Pocketbook Poetry Open Mic

Thursday 1 October, 5-7pm

Tickets: FREE
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Join Newcastle poetry collective Pocketbook for an after-hours evening responding to Cavitation. Enjoy a welcoming open-mic poetry session inviting audiences to reflect on how places can be a site of rupture, memory and unstable knowledge. Featuring an interactive poetry exchange and space for gentle participation, this free event invites reflection on how a sense of place shifts through movement, migration and environmental forces.

ABOUT POCKETBOOK

Pocketbook is a grassroots, not-for-profit creative collective rooted in Newcastle’s literary and arts community. Emerging from a student-run open mic, the group now supports and platforms local writers and visual artists across the Hunter through publishing, events, and collaborative projects.  Pocketbook exists to fuel emerging voices and actively sustain the creative future of our Steel City.

Cavitation and Cavitation: Breathing Ocean are major commissions initiated and led by The Lock-Up, Newcastle, and presented in partnership with New Annual 2026.

Izabela Pluta has been awarded a Creative Australia Visual Arts Major Commission grant through the international co-commissioning partnership of The Lock-Up and TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Poland.

The Lock-Up and this project are supported by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body, Create NSW, and New Annual 2026.

Collaborators and project partners include the Australian Tapestry Workshop; Adam Hulbert, sound artist, composer, researcher and performer; cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis; Ocean Seagull; Tangaroa Blue Foundation; the Institute of Oceanology, Polish Academy of Sciences; Hunter Gatherer Network; Event Engineering; Heritage Stoneworks at the NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure; and AX Interactive.

Izabela Pluta is represented by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert.