| Les Wicks | |
|---|---|
| Born | 15 June 1955 Sydney, New South Wales |
| Occupation | Poet, publisher, editor, workshop coordinator |
| Known for | Poetry |
| Children | One child |
| Website | |
| http://leswicks.tripod.com/lw.htm | |
Les Wicks (born 1955) is an Australian poet, publisher and editor. He has a long list of achievements in writing, publishing and broadcasting. This includes the publication of eight books of poetry.
Contents |
Wicks grew up in western suburbs Sydney. Les played in the band Iron Mouth. The Vietnam war savagely divided his family and taught him early activism. By 17 he had his first poem accepted & was school organiser for the secondary school students' strike. He did a history degree over some years at (Macquarie University) as well as a variety of unskilled and semi-skilled jobs while living in Sydney and London. In the late 70s he embarked on his first publishing exercise – Meuse publications (with Bill Farrow) which was a high water mark in Australian poetry publishing with its cutting edge mix of text and graphics. He helped set up the Poets Union in NSW. From the 1980s he worked as a union industrial advocate for a number of Unions after obtaining a graduate diploma in Industrial Law (University of Sydney).
He has been a guest at most of Australia's literary festivals, toured widely and been published in over 250 different newspapers, anthologies and magazines across fifteen countries in nine languages. During September/October 2006, Les Wicks was a guest of the Festival International de la Poesie in Quebec, Canada. 2011 he was the 1st Australian guest at the International Literary Festival, Lviv, Ukraine .
His fifth book of poems, The Ways of Waves (Sidewalk, 2000) celebrates the Australian summer. Number six, Appetites of Light (PressPress, 2002), is exploration of the qualities of light, while the seventh takes readers to "peopled landscapes"... Stories of the Feet (Five Islands, 2004). The Ambrosiacs (Island,2009) concerns “endings”- an elegy - from ecology under stress to the loss of close friends. Wicks explores a sequence of endpoints: spiritual exploration, suburbia, rural escapes and travel...all with his typical raw honesty, humour and rage. A startling, and ultimately affirming picture of generations and lives. joanne burns writes of "the Ambrosiacs" "…intense, quite relentless, often dark and pessimistic. But this of course is not the whole story, for within these pages are striking moments of grace, awareness, acceptance, restitution…". Much of the work in later books features what Wicks describes as "this waterwall, a cascade". Through building layers of proposition, assertion, voice & imagery a broader picture is created.
Shadows of the Read was published in 2011 (Krok) featuring work in both English & Ukrainian.
Stylistically, he spans both a vernacular performance poetry and more linguistically dense, often dark explorations. He is hard hitting and humorous.
Other projects include publishing and editing poetry outreach like Artransit which put poetry and art into Sydney & Newcastle (NSW) buses and Heritage Light which saw a poem published on the surface of the Parramatta River. E-books have explored Sydney beaches & Broken Hill through words & photography. In association with Krok Publishing the first anthology of contemporary Ukrainian & Australain poets in English & Ukrainian was published - AU/UA: Contemporary Poetry of Ukraine and Australia. He runs a workshop program across Australia called Plan to Be Published.