Π O



Nights of Excesses

for Sean O’Callaghan A Kalashnikov, is an AK-47. Americium, is an actinide, and has an Atomic number of 95. The sun, is 93 million miles away. The word punch (in Hindustani) means 5. The Dead are mourned, in Muslim cultures …

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Review Short: Π.O.’s Fitzroy: the biography

For Π.O., ‘Fitzroy is what you, bump into/ when you leave home’ (599). It was outside his family’s first front door after they escaped the Bonegilla migrant reception centre in 1954. After sixty years and homes in other suburbs, it is still the place that his poems gravitate towards. If anyone were to attempt writing the biography of Melbourne’s first suburb, Π.O. is the poet.

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unAustralian English: Oscar Schwartz Visits Chris Mann in NYC

I went to visit Chris Mann in his apartment in Manhattan at the beginning of July 2012. Half of his apartment was covered with plants. There were trees, ferns and flowers hanging from every landing. Mounted on the walls were wood-framed bookshelves, completely packed. The other half of the apartment had a wooden table, kitchen, grand piano, and beyond that, some rooms for sleeping.

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Π O’s 24 Hours: Ulysses in Fitzroy

This is Π O’s bio note at the end of 24 Hours (1996), a 740-page, self-published epic poem set in Fitzroy, Melbourne. The P and O of his pseudonym are his actual initials and since the 1970s, Π O has been this poet’s stage-name as much as pen-name. In 1977, as Billy Marshall-Stoneking mentions in ‘Π O;An Appreciation’, Π O performed his poetry more than 250 times with Marshall-Stoneking and Eric Beach in and around Melbourne.

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Everything Poem, part 4

There are 455 active volcanoes in the World and blood completes a circuit of the body every 23 seconds, but you weigh 40 times as much as your brain and it’s impossible to describe a spiral-staircase [without using a finger] …

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Lebanese Poetry

He came over (to the counter), ordered a coffee, and asked me if I was Lebanese (cos he was) – I said “No” / Greek. He asked me, what I was reading and I said “Poetry”. I asked him, did …

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