ESSAYS
Ratbag Editorial
Ratbag poetry and Ratbag poets are not, necessarily, one and the same. There are poets for whom a Ratbag poem requires the serious maltreatment of themselves, while there are others for whom Ratbaggery is the effortless demonstration of their personal grace. There are poets who begin writing as Ratbags and become stockjobbers of Romantic flap, while others begin by making exquisite paste and later come to hear the sublime music of the rant.
A Poetics of The Naughty
The word ‘naughty’ is etymologically related to the number naught. Winning, and its relationship to one, along with duplicity and its relationship to two, seem to be the only other similar contemporary instances where a number becomes descriptive of a particular kind of activity. But being naughty is not the opposite of winning, in the sense that winning is being number one.
Notes on Ratbaggery
What Is a Ratbag? We think that ‘Anxious to Know’ must be a very selfish kind of person to think that any girl should endure dancing with him all night. He must think he’s a swell dancer. He wants to know what a ratbag is. He should know as Perth is full of them, and he’s probably one himself. After all, the people of Western Australia have no existence. They are people who have come to make a fortune, then return to the eastern colonies. They have no interest in the land except as an instrument of their material welfare. They are robbers and fleers. For them, succession is not just a ratbag’s dream. It is still taken seriously. Ratbag – meaning an eccentric or ‘queer’ person – most likely originated in Western Australia’s Hutt River Province.
Ratbag’s Polemic
In Michel Serres’s book, The Parasite, rats figure as exemplary relations. When a rat turns up in your kitchen, you are each other’s guests: just as the rat is canny at thieving morsels of bread and rind, so too is the rat canny at crafting a home from a network of theft. A rat’s interference makes you an intruder …
More Intensity: Topography of Poetry Outcrops
In April 2012 I published a Guncotton blog post, responding to a paper given by Peter Minter in Melbourne. Specifically I was interested in his proposal that Australian poetry could be viewed as an ‘archipelago’ of ‘psycho-geographic’ poetic activity. With thanks to Cordite Poetry Review for inviting me, and once again to Minter for his potent departure points, I’d like to expand on that post, particularly on seeking an alternative to national/ist and ‘monolithic’ ways of framing the poetry produced in and about this continent. By proposing an ‘archipelagic map’, Minter grants local poetry an appropriate critical framework that steers away from some problematic aspects previously encountered in reading and defining ‘Australian poetry’. In doing so, this framework negotiates a view of local poetry that is properly sensible to the actual, situated ethics of poetic practice and community.
Letter to Michael Nardone
Thanks for your letter. When Kent MacCarter first invited us to co-pilot this little Cordite dinghy and asked for our thoughts on transpacificism, I fell back – on the opening lines of Richard Brautigan’s ‘Pacific Radio Fire’ – ‘The largest ocean in the world starts or ends at Monterey, California. It depends on what language you are speaking’. A tiny story of radio-burning and quotidian heartbreak, it is a narrative speck on the Pacific rim, dwarfed by ‘the hugeness of the Pacific Ocean with all its vocabularies’. Indeed, the Pacific, as a whole, is unfathomable.
Letter to Josephine Rowe
It is tomorrow where you are. There are record heatwaves and bushfires burning through the interior. Red-brown clouds of smoke where the woodlands smolder. Here, in Montreal, we are deep in snow. Deep in snow, I mutter out loud, tromping over Mont Royal: Deep in snow, eep in ow, e – i – o. Barely a syllable seems to rise above the drifts.
Secretary of Smash the State
Some influential, provocative articulations of position made by American US poet Kenneth Goldsmith are through redefinitions of the type of work that poetry is, and the type of work a poet does. Goldsmith’s critical writing continues to attract controversy in Canada and the USA, partly by how his re-figuration of the idiomatic labour of the poet challenges the discourse of craft. Rather than a specialised virtuous labourer or artisan, Goldsmith’s poetic worker is a hybrid of wage slave and outlaw.
Posted in ESSAYS Tagged Anne Glickman, Brian Fawcett, Donato Mancini, Kenneth Goldsmith, poetry criticism, Steve McCaffery, Stuart Newton Leave a commentHere(by) Freight
Scanning out across the shipping yards of Long Beach, California, my eyes barged into a crowd of ship-to-shore cranes, their booms twisting atop a copse of gantries. Busy operator cabins, tucked in at pivoting junctions, rendered the cranes a leisurely …
Le roi Nickel: Jean Mariotti en Nouvelle-Calédonie
[Cordite Poetry Review published this piece only in its native French. Resources for its translation were unavailable - KM] S’il vous plaît lire les traductions en anglais de ses poèmes. C’est ainsi que Mariotti s’est présenté en 1948 à l’éditeur …
Reinventing the Ancient Across four Cultures, One Ocean
Introduction A Nest of Cinnamon was an international, multi-art form performance of three distinct art forms and artists: 1: poetry and spoken text created and performed by Angela Costi 2: playing of the Sheng instrument by Wang Zheng-Ting. The Sheng …
Posted in ESSAYS Tagged Angela Costi, Christian Leavesley, Stringraphy Ensemble, Wang Zheng-Ting Leave a commentEditorial Introduction: Crossing Bloodlines
Baca pengantar dalam Bahasa Indonesia The poems in this collection trace the overlapping cycles of the human journey from birth to death across the space/time habitat we measure in footfalls and poetic metre. Travelled in the company of family and …
Posted in ESSAYS Tagged Deborah Cole, Dorothea Rosa Herliany, John H. McGlynn, Kent MacCarter, translation Leave a comment
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