What to do on a Monday night when other responsibilities are in abeyance? First up was a night at Smiths for Geoff Page's poetry. He was featuring two poets this night, reading for a group of ~40 people. First up was KT Nelson, a local who now spends time in Central Australia, has won prizes and released poetry, not least in her book Inlandia, with references to her outback experiences with Aboriginal resonances. Then Jelena Dinic, originally from Serbia, now Adelaide, who immigrated during the collapse of Yugoslavia. Again, an award winner and quite a prolific publisher of her poetry. In this case, somewhat influenced by Serbian poetry, as Serbs seems to be. As she said at one time, in Serbia "even war criminals want to be poets". I found KTN's poetry to be fairly straightforward with well formed political, personal and such opinions. Jelena seemed to write in a more colourful style on matters personal and otherwise. I was startled a few times (in a most pleasant way) by unexpected combinations and colourful images. Maybe not literally accurate, but one was something like "dust ... as if the walls were undressing". Wow! Poetry is not a normal outing for me but I might occasionally try some more. Then walking about a pretty quiet Civic, I passed Hippo and there was gear in the window. I went up to find a blues night with no less than DJ Gosper. I arrived in the break so mostly chatted with Dean Edgecombe and heard just a few tunes by the band. Nice, somewhat laid back, authentic and well felt blues, mostly original but one very well spotted tune out of Melbourne. So much enjoyed if only for a short outing. And dancing, not be me, but by a few mature rock'n'roll couples. I shouldn't be so surprised but I found plenty to do on Monday night in Civic.
Geoff Page present Poetry at Smiths featuring KT Nelson and Jelena Dinic. DJ Gosper (vocals, blues harp) led a band with Jeff Prime (guitar), Dean Edgecombe (bass, vocals) and Jack Barnard (drums) at Hippo.
