CONTRIBUTORS

Fiona Hile

Fiona Hile is the author of a chapbook of poems, The Family Idiot (Vagabond), and a full-length collection, Novelties (Hunter). Read her ongoing commentary on Australian poetic communities.

Introduction to Elena Gomez’s Body of Work

There’s a difference between occupying a seemingly unceasing parade of subject positions through a kind of colonising, thieving, dissipatory borderlessness … and inhabiting them as a form of aesthetic and political revolt.

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Sandra D’Urso Interviews Fiona Hile

To read Hile’s poetry is to encounter what it means to be a desiring subject in a contemporary world. Her use of vernacular recalls and transforms the details of everyday life, while gesturing toward the grand themes of a European philosophical tradition.

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MATHEMATICS Editorial

I was already quite a few years into a creative writing PhD titled ‘Generic Engineering’ and flailing around quite spectacularly in a galaxy of words when an academic friend, perhaps hoping to spare me the indignity of a completed thesis and potential employment, flipped to the middle of the 526-page book he was reading and wordlessly pointed to a single sentence. ‘Due to a predilection whose origin I will leave it up to the reader to determine,’ he read, ‘I will choose the symbol ♀ for this inscription.’

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Submission to Cordite 83: MATHEMATICS

MathematicsThe invention of transfinite set theory by the 19th Century German mathematician, Georg Cantor, hinges the romantic conception of a boundless infinite to a post-Cantorian description of an infinity of infinities.

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Whatever

dictate your every word, you bright nymphs mistake the possible. Thank you for the plangent note, the sacrifices that were not at all intended as an offering. The snare you prepared with the guile of an anxious siren. If I …

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Muster

Every star has its double, different coloured blood cometing at length. How you will defeat me, with a scythe or a ladder, a hoked up piece of trash untucked beneath a raging plinth. Your feelings, juiced on perforated, in which …

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Fiona Hile Reviews Lionel Fogarty

Lionel G. Fogarty is an indigenous Australian poet who is recognised for the excavation of a poetic space in which, as Michael Brennan has written, ‘his community and culture is recuperated and asserted’ whilst ‘dominant discourses, both political and poetic’ are subverted and destabilised. These qualities make Fogarty’s work difficult to review in a context in which the status of indigenous literature remains, for some institutions at least, seemingly unapproachable.

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The Satisfaction of Speech

Stretched out across the selfish wool table, I fix on a mood in the high key of you, twiddle my hi-viz wedding ring and laugh at the way rhyme and metre protect us from happiness. Angels’ tears fill the rivers …

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Bauxite

(Notes from a Lecture Delivered by a Former English Poet Laureate) At the age of six you were a bloody little genius Bauxite was the only word you could spell But I knew the year of the Battle of Hastings …

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Courtly Love

Song of the troubadour, dance of the happy shades mid-saggital cut-away of the Palatine Uvula catalogue of all catalogues includes Lufthansa treachery, the Alphabet murderer’s citational liquidation. Not quite revealing the thing that offends you, the impossibility of saying it …

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Wandering through the Universal Archive

One of the sequences produced by the collaborative entity, A Constructed World, renders the phrases ‘No need to be great’ and ‘Stay in Groups’ in a range of media – silk-stitch, screen print, photography and painting. One of the painted versions of the image shows a naked woman covered in yellow post-it notes overseen by a hulking, shadowy male. These figures represent the artists Jacqueline Riva and Geoff Lowe. The image appears again in the form of a photograph and the installation was staged in various places around the world – as if the only way to get the message across would be to subject it to constant repetition in as many different formats as possible. Indeed, a number of the collective’s performances and installations attest to the impossibility of communication – even as these take the form of images that can’t fail to deliver. Avant Spectacle A Micro Medicine Show, 2011, features skeleton-costumed performers inexpertly singing and playing instruments while six knee-high wooden letters – S, P, E, E, C and H – burn like small condemned buildings at front of stage.

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Why Are there So Many Poems about Goldfish?

It’s not as if they speak to us of some tequila moonscape lost to sense, though the telepathy of our own hand-coded secrets might. Python Technology integrates our systems more effectively, overruns us like mice. To bolt a metal bar …

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