CONTRIBUTORS

Jacinta Le Plastrier

Jacinta Le Plastrier is a Melbourne-based poet, writer and editor. She edits the ‘Guncotton’ blog for Cordite Poetry Review, curates the monthly Gilgamesh Modern Salon and is Publisher at John Leonard Press. Her poetry collection, The Book of Skins, will be published March 2014.

http://www.jacintaleplastrierofficial.blogspot.com.au/

Poetry of the Eye: The Visual Aspects of Poetry

Posted on May 12, 2016 by Jacinta Le Plastrier

Image by Tim Grey Presented by Cordite Publishing Inc. and Australian Poetry, and hosted by poet Toby Fitch, this workshop at the 2016 Emerging Writers’ Festival will open your eyes to the potential of the poem on the page. By …

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Jacinta Le Plastrier Interview Sarah Holland-Batt

Posted on September 10, 2014 by Jacinta Le Plastrier

Australian poet Sarah Holland-Batt, b. 1982 in Queensland, grew up in Australia and America and also writes fiction and criticism. She was a Fulbright Scholar at New York University where she attained an M.F.A, and is currently a Senior Lecturer …

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Analogue Bodies: A Conversation with Tom Lee and Zoë Sadokierski

Posted on July 10, 2014 by Jacinta Le Plastrier

Analogue Bodies is a collection of essays by Tom Lee, materialised as set of illustrated books by Zoë Sadokierski. The project looks at different parts of, and events within, the human body and historical ways of depicting and making sense of them. It aims to humour and, on its day, to educate. It was presented as part of the recent Emerging Writers’ Festival 2014 at the Wheeler Centre.

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Jacinta Le Plastrier Interviews Nicholas Walton-Healey

Posted on June 7, 2014 by Jacinta Le Plastrier

Image of and by Nicholas Walton-Healey Land Before Lines is a book from Melbourne-based photographer and writer Nicholas Walton-Healey. The 144-page, full-colour volume (the images appear in black and white here for page recall considerations) features portraits of 68 Victorian …

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The Writing: Benjamin Laird

Posted on May 16, 2014 by Jacinta Le Plastrier

Melbourne-based Benjamin Laird writes computer programs and electronic poetry, which he discusses here in the first of a new, occasional blog series looking at the writing practice of contemporary Australian poets.

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When they Come for You: Poetry that Resists

Posted on March 11, 2014 by Jacinta Le Plastrier

‘This machine surrounds hatred and forces it to surrender’ were the words inscribed on the banjo of American folk legend and activist Pete Seeger, who died at 94 in late January 2014. Reading the tributes to Seeger, I was struck by a recurrent theme: his moral courage, which he lived out unrelentingly across a lifetime. Commenting on the ‘not common behaviours’ which made his life exemplary, a New Yorker post by biographer Alec Wilkinson wrote of ‘his insistence on his right to entertain his own conscience’.

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Shining Worlds: On the Artist’s Book of Robert Adamson and Peter Kingston

Posted on December 23, 2013 by Jacinta Le Plastrier

I’m sitting in the Rare Books room of the State Library of Victoria, lost in time and strangely joyous as I encounter one of its new acquisitions, the late 2012 ‘artist’s book’ and collaboration between poet Robert Adamson and well-known Australian artist Peter Kingston, Shark-net Seahorses of Balmoral: A Harbour Memoir.

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Silence Turned into Objects: Looking at where Poets Write

Posted on October 9, 2013 by Jacinta Le Plastrier

Among the most extreme, in the sense of horrific, writing places for poems bequeathed to us would be the conditions in which Ezra Pound produced The Pisan Cantos. There is some speculation as to the exact number of those Cantos …

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‘It was a place of force—’ Re-reading the Poems of ‘Ariel’

Posted on June 12, 2013 by Jacinta Le Plastrier

So much has happened to poetry since Sylvia Plath completed her last poems fifty years ago in 1963 that it might seem weird or regressively sentimental to focus back on them. But, encouraged to do so by a number of anniversary events around the globe this year, what strikes is the endurance of these final poems’ brutal clarity.

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Suspensions of the Real

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Jacinta Le Plastrier

Studying the Sylvia Plath archival papers at Smith College in 1993, poet, editor and critic Felicity Plunkett intuited that a number of pages were missing from one poem draft. Plath assiduously page-marked drafts of the poems that were to become the Ariel poems. Plunkett was unable to uncover these pages in any of the archives made available to her, which were still in the process of being organised. One night, in dream, she ‘receives’ a phone call, made from a black, period-piece telephone, words delivered in Plath’s idiosyncratic trans-Atlantic diction – ‘look in the yellow folder’.

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IWD: Murder, She Wrote

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Jacinta Le Plastrier

Three lines from The Seventh section of Finola Moorhead’s A Handwritten Modern Classic, first published in 1977 and re-issued March 2013 by Spinifex Press, close out a varied discussion by the author on the political nature of death, that Socrates’ death ‘was political’ (as underlined in the handwritten original), that Socrates was not a writer and that writers ‘need teachers like Socrates’. In the same section she argues that artists often use ‘Another’s pain … for the success of expression’. ‘Art as comfort’, Moorhead follows on, ‘ — strange concept. / Such assumptions aren’t questioned often enough.’

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