it's broken because someone's twisted the top off so there's nothing to push down and as the water's gushing out into the cracked enamel sink, and I'm thinking what a waste this is, a whale plops out and starts singing, followed by some fish, and a turtle who tells me about the creatures we'll meet when everything's flowed over and as I watched them swimming and spinning, I turned the tap off at the mains because we're not quite ready yet, M nature comes home, answer the door promptly when she nubs, invite her in to sit awhile, make her some tea and note how she's aged, her thin hair, her drawn face, how much smaller she seems, but don't mention it, offer to rub her feet while she sips a cup of chamomile, talk to feel the silence, ask her how she's been, if she's whipped up any devastating storms lately, where her last fire, flood, drought was, try not to notice the way she stares at you, how her mouth is tight, her dark eyes ablaze despite her winter, and try not to notice your tremble, which starts in your head and swiftly spreads as though you're her next disaster. Find your cheeks a wet, your mouth is dry, that you can't quiet your heart. Feel her reach inside you, rip through your arrogance, your empty sorries, what you said you would do and did not, until you're a snivelling, snot-caped mess.

08:07

Know then, like lightning, how she wishes she was no mother at all. Turning. I meet Dark at the wrong time. He tells me I'm late as he lights another star like a cigarette. I take a seat under the moon he's leaning over. So, how much do you know, he asks, cocking his head further into shadow. I feel the moon hold its breath, the ice of it lifting. Probably more than I should, I reply, tracking the path of a comet as it blazes through the room.
Then you know how this ends, Dark says, as he leans forward to stroke the silver in my hair. I pull away to the moon, but he's now holding my chin, looming like a distant relative. Then, without warning, he brings out the world from his pocket, and curls my clammy hand to place it in my palm.

It's greens and blues, and not as green and blue, and there's a sense of falling. As Dark sits back and stretches his legs, I try my best to keep it turning. The Ministers. The Minister for Drought submits a proposal. Due to the severity of the current situation, I propose a ban on external H2O use worldwide with a media effect. The Minister for Green Grass objects. The Minister for the Sun supports his objection, stating he cannot sustain the portfolio of his colleague alone. The Minister for Drought relents. Kaviyatsi's proposal with On Grass accepted. The Minister for Fresh Air releases an audible sigh. The Minister for Blue Sky clears his throat. The Minister for Wind and the Minister for Solar exchange looks, having united since the Minister for Mining resigned.

The Minister for the Moon appears. He is rarely in attendance. The Minister for Tides rises to his feet, and continues to rise. Pressure builds. Order! Order! cries the Minister for Earth, struggling to be heard. Applause. I've just got one more. Yeah, so I thought we'd end on a happy note, despite the title of this one. So this is called rut. I don't understand people with fruit trees who don't pick the fruit. Why have them if you're just going to let their little gifts rut? The shriek of birds from the branches doesn't convince me. Maybe they don't like fruit, or they're renting and couldn't care less. I pick up dying peaches, pocket-sized planets slowly wasting.

But why not save the fruit and leave it for others to enjoy? Untouched ones hanging catch my eye. Their skins signalling sweetness, like a promise of hope. Another hopeful poem. Small beginnings. I search bread bin to replace one rusting, as if it houses damp, not oven -baked goods.

Infinite choices on endless pages. One catches my eye in oat milk, with a bamboo lid that doubles as a pudding board. I browse the site, find a matching compost bin.

I put both in my cart, with organic mesh -produced bags, compostable wrap, washable dishcloths, reusable baking paper, and recyclable food pouches, eager to keep plastic unmade. Ignoring the footprint delivery will make. I'm welcomed on the start of my sustainable journey with a free sprouting jar. Imagine small beginnings.

12:28

Speaker 2
On Vision Australia Radio you're listening to our conversations on the work and experiences of emerging writers. Our guest today is the poet J .V. Birch, recorded live at the September No Way Poetry readings at the Wheat Sheep Hotel. Julie, you've published four chat books for our listeners who may not be familiar with the term chat book. Would you tell us first of all what that is and why it is an appealing format for poets to publish their work in?

Speaker 3
Okay, so chat books tend to be a collection of poems between, say, 15 to 30 poems. And so it's not quite a full length collection. And I think it's quite attractive to poets who are looking to get their work out there as a small collection to a wider audience. And there's lots of publishers in Australia that publish chat books. And yeah, all different kind of quality and length. So I think the reason it appeals is, yeah, like I say, you don't have to have like a full length collection of, say, 60 poems. And yeah, you can either have them themed or it's entirely up to you. But yeah, I think it's just because it's kind of a bite sized book, if that makes sense. So I think that's why it's so appealing. Yeah.

Speaker 2
One of the questions that I've been asking on this program is how poets and authors choose their publishers. What drew you to get in Derip Press and what have you learned from working with them?

Speaker 3
Ah, Ginanddara Press, run by Steven and Brenda Matthews and based here in Fort Adelaide. And they're just an amazing publisher, they've published so many different works over the years and not just poetry, they publish other forms as well. And yeah, they've just got such a great reputation and they're very down to earth, very approachable, very patient and a great eye for detail and the editing process. So with all the chat books that I've published with them and they also published my solvent collection as well, just the attention to detail and you know what it's like, your own work, you read it so many times and you become almost blind to mistakes.

And so they were very, very good at picking up things that I just missed or suggesting different ways of punctuating a sentence and just, yeah, just the patience and just very accommodating and very enthusiastic about getting my work out there. And they also helped with promoting the work as well, was it? It was published and launches and things like that. So yeah, highly recommend Ginanddara.

15:32

Speaker 2
J.V., your poems have appeared on city streets in the reigning poetry and Adelaide Festival. What is the festival and how did your poems actually appear on the street?

Speaker 3
Okay, so this used to be an annual event. I'm not sure if it's still annual, but essentially it's run through University of Adelaide. And I see that they call for poets to submit their work, and it's normally very kind of short pieces of work, so up to four lines of poetry, which greatly appealed to me because I do have the attention span of a goldfish. And the way they do it is they stencil the words onto the sidewalk. I think it might be using some kind of wax so that when it rains, that's when they appear. So, yeah, I think it's done, like I say, using some kind of wax.

Yeah, and it is just like magical, you know, you're just walking along the street and then like it will start raining, and these words just appear. It's almost, yeah, it's an amazing thing. But yeah, I haven't seen it advertised for a while, so I'm not sure if it's still running, but it's a great initiative.

Speaker 2
Fantastic. You're a three-time winner in the poetry category of Mindshare's Creative Writing Awards and a prize winner in the Molotov Cocktail Shadow Award. Your collection, Ice Cream and Tar, published by Servition Books, was a winner in the James Tate International Poetry Prize in 2022 and congratulations on those awards. Would you tell us how it feels to win local and international prizes and awards?

Speaker 3
Wow, never been asked that before. I guess it's just brilliant to be acknowledged and again, you know, winning an award, it widens the reach of the audience that you can get your words out to so Yeah, it's weird because you know I'm at home writing away and I don't think of myself as necessarily an award-winning poet and there are much bigger kind of awards and prizes out there, but yeah I guess it's just a great feeling to have my poems and my work acknowledged in that kind of wider arena I guess.

Speaker 2
And finally, can we ask what you're working on at the moment?

Speaker 3
Yes, so I'm working on another full length collection, so I need to get my attention span in order and it's actually, I don't want to give too much away, but it's actually based on fairy tales. So it's kind of looking at them with a different lens and like weaving in some autobiographical details but also some different aspects like climate change, feminism and you know, what's going on in the world at the moment.

So yeah, so I've got, I'm probably about a third of the way through, but with any kind of project, I love the planning stage and sometimes I just get stuck in the planning stage because I love it so much and all the organising and the post -its and the mind maps and then I fail to actually write the poems, but yeah, so that's what I'm working on at the moment.

Speaker 2
Thank you very much. Our guest on Emerging Writers today was the poet J.V. Birch, presenting as part of the No Wave Poetry readings at the Weet Sheaf Hotel. We heard last week from Jennifer Liston, and next week, to conclude our special feature on the September readings, we'll hear from Yelena Dinnich and Caroline Reed. Since last week's program, the first in our series of live recordings from the September No Wave Poetry readings at the Weet Sheaf Hotel, Liston has expressed interest in knowing more about No Wave, so here's the summary based on information that appears on the No Wave website.

The No Wave Monthly Poetry Reading series was started in 2018 by Dominic Symes, who at the time was completing a PhD in Adelaide. Dominic continued running this series of events while living in Cambodia in 2019, during lockdown in 2020, and while living in Melbourne from 2021 to 2022. In 2023, the series has been transitioned into a collective, with different Adelaide poets guest curating the event each month. The September No Wave readings, as we've mentioned on this program, were curated by the poet Jill Jones, and featured the four wonderful poets whose readings we're broadcasting on the program this month, JV Birch, Jennifer Liston, Yelena Dinnich and Caroline Reed.

The No Wave website acknowledges the work of Banjo James, Olivia De Silva, Gemma Parker and Alex Sutcliffe in the No Wave collective. What was the thinking behind the No Wave series? Dominic Symes writes on the website that the purpose was to bring together some of Adelaide's best poets, some of the best emerging local talent, along with more established poets, local and interstate, to give readings from their works to fans of poetry. No Wave was designed as a testing ground for new work, with the aim of playing an important role in the creative development of local poets. Quoting here from the website, The readings have been primarily concerned with raising the profile of poetry in Adelaide, showcasing the best local talent by creating a space for diverse voices to take their craft into new and exciting places.

Equally, the readings are an occasion for local poets to share ideas, encourage collaboration and enhance the sense of community surrounding poetry in Adelaide. I can certainly attest to the strong sense of community that was evident at the No Wave event that we recorded for this program and which has been present at other poetry events that I've attended in the series. Lineups for the No Wave poetry events, held on the first Wednesday of the month, are posted on the Weet Sheafs website and social media. Through these sites you can also find out about book launches hosted at the venue.

This programme can be heard at the same time each week on Vision Australia Radio, VA Radio Digital, online at varadio.org and also on Vision Australia Radio Podcasts, where you can catch up on earlier episodes.

22:57

Speaker 1
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Speaker 2
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