Way back in the dim, dark days of the early 1990s, while touring the US together with the poetry troupe, ‘Ozpoets’, Kim Downs and I devised a show of our original poetry and music.

It was called ‘Fit of Passion’, and represented a melding of my work (about gender and my attempts at living in the world while female) with his work (about masculinity and the social conditions affecting men).

In 1997, we received a touring grant from Arts Queensland, which allowed us to take the work to the regions, and to publish a book of the poems accompanied by an audio cassette, featuring 6 songs on one side and eight ranty performance poems on the other.

This audio has just been digitised, and the songs can be heard here:

And the poems can be heard here:

The entire text if the book is available for viewing and free download here:

https://lizhalldowns.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/fit-of-passion-liz-hall-downs-kim-downs.pdf

And an essay discussing the work, the tour, and responses from critics and audiences is here:

Fit of Passion – Public Performance of the Poetry of Gender

Spoken word performance was really becoming ‘a thing’ during this period, and we were happy to have been part of the push to take poetry out of the academy and onto radio, television, and the stages of small venues across both Australia and the USA.

Elsewhere on the blog you can find the video archive of all the poems being performed by their authors live to camera.