ESSAYS

Exoskeletonism: Writing Poetry about the Films of Akira Kurosawa

These lines are from a second poem of mine about the image of the actor Toshiro Mifune in the Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon (1950), a follow-up to my poem ‘The Bandit Without Mifune’, which refers to an autonomous image of the bandit character waking in the oil of the celluloid – a much better line than those above, I know.

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Weaving Blankets of Story and Hearts of Gold: An Archival-poetics Praxis

My dad was diagnosed with lung cancer on his fifty-ninth birthday and after a fierce battle with his body and mind, he died two years later. In the face of all odds, he maintained optimism and hope.

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NO THEME 10 Editorial

A callout for a poetry of consciousness ‘that enacts and is responsible for what it considers’, that has been written with an awareness of ‘crises, brinks and redress’, was always going to bring some powerful and confronting work.

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BROWNFACE editorial

I was 12 and in Year 7 when Chris Lilley’s mockumentary Summer Heights High aired on ABC for the first time.

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maar bidi: Carving Sovereignty and Desire in Indigenous Youth Storytelling

Academia has inherited a long history of non-Indigenous people speaking for Indigenous people.

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A Mouth Saying Stroh-beh-ree

For reasons sufficient to the writer, as ‘Papa’ would say, certain places, people and words have been left out of these notes. Some are secret and some are known by everyone.

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In Black and White: Pictures from the Camera Obscura

I’ve been trying to train myself out of black. It’s not going well – on the rack my eye still heads that way every time. I know in theory that some colour would suit me better but I seem to be shut in the dark.

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SINGAPORE Editorial

We consciously eschewed the substantial but well-represented body of Singaporean poetry originally written in English, and instead sought out voices from Tamil, Malay, Chinese and more which have not been as well circulated in the anglophone literary world.

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Poetry Against Neoliberal Capitalism in Ali Alizadeh and Melinda Bufton

Poetry has a long history of disruption, resistance, and revolution, overlapping the concerns of politics with literature and the boundaries of language.

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Direct Action on Things: Harry Hooton and Artist Film in Australia

A line from 1855, first published by Walt Whitman in the poem ‘Song of Myself’, appears again at the beginning of a film produced during a Creative Arts Fellowship at the Australian National University in 1969

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PROPAGANDA Editorial

Loaded term: propaganda. Hardly the mild descriptive tag of its origin, the word now invokes visions of cynical manipulation, grand conspiracies to turn entire populations against their own interests and against each other. Sure, plenty of coordination between bad actors …

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Excerpt from In the Time of the Manaroans

Miro Bilbrough’s memoir, In the time of the Manaroans, is set in a remote countercultural milieu in Aotearoa in the late seventies.

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The Surveyed Vision: 36 Meditations on 3 Books by Barry Hill (Peacemongers, Grass Hut Work and Reason & Lovelessness)

a. Justice is Barry Hill’s overarching leitmotiv.

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Music Becomes Memory: What Listening to Music Does to the Poetic Voice

When I think about the music that’s closest to me, that’s an inextricable part of my identity in how unwaveringly I have carried it through time.

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Fox Mask Children

Exactly one year ago, foxes appeared in the forests and towns around here for the first time. In muscular structures, trauma or damage to the fibres is the very condition of growth.

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CREATURELY: In Praise of New Poetry from Aotearoa

We are living in uncanny, uncertain, and uneven times. It is difficult not to feel undone by it all.

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A Poet’s Progress in the ABC: Reflections on a Life in Radio

On my job application to the ABC in 1983 I mentioned that I was a poet, even though the job advertised was for a purely technical position as a trainee sound engineer.

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Anti-Doodles: a Dada-ist Game for Long Pandemic Afternoons

As 20th Century Europe erupted into the chaos of the Great War, Dadaists responded with art forms that reflected the fragmentation and the unintelligibility of the world around them.

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On Speaking and Unheard Women: Interrogating Classical Silence in the Poetry of Anna Jackson and Helen Rickerby

When we meet Cassandra in Aeschylus’s ‘Agamemnon’ – this stolen princess, this famed beauty turned ill-starred prophet, hauled onstage as Agamemnon’s prize for victory over the Trojans – she is silent for 270 lines.

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Motherhood, Language and the Everyday During the Poetry of Astrid Lorange, Amy Brown and L K Holt

For a long time after my daughter was born, I looked for representations of motherhood everywhere. I looked for it in casual interactions with other mothers in the park and on the street, I looked for it with friends, in mothers’ groups and on the screen.

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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 …

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Net 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 …

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Unearthing 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 …

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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 …

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