Pete Spence – September 22 2019

Pete has achieved high acclaim for his work in painting, experimental film, visual poetry and lyric verse. He has made a number of films, some screened internationally in the UK, Germany and Switzerland and festivals in Australia. He has been a sapphire miner and forklift driver and in 1984 founded Post Neo Publications. Having started writing in his early teens, Pete was first published in the early 1970s. His other works include his first poetry book, FIVE Poems, and his other chapbook, Kynetonbury Tales or Dog Days. Three main areas have developed in Pete’s art: Visual Poetry, Mail Art, & traditional writing. The writing, according to Pete, split into three different styles, one inspired by the New York School, one by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E School, and “an odd group of things that don’t fit into any school”. Pete is a survivor of the rare disease infantile acrodynia, also known as Pink Disease after the marked reddening of the body’s extremities, which was especially prevalent in the first half of the 20th century and primarily attributed to exposure to mercury commonly found in teething powders.

Perrier Fever
Grand Parade Poets, 2011; ISBN 9780987129116
“I opened [this] book at random the other day, on page 105, – the poem entitled ‘Shop’: “i thought the shop / was called SLIDE / until i walked into the door!” I’m still visualizing a kind of Jacques Tati cartoon, or Charlie Chaplin, or Rowan Atkinson. The jokeyness transmutes or elevates from ha-ha to Surrealist smile in the poem ‘Drawing’: “i muscled in / all the angles / crosshatched in / the shadows / only to realise / i’d drawn / a horse without / neck or head / and its tail / was a cloud / in the sky”. Perhaps this collection … is his humorous selected poems … But even so it’s informed by the totality of his poetry…. Spence, like Wallace Stevens, can be poet as painter, poet as musician, poet as inventor and conjurer of effects – of sensations which course the mind, tickle the tongue ….” – Kris Hemensley, Rochford Street Review

Excurses
Picaro, 2012
“Like Perrier Fever, the poems in Excurses are highly energetic, leaping from one thought to another in an eccentrically disjunctive fashion, so that in ‘Wittgenstein could have given his brother a hand’ we read: “what is/all that muck/on the piano?//all your thoughts need ironing!” Excurses revolves around the motif of music, lending the chapbook a sense of cohesion, although the individual poems often veer off wildly in whatever direction the apparently spontaneous compositional method leads them …. like O’Hara, Spence makes writing poetry look deceptively simple, although achieving such ‘ease’ is a rather difficult task …. For those unfamiliar with Spence’s work, Excurses offers a fine introduction to his wonderfully eccentric poetry; for those already acquainted with his poems, Excurses is a welcome addition to the oeuvre of an innovative, and I should say important, voice in contemporary Australian poetry.” – Cameron Lowe, Cordite Poetry Review