Wagga Wagga, Derek Derek
Poetry for Cordite 44: GONDWANALAND will be guest-edited by Derek Motion with featured artists Maxine Beneba Clarke and Favianna Rodriguez.
What does Gondwanaland mean to Motion? There is no intended prescriptive statement or gestalt. The name suggests a shared history as well as a process of divergence, the initiation of hemispheric identities.
A quartered tangelo?
Sri Lanka’s drift?
Limbs of Xenomelia?
The coast near Broome?
Everything is constantly severing, moving and re-forming … even that which seems most solid or stationary. How does contemporary poetry reach back into prehistoric ecosystems, personalities, engaging with ‘the now’ of transnational communication? What anticipated future shifts and continental/psychological assimilation lay ahead, even a post-Earth / Earth-form identity? There is vast space in this theme.
Derek Motion lives with his family in the Western Riverina region of NSW where he works as an Arts Development Officer. He has been writing poetry for many years, and quite a few of these pieces have been first published with Cordite. He was previously director of The Booranga Writers’ Centre, and has edited fourW twice. His first collection, lollyology, was published in 2012.
Cordite 45: SILENCE with poetry guest-edited by Jan Owen is coming up.
