Johanna's BlogMike Ladd
b. 1959, Adelaide
Mike Ladd is currently producer and presenter of ABC Radio National's poetry program Poetica. After completing a Bachelor of Arts at Adelaide University, he began to publish his poetry widely in Australia. He has often collaborated with musicians, including the groups The Drum Poets and newaural net.
In the early 1980s Mike travelled in Europe and Africa. While in Senegal, he made recordings of the traditional poet-praise singers known as the 'griot'. In London he worked on short-term contracts for the BBC and the British Institute of Recorded Sound.
Returning to Adelaide, Mike gained a traineeship at ABC Radio. After working as a sound engineer for 10 years, he became a producer in the Audio Arts department and subsequently began his present role on Poetica . In 2000 he took up a Churchill Fellowship in the UK, Ireland and France, where he studied poetry and radio production. In 2005 and 2006 he worked in Papua New Guinea with local writers, actors and directors, developing a radio serial in Tok Pisin, which was broadcast on the NBC. In 2006 he was also awarded the Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship at the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature and was a guest of Venezuela's World Poetry Festival.
In 2008 Mike participated in Red Room Company's Nightwrighting project and was part of the Red Room Poet Advisory Team.
Publications
1984: The Crack in the Crib
1994: Picture's Edge
200: Close to Home
2003: Rooms and Sequences
2006: Shacklife - a chapbook of selected poems
2007: Transit
Night Drive: The Hume
Cath braked hard to save a fox - eyes points of sodium in the high-beam.
From the back seat, I was launched out of shadow and flare-crossed sleep,
crushed to the blindblack floor by that heavy lover, Inertia.
The tyre screamed into smoke, squared their circle,
and we bumped from then on, all the way to Sydney.
Around another bend we began to see scattered milk bottles, a lower starry sky
- then the glass truck on its side, amber pulses and looming cop faces,
the burnt-out wreck of the other truck, and bloody shapes in blankets.
That was near Jugiong in the small hours, the cresty bit that helped earn the Hume
its 'Deadly' epithet. All rebuilt now: dual rivers of red and white.
