ESSAYS
Never Be Alone Again: Hip-Hop Sampling as a Technique in Contemporary Australian Poetry
One of those most important battles of hip-hop’s first two decades wasn’t waged between two MCs at a cypher. And it wasn’t a couple of b-boy crews popping and locking at a block party. Instead, it pitted a hip-hop clown against a puffy-sleeved Irish balladeer.
EARTH 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 …
When 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.
Colours 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.
BAYT Editorial
In Arabic, ‘bayt’ means house and also a line of poetry. Welcome. I hope you enter and explore.
Dear 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.
In 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.
The 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.
Reel Bad Lebs
Up until I was nine years old, my favourite film was Blood Sport. Frank Dux, who was played by Van Damme in the prime of his career, competed against the world’s best fighters in the underground martial arts tournament called the Kumite.
PEACH Editorial
On 23 April 1979, Blair Peach, a teacher from New Zealand, was killed by a blow to the head delivered by an officer of the Metropolitan Police Force Special Patrol Group (SPG).
System as Sociopath: Poetics, Politics and Nursing in a Letter from the States
Christmas Eve on the unit. The nurses’ station is in the middle of a long corridor, consisting of a low counter about ten feet long. A couple of psychiatric nurses are seated at laptops on wheeled stands, looking through medication orders, writing notes.
Australian Marginalia: Encounters with Australia in Raymond Roussel, John Ashbery and Georges Perec
You would not like Melbourne, for it is full of handsomes [sic] cabs. I adore it, for I love this form of locomotion. I have already used the candle-powered heater, for it is winter here; during the first part of the crossing, I think they would have melted without my lighting them.
Phantasmagorically Noh: The Blindness and Rage of Brian Castro Deconstructed
‘write prose and cut your margins,’ a friend and editor advised — Brian Castro (22) Blindness The blindness presented here is metaphorical, if not phantasmagorical, for Castro calls his verse novel a ‘Phantasmagoria […] in thirty-four cantos’. For me, actual …
Mosaically Speaking: Pieces of Lionel Fogarty’s Poetics
As the Hong Kong riots reach their sixth consecutive week, I’m emailing a friend at Hong Kong University who writes about liberty and subjection.
NO THEME VIII Editorial
Nothing makes me feel my fallibility more than editing a literary journal, marking papers or judging a literary competition. I can be wrong. I can be unclear. I can miss things.
Shipwrecks in Modern European Painting and Poetry: Radical Mobilisation of the Motif as Political Protest
Shipwreck is also the synecdoche of all that shadows imperial expansion – navigational misadventure, piracy, cyclonic assault – tracking like sharks on the blood trail imperialism’s would-be glamorous advance.
Residence: Dwelling with The Shards (an essay)
When S. and I started to talk, the directions were endless, and sympathetic. What passed between us, over coffee and chai, in emails, in text messages, were the names of authors, books, artists.
MONSTER Editorial
I’m writing this after news that W S Merwin has died. His Selected Poems still sits on my bedside table, never far away in case of a spare moment.
Poetry, Whatsoever: Blake, Blau DuPlessis, and an Expansive Definition of the Poem
William Blake pinches himself. Yes! He is alive, not in heaven or hell for all eternity, but on earth, for just as long as I need him for the purposes of this essay. In the almost two hundred years since William Blake died many things have changed.
On Being Sanguine: Two Years of Panic and a Response to Terror in Christchurch
One Sunday, when I was an art student in London, I got on my bicycle and left my parents’ vicarage in Surrey for my room in Murray Mews, going along the River Thames and through London’s parks: Bushy Park, Richmond Park, Hyde Park and Regents Park.
A Deaf Rough Trade: Defending Poetry to ‘regular people’
The poem is from page 37 of Michael Farrell’s latest collection, I Love Poetry. The poem on page 37 has no title, so I will refer to it from here on out as ‘37’. Not only is 37 untitled, but it is also without words.
Chorography and Toute-eau in the Waters of Lower Murray Country
The first line of this fragment by poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite opens philosopher Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. ‘The unity is submarine’.
Aussi / Or: Un Coup de dés and Mistranslation in the Antipodes
‘Shipwrecked on the shoals of contingency’, Australian poetry is haunted by Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Un Coup de Dés. Its publication in Cosmopolis in Paris in 1897 struck a nerve or, rather, a vessel within Australian poetry bloodlines,
Editorial to AFRO AUSTRALIAN
I can’t think I am living large if the home we live in is a mess while my own room is spotless. I want a beautiful mansion for all of us. Yes, I realise this is not a seamless nor an especially artful allegory.
