Cordite Poetry Review

Judith Bishop Reviews Phillip Hall’s Fume

Posted on February 11, 2019 by Judith Bishop

Fume by Phillip Hall
UWA Publishing, 2017

This review was developed in consultation with Cordite’s Guidelines for Indigenous Writing and Editing.

Phillip Hall’s Fume is rare for the raw, fresh force and integrity of experience that lies behind the poems. Fume was largely written during a period of five years (2011 – 2015) that Hall and his wife Jillian spent in Borroloola in the Gulf of Carpentaria, where Hall worked as a sport and camp teacher in a role focused on activities for local Indigenous kids. The poems are framed by two personal essays, ‘Bad Debt’ and ‘The Stick’, which orient the reader by providing biographical and local context. As Hall observes in these essays, indigenous youth and elders in Borroloola continue to suffer daily from historical, structural and intentional white racism. In Fume, Hall provides a personal testimony to the intensity of this trauma. In the last two years of his stay, Hall was treated for mental illness arising from the suffering he witnessed in Borroloola – a fact that underscores its extremity for the Indigenous people who undergo that trauma directly.

Many years ago, I spent a few months in Arnhem Land, learning from speakers of the Bininj Gun-wok language. During my time there I was directed to read Richard Trudgen’s book Why Warriors Lie Down and Die, which first brought home to me the severe consequences of ongoing and original trauma for Indigenous health and wellbeing. Like Hall, I also witnessed the joy of ‘two-ways’ education at work, led by an Indigenous principal and teachers. This is a model that, in opposition to colonial assumptions, proudly supports primary learning in Indigenous cultures and languages (including Kriols). In this context, formal English serves as a bridge for Indigenous kids to choose to connect with the non-Indigenous world. Two-ways education encourages learning that grows from the ground of Indigenous knowledge that even the youngest kids bring with them to any formal classroom. Hall drew on a similar principle in the Indigenous story-telling group he worked with in Borroloola, called Diwurruwurru or ‘message stick’; the group’s members expressed what they wanted to say, in the language they chose to say it in.

As Hall describes in ‘The Stick’, he arrived in Borroloola with the understanding that ‘First Australians must be listened to. You cannot work [in partnership with Indigenous people] successfully if you do not first sit down and listen’. Fume provokes many questions in response to this act of listening. What is the nature of such listening? What does it mean for a non-Indigenous person to listen to Indigenous peoples’ experience and knowledge? An answer might begin with the fact that listening first requires a speaker: it positions the Indigenous speaker as the possessor of sovereign knowledge and experience that may be shared, or not shared, as she or he decides. But where the listener is white, the act of listening is shadowed by the possibility of the appropriation of Indigenous knowledge and experience, on the one hand, and on the other, a too-easy resolution of colonial shame. Fume is keenly aware of both dangers. Hall admits to having been driven by a desire to ‘empower Indigenous youth to make their own choices … and to assert their own choices and culture’ – and having learned from a Gudanji elder, Nana Miller, who adopted him as kin, to ‘embrace … humility’ with respect to that desire.

I first read Fume alongside Ali Cobby Eckermann’s splendid Inside my Mother (Giramondo, 2015), in order to hear them together: a celebrated, female, Indigenous poet, and a male, non-Indigenous poet, each using the lyric mode to bear witness to the cross-generational and daily effects of trauma on the custodians of Country. Eckermann’s poems feel gentle, spacious – questing and questioning – but patient, as if written from a place beyond, or beside anger. Fume, as the title suggests, contains poems written in the aftermath of an anger that remains.

Though very different, both are strong works: they are spiritually powerful and affecting. A spiritual meaning is particularly present in the word strong as used by Indigenous speakers. As Hall notes in his introduction, ‘Bad Debt’, massacre sites are ‘strong places’ for Indigenous people. But strong can be positive also, as it is in a poem by Hall’s Indigenous kin younger sister, Trishanne, cited in ‘The Stick’:

This makes us all so
Brolga joyful, leaping and trumpeting
To the world this welcome
To Culture and Country –
This strong one memory of place.

The word ‘strong’ provides a glimpse of how deeply Indigenous varieties of English – and the Kriol languages they give rise to, when kids begin to speak them as their first language and make them their own – are inhabited by ancestral memory. Their meanings have been shaped by Indigenous languages and cultures from the start of contact history. They are deeply resonant.

Listening to the many poems in Hall’s book that convey the words of indigenous friends in Aboriginal English, such as ‘Millad Mob Da Best!’, the non-Indigenous reader needs to work hard to hear the resonant depths of these words and their meanings:

wen do gate crack open my big one buja come crashin
out on gun fired screwed-up muscle ngabaya of a horse
                              come on buja, hang on
           dat big one horse, e bin bash, buck an sling

A glossary is provided for words that come from local languages. But dem, dat and other half-familiar words remind the reader that Indigenous languages have different sound systems from the standard English one, and those systems have changed the English sounds. Another word, ‘millad’, as in ‘millad mob’ (meaning we, us, ours), seems to remember the English used when colonisation first began, and has turned it into an expression of Indigenous solidarity, belonging and resistance. (Interestingly, there is a fine distinction made in many Indigenous languages between ‘we’ including you, and ‘we’ excluding you).

Poems such as the one above are important for their representation of Indigenous speakers, with their explicit permission (as recorded in the book). These poems try to pay respect to the many dimensions of Indigenous worlds – worlds that exist in the same spaces as non-indigenous ones – and dimensions that can only begin to be intuited in their difference and complexity through listening to their words.

Pages: 1 2

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged Judith Bishop, Phillip Hall

Bella Li on as Associate Publisher

Posted on February 5, 2019 by Kent MacCarter

Image by Leah Jing McIntosh.

I’m honoured to announce that Bella Li will be joining Cordite Books as Associate Publisher. There is much activity with the books, and her masterful eye, publishing nous, and creativity will be a welcome and necessary addition. Look out for a new series of Cordite Books that focuses on visual poetics and artbook / poetry hybrids later in the year.

Li is the author of Argosy (Vagabond Press, 2017), which was highly commended in the 2017 Anne Elder Award, commended in the 2017 Wesley Michel Wright Prize, and won the 2018 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry and the 2018 NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry. Her second book, Lost Lake (Vagabond Press, 2018) was shortlisted for the 2018 QLD Literary Award for Poetry. Her writing and artwork—including poetry, microfiction, essays, reviews, collage and photography—have been published in journals and anthologies such as Best Australian Poems, Meanjin, Overland, Peril, Rabbit, The Kenyon Review, Archives of American Art Journal, and Western Humanities Review, and were included in the works displayed at the Triennial of the National Gallery of Victoria. She was a managing co-editor at Five Islands Press for six years, and has also worked as an in-house editor at Lonely Planet and a judge’s associate at The Supreme Court of Victoria. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, sessional lecturer and tutor in creative writing and literary studies, and freelance editor, proofreader and indexer.

Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged Bella Li, Kent MacCarter

Alex Creece on as Production Editor

Posted on February 5, 2019 by Kent MacCarter

I’m honoured to announce that Alex Creece is joining the Cordite Poetry Review fold as Production Editor, joining us from her time in the Cordite / Monash University Summer Term Internship Program.

Creece is writer, poet, student and average kook located in Victoria, Australia. She is currently cobbling together her debut poetry manuscript, and has recently participated in Digital Writers’ Festival, as well as the Toolkits: Non-fiction and Toolkits: Poetry programs with Express Media and Australian Poetry. She is passionate about diverse voices and perspectives within the arts, and often incorporates her experiences as a queer and autistic woman into her pieces. She has been published with Scum Mag, SBS Life, Archer Magazine, and others. She can be summoned at will by screeching into the night sky.

Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged Alex Creece, Kent MacCarter

Review Short: Diane Fahey’s November Journal and Carmen Leigh Keates’s Meteorites

Posted on February 5, 2019 by Nathanael Pree

November Journal by Diane Fahey
Whitmore Publishing, 2017

Meteorites by Carmen Leigh Keates
Whitmore Publishing, 2017

The most recent work by Diane Fahey, November Journal, and Carmen Leigh Keates’ first collection, Meteorites, represent two offerings of quiet intensity controlled and mediated by distinct voices and their respective energies. These volumes, both published by Whitmore Press, comprise a young poet’s sequence brimming with restless, cinematically inspired content, in contrast with a more deliberately delineated work, using an ancient, stripped down discipline to let its luminous ideas and images more clearly emerge.

Fahey’s method is expressed in one of her hundred tanka poems with such clear and concise elegance it is worth citing ‘Day 11 / Research’ in full:

Fields, woodlands explored
on foot. Shining-eyed fauna
who’ll gaze, later from
page, screen. Poems take shape, curved
inside bellied drops of time.

The tanka form is over a thousand years old, and is typically used to convey a strong sense of connection to nature and the elements, while allowing for the self to express itself as part of these, with just enough space for personification. From the outset of her journal, Fahey encounters bright and almost beatific beings of the natural world, which by a sleight of hand, or pen, may also constitute ‘a treasure trove / to be sacked.’ Birds and insects come into view as crystalline entities, in the company of other animate phenomena that could well have arisen from a text such as Rimbaud’s Illuminations, recalling the hallucinatory wonder of unmediated contact in their apprehension and presentation. In her responses to Country (which is acknowledged with due respect and embodied in the book) Fahey takes careful measure of her wandering, and winds her lines through the leaves and light of late Spring days as they lengthen.

The phases of each day emerge with their living protagonists, animal life marking a sense of synaesthesia seeming to derive both from instinct and a palpable sense of Deep Image poetics. In the pre-dawn darkness, for instance: ‘Only the birds’ voices shine.’ Pipits, swallows, starlings and cormorants are just a few species which embody emotions ‘when you / enter the bird soul … felt and known as real.’ Addressing the wattlebird, Fahey asserts: ‘I know, wattlebird / we are one’, the bird and poet with their respective craft and materials, deriving lattice, mesh and text from the same original source, as ‘fingers splice and wreathe / vinous lines, language in leaf.’

This cross-species kinship is adumbrated by the presence of others, such as the snake world, unseen yet no less present in its semi-visibility, both an initial caution and ‘fugitive signature’ that marks her parting. By contrast, the solid forms of cattle stand as correlative for a slightly alien assertion or imposition on the landscape, but ‘As they graze, hide shifts over / rib cages shaped like small hulls’, implying transformative potential in the vessel-like structures mammals share and sometimes come to imagine in worlds beneath the skin.

On the surface, Keates appears to operate in an entirely different kind of landscape, one that has shifted onto screens, in liminalities and borderlands, and where: ‘If there are animals here / they have not yet been added. / Not even their voices.’ The poetry operates in spaces that are cleared, connected and preserved across time, yet punctuated by palpable absence or transposition. In a landscape of absent animalia there is also a shift in transportation: ‘Walking among the boat-graves, we must remind / the tree and stones of the fish before the fossils.’ This extends to construction. In an Estonian church, ‘The cathedral walls have stone fins like tendons. / Look what we are in.’ Even at the polarities of geographical location – Keates writes from the extremes of northern and southern settings – there appears to be no way of evading the multiple layers and dimensions of evolution.

Keates presents a number of these poems upon a backdrop of her own subconscious: ‘usually my dreams have a grey light’, and uses the intertextuality provided by images artfully recreated from cinematic masterpieces to eloquent, oneiric effect. A standout example is her take on Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, with deft paraphrases of the pagan rites and raw power of youth, coupled with his novice monk’s sense of sexual transgression. The poem concludes with a pair of evocative images, before ending with what could be the book’s most memorable line:

On the surface of new knowledge
his shame makes steam.
The horses flush leather-black nostrils
to test how far he’s gone.

If you feel shame before a horse you are on fire.

Keates also indicates her imagist leanings and writerly role: ‘This poet is a photograph’, a special self-object, comprising silver dust, an animate artefact. This comes with a sense of Tarkovskian ‘Nostalghia’ in her final poem, applicable to the here and now as well as to the forces of history that create spaces between scenes that we remember, and others that are either forgotten or emerge from the strata of memory as discrete if uncontrollable events: ‘and in this layer, memory / is a demon that walks / like a soldier from a tunnel.’ This trope of return is far from being randomly placed, and in this alone, Meteorites finds grounds of affinity with Fahey’s ending which, ‘in its own time, in its own time’ is titled as an arrival and finds its metre in the footsteps of an echidna.

Keates’ endnotes tell us that the even the places seemingly unrelated to the cinematic strands that tie this book together are in fact significant in the history of film, as shooting locations or sites of residence for the auteurs themselves. They help form a palimpsest upon which presences from a recurrent past are reimagined and inscribed, just as Fahey’s living canvas collates eternally immanent forms of being in strands and sediment, capture and release.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged Carmen Leigh Keates, Diane Fahey, Nathanael Pree

Review Short: Vahni Capildeo’s Seas and Trees and Jennifer Harrison’s Air Variations

Posted on February 5, 2019 by Jo Langdon

Seas and Trees
by Vahni Capildeo
Recent Work Press, 2018

Air Variations
by Jennifer Harrison
Recent Work Press, 2018

Numbers 8 and 10 in the IPSI (International Poetry Studies Institute) limited-edition chapbook series, Vahni Capildeo’s Sea and Trees and Jennifer Harrison’s Air Variations comprise crystalline, eidetic poems that attest to language’s capacity to renew and reinvigorate.

Trinidadian-British poet Capildeo’s Sea and Trees celebrates language itself – in its mutability and its material suggestiveness; its relationship to the world. Indeed, the natural world is signalled as a concern of both collections, by way of their titles, yet both demonstrate an extensive and transitory scope, along with a tendency to play.

In addition to each author’s prize-winning works in poetry, Capildeo has worked as a lexicographer at the Oxford English Dictionary, and Australian poet Harrison is a neuropsychiatrist. These biographical details feel germane in how they resonate with the sense of the two poets’ interest and fluency in realms of language broad and specialised.

In Capildeo’s ‘From Journal of Ordinary Days’, we read:

Sometimes I dream in a language that is mine only by scratches,
but I can get the tune of it, a whole conversation 
between strangers friendly to each other, dawdling behind me
somewhere outdoors, a sandy cone of syllables 
rising and falling, whole sentences
coming smattering to the surface from an occluded source.

Images such as Capildeo’s ‘sandy cone of syllables’ give language a concrete, textured presence (even, as here, in its obliqueness), in ways observed across the collection. Indeed, the poems often focus acutely on sensory perception. In the first section of the sequence ‘After a Hymn to Aphrodite’ (‘I. That Voice Revises Several Languages’), Capildeo writes:

[ … ] Don’t
we think of light and warmth together, cold
rock carries no weight, no, interstellar space
cannot impress us – to my knowledge. And 

if we put our skates on? Though unplanned,
each ecstasy’s, each hesitation’s, trace
does cut some ice, in sharpened progress curved
again by lines on whiteness.

Here the attention to language concerns the colloquial, with the idiomatic ‘put our skates on’ – move, hurry – set in the poem’s vivid, tangible space, where actions are in negotiation with atmosphere.

There is also an acute interest in the intricacies of language – its composition and junctures – in ‘Vowel Poem: Albedo’, which begins:

Will you tell me a word 
so beautiful that mourning
yields up its you to life
an o towards an r,
or is a vowel’s ghost
so powerful that mourning
invests with amethyst 
the lily fields of dawn?

The poems are often comical, wry. The next section of ‘After a Hymn to Aphrodite’ (‘II. Put the Girls in Florals’) opens:

Easter tide 
these trees
are showing off their reproductive organs
mostly like a froth and creamy dazzle
all over themselves, unstoppable
(how confusing).

The poem itself dazzles with its effervescent, playful portrait of the trees ‘displaying airy brilliance sheer of fruit’; there is ‘something dancing: / a heart’ (these latter lines are also indicative of the poems’ playful reworking of the kinds of abstractions that abound in clichéd expression).

‘For Adjectives are one Road Cut into the Precipice Bordering Perfection’ offers a close reading of colour, association and translation:

I saw a sky the colour only of bluebells
the clear blue loved, reserved, only for bluebells 
for imaginary equatorial cumulonimbus bluebells 
– little like the actual absent weak-stemmed lilac flowers –

If you see,
we have that reading in common,
bleu celeste     celestial blue

There is also a clear sense of dialogue with discourses on poetry – its dictums and tendencies. ‘Salthill Blue for Mr Laughlin’ opens:

Thinking unlike a poet,
quit making it new
or dragging netted memories
for the breathless why

Veering by Pound’s often-cited maxim, and rejecting affinities for nostalgia and earnest or precious breathlessness in verse, Capildeo offers less of an ‘ars poetica’ than the poem might initially motion as it shifts back to a sequence of concrete images:

this milky blue is also
taffeta, a sheen
of pouring fabric
beyond a purchaser’s means.
The sea creeps up on walking,
on the unsinkable sun,
shoes unburying seaweed,
sandworms burrowing down.

A similar sense of vim threads through Harrison’s poems, which, like Capildeo’s, are strikingly polished and musical in their composition. Air Variations opens with
‘I Topiary’, where a quiet energy hums through an associatively expansive garden space:

he cuts the hedge into a flat top
the bay tree and olives into disco balls
clipping and trimming              paring and shaving

he spends all day on his version of a city
a border collie lies nearby ticdreaming
and outside        in the street        a neon blue ford

In the same poem, a succession of silhouettes produce a striking alchemy:

shadow and cone          oblong           circle     and cube
emerge into clipped form          distempered 
               the lavender now a hard blue spoon

Harrison’s poems are consistently rich in their immediate and emotional atmospheres, as we see too in ‘VII Scrap Yard’, with its ‘swash of autumn pear leaves meant to yellow / fall without attention’. The poem closes:

yes          this is another kind of swimming
out here               alone     beyond the lovely reef
and did you not expect it to be cold

even though that shard of memory      came
so suddenly from nowhere      like a psalm
of the past      piercing the heart of breath?

A strong sense of place often figures, along with the presence of interlocutors – both human and cultural. In ‘II My Cousin Rachel: The Movie’, Harrison writes:

Afterwards     none of us liked the film     we
Said     all words felt sharp     a little unsafe
we embraced lightly 	the night’s aftershine 

thimbling from a thin quarter moon     gloom
	emptying us home     through manicured streets
sleeping birds 	empty shops in pirouette

This careful pacing and filmic sequencing of detail and view – achieved through the poems’ artful structuring and lineation – extends across the collection. In ‘XII Emily Dickinson: The Movie’:

squares of sunlight appeared      appositely 
in windows     and phantoms      slipped in and out
of the fascicles             my favourite part

was how she sewed her pages     together
a large blunt needle      pushed     pulled through paper
as though paper was the skin 	of herself

At each turn these collections are ultimately joyful, even as they elicit various moods. Capildeo’s, for instance, opens with a sense of menace: ‘The trees had evolved to eat other trees. / That this happened at the end of a garden. / This was first noticed in a small tree’s wincing’ (1). The chapbooks provide compelling and rewarding samples of the poets’ work. Poems in Seas and Trees appear in Capildeo’s collection Venus as a Bear (Carcanet, 2018) – true to IPSI’s intention that the chapbooks offer more than might appear from any one poet in a single journal issue, ahead of publication in book form.

IPSI’s slim, smartly produced volumes showcase two invigorating voices, inviting further or renewed engagement with Capildeo, Harrison and each poet’s luminous, vitalising music.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged Jennifer Harrison, Jo Langdon, Vahni Capildeo

To Outlive a Home: Poetics of a Crumbling Domestic

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Evelyn Araluen

J’s place is hard to see from the street. The ferns and crepe myrtle have eaten into the slumped fence, and the ivy and jacaranda have swallowed all but a few bricks of the garden wall. Out the back the crumbling façade of the half-condemned late 1860s mansion is held up as much by tree as it is by stone, so we hang water dishes and seed feeders from the encroaching branches for the birds and brushtails that live here as much as we do. In winter it’s a struggle to seal out the drafts, and in summer it’s a battle to keep the mozzies at bay as we lie in musty, sticky heat. I’ve been slowly moving my things into available gaps around the flat, which was awkwardly adapted out of the servants’ quarters sometime over the last century. It’s weird and pokey, but we love the quiet beauty of the house and everything trying to reclaim it. It’s what we can afford as we work arrays of casual jobs to prepare ourselves for our aspirational academic middle-classery. Here we can get pot plants and pretend we’re only pretending at our economic and geographic origins, strolling over to the gentrified side of the train tracks for flat whites and avocado smashes with the trendy young dickheads strolling West from North and East Sydney after dumping their law degrees and parental expectations. I know that it’s mostly just the proximate aesthetics which separate structures like this charmingly dilapidated outer-inner-Western Sydney pile from my nan’s old asbestos modular farmhouse with its galvinised piping and shanty shed supplementations up the coast. We’re taught to aspire to something bigger than we came from. Maybe one day we might have money enough to push my people out of Redfern or Waterloo. Maybe if we become rich, we can buy stolen land on my Country.

Heidegger claims that to be human is to dwell and build. The everyday might retract something primal from our understanding of this aspect of our nature, but linguistic history retains the central provisions: that building itself is dwelling; that dwelling is what mortals do on earth; and that there are modes of building which grow and cultivate and modes which erect new structures. The plight of dwelling is not a material one, such as housing shortages or economic limitations, it’s our forgetfulness of this history of meaning and our own mortality which necessitates mankind’s constant need to create new meaning and place, a struggle which will remain a torment until the struggle itself is understood for its own terms. What humans need to sustain, according to Heidegger, is the relation of land, sky, mortals and the divine, so they might build and dwell in the true nature of the earth without exploitation.

Heidegger was not the first and is by no means the last to propose symbolic terms for a material crisis. His writings on this condition of existential homelessness take cues from the work of Friedrich Hölderlin, particularly poems such as In Lovely Blue and Man, which oscillate between the despairing realisation that nature, not man, is the image of the divine, and the assumption of a natural world which is fundamentally responsive and servient to the exceptionalism of mankind. These contradictory impulses and the symbolisms they negotiate compete within the predication of Western possession and can be seen elsewhere in empire. In early colonial Australia, the perceived hostility of the land to Western forms of building and cultivation produced an array of visual and literary tropes of hardship and resistance in which notions of home and homeliness anxiously deliberate cultural and geographic distance from the imperial centre. As Affrica Taylor and Marilyn Lake have observed, narratives of exploration, discovery, settlement and struggle which emphasise white heroism and resourcefulness against the unheimlich of the Australian landscape were mobilised to legitimate a sense of settler sovereignty and right-to-dwelling, but do not always resolve the unhomeliness of the setting. Bush poets such as Henry Lawson and Barbara Baynton constructed homesteads which concentrate poverty and struggle, and function more to stage the land’s cosmic retribution than they do to provide a domestic refuge from the elements. Jonathan Dunk, in his study of early colonial short fiction, has written that the deeper grammar of these lonely refuges and crumbling shacks in the bush always speak towards expiation and possession. Sacrifice the goanna, the blacksnake, bury your work-mates tanned to leather by a hostile sun, mumble a few words in their honour at twilight. Raise resilient children, lie half awake at night as possum claws rake the corrugated iron, build, dwell, expand, maybe eventually belong. But you won’t, not really – the spectre of what you’re trying to conceal is written in the metrics of your bush-ballad, etched everywhere in the wide dark watching the solitary homestead, waiting for the final breath that puffs out the last candle when you’ve muttered that prayer to the wrong hemisphere’s god.

While these pre-federation tropes of settler colonial Australia’s multifaceted and at times contradictory pastoral modes seem to recognise something of their incompatibility with Aboriginal land, they seek their resolution from burial, rather than reciprocal encounter with Aboriginal presence. They want to build a lasting allegory, a structure of feeling capable of making sense of European life on this continent, a struggle which continue to pervade contemporary Australian literature. Early writers such as Lawson, Harpur and Kendall pot-planted Aboriginal graves in their arcadian glens to anchor the doomed-race theory popularised by Darwin in his 1836 visit to New South Wales. In post-Mabo fiction – from novelists such as Kate Grenville and Andrew McGahan – the homestead stands on these cultural remains, rupturing settler fantasies of belonging and domestic tranquillity with spiritual retribution. But no attempts are made to encounter Aboriginal presence in agential, embodied, and material ways. In these narratives the colonial homestead, built on an interchangeable foundation of rock engravings, burial sites, or massacre grounds, is rendered structurally and cosmically unviable under the weight of settler guilt. Typically, it’s not even the right petroglyphs, opting for a generalised iconography bastardised from someone else’s Country, a vague outline of a whale graffitied on domesticated sandstone while Gurangatch stirs in the amber water below.
Different strategies emerge to address differently interpreted concerns. The poetics of place and home which developed throughout the twentieth century did at times contemplate the cultural and political implications of dispossession, but they mistranslated the terms. The Jindyworobak movement in particular, of which Les Murray cites himself as inheritor, sought a language of place and home in co-opting Aboriginal culture, borrowing a few words in a time when Aboriginal people lacked fundamental human rights, but nonetheless were politically organising against the ongoing violence of invasion and settlement. The insignificance of linguistic or spiritual authenticity is demonstrated by how cleanly these poetics can be shifted back into standard English, as we see in Murray’s Bunyah poems, which reach for geographic and cosmic belonging through structures of work, defence, and heritage, and situate the pastoral home as the meeting place of human and natural worlds:

the earth contracts, the planks of the old house creak,
 making one more adjustment, joist to nail, 
nail to roof, roof to the touch of dew. 
Smoke stains, rafters, whitewash rubbed off planks ...
 yet this is one house that Jerry build to last:
 when windstorms came, and other houses lost
 roofs and verandahs, this gave just enough
 and went unscathed.

Pages: 1 2 3 4

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged Emily Stewart, Evelyn Araluen, Friedrich Hölderlin, John Kinsella, Jonathan Dunk, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, les murray, Melody Paloma

‘The Rally Is Calling’: Dashiell Moore Interviews Lionel Fogarty

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Dashiell Moore

I would like to acknowledge that this interview took place on the land of the Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin Nation. May the strength of Indigenous knowledge generously offered by Lionel Fogarty reinforce the place of First Nation elders, past, present, and future.

The poetry of Yoogum and Kudjela man, Lionel Fogarty, may be hard to follow, often distorting colloquial phrases or standardised grammar to retool the colonising English language into a form of resistance. His description of it here as ‘double-standard English’ conveys Fogarty’s intent to demonstrate how the English language can oppress Aboriginal peoples, forcing non-Indigenous readers to experience what it feels like to be alienated by a literary text. These actions have led Ali Alizadeh to describe his poetry as an expression of his ‘staunchly decolonised, Aboriginal identity’. I would argue that to read Fogarty is not to be positioned as an outsider, but rather to be given the challenge to conceptualise new reading methods as he positions us in a world estranged from itself.

As is fitting of a self-described ‘oral poet’, a similar experience can be had by engaging Fogarty in conversation. I was fortunate enough to experience this in an interview with him in September 2018. My conversation with Fogarty took place in the lobby of the hotel he was staying at in Melbourne, at a time where I was able to work through some of his manuscript material used for the publication of his most recent poetry collection, Lionel Fogarty Selected Poems 1980-2017. As such, the first question I ask in this interview refers to his practice of illustrating his first draft manuscripts, an aspect of his work which has yet to be properly engaged with in literary studies.

In conversation Fogarty is expansive, often deviating between topics in a rapid stream of consciousness, calling on an extensive memory of names, places, contacts, and inspirations throughout a writing period over forty years. Fogarty’s interweaving of various fragments is hard to follow, yet they leave a collective impression that nevertheless implies his point. To engage Fogarty in conversation, and to ask him questions is also to engage with a series of critical problems. How can we best respond to the philosophical and epistemological foundations underlying these ungrammatical turns of phrase? How might a conversational style inform a written poetics?

Speaking with Fogarty forced me to consider more deeply the intersection of literature with the political biases of those acting within it, as well as the efforts of certain writers and readers to separate the political from the realm of poetry. Fogarty has a unique perspective to offer, for instance, on the ideal relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians:

You might think that I’m trying to stop non-Indigenous people from participating in the community, that’s not my motive. My motive is to expose it before it eventuates … co-operating together means co-operating on the basis of what are the real needs, sovereignty, not a heart and compassion change, but a physical material change.

Something I was conscious of in this interview, however, is the extent to which characterisations of Fogarty as an ‘activist poet’ have over-determined the frame by which we read his writing. To this end, I have alluded to a more open conception of his poetics by asking him questions regarding the poetic influences that informed his writing over the course of his career, his experience of being translated, and the poetic connections he has made with other Indigenous peoples of the Pacific.

I am tremendously grateful for the time Fogarty took with me the day we conversed, and for being so patient with my questions. I would also like to thank the editor of Lionel Fogarty Selected Poems 1980-2017, Murri scholar Philip Morrisey, for coordinating my dialogue and to Cordite Poetry Review for agreeing to publish it here. The interview ran for over five hours, with Fogarty barely stopping to eat or drink. Unfailingly, Fogarty was expansive on even a minor point. I have condensed this content here but have retained the key components of what was expressed. Please be advised that this interview took place in a public setting and my transcription of it may include misspellings of some of the finer references Fogarty makes. Fogarty has had the chance to read over the interview, and through a lengthy editorial process, it has evolved into the form it is currently in.

I am still pondering some of the questions Fogarty led me to ask. For instance, is our current conceptualisation of politics in literary studies limited, given what Fogarty expresses far exceeds what may be considered political? Please consider on this note the distinction he makes between ‘land rights’ and ‘earth rights’. How might the extra-literary material found in his manuscripts inform considerations of Fogarty’s existing published texts? Furthermore, how might a renewed valuing of struggle and confusion as critical states better our appreciation of Fogarty’s retooling of the English language? As Fogarty himself says in the interview, quoting from his poem, ‘Tired of Writing’: ‘I see words beyond any acceptable meaning, and this is how I express my Dreaming.’

Dashiell Moore: Thank you for sitting down with me Lionel. What your readers might not be aware of is your practice of illustrating draft manuscripts prior to publication. The way you turn to painting, I’m wondering what is the relationship between when you write as opposed to when you paint?

Lionel Fogarty: Yeah well, my kind of paint, well I call it illustration really, scribbles you might as well say. I call it painting because I paint over it and in-between it, with just normal paint. In terms of their effect, more of illustration I think. Painting or illustrating a police officer, or anything to do with cultural forms, I find that, these bring me into the present-day society for myself because the reflection I had because I was not an illustrator or artist in anyway, but as a speaker, in terms of the poetry I always went into stories. Even if it’s double-standard poetry. I always felt that every verse or illustration of the words has to have a story in it, regardless of every poem that I wrote. In the story I seemed to have fireflies of …

DM: Go ahead, you were on a roll there.

LF: What I was trying to say, is that the fireflies, the fire what happened to me when I was small. My father was the one who taught me how to make the fire, prepare the fire even before I made the fire. I had to go through a couple more years, until seven, before I started to make the fire. I had to gather a lot of chips and things like that. In my younger teens, the fire was a song fire. People sing songs, dancing. But there is no alcohol at that time, or even tobacco. People would just gather to sing songs to more or less welcome other people in and out of Cherbourg as they were shifted around. Painters used to come around my fire. What amazed me, in looking back on that time, the painters used to chuck the paint into the fire when the authorities came up the road. This reflected into me, it stopped me from keeping up that artwork later on when I found out I had a talent in speaking and writing after I became politically involved with the conspiracy charges against the state with Denis Walker and John Garcia. After that, I went into political writing and working with the community creating magazines with Cheryl Buchanan, mother of six of my children. At the time I met her, she was operating down here [Narrm, Melbourne], while I was facing those charges in Brisbane. See I got a long story.

Cheryl was working with the Australian union of students, supported by the Koori Community here, creating the BSB, a Black News service, an information centre, collecting information about the sovereign rights, the Islander fight, everything in Australia at that time. All of this went into the magazine, the union supported get out. Later on, she worked out a trip for me to go up to Aurukun, a festival where they brought tribes together like Garma in Arnhem Land, but before that. I went along to that, Cheryl knew about it and got me to meet the Weipa people who were Mapoon people not far from Weipa, who were taken away from their country from the 1930s and 1940s. I met those people who returned to their country, and at that time, the ABC were doing research on a book on mining communities, involved with trying to abscond the mining out of Mapoon at that time. The Mapoon tried to tell stories to a priest, named Roberts at that time with the research, and they were recording them, letters of course, not political statements about what they wanted. People like Gerry Hudson, Jean Jimmy. I went to the Corroboree ceremony, met the old man, Eric Koo’iola, involved in the Wik decision, way before the Wik decision was happening they went down to Canberra and rallied (Fogarty is referring to the landmark legal case, Wik Peoples v The State of Queensland, in which Native Title Rights was upheld against statutory leases in 1993). Well I met that old man. They got me in touch with a custodian of the area, named Johnny Koowarta (a Winchanam man from Aurukun). He was a traditional owner involved with lawyers and barristers talking to the High Court of Australia. This was way before Mabo. (Koowarta led a group of Traditional Owners to purchase the Archer River cattle station for the Aboriginal Land Fund Commission in 1976, but was blocked by the Queensland Government. Successfully claiming a breach of the racial discrimination act in 1975, Koowarta’s case was upheld in the High Court in May, 1982. Unfortunately, the Queensland state government had gazetted the property as a National Park during this period).

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Posted in INTERVIEWS | Tagged Dashiell Moore, Lionel Fogarty

Jackie Ryan: Teaser to Burger Force 3

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Jackie Ryan

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Posted in ARTWORKS | Tagged Jackie Ryan

Dispatch from the Future Fish

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Eloise Grills

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Posted in ARTWORKS | Tagged Darlene Soberano, Eloise Grills

DOMESTIC Editorial

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Natalie Harkin

I invited you to lean into this DOMESTIC sphere in all its homely undoing; to rupture the masquerading shape of cosy bliss; to plant seeds and haunt with your words; to unsettle and shape what survival looks and feels like – and you did. You lured me into other-worlds with your heart-on-sleeve, body-on-the-line words; a DOMESTIC fever-immersion that broke my heart and made me rage, laugh out-loud, question and delve deeper when I needed to know you more. You kept me awake. You got under my skin. None of it was easy.

This collection bears witness to a profound, unsettling ‘intimacy’ situated in relation to the interpersonal relationship domestic sphere; and to global processes and neo-colonial connections that manifest culture and power. Such ‘residual’ and ’emergent’ intimacies¹, exist beyond time and place, where dominant worldviews and systems continue to shape environments, movements and societies today; where history seethes quietly and persistently into the future. Here, the liberating power of poetry is a means to contest and potentially shift or transform oppressive ideas and dominant ways of knowing. The poets here are active and affecting in their refusal to accept what is imposed as inherently universal, or inevitably inherited to the future. As their words unfold to make new meaning, intimacy on the DOMESTIC front can be understood to mean almost everything.

Here, domestic is home: loving, nostalgic, troubling. It is that place frozen in time with grief, fear and longing and where memories are triggered. The kitchen is significant. Survival is knowing how to use a carving knife and where the heavy saucepan artillery is kept. Bedrooms and lounge-rooms retain moments that key change and shift through an astute knowing of where and how to position oneself in rooms that confine and choke. It is a house reclaimed and demolished, tending to spectres and mundane objects that remain in the debris. It is the irony in Misogyny-Speech tea-towels, and the chaotic filth-confessions of poets in lairs. It is hiding under tables. It is a women’s shelter night, and a child’s money-box raided for vending-machine cuisine on the run. It is lifetimes in moments inhaled and freeze-framed.

Domestic is clever knowing: the casual racism, stereotyping, scapegoating and cultural appropriation; the intergenerational fight to be seen, heard and recognised as sovereign First Peoples of Australia. It is a broken story: raw, gaping, mended and scarred. It is estrangement and strange-entanglement; our abandoned mothers and our children alienated / dead / missing. It is walking small-town streets, searching for recognition in the eyes of strangers; the serendipitous-search for family found over shop-counters, and the arrival home. It is intimacy with country, travelling between sliced stone mountains and returning to important bodies of waters and lands when we die. It is protest ignited and bushfires burning in our eyes. It is cultural survival through the language of food and paying homage to grandmothers; to their bountiful gardens that keep blood-memory, love and culture alive; and to their return as they finally walk barefoot and seep into that place where two lakes kiss.

Domestic is war: reliving horrors of Auschwitz in the gaps and remains of small-talk with skin-head tradies fixing floors. It is the defence of Palestine and the sound of drones tearing hair from mothers and lands. It is unpacking a suitcase of behaviours, accents and smells to settle diaspora’s flux, tracing back through lands, time and recipes; piecing together fragments, damaged and whole. It is terror’s war and refuge and a refugee’s flight. It is blank-eyed children looking after children and the psychological trauma of detention centres. It is criminal. It is a river’s dried-bed, and washing away the evidence of monsoons, mushroom clouds and cultures. It is taking routine lessons in your domestic waters on how to float safely on your back so you might survive the flooded wake of the next typhoon. It is the war on waste. It is capitalism’s toxic consumerism, hyper-hygiene-madness and a supermarket’s fruit wrapped in plastic.

Domestic is love: it is growing into each other’s skin; it is conditional, and the tortured realisation that a line has been crossed. It is violence disguised as love. It is about control, being out-of-control, being weak and insecure. It is obsession. It is a trace of blood through blunt-force injury. It is knowing homophobia and the back of your shoulder like the back of your hand. It is sexual assault, the objectification of women and fight-flight strategic survival. It is suffering a suffocating holy-matrimony and the ability to talk yourself alive. It is becoming the mother whose apron-strings you severed.

Domestic is family: a bi-polar journey, it is boxes and categories, defying fixed-identities and multiple subjectivities. It is making dinner-plans on the hop in predictive-text hilarity. It is care-giving and aging well and un-well, and that crashing moment when you can no longer remember, or you are no longer visible to the one who sees you best. It is birthing, sleep-deprivation, post-natal depression and melancholy. It is a rite of passage and hormone-fuelled hate; an impossible present and the more impossible future without him or her, and having to return. It is nostalgia; a yearning for connection, for what used to be or could possibly be. It is raising children; it is sacrifice and poverty and making meals out of thin air; it is finding old letters of Champions to ground their humanity; it is clear eyes fixed on the absent once present, and the last broken one to look away.

Domestic is the Ultra-White Flour in a country-town’s Reconciliation Week scone; it is a Black Mary servant girl’s Christian mission indoctrination; it is the raw sound of mourning and evolution’s death rattle; the base-line for a heart and a call-in from a past that warns … it is acts of protection that find ways to hold close and hang on.

Domestic is servitude: a history of indentured Aboriginal labour. Slavery. A black-breasted-wet-nurse’s life-giving sustenance. It is stories in tea-leaves and tea gone cold with half-empty hearts. It is dust wiped from surfaces and being threatened by Master Six over spilt milk; it is holding family and culture close to your linen apron-bound body. It is never being invited to sit to lunch.

Domestic is skin: it is black / blak / brown / white and drinking bleach in sick melanin-madness. It is fetishised and objectified; wanted, touched and possessed. It is defying shame; loving your skin, your face, your neck that once held chains. It is queer pride and flying free from cages. It is loving your beating heart.

So much poetry. My hope is that you will read and bear-witness to all that is shared and exposed here, complicit in this vision to do something else with it all; that you might delve-deeper to act and contribute to the emergent / urgent shift that is required on so many DOMESTIC fronts; that you will be compelled to work toward something-else honouring, hopeful and loved; safe and just and whole. To walk free. No fear.

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged Natalie Harkin

7 Portraits by Ali Gumillya Baker

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Ali Gumillya Baker

‘Bow Down to the Sovereign Goddess’ (series 1-5), 2012; exhibited at Art Gallery of South Australia, ‘From the Street’ and part of the Flinders University Art Museum Collection. Portraits: Alexis West, Simone Tur, Nazaree Dickerson, Tracey Rigney and Faye Rosas Blanch.

‘SovereignGODDESSnotdomestic #1 and #2’, 2017, exhibited at ACE Open, in The Next Matriarch as part of TARNANTHI Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art. Exhibited at the Koorie Heritage Trust, 2018. Portraits: Natasha Wanganeen and Bianca Leicester.

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Posted in ARTWORKS | Tagged Ali Gumillya Baker

Selections from 3 Yhonnie Scarce Series

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Yhonnie Scarce

Yhonnie Scarce | N0000, N2359, N2351, N2402 | Blown glass, archive photographs, dimensions variable; 2013 (detail)

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Posted in ARTWORKS | Tagged Diane Tanzer, Nicola Stein, Yhonnie Scarce

Kathy Acker and The Viewing Room

Posted on February 1, 2019 by McKenzie Wark

The last time I saw Kathy Acker was in London, in July 1997. I wasn’t sure how she felt about me at that point. I had failed to drop everything to be with her in San Francisco the year before, and I had failed to make a job materialise that would have brought her to Sydney, as she wanted. Things had, I felt, ended in a disappointing but amicable dead end. ‘Just be my friend,’ Kathy said, early on, and I had promised I would.

Being friends is more of an undertaking than being lovers.

Charles Shaar Murray: ‘I met Kathy Acker at a dinner party in a Mexican restaurant in Soho. A little over 24 hours after that meeting, we discovered ourselves to be in love and resolved to spend the rest of our lives together. We spent most of the next five days almost continually in each others’ company.’¹

She had decamped from San Francisco back to London, with all its difficult memories, to be with him. She knew she had cancer, or maybe knowing and not knowing. She was already planning to return to San Francisco. I happened to be coming to London on some arts organisation’s tab, so we agreed to meet there, in a city where both of us were strangers.

It seems likely we had a meal somewhere, but I remember nothing about that. The part I remember starts with going to see a performance. What I remember is that it was a one-man show about a gay man living with AIDS who expected to die soon. The performer had such presence, not just with his language and gesture and stories, but with his body.

The performance was in a lecture theater at a London teaching hospital. His only prop and light source was an overhead projector, of which he made brilliant use. The show was both cutting and moving at the same time, a portrait of the state, medicine and technology as much as of this man’s life.

That was the first part of the show. The second was very short. He told us that the lecture room in which he was performing was next door to a former viewing room. In the past, hospitals set aside such rooms for relatives to view the recently deceased. In a viewing room they could be arranged properly as a kind of tableaux for relatives to pay their last respects. The performer asked us to wait five minutes. Then we were ushered into this viewing room.

The viewing room would have held maybe a dozen beds, a sort of ward for the dead. There was only one bed in it, and that bed was the only thing lit, the room being otherwise dark. The colors I remember are sienna, mahogany and salamander. Or maybe those are feelings. In the bed was the performer, neatly arrayed, completely still. He was acting as his own corpse. This was the second part of the show.

Part of the point this made was that even in the late nineties, a gay man with AIDS could not count on his real friends, his family of choice, being able to be with him in hospital, or to have the right to see him in death. There was something dignified about the viewing room, the intentional staging of the dead one, and the performer turned this to his advantage. We strangers were in a place to see his future self where his friends might not.

In the viewing room, everyone was silent. The energetic buzz of premature after-show conversation dropped down to nothing. We all just stood around. Kathy was next to me. I wanted to hold her hand, or something, but I did not know if she would want me to, or if it would make her feel worse. We just stood in the audience, this audition for silence, being silent together. It was such a naked contrast to the animated quality of the first part of the show. Then we left.

Memory is a genre of fiction. For a long time, I have wanted to know what the performance was that Kathy and I saw on our last night together. I found out finally by asking on FaceBook and tagging some people, who didn’t know, but knew people, who knew people, who knew: The Seven Sacraments of Nicholas Poussin, by Neil Bartlett.

I ordered it from Amazon. Read it. Now I know it was performed at Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, from the first to the seventh of July. I had forgotten that most of it was about Poussin’s paintings of the sacraments. Memory changed the ending. There is indeed a second half of the performance, but Bartlett sits in a chair opposite an empty bed, as if he were holding the hand of its occupant. The pillow is creased in the middle as if a head lay on it.

Neil Bartlett: ‘You will have noticed, those of you who were brought up with these words as I was, that I keep on remembering them wrong. I have erred, and said things, like I’ve lost my place. I have left out the words which I ought to have said, and I’ve put in some of those that I ought not to have put in, and I just can’t help it.’²

Kathy didn’t want to go out, so we took the tube to her place, getting off at Angel station. Her apartment lay alongside one of London’s canals. I could see canal boats tied up there. Kathy often said she wanted to be a sailor, to take off into the rolling waves. She was a sailor in the ways that were available to her. Writing (fucking) was her sea. I imagined her pottering about on canal boats, where the city meets the rising tide.

Her address was 14 Duncan Terrace. I’m looking at it again on Google Maps. The red door is as I remember. I see that when Street View last cruised this block, it was for sale. On the other side of her street is not the canal, it’s a strip of green parkway. There’s waterways nearby, and if I zoom in on the satellite image I can see narrow-boats pulled up along the banks. Looking at the satellite images, and playing with the street view, triggers other memories, whether real ones or not I don’t know.

I remember her flat as one of a row of identical brick Georgian terrace houses. Judging by the quality of motor parked there, quite a posh area now. The brick grimy, the white-painted details shiny in moonlight. The famous writer Douglas Adams lived on the same block, Kathy said. He could afford a whole townhouse. His lights were on. I caught a glimpse through the window of his bookshelves, in white wood.

In memory Kathy’s place seems like a basement flat but I don’t know if that is a memory of architecture or of mood. Kathy rummaged around in the kitchen for wine, glasses and an opener. I looked at the bookshelves. All her books seemed to be here, neatly arrayed in alphabetical order, in double rows, just like they had been in San Francisco. I got a little distracted looking at treasure I would like to read, like I did when I stayed with her in San Francisco that short while. When she was out at the gym I just rifled her books, stealing lines into my notebook. I was always careful to put them back in the right place.

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Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged Charles Shaar Murray, Kathy Acker, Leslie Dick, McKenzie Wark, Neil Bartlett

To Live There: on ‘Dispatch from the Future Fish’

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Eloise Grills

‘Dispatch from the Future Fish’ is a visual poem that is deliberately referential, opening up conversations and foregrounding the notion of writing into certain traditions: those that are given to us and those that we choose.

The first lines,

I come from
an archipelago
where land is built
on top of water
and that is called
a reclamation

come from Kyle Dacuyan’s poem, ‘American Vernaculars’. The section title, ‘Your President, Eileen Myles’, is also the title of Myles’ event organised by The Wheeler Centre, Melbourne in May, 2018. The Lobster is a 2015 film directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. The last lines of the poem, ‘We are all going forward. / None of us are going back’, are also the last lines of Richard Siken’s poetry collection, Crush.

‘Dispatch from the Future Fish’ opens and closes with a reference, both of which are taken from queer works and/or queer artists. These careful citations reflect on the practice of honouring queers who have encouraged other queers to walk down the path of living a queer life – whatever that life may look like.

It is also the case that much trans* art and many trans* artists may be drawn to these kinds of assemblages. Jack Halberstam writes of this in Unbuilding Gender where:

Trans* bodies … function not simply to provide an image of the non-normative against which normative bodies can be discerned, but rather as bodies that are fragmentary and internally contradictory; bodies that remap gender and its relations to race, place, class, and sexuality; bodies that are in pain; bodies that sound different from how they look; bodies that represent palimpsestic identities or a play of surfaces; bodies that must be split open and reorganised, opened up to chance and random signification.(n.pag)

‘Dispatch from the Future Fish’ takes from trans* criticism the imperative to be open to transformation. It is significant, then, that the poem is also a collaborative effort between Darlene Silva Soberano’s words and Eloise Grills’ interpretive illustration. The handwriting within the piece comes from both artists; Soberano wrote the section titles (‘A Reclamation’; ‘Your President, Eileen Myles’; ‘A Reclamation Part II’), while Grills has transcribed the words of the poem. The words of the piece have gone through several forms, first typed in a Word document, then written by hand into the comic’s visuals and finally converted back to a digital form readable online. The words bend: open to human hands holding both pen and pencil as well as typing. In the visual images they follow the rivers and are depicted as being among nature.

The first instance of the poem emulated Myles’s signature staccato style of language, but Grills’s visual arrangement of the poem suggests a slower reading. Consequently, in this final version, the dedication to Myles suggests both a marker of time as well as an acknowledgement of style. At its heart, ‘Dispatch from the Future Fish’ is a poem that rages against aloneness, and both its referential nature and collaborative creation echo this discussion in the work.

In the section titled ‘A Reclamation, Part II’, the lines, ‘I stop for a second / It looks me in the face / holds my gaze, / and calls me by its name’, are lightly paraphrased from the last lines of André Aciman’s 2007 novel, Call Me by Your Name. The title references the character Oliver talking to his lover, Elio: ‘Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine.’ This line celebrates the sameness of the two lovers; their sameness of sex, sameness of two different selves in an intimate moment. Their sameness is queer – that is, also strange; it is strange to call somebody else by your own name. And still. It is a strangeness taken upon by queer people, especially in the way the world perceives us: ‘we don’t have to be witty and charming people who keep our lives discreet and marginalised in the straight world’ (Love, p. 157).

In ‘Dispatch from the Future Fish’, the speaker encounters a fish from the future. The fish calls the speaker by its name and, in doing so, claims the speaker as its own – encouraging them to adopt they/them pronouns. Unlike Call Me by Your Name, the encounter here is not necessarily romantic, but still reckons with the idea of strange sameness. Here, the two different selves in two different forms, the fish and the human, become one.

Many people considering using they/them pronouns hesitate due to the strangeness of the language. Despite efforts by dictionaries to continue asserting that the singular ‘they’ is grammatically correct, and despite the fact that ‘it’s likely that singular they was common even before the late fourteenth century’ (Baron, n.pag) – the term is still perceived as being grammatically awkward and confusing. Eileen Myles argues for the embracing of this awkwardness, or assigning personal significance to the awkwardness of the pronoun. In an interview with Emma Brockes, Myles describes how: ‘[w]e are many. I like the collective notion of self. I think more people for more reasons should take on ‘they’’(n.pag.).

It makes sense then, for the last lines of ‘Dispatch from the Future Fish’ to be grammatically awkward: ‘Future fish, I know who you are / I am they’. They is truly strange and to deny this aspect of the pronoun in service of progress is to deny queer practice. They is still undergoing transformation. To be they in this moment of history is to receive the benefits earned by the plights of older queers – but to be suspended before solid entrance into the mainstream. Like the early years of drag performance. Like the early years of the word, queer – its history now has the luxury of being forgotten; the luxury of forgetting why it was chosen – ‘because it evoked a long history of insult and abuse – you could hear the hurt in it’ (Love, p. 2). The dream, perhaps, is for the history of they to be forgotten – which is irresponsible, but such is the conventional marker of progress. For now, however, they/them pronouns contain a certain magic, for it ‘wakes us with its strangeness’ (Kaminsky, n.pag.).

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Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged Darlene Soberano, Eloise Grills

The Wild Workshop: The Ghost of a Brontëan Childhood in the Life of Dorothy Hewett

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Lucy Dougan

Courtesy of the Archive of Lesley Dougan.

An indelible part of the Brontë mythology is their symbiotic development as young artists in an isolated environment. Some time ago, Juliet Barker’s biographical scholarship on the culture at the parsonage and the Brontë siblings’ lives in Haworth has questioned that isolation in terms of the rich resources available to the Brontës siblings and a family culture that strongly encouraged their imaginative and artistic development.¹ More recently, director Sally Wainwright’s TV movie To Walk Invisible has meticulously recreated the dynamic relationship between the Brontës’ childhood fantasy worlds and their adult writing, along with the strategic ways in which the three sisters built a professional path towards their lives as novelists directly through their sibling bonds. Wainwright’s interpretation of the sisters’ creative lives has gone some way in recovering both the weirdness and the ordinariness of the Brontës in it they seem closer (more graspable) than in any recreation of their lives encountered before. In a similar fashion, Simon Armitage’s recent engagement with Branwell Brontë’s life and legacy achieves, I think, a similar thing. As critic Drew Lamonica Arms has noted

(f)or the Brontë sisters, home – and no place like home – offered the liberty to be together and to be themselves, and this meant the freedom to write. Writing in collaboration reinforced the Brontë’s sense of family solidarity. It was also a means by which they established, asserted and explored individual difference among siblings cast in the same mould, raised in like circumstances and spaces, placed in similar life experiences as daughters, sisters, governesses and authors, whose devotion to one another was both profound and intense (96-97).

I want to consider the significance of the space of childhood in the creative development of Australian poet, playwright and novelist, Dorothy Hewett (1923–2002) through the lens of the childhoods of the Brontës by tracing connections between isolation, place, physical freedom and family culture in relation to artistic development and identity. I want also to think about the role of sister relationships and the influence of parents within the context of isolated upbringings.

In her revisionary introduction to Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Brontë attempted to excuse the perceived scandalous nature of that novel by stating that it was ‘hewn in a wild workshop’(xxiv). Whilst one can see the ploy behind this statement – Charlotte Bronte’s attempt to cast Emily Bronte as a naïve primitive in order to fend off accusation of unseemly writing for a woman – the designation ‘wild workshop’ is handy to my purpose in that in suggests the combination of a space and an activity that is separate from the day-to-day world. It also brings together seemingly contrary orders of a space that are potentially both disordered (wild) and ordered (workshop). In this way, in this tension, it ultimately describes a psychic space as much as the moors of Yorkshire or Lambton Downs, the 3000-acre wheat and sheep farm in Western Australia on which Hewett spent her formative years.

That first spaces define and haunt artists is a well-established notion. Janine Burke argues in her book Source: Nature’s Healing Role in Art and Writing, that this is practically the driving force behind many artists’ adult output – and that to lose the first place is almost necessary. The Brontës, perhaps more than any other writers, symbolise this extreme connection to childhood haunts. Emily Brontë in particular is figured as being earthed in the domestic life of the parsonage and its surrounding moors and of hating time spent away from there. Bruce Bennett argues that Hewett shares with other Western Australian authors such as Peter Cowan and Tim Winton an ‘organic’ notion of local environments also shared by English writers such as D H Lawrence, the Brontës and Wordsworth. Of Hewett he writes, the ‘imagery of place and especially of remembered places of childhood is a necessary prerequisite to the figuration of human behaviour and action’ and that this connection to writers such as the Brontës gives her work ‘an inter-textual richness and force’(20). This particular nexus of intense connection to childhood home, the positioning of that home as extremely isolated, to missing that home, and to the bonds of both sisterly affection and competition would, I argue, bring this sense of a Brontëan haunting to the artistic formation and identity of Hewett.

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Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged Charlotte Brontë, Dorothy Hewett, Lucy Dougan

Externalising the Symptom: Radicalised Youth and The Membrane

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Stephen Muecke

I was radicalised in my youth. I came back from a year in Paris in ’68-69 with my parents, and went to Monash University, a ‘radical’ campus when it was new. I was not a leader; I was still too young for that, but being radical was a trend. In Paris I had been knocked to the ground by the CRS, the riot police. Back home I went to all the demos. I refused to go to Vietnam, and Gough’s election in 1972 saved me from a court case that would have punished me for non-compliance with the draft.

Not everyone was radicalised in those radical times. The boring students in the Liberal Club were biding their time. We were the ones who were going to change the world, uttering the word ‘revolution’ with all the naïvity of youth. Some even headed off to South America in search of some real action. The tentacles crept out. The revolution spread to gender issues and then baby boomer Indigenous youth announced their survival and woke the rest of us up to the foundational injustices of colonial Australia.

And now, today, there is a moral panic about the ‘radicalisation’ of youth of an Islamic confession. It is not totally different. What the kids of today share with my generation is the yearning to define their own place in the world, to be allowed to make their own home and be allowed to do it differently from the common sense expectations of the broader society.

‘They come over here and they …’ Joe, at my Saturday arvo baseball game, lets the unfinished sentence fill up with all the imaginary sins of a new unknown migrants. I think I should ask him if he has ever had a chat with one of ‘them’. Or with his father who might have had, long ago, similar complaints about ‘dagoes’ and ‘wogs’ that have now evaporated.

‘Joe, did you ever talk …’ I start to ask, but he is already striding towards home plate. As clean-up batter with two runners on, he has a job to do. ‘No pressure,’ I yell out, to no-one in particular. Baseball is a game full of such supportive chatter. In this Adelaide suburb, everyone on the team, even the whole club, seems to be white.

It’s the concepts that matter. What used to be the positive value of ‘revolution’ – kids actively working towards a utopian future – has been fragmented into isolated acts now called ‘terror’, coming from outsiders. And ‘we’ can only react.

The meaning of the veil

How does one conceive of a woman with a headscarf? Such women have been subject to hateful acts, even in the anonymous diversity of shopping centres in Australian suburbs. The French ethnopsychiatrist, Tobie Nathan, whose new book The Wandering Souls I have just translated, sees the headscarf first of all as a concept. He calls it a ‘membrane’, based on the meaning of the word ‘hijab’. The veil is not a sign of oppression, the women wearing it would be the first to agree, but one of status, the status of a married or marriageable woman who has chosen not to hide, but to show:

…[a] young veiled girl professes and exhibits a philosophy; she proclaims that she belongs to a group whom she intends exclusively to endow with all her vitality, all her thoughts, all her love. Here the veil is not the mark of a repression of sexual life, but the announcement of a preliminary selection of candidates.¹

The same concept is at work where the veil persists in ‘Western’ traditions in the form of the bridal veil that symbolises the division between single woman and wife, a ‘membrane’ she crosses by lifting the veil at the end of the ceremony as she embraces her new identity.

A woman of Islamic faith wearing a veil in a diverse Western society runs the risk of hate acts not because she has submitted to an archaic moral order, but because, according to Nathan, her clothing is actually a kind of fashion – that is, a way of presenting herself that distinguishes her from the common by being attached to a select group. That is what provokes the outrage: there is a principle in ‘our’ society that no-one is supposed to be sexually inaccessible.

The Jewish refugee

‘They are like me’, says Tobie Nathan, also a baby-boomer, who arrived in Paris in the 1950s as a refugee kid whose family was expelled from Cairo after the Suez crisis. He grew up poor on a housing estate, like the ones where the youth of today are being ‘radicalised’ by Islamic extremists. He knows where they come from.

Later, like me, he was on the barricades in May ’68 in Paris demanding radical solutions (actually, I was more of a tourist on the sidelines, standing there amazed). The more militant were prepared to risk their lives to overthrow the regime of an older generation that was out of touch and failing to provide a viable future for our new ‘booming’ generation.

As an ethnopsychiatrist who has spent his career developing therapies suited to migrants and refugees, ‘wandering souls’ struggling to find a way to belong in metropolitan France, he knows what can cause people to seek desperate ‘radical’ solutions.

Bintou’s therapy

But most of his patients have been people like Bintou, a young woman of African extraction.² The usual medication and therapies had done nothing to help her ‘psychosis’. But Nathan’s ethnopsychiatric clinic took her cultural background seriously. On her case he had one doctor in the group who spoke her language, Wolof. Another doctor used the divination technique of ‘throwing the cowries’, a technique that gained the young lady’s confidence and involved her in her own therapeutic process. This was perhaps no more ‘mumbo-jumbo’ than some of the Freudianism that had alienated her in other clinics.

The prescription that Nathan derived from the whole process was that she should ring her mother in Africa, and ask her to get the local healer to sacrifice an animal… This, along with other subtle actions, was carried out in due course, and the overall therapy was one of reintegrating a ’wandering soul’ to her family, community and ancestors. She was cured. Nathan’s insight is that Western psychiatry and medicalisation isolate the patient with their symptom (it becomes their identity), while his ethnopsychiatry externalises the symptom – it could be caused by the gods or someone casting a spell – and it is treated by procedures that reintegrate the person into their community (they regain their identity).

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Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged Stephen Muecke, Tobie Nathan

On Deep Breaths and Friends Forever: Im/materiality and Mis/communication in Happy Angels Revisited

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Lu Lin

It starts with a beautiful day in the sea, so full of souls, and it will be forever.
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Things I want to tell you about:
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the sun’s rays, my teacher, things that are woolly to touch, body organs and elastic forms,
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all happening in the world, with nowhere else to go.
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Happy Angels Revisited (2018) is my audio adaptation of the children’s book Very Happy Angel Visit (2016) by Hela Trol Pis (Max Trevor Thomas-Edmond) and Hulugold (Chris Peckham). Released through Hela’s publishing project 5everdankly, the print version combines Hela × Hulu’s experimental writing and drawing practices to produce magical milk-glass pictograms through the story of a shape-shifting angel and her friends. In this gentle reading-recording, Happy Angels Revisited considers the sonicities of body/-language through some of the book’s key themes of desire, religion, holograms, fuzziness, and friendships.

∞

Taking cues from the Call and Response, an interactive polyvocal model used in antiphonal music traditions such as gospels, hymns, and sea shanties, where audiences respond to the ‘call(s)’ of a speaker, Happy Angels Revisited pursues a modality of swaying. Moving through and in excess of the sonic and the poetic, the polychoral and the literary, the you and the me (without recourse to a binaristic split between self and other), this is an invocation into the voice’s capacity to displace and disperse itself into multiple literary and aesthetic traditions, as a way of gauging encounters, affects, and relationships. Ythm, an audio journal of contemporary poetry, exemplifies this Call and Response structure in its first issue; Fred Moten’s Reneo’s Open House calls, and four poets respond; invoking a practice of beckoning and attuned listening, a practice of linkage – just like linking arms, like a chain, like a bead bracelet, like a friendship bracelet, a circle loop that means friends forever. The journal itself is auspiciously presented in a circular format – also what I imagine the shape of pores to be.

the sun needs you in it

Happy Angels Revisited is about slow and self-reflexive discharge. Through oral storytelling that moves between modes of address and subject, it is about identifying (without over-exerting) the things that happen in and around the body, and gently, slowly, leaking, expelling. I haven’t quite been able to commit to a name regarding Form but maybe the closest is something between a bedtime/wake-up time story, or a guided meditation; a type of relaxation therapy to facilitate the practice of breath and detachment from thought-induced congestion; easing the movement of worlds towards more renewable and sustainable flows of energy.

where do things go when they disappear?

The angel learns, and plays
games in the world, so adorable,

I’m hiding from you cutely…

and then takes a giant nap after a big day of swimming, playing, and practising care.

Do you know how important rest is?

even the biggest angel needs a nap

You are the angel, but also the world, which goes in every time you breathe.  

that’s what breath is

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Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged John Durham Peters, Lu Lin

Letter to Anne Carson: Work of Remembrance and Mourning

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Subhash Jaireth

‘I came to think of translating,’ you write in Nox ‘… as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch.’ I read your words and imagine you standing in a dark room, your hand thrust forward for a handshake with Catullus’s Poem 101. Paul Celan, the poet you admire, once wrote to a friend that he saw no distinction between a handshake and responding to a poem. But the handshake between a translator and a poem is of a special kind; the first touch is often tentative and timid but once the hand has been grasped, to let it go becomes impossible.

You too can’t let go the hand of Catullus’s Poem 101. ‘I never arrived at the translation I would have liked to do of the poem 101,’ you confess. ‘I guess it [the translation] never ends.’ The groping for the light switch continues. But it doesn’t mean that the effort is wasted. ‘A translation,’ writes Walter Benjamin, touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flow.’ Benjamin’s metaphor of a tangent touching a circle seems in consonance with your groping for the light switch. Both touching and groping can’t happen without hands, and no handshake without them is ever possible.

Benjamin suggests that ‘… languages are not strangers to one another,’ and that only translation can express the kinship of languages more clearly and profoundly. Maurice Blanchot adds an extra emphasis to the idea when he suggests that ‘each language, taken by itself, is incomplete.’ His brief Translating seems to me to be a handshake as well; a handshake between languages; Benjamin’s German text was, most probably, read by him in French, and his own French text has reached me in English.

I have experienced the kinship of languages first-hand, and I am lucky that I continue to enjoy the experience. Like most Indians I was born and brought up in a multilingual family that made use of at least four languages: Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu and English. At home we spoke Punjabi, our so-called mother tongue, but none of us could read or write it because we hadn’t taken the trouble to learn the Gurumukhi script. Hindi became a convenient replacement.

My mother didn’t know English but this didn’t stop her from using English words she heard spoken around her. She employed them with confidence relying on an intuition that rarely failed her. My father’s grasp of Urdu was as good as that of English. He knew the Arabic script in which Urdu was read and written. My father also knew Persian and loved Persian poetry especially that of Mirza Ghalib, the nineteenth-century Urdu and Persian poet who died disappointed that his poems in Persian remained unappreciated by Persian poets.

So at home like many other Indians we spoke a hotchpotch of languages. This hotchpotch or khichidi, to use a Hindi word, continually evolved without any conscious effort from our side. However, the mishmash of our everyday speech coexisted without any discernible tension with a more literary version of Hindi and English that entered the family with books, magazines and newspapers.

In October 1962, when my father, a junior officer in the Indian Army, was sent to fight in the Sino-Indian War, the letters he wrote home to my mother were in Urdu written in the Arabic script. Only my mother could read them and so had to translate them for us. My mother replied to his letters in Hindi (in the Devnagari script) that my father could read and understand but wasn’t able to write.

I began learning English in primary school. When I moved to a high school my father started coaching me at home. His method relied solely on translation for which he used a book that had texts in English and Hindi. He would ask me to translate them: English into Hindi one day and Hindi into English, the next. Often brief news reports from The Tribune, his favourite English daily, were given to me to earn bonus points, which were occasionally converted into money to add to my pocket allowance. I used the savings to buy my first book, The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha. This large hardback book was judiciously illustrated with colour plates and black and white drawings. I liked the stories and soon translated one of them into Hindi; not to show it to my father but just for my own pleasure. The book and my first attempt to translate a story, just for pleasure, made me fall in love with Sancho Panza, whom I saw in one of the illustrations seated luxuriously on his lazy mule.

Translation and translating which for many years remained an inexhaustible wellspring of pleasure became a compulsion when I went to Moscow to study geology. To learn Russian was a necessity but it also meant that I had to put away Hindi and English so that I could learn to think and imagine in Russian. It has to be the language in which you dream at night, I used to be told by my teachers.

For many years I used translation as an exercise to remain in touch with Hindi and English. Each time I read a Russian poem that I liked, I scribbled its translation next to it. Often translation from Hindi into Russian served the same purpose. Some of my first Russian poems emerged initially in Hindi and were translated into Russian. Viktor Urin, a Russian poet, who mentored a group of writing students, read one of my self-translated poems and said that they sounded strange in Russian. But they should, I had wanted to tell him.

However Viktor was keen to show me the difference. Hence in less than an hour, he transformed my ‘clumsy’ translation in to a ‘proper’ Russian poem that soon appeared in a Russian magazine. I was thrilled to see my Russian poem published but each time I read it, I felt sad that it had lost the strangeness that Viktor was so concerned about.

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Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged Anne Carson, Paul Celan, Subhash Jaireth

Translated Extracts from Chantal Danjou

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Dominique Hecq

Rehabilitation of the Inferno
If Yellow
(Extracts)

an odour of cut grass
she who walks falters
land of deceiving linearity
like creases in a pillow
black and white slumber
one foot in a dream the other harried
bust opening its closet
of emotions closet turned display case
where butterflies sleep
structure of the void that inhabits us
odour of blanched grass
shadow of the elder tree adds moistness
flash of salt pans
butterflies disrupting contours
vertigo yet again
she who walks the we
takes us here and there
unpetals poppies
behind her orchard limbs of the absolute
paralyse slowly O ending of the body
at the end of the dream frame of us
tangible of some hidden path where to rest
then colza seemingly green-yellow
yellow! Then odour with no colza no orchard
no shade neutralised world

broom on the side of the roads
what being is held deep down?
Neither fauna nor flora nor mineral nor human
this and that such brilliant designations
so bright that the dark cave preceding
has paled that genera gyrate
that yellow gets louder and louder!
Ah! Superb and crowned are the living
marching from no longer marching
this from shade that from light
luminous voice crossing borders
rhythm of bushes this-that
thick as stars
death-their slowly falling to…
What well masks the asphalt?
What sieve collects yellow after yellow?
Gobble-beauty broom wings cut out
in blue too blue beam of lines
silence-chronicle bend and…
swan-roads-their blacks
sailing towards the fire
lied-shape lied-shape
landscape compression
capital letters under anvil
bottles cans clinking

under the marquee that dances?
That stopped dancing?
Big wind Thing
creeps in abstractions
sometimes thereby amplified
sometimes spreading a veil of dust
or catching fire or unmasking a human
shape its leg arm leg arm
diurnal elasticity night tension
love Thing too
jackets thrown onto embers
gyre or eclipse Thing
when will you engage with that which dances?
Faces pierce the dark
hanging like festive lanterns
light footed monsters are born
time is black as a wood stove
odour is a beautiful labyrinth
men women writhing like forests
it—other of Thing—pours stillness into jars
glasses and dishes frost shatter
the acrobat steps into fear
in the city everything is still
trees show off their fake growths

belly bared for the dance
as round as a mirror
O ballerina-dancer!
bellies turn into face spaces
ready for absorption
as if these were wings to hide in
and hands how strange
butterfly-beige cross your destinies
the marquee is that instant
when things slip or float
man held man with strings
with little flags
with gnarled branches
by the horns
through the monkey on his back
and in the end—they say—man got extinct
the Thing came back
from between foliage nights roofs
perhaps it fell
from one of those curvaceous thighs
Ah! Look at it go!
How it threatens to trip them!
How hard it is!
Enormous and shapeless
islet in the mist

peace-fright
does one know of any other kinship branching off
mute face with one eye always shut tighter
from dark to light patio with hydrangeas
huge flowers bit by bit transformed
into these anthropomorphic suns
these stern faces of grace
hankering after sublime hatchings
stems reaching out for the affrighted
face—how quickly they grow
to hide it! Streams course through it
from times immemorial—how old!
Centre piece of the garden like a white statue
bird song wings night out of the night
long so called supple papyri modulation
time of buzzards train coursing through fields
redolent face sagging face herb basket
train chug-chugging ever more slowly through each
contorting body—the infinite is near—hisses train
drops man in a field with mountains
in the background—see you—says the man
and the train chugs on through the valley pondering
the death by landscape of the humanoid.
At last! A sigh. Lighter, it brushes through the lavender
that used to fill fabrics and places with its fragrance

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Posted in TRANSLATIONS | Tagged Chantal Danjou, Dominique Hecq

Translations from Old English

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Spenser Santos

The poems included here date to between the 7th and 10th centuries. Their original authors remain unknown. “The Dream of the Rood” is preserved in the Vercelli Book, and narrates the events of the crucifixion from the Cross’s perspective, recasting the event in the language and form of Old English heroic verse such as Beowulf. The poem uses the narrative device of the dream vision in order to justify its final exhortation to readers to follow the Cross’s example of good service to Christ. ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’ offers one of only two poems in the entire Old English corpus to have an unambiguously female voice. Difficult in the Old English, the poem presents multiple challenges for translation. The precise genre of the poem is unclear, and scholarly consensus is divided on the whether or not the words earne and dogode in the manuscript are scribal errors (this poem also provides the only attestation of the word dogode in the language, if the word is intentional). Riddle 46 is one of roughly 94 (some debate exists regarding the boundaries between riddles) riddles contained in the Exeter Book. The riddles are diverse in subject matter ranging from religion, to handicraft, to the natural world, to double entendre, and have served as inspiration for later writers like J R R Tolkien. Riddle 46 is a religious riddle, which names thirteen family members seated to dinner, though there are only five people. The solution is provided for the reader’s convenience in a footnote.

The Dream of the Rood

Lo that I wish to speak the best of dreams
That came to me in the middle of night
After the speakers dwelt in slumber!
It seemed me I saw a most splendid tree
To rise into the air, festooned with light,
The brightest of beams. That signal was all 
Covered with gold. Across the land gems stood
Fair over the earth. Five of them there were
Up on the axlespan. The Lord’s angels
Beheld all fair there across creation.

Yet this was no gallows of the wicked
But where the holy spirits saw him, 
Mankind over the world, all this gloried realm.
Splendid was triumph’s tree, and sinstained I
Was wounded with defilements. I saw God’s tree,
Honored with clothes, to shine in joyousness;
In gold the Holy tree was dressed, covered
Honorably with gems and golden cloth.

Yet through that metal I could perceive
The wretched old struggle, when it first began
To bleed from its right side. I was aggrieved
With sorrows, fearful of that fair vision.
I saw that tree change quickly its colors
And its garments. Sometimes it was dripping wet,
Covered with flowing blood, or clothed in gold.
Yet lying there for a long while I,
Sadhearted, saw the tree of the Savior,
Until that time when I heard it to speak.
The best of wood began to say its words:

“Years ago that was, yet still I recall
That I was hewn from my home’s edge
And stripped from my trunk where strong fiends seized me,
They selfwrought a frenzy and bade me their wretches to heave.
Those soldiers shouldered me until they set me upon a hill;
The fiends fastened me there tight. I saw the Freer of mankind
Zealously approach: to ascend me was his wish.
There I durst not bow nor break over the Lord’s
Word, when I saw the world’s surfaces 
To quaver. I could
Defeat all the fiends, yet fast I stood. 

The young hero ungirded himself—that was God Almighty,
Strong and stouthearted. He scaled the high gallows,
Mindful in the eyes of the many, that mankind he would liberate.
I buckled when the Son clapt to me. Yet I durst not bow to the dirt,
Nor fall to the earth’s surface, but fast I had to stand.
Rood was I created. The powerful king I heaved,
The Lord of the Heavens; I durst not lean myself.
They throughdrove me dark nails, the dints on me visible,
Open scathings of malice. I durst not scathe any of them.
They besmirched us both together. I was all with blood drenched,
Gotten from this man’s side after he had given up his spirit.

A long while have I waited on this hill
Of seething fate. I saw then the God of hosts
Direly stretched. Darkness had
Covered with clouds the corpse of the Lord,
The shining splendor, a shadow went forth,
Dark beneath the clouds. All creation wept,
Cried the King’s fall; Christ was on the Rood.

Yet from afar there fared the brave 
To the atheling. All that I beheld.
Sore I was aggrieved with sorrows, yet to the swordhands bowed down,
Gentleminded and greatly eager. God Almighty they took there,
Heaved him from that heavy torture. Hildr’s men abandoned me
To stand in the blanket of blood. I was all stricken with arrows.
They set there the limbweary one, stood by the ends of his corpse,
Regarded there Heaven’s Lord, and rested themselves there a while.
Battleweary after the great war, the warriors in the sight
Of the killing instrument undertook to crypt him.
They carved it from a bright stone, stowed therein the Lord of victories.
They began to sing to him the sorrowsong,
Wretched in the duskening. Then they desired to journey again,
Dejected for the great king; he dwelt there with the smallest army.

Yet there we stood, still for a good while,
Weeping in place after the warriors 
Cried up into the sky. That corpse, that fair
Lifedwelling cooled. Then one caused us to fall 
Down to earth. That destiny was terrible!
Someone buried us in a deep pit, yet there discovered me friends,
The Lord’s servants,
And they girded me in gold and silver.

Now you might hear, my hero, my dear one,
That I have withstood the works of the baleful,
Of terrible sorrows. The time is come now,
That far and wide they worship me,
People over the globe and all this glorious creation
Pray to this sign. God’s son—on me he
Suffered for a time. Therefore in splendor I now
Rise under the heavens. And heal them I may,
Each of them until they be in awe of me.

I was once honored of the hardest torture,
For the loathsomest people; life’s way—I
Spread it before them, before the speechbearers.
Lo, the Elder of glory exalted me
Over the wooded grove, the Guardian of the Kingdom of heaven,
Just as he did his mother too, Mary herself,
Almighty God, for all mankind 
Worthied her over all womankind. 

Now I charge you, my cherished hero,
To say of this sight to all mankind
Tell the word that it is the tree of glory
On which Almighty God was made to suffer
For mankind’s many sins
And Adam’s ancient deeds.
He savored death there, yet the Savior arose again
With his great might to be mankind’s helper.
Then he ascended to the heavens. They will hasten to that place again,
In this middle earth, mankind to seek
The Lord himself on the last day of judgment,
Almighty God and his angels with him,
That he will judge, for he wields judgment’s power,
Over everyone here (as once he himself did before)
Who in this loaned life deserves it.

May there not be any unafraid
Of the language which the Lord speaks.
He asks before the multitude where that man is
Who would savor, in the Savior’s name, 
Bitter death, as on the beam he once did.
But then they become fearful, and few think
What might they start to say to Christ.
Then there need be none afraid
Who bears the best sign in their breastchamber,
But every soul shall seek from the earth
Through the cross to the kingdom,
Those for whom to live with the Lord is their thought.”

With joyous heart then I prayed to the tree,
With great zeal. I was alone there with a
Small army. The soul was urged its way forth,
And I endured many times of longing.
For me life’s hope is now that I might seek
The tree of victories alone and more
Often than all, to honor it well.
For that is my desire great in my mind,
And to the cross is owed my patronage. 

I have few friends in earthly realms, but they
Henceforth have left worldjoy, have sought the Lord;
They now in heaven live with the high father,
In glory dwell, and hopeful I await
For when one day the Lord’s cross, which I
Have seen here on this earth before, takes me
Away from this fleeting mortality
And then am brought where much happiness is,
To joy in the heavens, to where God’s folk	
Are set to feast, where eternal bliss is,
And when I seat myself where sith I may
In glory dwell, and fully with the saints
Partake of joy. 

                                          To me God is a friend,
One who here on the earth once had suffered
For mankind’s sins upon the gallowstree.
He released us. And He forgave us life
And a heavenly home. Hope was renewed
With life and bliss, for those who ere tholed fire.
The son on that trip was victorious,
Able and strong when with a many he came,
A troop of souls, into the Lord’s kingdom,
Of the almighty one, to bliss with angels
And all the saints already in heaven
Who lived in glory, when their ruler came,
Almighty God, to where his homeland was.

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Posted in TRANSLATIONS | Tagged Spenser Santos

The Poets: Pejk Malinovski Self-translates

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Pejk Malinovski

Image courtesy of The New York Times.

The Poets
(Extract)

Poets who love. 

Poets who love Greece. 

Poets who want to be loved and when they are, immediately leave poetry, relieved.

Poets who write their phone numbers into poems.

Poets who have no words for it.

Poets at parties dreaming of bright solitary spaces.

Poets in bright solitary spaces dreaming of parties.

Poets cutting lemons in the dark.

Poets in long columns on a long march.

The poet’s fascination with snails, which have both penises and vaginas and stab each other with calcium arrows before they mate.

 The poet’s tears when he takes her sex in his mouth.

The poet who wants be tough, so she buys a leather jacket and sits on a motorcycle and fucks a girl who comes from a little village and writes poems about it, feeling the power crackle from her fingertips like lightning. 

Poets who plan bank robberies with their poet friends. 10 downtown banks are to be robbed at the same time, so at least some of the poets can escape in the confusion. In the banks they plan to leave poems (bad idea).

…

The poet smiling at grasshoppers.

The poet investigating the poetics of hotels.

The next destination always seems more appealing to the poet than the place she is in. The previous stops seem more attractive the further away they are.

The poet’s face when she realises that she can never come home. That there was never a home to begin with. 

The poet holds an important post at the institute of longing.

The poet feels bored, wherever she is.

The poet’s noble melancholy, one final remnant of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The poet imagining the future of golf pants.

The poet in his bathtub, like a cruise ship anchored in a deep fjord.

The poet, with the superiority of the penniless, towering like a lighthouse on the outermost point of her feelings.

The poet, with the anxiety of the ill adjusted, writhing like a worm in the intricate maze of his mind.

The poet with milk in his beard.

The poet with her foot on the gas.

The poet with his young male assistant.

The poet with the daughter of the cook.

The poet with her face in her hands.

The poet with her PhD.

The poet with gloves on, breaking into her own house to claim insurance money.

The poet with his finger on the Ouija board.

The poet evoking in daydreams all the houses she ever lived in. The living rooms, the bedrooms and kitchens, the furniture, the view from the windows. The poems she wrote in those houses. Finally, the daydreams she had in each room.

The poet prefers texts in which the I (if there is one) is a fluid I. An I capable of assuming all positions, masculine, feminine, young, old, human, animal, leaf of grass, tectonic plate, one after the other, or simultaneously. A doubting, searching, aspiring self. A furious, calm, expectant self. A little gnome-self during World War 2, safe and sound by the fireplace.

The poet who refuses to give up. Bald head bent over the white paper, which he slowly fills with prepositions, conjugations of God.

The poet’s ferocity, tamed by his obligations to a girl he adopted from China, shortly before 9/11 ruined the idea that he could give her peace and security.

The poet’s vanity and notions of an afterlife, the meticulous letters addressed to friends, publishers, critics, but written with the dark shelves of the national library in mind.

The poet’s late realisation that a lifetime of antagonism towards a particular critic was the fire that kept his poetry going.

Poets interested in what happens when you take psychotropic drugs.  

Poets interested in what happens in the days after taking psychotropic drugs.  

Poets who argue that Poetry is far wiser than any poet, wiser than anybody. 

Poets who write about the dark side of Chinese society. 

Poets who identify deeply with Glenn Gould and Joseph Cornell. 

The poet who consciously works to destroy the memory of his privileged upbringing, burns all his bridges and ends up in a foreign country where he becomes a guru for a bunch of drug addicts who find solace in his limitless self-hatred.

Poets who win awards and develop an artificially inflated self-image they can then use as an excuse for new assaults on the language. Trembling cadence fever, grandiose metaphors.  

Poets who win awards abroad because translation conceals the violent assaults they have committed on their mother tongue.  Poets whose sensitivity to their mother tongue is so intense that it can never be translated.

Poets who are hurt when the public recognition they so despise passes them by. 

Somebody nudges the poet in the movie theatre. He must have fallen asleep. Maybe he was snoring? Why else would they nudge him?

 The poet at night, studying the trees in empty parks.

The poet in the morning, studying the landscape of the duvet.

The poet puzzled by the existence of moose. 

The poet a jar.

The poet’s meticulous account of the comings and goings of swifts, their numbers and behaviour.  

Poets who write long suites about the wind or the sea.  Poets who write poems with the help of google searches.

The internet poet is to literature what the cafeteria is to the school system.

The romantic poet is to literature what the butterfly is to the butterfly effect.

 The three poet friends who invent a fourth, fictional poet who puts an end to their friendship.  

Poets who are late for appointments.  Poets who sign petitions for peace. 

Poets who help out in Haiti.  

The poet, married, with 2 children and his own house, ranting against the petite bourgeoisie, seeing himself as a revolutionary anarchist and blaming other poets for being apathetic.

  The convenient self-deception of the poet.  

The poet who falls down, down, down in a dream with a lot of other people and chairs and tables in a kind of waterfall. 

Poets meeting amid a swarm of bees.

 Drunk poets playing long table tennis tournaments without a ball.

Poets undressing, fully.

Poets hiding inside the Trojan horse.

Poets jumping on wrecked cars in the morning sun.

Poets discussing the difference between having friends in literature and having friends in real life.

Poets discussing whether they’d rather be burned alive or eaten by a shark.

Poets being kicked out of the art gallery after having sex in the bathroom.

Poets, somewhere near a tennis court at night, feeling lost in life, but life knows exactly where they are.

Poets gathering around a bonfire with their favourite books, one brings Inger Christensen’s Alphabet, another John Ashbery’s Tennis Court Oath, someone else brings Pieter de Buysser’s Landscape With Skiproads, each of them explain what this book means to them, how it inspired their own writing, led them to new awareness, and then they throw the books in the fire. All meaning transformed into heat, the original hunt for the right words, mirrored in the syncopated dance of flames over smoking pages, fire as the ultimate reader.

Poets by the lake, mimicking titles of famous novels for the others to guess.

Poets disappearing as calligraphy over the ice.

Poets chased by the shadows of clouds.

Poets imagining life as an artist, selling a lot of art and having a house in Spain.

The poet watches the path of ants through the kitchen.

 The poet imagines the bookshelves are high-rises and each book is an apartment full of word-people, living side by side, infinitely close. In this metropolis of meaning, new landscapes, smells, feelings, ideas open up with each millimetre, in every direction.

The poet imagines all the pregnant women on the street in New York suddenly breaking into synchronised dance, like in a musical.

 The poet exits a dark stairway, feels the cold, dry air. The steam from a dog’s tongue.

 A dog the poet has never known has sighed.

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Posted in TRANSLATIONS | Tagged Pejk Malinovski

Carnage, Crosses and Curiosity: 13 Images by Yvette Holt

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Yvette Holt

Over the course of her outback chapters, spanning close to a decennial, I have taken over 56,000 photographs covering some 500,000 square kilometres since immersing into the greater desert regions of Central Australia. In particular, I am drawn to the decaying enamel of rust in the dust levelled at an assortment of post-carnage and yesteryears’ abandonment of motor vehicles peppered throughout the Central, Simpson and Western Deserts.

Literally climbing in and out, over and under of hundreds of metal carcasses not yet completely interned to the sands, her photography arches in between the chromatic intersection of light and darkness with a prescribed interplay on religiosity filtering deliberate sentiments of votive imagery through oscillating frames of prayer and faith – crucifixes and crosses.

The shattering of glass captured from these former carriages of petroleum movement heightens the illusion of a phosphorescent diaspora absorbed from windshields to quarter-glass to passenger walls of air, light and protection. Canvassed into the landscape of a baron inland sea, these prismatic shards of iridescent intensity not only satellite the curiosity of the photographer but also hostage solitude and fragility of the imagined rear view.

1. Namatjira 

Quarry floor tiles shadowing a high noon cell style window pane cast by natural sunlight at Albert Namatjira’s two-bedroom family home, six kilometres west of Hermannsburg. Western Arrernte Ntaria, Hermannsburg, 2017

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Posted in ARTWORKS | Tagged Yvette Holt

Body of Sound

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Yasmin Heisler

Martina Copley | Drawing for unworded onscreen sound poem, 2018 | paper, graphite, ink | 29.7 x 42cm

I’m excited to curate these artists to celebrate the communicative complexities of the body-sonic sphere. In an environment that is increasingly negotiated through algorithmic and predictive technology, this work allows us to re-examine orality.

Alessandro Bosetti: Plane / Talea #39
Carolyn Connors: untitled
Catherine Clover: Birds of New York series
Jacob Kirkegaard: Stereocilia for 2 Ears of 1 Person
Joel Stern: Twin Murmurings
Martina Copley: Unworded sound poem
Ania Walwicz: ‘Eat’ from Horse
A J Carruthers: Consonata

From involuntary sounds and inner voices to deconstructed words and letters. There are translations of avifauna and vocalisations reflecting space, all of which give rise to insightful contemplation and the wondrous possibilities of connection.

Posted in CHAPBOOKS | Tagged A J Carruthers, Alessandro Bosetti, Ania Walwicz, Carolyn Connors, Catherine Clover, Jacob Kirkegaard, Joel Stern, Martina Copley, Yasmin Heisler

‘Eat’ from Horse

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Ania Walwicz

Posted in SOUND | Tagged Ania Walwicz

Issue Launches.Submissions Windows.

Issue Launches.
Submissions Windows.