ESSAYS
INTERLOCUTOR Editorial
Before you do anything else today, I want you to stop and listen. I want you to close your eyes and listen to your surroundings. What is it that you can hear? Birdsong? Is it the sound of passing cars? The wind whispering?
Nativism and the Interlocutor
He couldn’t remember having read the Lorca poem before, but he must have as the parallel between the two poems was too great to be coincidental, besides, he had certainly read the book years ago.
I Have Three Wounds: Of Life, Love and Death
All of what remained in us was down to hours – daily, weekly accumulations of them – silent spans like we were puppets without any public function. My family and I were silenced humans, wounds of exile struggling to enjoy just a moment in an empty Adelaide street.
The Interlocutors: Poetry and Jazz in Collaboration
How do jazz and poetry talk to each other? Of course, they can lament their shared marginality to the majority culture – but that will take us only so far. They can boast of their heroic figures over a century (jazz) or the millennia (poetry). They can hyperventilate about the talents of the latest prodigies in either form, but that will almost always be ahead of the facts.
boy, what god couldve done if only hed had money
Dyslexic Empathy A (there being of course some subjects that just dont have a name (iknowcoziwasthere (a semantically deviant sentence both true and false))), a caricature of Maybe.
GIBBERBIRD Editorial
This issue is a poetic conversation between a source poem and ten poems found from within its lines. It’s a refraction of language and image through poetic prisms, an intersection of the familiar and unfamiliar, blurring the edges through the 11 authors’ interpretations.
A Diasporic Journey: Greek-Australian Poetry in Bilingual and English Publications
It all started for me in 1983 when Dimitris Tsaloumas – a Greek poet in Melbourne – had just won the National Book Council Award for best book of the year with his poetry collection The Observatory, in bilingual form. In other words, he had won an award based on the translations of his original Greek poems, as the judging panel did not have any knowledge of Greek. It was certainly a first for Australian letters.
Asian Australian Diasporic Poets: A Commentary
This essay provides a survey of the poetry of some Asian Australian poets, and does not attempt to be definitive. Diasporic poetics raise more questions than they answer and are just as much about dis-placement as about place, just as much about a ‘poetics of uncertainty’ as about certainties of style/nation/identity.
JACKPOT! Editorial
Twenty years ago, I decided to leave university after five weeks into my first semester. I’d worked hard for a year in a pre-tertiary course and discovered a genuine spring of warmth that bubbled inside of me when my college lecturers praised my creative writing assignments. Later, I was accepted into a good university and took English Literature 101. An editor of a literary journal had suggested that my short story writing was lacking in momentum, but critiqued my misadventure with words as having a certain ‘poetic’ quality. His advice was to try my hand at verse.
Three Poems and Webb Lecture by the Inaugural CAL Chair of Poetry
Robert Adamson began his post as the inaugural CAL Chair in Australian Poetry at UTS in February 2012. Funded by the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) for three years, the Chair in Australian Poetry is the first of its kind in Australia.
Words Wrought in the Rockies
This week, Canadian poet Caitlynn Cummings, editor of the Calgary-based journal, filling station, gives us the lowdown on the recent Canmore artsPeak festival, which took place in the Canadian Rockies in June.
Notes from Narrogin and the Great Southern
I’ve led a spoiled existence over the past few decades when it comes to living in communities with thriving programs of literary activities and writers’ festivals: firstly Perth, then Albany and Geraldton. My move last year to Narrogin has found me in much quieter environs. I’m enjoying exploring my new neighbourhood. After decades living on the coast, the landscape of the wheatbelt is slowly working its way into my poems.
Divertimenti: Hemensley on the Time of Vleeskens
In memoriam: Cornelis Vleeskens, 1948-2012 Reading Cornelis Vleeskens’ divertimenti on random days (Earthdance, 2010), has me thinking of Franco Beltrametti, as occasionally I do. We almost met, courtesy of Tim Longville and John Riley, who’d advised that Franco, our fellow …
Notes on Five Canadian Small (micro) Publishers
Canada has had a wide array of small literary publishers over the past few decades. Most notably, the small press explosion in the 1960s created small presses such as Coach House Books, blewointment, Talonbooks and Oberon Press.
Islanding the Antipodes? Notes on Archipelagic Poetics
The result of this alternative view of Australian poetry, argues Minter, is a ‘more ethical set of metaphors’ to describe the intentions and movements of Australian poets and the affects of their work. Such metaphor would include, for example: distance; poetry as diplomacy; and poetry as survival, among others.
Gig Ryan’s New and Selected Poems
Gig Ryan asserts that, ‘Poetry is our response to the world, but it’s also the thing we poets find the most taxing, the best of engaging our brains. Ideally – like all good art – it should make us think.’ Yet, as she also acknowledges, meaning is often secondary when reading poetry. That is, it is intensified and made more complex by the poem’s sensual materiality and the affect it may evoke.
SYDNEY Editorial
This time last year, I returned to Sydney after almost two years away. For those years, Sydney had existed for me as a terrible video screen, an occasional and discomfiting image through choppy internet connections; or else, as a perfect …
Ross Gibson’s Blustertown
The town’s biggest fools are those who come from elsewhere and fall in love with it when they’re young. As a rule, these fools fall hard, beyond reason and recovery. I know because I fell that way. As you do when you’re twenty.
‘Xerographesis’: On Poetic Art and the Object in Amanda Stewart and Anne Tardos
Realism seems very S and M in its desires – Amanda Stewart, ‘Poetry Ideas’ What I write, as I have said before, could only be called poetry because there is no other category in which to put it. – Marianne …
These Living Walls of Jet: Visiting the Open Houses of Poetry
The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will. from Czeslaw …
The Quickening Art of Jazz Poetry
‘if you’re in this higher condition and you’re performing, something transcends the music and reaches inside of someone else… someone gets it, they leave and do their thing. Then something comes out of their mouth they didn’t intend to say, …
Little Magazines Exemplars: A Companion Piece to ‘To Anthologise the Now Perpetually’
There simply is no easily had “brief record” of modern and contemporary little magazines held by the University at Buffalo’s Poetry Collection; even if we were to divide by era, geography, or special interest—there are, after all, over 9,000 such …
‘Hunger repletion musick fire’: Dransfield, Post-punk and the Countrylink Express
Many of you will be clued-in on the recent commentary re. Gray and Lehmann’s Australian Poetry Since 1788 anthology, published toward the end of last year. One of the criticisms of the book has been the choice of poets included, …
Australian Print Poetry and the Small Press: Who’s Doing the Books?
One of many pressing concerns for small publishers in Australia is simply this: are there enough buyers to consume their print runs? The question begets three subsequent concerns. Firstly, are Creative Writing programs creating a glut of writers and, in …
