food and runes”

“… the bookshop

round the corner spells

work only if life’s banality
becomes the node

of bewitchment” !!!

It’s easy enough to look at a selection of work — an issue of cordite, for example, or (ahem) an anthology — and see its exclusions, beginning first with whatever the reader’s personal bugbears happen to be. This is fine enough — we’ve all got agendas, else perhaps we wouldn’t find reading very interesting.

I don’t want to be glib here — this mode of engagement is absolutely necessary when engaging in a proper critique. I think though, it is rarer and harder for readers to make connections between what they have in front of them, and grapple properly with the frisson caused by a set of poems together. In this instance, a set of poems very carefully chosen by Astrid.

When I put Bonny’s post up, I was really excited by the way her ideas sat with the content of the Sydney issue, and I’m very glad that Dennis and Corey have both engaged with this. And Dennis, while I disagree with the specifics of your comment, I do think your perspective on the Sydney issue as three issues away from OZ-KO is a really interesting one. There is no point having an archive of issues if we don’t look back and forth and continue to generate new ideas about and between them.

As to Patrick Jones’s city comment, mostly I don’t live in them. But millions do, where the ability to learn to communicate more effectively between and across languages is of increasing importance.

And Corey, I note the singular here: “it feels no need to take the hand of its reader, as if in a zoo”. Ouch! Did I say that? This is starting to turn nasty, like over at Overland. Zoo politics? I’m more Albee’s The Zoo Story than anything.

More seriously, I don’t know why I drew on a filtered understanding of a paper delivered at a conference I didn’t attend. I liked what I read. It seemed to fit. I’m sticking with it. (Though I must stop coveting things just down the road; just as I must stop hitting these comments boxes.)

I got the centripetal bit: that may be the differend here. Of course there are Sydney’s and there are Sydney’s. It’s not that the Sydney I got in Cordite 38 wasn’t the Sydney I wanted. More that I would have liked to have seen and read of a Sydney with a political imagination that was more representational and representative of its linguistic, ethnic and cultural diversity, one that I, and perhaps other people, have actually experienced. If that paints me as a poetry conservative, so be it. The Sydney I saw in the grain of sand that is Cordite 40, although beautifully grainy in its language use, lacked the political imagination I desire and desired.

Thanks for the turbo-charged replies. Now the choral ode that is the moaning frog chorus in my wake is reaching its epode, and soon I’ll be asked to join in.

Dennis, I think your call for better representation of the multilingual is a good one. However, I’m not sure this is adequate criticism of a collection of poems on the concept ‘Sydney’, as well as geographic site, Sydney. This is not to say I don’t think Lorange’s curatorship doesn’t mobilise aspects of Minter’s archipelagic programme, I think in fact especially since it is this conceptual, psycho-geographical Sydney that is so strongly foreshadowed in an issue by poets from around Australia it as a collection of poems shows real, incidental fidelity to the notion.

Firstly, many of the poems speak about Sydney from elsewhere, and in fact flag their participation from satellite spaces and circle the notion of Sydney via digressions through a farrago of other spaces, psychic and geographical. Perhaps the centripetal nature of this circling you’ve overlooked, Dennis. What dissatisfies you as seemingly void of the real, underrepresented and multifarious cultural-linguistic space of Sydney I think is instead a gyre of these same sometimes disseminative, sometimes digressive forces whose eye is Sydney, meaning all the cosmopolitan aspects to these poems entailed. To me, Pam Brown’s poem ‘Worldless’ speaks volumes: “Korea and Kinglake / photography exhibitions” in a poem that maps an experiential itinerancy.

As multiculturalism becomes proceedingly co-opted as part of a larger, homogenising state-led nationalism – that the immigrant’s specificity be renounced for the sake of “Australian” “values” – the need for poetry to map “the broad set of unofficial Sydneys” seems to me to become proceedingly more vital. I think many of these poems demonstrate Sydney’s cosmopolitanism, it feels no need to take the hand of its reader, as if in a zoo, and reflect on the taxonomy of its cultural diversity. That said, yes the multilingualism is missing here. This however does not make it ineligible for the archipelagic, the transnational, and to overlook the obvious cosmopolitanism of these poems – just count the instances of hybridity, locality national and international – can only be wilful, or at least mistaken. Remember, a conceptual, psycho-geographic Sydney, whose rightful multiplicity – its ability to speak for itself and thus the weird appearance and desire to speak about places inextricably connected to Sydney (I don’t think Sydney only wants to speak about itself!) in a broader international archipelago – is presented here with sophistication, spontaneity, and breadth.

If I may hazard speculation on Astrid’s methodologies, perhaps if soliciting the poetry rather than blind assessing submissions she might have sought out multilingual poetry in aid of her project of presenting unofficial Sydney in the plural. However, to properly read her curatorship I think it’s worthwhile valuing this non-representative gesture that I do think, mind you, brings us to some fascinating new perspectives of the city.