- 115: SPACE
with A Sometimes
114: NO THEME 13
with J Toledo & C Tse
113: INVISIBLE WALLS
with A Walker & D Disney
112: TREAT
with T Dearborn
111: BABY
with S Deo & L Ferney
110: POP!
with Z Frost & B Jessen
109: NO THEME 12
with C Maling & N Rhook
108: DEDICATION
with L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik
107: LIMINAL
with B Li
106: OPEN
with C Lowe & J Langdon
105: NO THEME 11
with E Grills & E Stewart
104: KIN
with E Shiosaki
103: AMBLE
with E Gomez and S Gory
102: GAME
with R Green and J Maxwell
101: NO THEME 10
with J Kinsella and J Leanne
100: BROWNFACE
with W S Dunn
99: SINGAPORE
with J Ip and A Pang
97 & 98: PROPAGANDA
with M Breeze and S Groth
96: NO THEME IX
with M Gill and J Thayil
95: EARTH
with M Takolander
94: BAYT
with Z Hashem Beck
93: PEACH
with L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong
92: NO THEME VIII
with C Gaskin
91: MONSTER
with N Curnow
90: AFRICAN DIASPORA
with S Umar
89: DOMESTIC
with N Harkin
88: TRANSQUEER
with S Barnes and Q Eades
87: DIFFICULT
with O Schwartz & H Isemonger
86: NO THEME VII
with L Gorton
85: PHILIPPINES
with Mookie L and S Lua
84: SUBURBIA
with L Brown and N O'Reilly
83: MATHEMATICS
with F Hile
82: LAND
with J Stuart and J Gibian
81: NEW CARIBBEAN
with V Lucien
80: NO THEME VI
with J Beveridge
57.1: EKPHRASTIC
with C Atherton and P Hetherington
57: CONFESSION
with K Glastonbury
56: EXPLODE
with D Disney
55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUS
with M Chakraborty and K MacCarter
55: FUTURE MACHINES
with Bella Li
54: NO THEME V
with F Wright and O Sakr
53.0: THE END
with P Brown
52.0: TOIL
with C Jenkins
51.1: UMAMI
with L Davies and Lifted Brow
51.0: TRANSTASMAN
with B Cassidy
50.0: NO THEME IV
with J Tranter
49.1: A BRITISH / IRISH
with M Hall and S Seita
49.0: OBSOLETE
with T Ryan
48.1: CANADA
with K MacCarter and S Rhodes
48.0: CONSTRAINT
with C Wakeling
47.0: COLLABORATION
with L Armand and H Lambert
46.1: MELBOURNE
with M Farrell
46.0: NO THEME III
with F Plunkett
45.0: SILENCE
with J Owen
44.0: GONDWANALAND
with D Motion
43.1: PUMPKIN
with K MacCarter
43.0: MASQUE
with A Vickery
42.0: NO THEME II
with G Ryan
41.1: RATBAGGERY
with D Hose
41.0: TRANSPACIFIC
with J Rowe and M Nardone
40.1: INDONESIA
with K MacCarter
40.0: INTERLOCUTOR
with L Hart
39.1: GIBBERBIRD
with S Gory
39.0: JACKPOT!
with S Wagan Watson
38.0: SYDNEY
with A Lorange
37.1: NEBRASKA
with S Whalen
37.0: NO THEME!
with A Wearne
36.0: ELECTRONICA
with J Jones
CONTRIBUTORS
Robert Wood
Peripheral Peripheries: Robert Wood on Alvin Pang
Here there are plastic chairs, plastic tables, phone screens, tv soaps, chicken rice, and the poem’s final word, which tells us what we have always known.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Alvin Pang, Robert Wood
Wembley Food Court
Intent on wonton destruction we fought streets combatted mortality thieved grandness from auto-tuned oysters. They sung out our numbers saucy asked and the sambal yams awaited deliverance. We forgot the steam shucked corn the color of lions drank nettle tea …
Posted in 84: SUBURBIA
Tagged Robert Wood
Review Short: Shane Rhodes’s Dead White Men
From the title of Shane Rhodes’s collection Dead White Men, we know we are in fraught if familiar territory. Those men are the subjects to be critiqued, argued with, taken down in light of today’s history.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Robert Wood, Shane Rhodes
Review Short: Homer Rieth’s The Garden of Earth
You could be forgiven for thinking that ‘Australia’ was simply this place, rather than an imagined community. It is of course not only a phantasm or a figment that is whole, but also real and divisible.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Robert Wood
Language Barriers
Many live after L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E then, but few live as it. There is no comparable, or adequate, rupture precisely because there is a lack of Historical, and philosophical, work being done. Cue the misunderstanding of what to radically break with.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Robert Wood
The New Reality in Australian Poetry
The generation of Murray is not my generation. The generation of Adamson is not my generation either. Nor is it Tranter or Kinsella.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Albert Tucker, Bonny Cassidy, Corey Wakeling, David Unaipon, Dorothy Hewett, luke beesley, Robert Wood
snake-well : a suite of wheatlands poems
i. ash loam and foot flesh farm-bones and skin maps pink, grey, graveground, form-grasses and wavetaints wellbaked and seed black ii. starlows the cropframe saltcanvas of generation, plateau waist the size of place iii. tigerhand by jokebite, and fivethink of …
Posted in 72: THE END
Tagged Robert Wood
Robert Wood Interviews Alan Loney
I first met Alan Loney at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. I was studying there at the time and Alan had been invited as a guest of Robert Creeley at SUNY Buffalo.
Posted in INTERVIEWS
Tagged Alan Loney, Charles Olson, Max Gimblett, Robert Creeley, Robert Wood
Review Short: Omar Musa’s Parang
Omar Musa is something of a phenomenon. I mean that both in the demotic and the philosophical senses. Self-publisher, author of the successful novel Here Come the Dogs (longlisted for the Miles Franklin), lyricist with international hip hop outfit MoneyKat, Wikipedia subject. As demonstrated by the author photo in this book Parang, autobiographical promotional videos (‘Live and Direct from Kingsley’s Chicken’), comparisons to Junot Diaz and his sartorial style, Musa has made a career from ‘the street’.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Omar Musa, Robert Wood
Cruel Buffoonery
In the North American summer of 2015 I journeyed into the heart of the MFA industrial complex.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Charles Bernstein, Clifford Geertz, Erving Goffman, John Kinella, Robert Wood
Review Short: Daneen Wardrop’s Cyclorama and Terrence Chiusano’s on generation and corruption
About a decade ago ‘trauma’ became an industry in the academic literary critical economy. This was due in part to the success of Cathy Caruth, but there were other theorists that mattered before and after (Freud’s ‘repetition compulsion’ and Elaine Scarry’s body in pain). Holding hands with trauma was ‘witness’. Of course, witnessing has been in the discourse for a long time as well, but there was a steady growth in its paradigmatic quality after the Holocaust industry began to develop more fully (see Norman Finkelstein).
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Daneen Wardrop, Robert Wood, Terrence Chiusano
Review Short: Amelia Dale’s Metadata and Thalia’s A Loose Thread
The question what are we to do at and with the limits of language presents itself as the central question in the two books under review here. That they frame themselves as poetry means that the context in which this occurs is different from art or graphic design – two fields into which both could easily be placed. One does not ‘read’ these works but apprehends them.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Amelia Dale, Robert Wood, Thalia
Review Short: Shane McCauley’s Trickster
It is something of a paradigm in literary criticism (poetics included) to couple West Australians with place. Of late Tim Winton and John Kinsella have occupied this ground, but it is there in thinking about Randolph Stow and Dorothy Hewett and many more besides. It was Winton, after all, who wrote – ‘we come from ‘the wrong side of the wrong continent in the wrong hemisphere”. The place, thought of quite literally as location, is simply ‘wrong’, meaning not quite right, meaning askew. This is to say nothing of the spirit here, or how, for a great number of people (some Noongars and others included), this always was and always will be the very centre of the world.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Robert Wood, Shane McCauley
Review Short: Ian Gibbins’s and Judy Morris’s Floribunda
How far we are from the radical days of realism. Prior to Adorno’s dismantling of Lukacs and the Stalinist led state institutionalisation of it, realism may have laid claim to being an innovative aesthetic with agreeably progressive political inclinations.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ian Gibbins, Judy Morris, Robert Wood
Robert Wood Reviews Duncan Hose, Jean Kent and Alyson Miller
In the library of Australian poetry animals occupy many pages. There are poems on kangaroo, frog, platypus and bandicoot; pig, dog, possum and cow; sheep, fox, dugong and crocodile; and an aviary of birds from budgies and pelicans to magpies and herons.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Alyson Miller, Duncan Hose, Jean Kent, Robert Wood