What actually do we mean by “precarious”? When I made the call for submissions, I had particular “at risk” spaces on my mind – employment, peace, health, community, ecosystems, social systems. Not only the global but the bodily. Not only systems of meaning-making but the water and the air. So, yes, what isn’t precarious, especially these days?
I read hundreds of submitted poems, and soon enough I realised that what I was looking for were poems that gave voice to some particular aspect of precarity, not only in what they spoke about, but how they spoke. I wasn’t interested in abstraction, solid ground, hygenic clarity, pyrotechnical displays or cool. The poems needed to themselves be teetering, staggering, bedridden or exposed.
The poems I’ve chosen for this issue of Cordite each, in their own way, face our acute, unavoidable vulnerability head on, while simultaneously staring it down. They don’t offer solutions, not overtly anyway (there isn’t any “solution” to precarity, not entirely). But their very existence – you reading them – is a kind of counterweight. What connects us, what keeps us going, is reinforced, maybe even amplified.
These poems speak to each other, across aesthetic and experiential distinctions. “I cannot help // I feel” (Eileen Chong, ‘Glide / Elide’) echoes quietly in “I forget the username / for my blood” (Dan Hogan, ‘Slippery’). Those “limbs lopsided to earth” (Gaele Sobott, ‘Byways’) remind me of “you whose emergencies / go unregistered” (Khairani Barokka, ‘praise poem for these girls i was’). And while the “hungry rust [is] eating / the underneath” (Kobus Moolman, ‘Flat’), for those lives under threat, including our own, another voice cries out, “They must endure. They must all endure” (Scott-Patrick Mitchell, ‘The Hurt’).
I experienced “I have not yet seen an undamaged mossbed” (Louise Crisp, ‘Dry Mountains’) as an unsettling parallel of “Austerity is the cure that displaces the sickness onto the poor” (Eleni Stecopoulos, ‘Becalmed’). And I couldn’t divorce the phrase “there became too many funerals to cry at anymore” (Peter Davis, ‘Portrait of a friend with HIV dementia’) from “tenderness creates a universe where right is not the issue” (Claire Gaskin, ‘The Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into the Recruitment Methods and Impacts of Cults and Organised Fringe Groups’).
These poems say, “I’m looking for a word / The (ex)plosives are ambiguous” (Luke Patterson, ‘Cosmolalia’). They find their own language, including the stutters and silences, in their own experiments, and in each other. And in you. They ask, “If I’m a wrong one, will you also be that / with me” (Jill Jones, ‘Observations On a Friday Evening When It Might Rain, When It Might Change’). And, “Are you breathing, / May I / enter?” (Medha Singh, ‘Lure, Endure’). They are, like Rachael Boast’s ‘Ass’, “emissar[ies] of burden”.
Honestly, I want to quote every one of these poems. There are sinkholes, handfish, chemotherapy, door-to-door evangelists, a fried cheese sandwich, colonialism, the abyss, ruinous rentals, Gugaamgan (the Gumbaynggirr word for ‘emu’), Sappho, plastics, war, and families. But read them yourself, and make your own connective tissue.
It’s fascinating to see, too, how through the anonymous submission process, quite a few of my favourite poets were behind the poems I chose. And there are also a good number of poets I’m not at all familiar with. The world of poetry might not escape precarity, but it’s vigorous.
In her book, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing asks, “What if precarity, indeterminacy, and what we imagine as trivial are the centre of the systematicity we seek?.. .A precarious world is a world without teleology. [This] is frightening, but thinking through precarity makes it evident that indeterminacy also makes life possible.” (20)
There’s an abundance of life in these poems, gesturing towards how we might live together.
