ESSAYS
Wrestling with Mode and Meaning: the Play of Poetry in Theatre
Sitting high in the John Golden Theatre on Broadway, the opening moments of Jeremy O Harris’s Slave Play leave me open-mouthed. A black woman, dressed simply and of another era – one might presume as a slave – enters the …
Posted in ESSAYS Tagged Emilie CollyerNet Carries Water
She’s balancing me on her hip, her bare feet sinking in the mud and her tiny denim shorts cutting across her dimpled thighs … She’s standing in front of a striped annex in a caravan park, somewhere in Far North …
Posted in ESSAYS Tagged Threasa MeadsUnearthing the Greek in the Australian: an Account of Owl Publishing’s History and Foundation
Poetry publishers are an essential staple of the poetry community. When their existence is challenged by funding cuts, blinkered economic rationalisation and misguided consumerism, poets rail – as we should. But when a publisher like Owl Publishing quietly states, it …
NO THEME IX Editorial
Amulet ‘This is not a Warning, it is a Threat! Happy new year!’ So tweeted the American President before launching a missile strike in Iran that almost began World War Three. The American President (for separate reasons) was impeached, and …
Posted in ESSAYS Tagged Jeet Thayil, Mindy GillEARTH Editorial
Why ‘Earth’? Because we are of it, because we are destroying it, because there is nowhere else. Because to think about anything else right now feels like dissociation. The theme of this special issue isn’t radical. It’s not political. It’s …
Posted in ESSAYS Tagged Maria TakolanderWhen Words Have No Equals: A Response to Lisa Robertson’s Thresholds: A Prosody of Citizenship
How far, then, is it possible to move beyond the confines of official languages, to find one’s voice? Is it possible to begin again, to reinvent oneself, and therefore change interactions with others, through language? Lisa Robertson certainly thinks so.
Posted in ESSAYS Tagged Anne Carson, Clarice Lispector, Judy Annear, Lisa Robertson, Luce IrigarayColours of the Ground: How Local Pigments Seek Local Words
It was just a moment, a single moment, but it contained so much. The bubbly little Getz in front of me was definitively, synthetically red. It seemed fast too, and intent, so I got a surprise when at the end of the overtaking turn-out it stopped almost to a complete halt so that I could go by.
Posted in ESSAYS Tagged Gregory DayBAYT Editorial
In Arabic, ‘bayt’ means house and also a line of poetry. Welcome. I hope you enter and explore.
Posted in ESSAYS Tagged Zeina Hashem BeckDear White, It’s OK to be white
In October 2018, the motion ‘It’s OK to be white’ introduced in the Australian Parliament by White Supremacist Senator Pauline Hanson.
Posted in ESSAYS Tagged Ghassan HageIn Search of Living Rooms Filled With Laughter: On Belonging as a British-Lebanese in a Time of Revolution
I had my first panic attack somewhere on the Central Line between Marble Arch and Bond Street. Sitting in an empty, well-lit carriage the world darkened and tightened around me. I thought I might disappear.
Posted in ESSAYS Tagged Nasri Atallah, Ramy YousefThe Arabic Poem that Jumped the Fence
In 1960, the Syrian Lebanese poet Adonis published his prose poem manifesto and the Lebanese poet Unsi al-Hajj published his collection Lan (Won’t) with its seminal introduction theorising for the possibilities of poetry in prose.
Posted in ESSAYS Tagged Adonis, Bassam Hajjar, Huda Fakhreddine, M A Caws, Nazim al-Sayyid, Unsi al-Hajj
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