Poetry Sydney and Garden Creative Lounge partner under the artistic direction of Michael Aiken for a project series on Transformation in five partitions 2024 - 2028 with the curatorial scope to reflect the diversity of cultural, political and social perspectives that preoccupy poets in our communities in our collective histories with relation to a commitment to the work, and practices of Charles Baudelaire.

For our ongoing series of annual events to mark the birthday of Charles Baudelaire, we invite artists of all kinds to respond to the theme of transformation – creatively, intellectually, viscerally, spiritually, and in any other way you feel compelled.

Each edition of this event will further venture into a specific area of transformation. In 2024, that sub-theme was laying down roots. Laying down roots. Because, although transformation can be a messy and chaotic, or a sleek and abrupt shift from one state to another, transformation encompasses creation and endurance far more vastly than it does destruction and cessation.

On this year's theme: Baudelaire's Birthday and journeys of transformation, 2025 edition / Egg /

'I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge…'

Curatorial direction from Michael Aiken

The germ of Charles Baudelaire’s work crawls into life in the mid-19th
century, extending its
reach towards the turn of the 20th
. His ideas provoke, then and now, ongoing responses to our
quickly shifting world. He excavates the swiftly changing, ever-urbanizing Paris of the industrial
revolution, as he not only observes but gets in amongst the transformations of place, people and
community occurring around and within him.
Taking this as our leaping point, Baudelaire’s Birthday has adopted Transformation as our
enduring theme. Following on from last year's edition of ''Laying down roots”, this year the
edition theme is “Egg”.

P R O G R A M : E G G

Host:
M I C H A E L A I K E N

Panel discussion: E G G
M I C H A E L A I K E N
S I D S L E D G E
A N G E L A S T R E T C H

Features:
H A N I A B I D E
E R A N D E G U Z M A N
C H A R L E S F R E Y B E R G
G A R E T H J E N K I N S
A I L E E N M O K A
P E T E R M I L L E R - R O B I N S O N
S I D S L E D G E

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In exploring this theme, we encourage artists to press further in these and other directions suggested by “Egg”.
Be serious.
Be playful.
Be daring.
And remember: an egg produces nothing unless the egg is broken.
Our featured poets will be responding to this theme, and participants in the open mic are likewise so encouraged.

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Celebrating Charles Baudelaire: journeys of transformation series | 2025 edition: E G G

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