John Forbes



Essential Gossip: Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan and U.S.-Australian Poetics

In 1985, when the bulky anthology Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania (first published in 1968) was printed in a new edition, it was advertised with the curious dust jacket recommendation: ‘hailed by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as one of the hundred most recommended American books of the last thirty-five years’.

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Never Be Alone Again: Hip-Hop Sampling as a Technique in Contemporary Australian Poetry

One of those most important battles of hip-hop’s first two decades wasn’t waged between two MCs at a cypher. And it wasn’t a couple of b-boy crews popping and locking at a block party. Instead, it pitted a hip-hop clown against a puffy-sleeved Irish balladeer.

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John Forbes’s ‘Miraculous Fluidity’

In a book on comedy, philosopher Alenka Zupančič has inadvertently discovered the key to the correlation of late twentieth century Australian poet John Forbes’s mastery of cultural imitation and his deconstruction of the mechanics of national identity so often queried in his work.

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Interview with John Forbes (Ella O’Keefe edit)

Hazel de Berg’s recordings take place in the homes or work spaces of the subjects rather than a recording studio. This allows something of these places into the recording whether birdsong, traffic or an r&b song playing in the background.

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Johns Forbes & Tranter: Reading and Discussion at Forbes Street Studios

John Tranter and John Forbes, Forbes Street Studios, 1980.

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Ross Gibson’s Blustertown

FilmThe town’s biggest fools are those who come from elsewhere and fall in love with it when they’re young. As a rule, these fools fall hard, beyond reason and recovery. I know because I fell that way. As you do when you’re twenty.

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Mark Garnett: On reading Ken Bolton's Three Poems for John Forbes Or, Poem for Betty

After meeting someone i kind of knew in the city for coffee at Pellegrini's i came home to my messy room. On the tram i was reading Ken Bolton's Three Poems for John Forbes and they have made me a …

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