Sue Kneebone | A cautionary tale of overconfidence
NO THEME VII Editorial: Lisa Gorton
Artwork:
12 Works by Sue Kneebone
Essays:
Bone Shame: Grief, Te Ao Māori and the Liminal Space where Translation Fails by Anahera Gildea
Re-imagining Place: A Psychogeographic Reading of Carmine Frascarelli’s Sydney Road Poems by Jake Goetz
‘Geelong checks its modernist warranty’ by Jo Langdon and Cameron Lowe
Scholarly:
John Ashbery’s Humane Abstractions by David Herd
Translations:
Four Translated Laia Llobera i Serra Poems by Amie Weiss
Shattered Writing: Four Translated Valerie Mejer Caso Poems from Edinburgh Notebook by Michelle Gil-Montero
Interviews:
‘We mirror what we see’: Holly Childs Interviews Cristine Brache
Four years ago, writing an essay on David Malouf, I learned that Hawthorn Library held a copy of his first poetry collection, Bicycle and Other Poems (1970). I borrowed it, and, sadly, I returned it, too. Today, I rang the library to find the book.
Confession: I should not have read Michael Farrell’s launch speech for Oscar Schwartz’s The Honeymoon Stage before attempting this short review. I had a large attack of Bloom’s anxiety of influence, but I simply couldn’t help myself because I truly appreciate Farrell’s wit and (worldly) wisdom. And now the damage is done.
Cristine Brache is a Toronto-based poet and artist. Her work explores the nuanced power dynamics inherent in many of our relationships. Brache’s practice incorporates video, sculpture, poetry and a multitude of limited edition objects, prints, t-shirts and publications. She and I met online in 2013, when she was living in Guangzhou, China, and making videos and taking photographs of unexpected and emotional English-language phrases on t-shirts.
In the context of John Ashbery’s long career it is possible to a claim a particular significance for that book. Published in 1970, it was the first volume he wrote after re-settling in the United States in 1965, having lived in Paris for the best part of a decade. It was also the book in which he arrived at a kind of poem – ‘Soonest Mended’ is an example, but so are several others, ‘Evening in the Country’, say, or ‘The Bungalows’ – that established a way of configuring voice, narrative trajectory, human relations and cultural reference that would become recognisable as characteristically Ashberyan.
TRANSQUEER is a call for you to say something that maybe you haven’t been able to say before. It asks you to find poetry in / between lines, binaries and stultifying categorisations; from the life of flesh, from inside the bleating, many-chambered heart of gender and sexuality.
