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Poetry post-1900
Photo of Ken Bolton courtesy the author
Ken Bolton (b. 1949) is a poet, art critic, editor and publisher, born in Sydney. Since 1982 he has lived and worked in Adelaide in South Australia, where he is associated with the Experimental Art Foundation (on whose web site http://www.eaf.asn.au/ can be found the site of the now defunct Otis Rush magazine and a listing of the books put out by the press he still operates, Little Esther Books). His Selected Poems appeared in Australia under Penguin; Wakefield Press published his 1997 collection ‘Untimely Meditations’ & other poems. He is the editor of Homage To John Forbes, Brandl & Schlesinger, 2002. More biographical information below.
A selection of poems: (Pinkham) / Some Thinking / Home Town / Poem (“I do a drawing ...”) / My Father / On a Page Beginning “Dear Laurie”
Ken Bolton and John Jenkins: Seven collaborative poems
In conversation with poet Peter Minter, 2005 (from Jacket magazine)
Ken Bolton: Modern Australian Poetry: An introduction for Poetry Ireland, Spring 2004
Ken Bolton: Requiem for a Heavyweight (Les Murray considered)
Ken Bolton reviews Selected Poems and Prose — Martin Johnston — ed John Tranter; University of Queensland Press, 1993, paperback, $22.95
Ken Bolton: ‘Return to the Past for the Cardigan Set’: a review of four poetry books: A Return To Poetry, three volumes, 1998, 1999, and 2000; published by Duffy & Snellgrove, and An Australian Heritage of Verse, edited by Jim Haynes; published by the ABC, 2000.
Ken Bolton reviews Selected Poems by James Gleeson and The Distribution of Voice by Martin Harrison
Lyn McCredden reviews Untimely Meditations and other poems (1997) by Ken Bolton. This review was first published in Heat magazine.
Bibliography
Off-site:
The Otis Rush magazine site
carries a selection from Ken Bolton’s and John Jenkins’ Lacanian noir pastiche based on The Maltese Falcon, ‘The Gutman Variations’.
Further poems and reviews and other texts by and about this author, or that mention this author’s name, can be found in Jacket magazine on the Internet: follow this link and type the author’s name into the Jacket Search engine.
Further biographical notes, current 2006.
Ken Bolton is a poet, art critic, editor and publisher. From Sydney, since 1982 he has lived in Adelaide, South Australia. He produces the Little Esther books series and edited the magazines Otis Rush and Magic Sam. His major literary collections to date are a Selected Poems (Penguin/ ETT, 1992) and Untimely Meditations and At The Flash & At The Baci (Wakefield Press, 1997 and 2006). Ken Bolton has also written a number of collaborative books of poetry, verse novellas etc., with Melbourne writer John Jenkins. In 2000 he had a six month Australia Council residency in Rome. He edited the book Homage to John Forbes (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2002).
For money (though not much money) he runs Dark Horsey bookshop at the Experimental Art Foundation.
He is interested in art criticism and art history, continental philosophy and in history and politics generally — and in the innovative side of literature.
Ken Bolton’s art criticism has appeared in The CAC Broadsheet, Artlink, Otis Rush and, regularly in the early 90s, in The Advertiser, Adelaide publications. And he has published in Photofile, Art and Text, Art Monthly, Meanjin, Agenda and Like and in Eyeline.
Ken Bolton studied Fine Arts at Sydney University where he tutored for a time. He has also taught in visual art or communications at: various art schools and universities, always for brief periods.
He won Melbourne University’s Michel Wesley Wright Poetry Prize for 1990. More usually he is short-listed: Two Poems — A Drawing of the Sky for the 1991 Victorian Premier’s Award, Untimely Meditations for the NSW Premier’s award in 1999. In 2000 he spent six months in Rome, courtesy of the Literature Board of the Australia Council.
Thoughtful — and yet forgetful, easily distracted, hardly there sometimes — his is a lyrical figure limned against the harsh outlines, the stark colours, of the art world in Adelaide, adding a word here, a thought there, in the general flux of words and deeds around town.
There are a number of things he wishes to avoid in poetry (the cornily ‘poetic’, strong reliance on metaphor, and the supposedly ineffable and transcendent). More positively he writes to keep himself awake, & amused.
When that fails he knows where to find a good book.
His next book — which will be a good book — is a study of The Circus, its philosophy, melancholy, hopes and fun, and their material conditions.
http://april.edu.au/bolton-k/index.shtml