ESSAYS
Emotion and the Self in Games
There are some books that carry you along a journey until your tears make it impossible to read. Films and television shows, too. Games evoke emotion in a similar way to non-interactive works, with some exceptions – the greatest difference being emotion facilitated through action. In this essay, I look at games and electronic literature that have triggered my emotions, and reflect on how this was achieved. The poet, novelist, screenwriter, playwright and games writer will find similar rhetorical devices being applied in different ways.
Prints in the New Snow: Notes on ‘Es Lebe der König’, J.H. Prynne’s Elegy to Paul Celan
In 1966 Prynne emphasised the necessity for poetry to ‘emphatically reclaim the power of knowledge for each and any of us in our common answerability as the creatures of language.’[1. Keston Sutherland, “Hilarious Absolute Daybreak,” Glossator: Theory and Practice of the Commentary, 2 (2010): 115-148, 117.] The ekphrastic, proprioceptive and dedicatory analysis that Prynne demanded of his readers through Kitchen Poems and The White Stone reaches a point of crescendo with Brass in 1971.
Notes from Yerevan, Armenia
First impression: Yerevan undulates out the semi-desert, ringed with what look suspiciously like nuclear reactors. Flight SU1860 jolts down at (the recently privatised) Zvartnots airport, and we pass a dis-assemblage of passenger jets in various states of stripped-down decay. In …
Notes from Medellín, Colombia
Since it began 23 years ago, the Internacional de Poesía de Medellín has grown to become a major poetry festival in the world, in a country riven by 50 years of civil war. This year’s Festival (6-13 July) coincided with a new round of peace talks in Havana between the Colombian Government and FARC, and FARC rebels reportedly fighting security forces in the mountains. The Festival featured Australian poet Les Wicks, who reports on his experience below. The Festival has also ‘grown’ up alongside seismic changes for the city of Medellín, Colombian’s second-largest and once described as the ‘most violent city in the world’ (Time, 1988), due to its brutal cocaine drug-cartel culture.
Foreword Viidikas: Reintroduction of the ’68 Poet
John Tranter, renowned Australian poet and occasional but incisive chronicler of the driving forces behind those Australian poets now classified as ‘The Generation of ‘68’ once wrote that the ‘Generation of ‘68’ was all about:
‘not the replacing of the old by the new (which soon becomes the established), but by the continual recognition of the need to ‘make it new’, to break down the urge to establish reputations and an entrenched position.’
Anecdotes surround Vicki Viidikas. None is definitive.
‘It was a place of force—’ Re-reading the Poems of ‘Ariel’
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.
NO THEME 2 Editorial
Of the poems I’ve chosen for this theme-free issue, some are headily elusive, such as the epistolary ‘Shooting“Correspondence”Gallery’ where meanings crumple and re-form through their costly tousled language.
unAustralian English: Oscar Schwartz Visits Chris Mann in NYC
I went to visit Chris Mann in his apartment in Manhattan at the beginning of July 2012. Half of his apartment was covered with plants. There were trees, ferns and flowers hanging from every landing. Mounted on the walls were wood-framed bookshelves, completely packed. The other half of the apartment had a wooden table, kitchen, grand piano, and beyond that, some rooms for sleeping.
Recording Archives: ‘A Way with Words’
For two years, from September 2009 to October 2011, I produced A Way with Words, a weekly radio program showcasing contemporary Australian poetry. In all, 106 episodes (each of around five minutes) were produced. Presented here is a chance to listen in on six gems from the archives vault – some of my favourites, chosen for the most part because they are impossible to find elsewhere as audio. A Way with Words was broadcast weekly by ArtSound in Canberra, picked up by Ozwrite on the National Community Radio Network, Dover Road Radio broadcasting from the Isle of Wright in the UK, 2KRRR Community Radio in Kandos and 3RRR in Melbourne.
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.
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 …
Poetry as Extorreor Monolothe: Finnegans Wake on Bakhtin
I was out drunk with friends one night in Perth, Western Australia. My father had just died. We were walking home, so to speak, and our path took us past the Church of Christ. At that, I launched myself at the wall of the church, found a toehold and lunged up into the air. I grasped the ‘t’ decal and with all my weight managed to prise it from the wall. The Church of Chris looked down upon us all. I continued on my way home, or rather to here, but not without the occasional somewhat gratified memory of the incident. I cannot help thinking of the sudden appearance of the Church of Chris as a sort of revelation, with something to say about the truth of something. That is what reading Finnegans Wake is like.
Reinventing the Ancient Across four Cultures, One Ocean
The collaborative mix of Ancient instrument, Sheng, modern reinvention, Stringraphy and Costi’s type of poetic practice led the artists to explore in detail the mythological journey of the Phoenix.
INDONESIA Editorial
0$). So why Indonesia? How did I come to get in touch with Sapardi Djoko Damono in the first place, let alone McGlynn, Cole and Herliany? During the time I was learning the rigging of ropes and jibs that intertwine …
Editorial Introduction: Crossing Bloodlines
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.
Editorial Pengantar: Menyebrang Garis Keturunan
Read this introduction in English Puisi-puisi dalam kumpulan ini merunut siklus-siklus perjalanan manusia yang bertumpang-tindih sejak kelahiran sampai kematian, melintasi ruang dan waktu yang kita hitung dengan derap kaki dan ukuran puitika. Berkelana di dalam lingkup keluarga dan masyarakat, perjalanan …
THE REALPOETIK MANIFESTO
FOR TOO LONG has poetry been disregarded as a valid vehicle for the exploration of real world experience. Too often has poetry been filed in the ‘too hard’ basket and deemed ‘irrelevant’ and ‘inaccessible.’
