2007 FESTIVAL REVIEWS & HIGHLIGHTS

Lucas North’s Co-Chair Festival Report

The audience. That was who I thought about when I learned that I had become the remaining Chair of WA Poets Inc. at the end of the 2006 WA Spring Poetry Festival. To ensure that it had a chance to bloom even further, I would have to assemble a team that could take this embryonic Festival to a higher plane of recognition.

With the addition soon thereafter of Helen Hagemann as Co-Chair, I knew the coming year’s event could balance the varied expectations of you, our audience. Working with precision and a monkish discipline, Helen and select others (both on and not-officially on our committee) learned that it was possible to bring a top line-up: we met Samuel Wagan Watson in February at the Words and Ideas Festival. I told him how I’d bonded with his street-level urban jazz, and he pledged to come west in October. But minutes later, Mark Reid told me he was migrating to NZ. I began to sense how this Festival might play with us. Helen thought she’d write to Dorothy Porter. When the verse-novelist agreed, it seemed too good to be true. We had to include Alvin Pang, the hovering post-future voice from Singapore.

After months of maze-running and negotiations, we had gathered a unique collection of voices for the Festival. Then, at the end of the theoretical business, we had to actually stage the Festival. We had a dedicated band of guerrilla poets and an audience I knew was frothing. Frothing to see other poets. Frothing to engage rivalries, celebrate the greats and witness the new wave on this west coast.