Now I find that once more I have shrunk
To an interloper, robber of dead men’s dream,
I had read in books that art is not easy
But no one warned that the mind repeats
In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still
the black swan of trespass on alien waters.

            Ern Malley, ‘Dürer: Innsbruck, 1495’

On the evening of Saturday 18th, from 5.30pm-8pm, William Holbrook (a PhD candidate at Trinity College, Cambridge) and Jeremy George (a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne) are organising ‘Ern’s Night’ in the Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio.

This night of poetry readings and performances commemorates 80 years since the ‘death’ of Ernest Lalor Malley, the great Australian poet who never lived.

The event will feature readings from Malley’s The Darkening Ecliptic (1944) and new poetic responses to that work. Participants include: Professor Mark Ford (UCL), Alison Barton (Judith E. Wilson First Nations Poet in Residence), poet-critic Robert Sheppard (Emeritus Professor at Edge Hill University), Dr Louis Klee (Trinity Hall, Cambridge), Evelyn Corr Araluen (poet and co-editor of Overland), Professor John Wilkinson (University of Chicago), and Abigail Fisher (poet and PhD candidate at University of Melbourne).

Some poems will also be set to music and performed by The Ern Malley Orchestra.