Review Short: Holly Isemonger’s Deluxe Paperweight and Jessica Cham’s premium pastoral poetry

Posted on March 6, 2017 by Nick Xuereb

Deluxe Paperweight by Holly Isemonger
SOd, 2016

premium pastoral poetry by Jessica Cham
SOd, 2016


Holly Isemonger’s Deluxe Paperweight is a mixed bag. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though it does make it difficult to write a concise review – one that provides the reader with an objective overview of the book’s contents, while simultaneously sprinkling throughout an appropriate serve of salty criticisms or sweet praises, depending on the reviewer’s palate; these remarks being, in the end, entirely personal judgements. What I ultimately want to convey to you is that the poems collected here are not all good and not all bad, but demonstrate genuine promise and wit, and that the mixed-bagginess mentioned above is probably intentional, though this doesn’t automatically excuse said mixed-bagginess. Saying that much is easy; what’s difficult is to explain why Deluxe Paperweight works, and why it doesn’t.

First, the chapbook is oddly structured. There are six sections and six distinctly different kinds of poems. Beginning with a series of ‘Reviews’ of films by Lars von Trier, Isemonger then turns to more conventional poetic forms with three ‘sad witch psalms ;(’, followed by a series of rearranged poems called ‘Hip Shifts’. Next is ‘Free Online Translation Service’, in which the author copy-pastes a paragraph through an online translator multiple times in order to jumble up the syntax until, in the final iteration, the passage is unintelligible (or at least I assume this is the case, since I can’t know for certain – it could be that Isemonger has manipulated the paragraph herself so that it appears to have been translated and poorly retranslated again and again). The longest section consists of three ‘Failed screenplays’, and the final piece, titled ‘Five Obstructions’ after the von Trier documentary of the same name, is a poem comprised entirely of questions. Intercut between these six poetic works are three comic-book-inspired pieces of visual art, made up of screenshots from various films, television programs, and paintings.

The first recurring technique that links these disparate works together appears to be ekphrasis: a rather unfortunate word for a rather nifty literary device. Film acts as a central motif throughout Isemonger’s poetry, though she is ultimately more concerned with the viewer’s private experience than with the filmmaker’s art. The poems in Deluxe Paperweight observe people who are themselves observing (and who are, in some cases, aware they are being observed). Thus, Isemonger remarks in her ‘review’ of von Trier’s Breaking the Waves that she ‘wouldn’t watch beyond the following frame if it weren’t for the handsome man’, and describes in ‘Hip Shifts’ trolling ‘the gallery for art that resembled life’. The prose poem ‘Free Online Translation Service’ begins with a description of a character recalling her experience watching an unnamed film:

If you ask her about the favourite part of her trip she will put her hand on her chin and look up, close her eyes and think of a film she watched at home in bed with an old boyfriend; a man ate canned pineapple, he ran around and around in circles to sweat out his tears, so he would stop being sad. (6)

The images Isemonger describes are provided without narrative context: the emphasis is on the recollection of the visual stimuli. This is perhaps why the three artworks in Deluxe Paperweight focus predominantly on images of different optical forms, from extreme close-ups of eyeballs, to a pair of binoculars, the lens of a camera, and the view through a peephole.

Reading Isemonger’s poetry, I am reminded of the feminist notion of the male gaze: indeed, several of her images are taken from John Berger’s BBC series Ways of Seeing (1972), which criticises the predominance of the male perspective in traditional Western cultural aesthetics. There appears to be a tension within the poems between Isemonger’s struggle to interrupt the hegemony of the male gaze and the need to incorporate its products into her work (all the images are taken from films by male directors or paintings by male artists). To subvert this, Isemonger turns to self-reflection; the mirror – recalling the vanitas paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries – becomes an important symbol of the feminine subject’s fragmentation via her re-presentation in male-oriented media. In ‘Failed Screenplay (Rom Com)’, a ‘version’ of the poet addresses this problem directly:

I cannot write the screenplay (looks up and locks eyes with herself in the mirror) and I’ll tell you why! (in the voice of Werner Herzog)

Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity – a fiendish stupidity (swivels in chair to address the camera) sometimes I write about me (gestures toward the mirror) sometimes I write about versions of me (yells) HOLLY!

Isemonger flits between flippancy and earnestness in her approach to this theme. There’s a double duality to her work, both in its tone and in its effort to balance literary art against so-called ‘low’ art, such as genre cinema, selfies, and Internet emojis; an idea that seems to be expressed in the chapbook’s humorous title: Deluxe Paperweight.

The tone in Jessica Cham’s premium pastoral poetry – a short work by another new poet – is similarly difficult to parse. Like Isemonger, Cham’s poetry is juxtaposed against images, though here they appear to be the author’s original photographs. The poem is written seemingly as part of an email to independent filmmaker, musician, and actor Vincent Gallo. Cham’s language is often playful, incorporating puns (‘oh de toilette’ (1)), surreal imagery (‘a tremendous exhale that swells / to the size of a balloon’ (2)), and jokes: ‘the only way you can move forward huh huh huh / is to recollect the sum total / of hugh grants acting range’ (3)). As the poem concludes, Cham becomes more direct—the underlying sensibilities of the poem seem to burst out into the open all of a sudden:

Ok so if u remove the fragmented syntax from
choreographed dance what is a difference
Between ur dance and an act of inexplicable dance
I don’t get it and i fuckin hate ur practise
                The work didn’t make sense and i hate her
personally like am i meant to feel sympathy for her
situation (3-4)

Cham shares Isemonger’s ekphrastic response to cinema, though it’s unclear whether Cham is addressing Gallo’s ‘work’ or someone else’s. Regardless, the sense of outrage remains largely the same either way – it reads like the secret argument you might have with yourself after visiting a bad art exhibit. There’s also the possibility that the above lines are intended as a kind of auto-criticism; Cham may be pre-empting the responses to her own work making it (like Deluxe Paperweight) all the more challenging to review. And both Isemonger and Cham use their self-awareness as a technique for satirising the dominance of the male gaze: ‘i have been tested installed and serviced for maximum performance and u should mount me on the wall to mark market economic value’.

Isemonger goes a step further, however, in her investigation of the transformative relationship between language and digital technology. This is where the chapbook shows the most promise but also ends up being the most disappointing. Isemonger’s experiments with language do not ultimately amount to much. ‘Hip Shifts’, where the poet rearranges three apparently unconnected stanzas of poetry, is reminiscent of the ‘Kenosha Kid’ passage of Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), though Isemonger doesn’t advance Thomas Pynchon’s linguistic experiment in any significant way. ‘Free Online Translation Service’ is much of the same. The use of an online translator to jumble up the sentence structure is reminiscent of the formal experiments of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets such as Charles Bernstein, but Isemonger’s poem doesn’t appear to add much to this aging tradition. You get the sense that something is trying to be worked out here; what that is exactly is difficult to locate. The final result is to make the poem more cryptic, though not necessarily more meaningful or interesting: ‘Eyes do not love, an old friend in bed at home, feeling stalls, or sweat, tears, pineapple round’.

Still, Deluxe Paperweight is worth a look. Holly Isemonger is a promising new talent and it will be interesting to see her art develop from here. Though this chapbook doesn’t achieve the full potential of its ideas, Isemonger manages to showcase a surprisingly broad range for such a short collection. But this is not quite a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none situation; Deluxe Paperweight is a challenging though flawed introduction to a new artist, whose future projects will likely overshadow this one.

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Review Short: Anthony Lawrence’s Headwaters

Posted on March 6, 2017 by Toby Davidson

Headwaters by Anthony Lawrence
Pitt Street Publishing, 2015


Headwaters is Anthony Lawrence’s fifteenth collection and his first with Pitt Street Poetry, whose website memorably suggests the humble reader should ‘Find yourself a shot glass, take a seat, and take a shot.’ This is the first time I’ve seen a publisher suggest their books be read thus, though in their defence, they do so in relation to lines from Lawrence’s ‘Wax Cathedral’. Ah well, when in Rome … a thimble of Lagavulin scotch as required and I’m finally ready to review. Non-drinkers may read on as they are.

Headwaters offers no great divergence from the impressive Signal Flare (Puncher & Wattman, 2013) or many prior works of note. It is recognisably ‘Lawrencian’: corporeal, tactile, connubial, self-reflexive, tenebrous, ecological, elegiac, transcendent, each flexing its own brand of toughness. ‘Connective Tissue’, which won the 2015 Newcastle Poetry Prize, is an early standout and the longest inclusion. Its six pages range from sickness to amazement at the body, seascapes and memory of country rugby games with ‘tough farm boys who made up / for a lack of finesse / with raw courage’. All are bound by the connective tissue which links poet and lover, honeyeater and flower, old man and young, walker and bird-printed sand. The opening poem of Headwaters, ‘My Darling Turns to Poetry at Night’, seems almost a prelude or epilogue to the subject matter of ‘Connective Tissue’, notably where ‘Her dreams have night vision, and in her sight / Our bodies leave a ghostprint where we’ve laid’, the double entendre of the last word a sly flicker of humour in the villanelle’s greater dance of abstraction and soft, imprinted skin.

‘The Deep’ is the poem I return to most. I’m typically (notoriously?) drawn to the marine, but in this case it is more the delicate, gradual rendering that makes this naked dive something more extraordinary:

                                           we slipped away 	 
without a word or gesture for goodbye
a dying sun like coals inside a fire opal
past fish like flying crystal
from a breaking chandelier, our rings
throwing sparks, our optical colour-wheels
depleted as we neared fatal levels 
in our oxygen, to surface under a sky
blowing over like ash, like a signatory
on love’s testament and will
made permanent and formal 
where acceptance moves apace
with a migrant shelving of the sea.

The rest of the poem is just as spellbinding, peering through ‘photic and abyssal zones’ where a world-record-holding free diver haemorrhaged to death, a marker buoy ‘tending / to the rise and fall of its reflection / like a woman with her face in her hands’. Lawrence’s detailed, absorptive luminosity is reminiscent of Martin Harrison, a master of generous lyrical concentration. Both poets, of course, share modern American tastes, though to refine this further does neither justice other than to note that Headwaters takes its epigraph ‘With no less purpose than the swifts / that scrawl my name across the sky’ from New York poet and musician Michael Donaghy.

The final sequence ‘Bloodlines’ sees the poet return to his country roots with its mixture of modern pastoral (‘the quad bike has replaced the night horse’) and Ted Hughes-esque visceral starkness. The starkness of ‘In Extremis’ is of a different order. Explorer poems are often considered out of vogue, consigned to the mid-century (white) Australian search for national identity in Rosemary Dobson’s ‘The Ship of Ice’, Douglas Stewart’s ‘Worseley Enchanted’, Francis Webb’s ‘Leichhardt in Theatre’ and Eyre All Alone’, with subsequent Indigenous retorts, for example in Jack Davis’ ‘The Black Tracker’. Lawrence’s ‘In Extremis’ resurrects the explorer poem with its depiction of a starving Sir Douglas Mawson in Antarctica:

In the late night flare and burn of the Aurora Australis
he finds the arc of a distress signal. In displacements of ice
breaking bone and rifle shots.
Standing where he’d once seen a leopard seal
tease a wounded penguin like a torn sleeve of muscle
from between the blue taproots of floebergs
he stares from the frayed portal in his balaclava
as if into the patronymic origins of his name. Maw.
The minke whale’s baleen like fly-streamers over a door.
The orca’s serated, invitational grin.

This is grand poetry without the pomposity, replaced instead by semi-survival and brute mammalian reality. I loathe ‘clean sheet’ reviews, but my harsher critical faculties can only peck at the edges here of the collection as a whole (does pseudo-ephedrine deserve a whole poem in ‘Medicine’?). The poems, as they should, correspond with one another. ‘Ghazal’, for example, serves as one geographic counterpoint to Mawson’s Antarctic solitude, the poet of his younger days alone in the red dust of Broken Hill, written into the present through the ancient Arabic form. Shifting sands, indeed.

Headwaters once again proves that Anthony Lawrence’s claim for a permanent place in Australian poetry stopped being a claim long ago. There’s little need to claim what you already are. Gravely, graciously, he’s just getting on with it.

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EKPHRASTIC Editorial: Poetry that Sees

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Cassandra Atherton

Ekphrastic

Ekphrasis

In ancient Greece ekphrasis was understood more broadly than in the contemporary world, indicating a complex genealogy for this term that encompasses so much fine poetry as well as many other forms of writing. For the ancients, the best ekphrastic poetry was prized because it presented an often dramatic picture in words, enabling the reader to ‘see’ and respond immediately to what was being described or evoked. Ekphrastic poetry provided a way of allowing readers or listeners to appreciate the imagistic and sometimes narrative content of poetry almost as if they might be looking at the object or objects being written about.

Ekphrasis was a rhetorical tool, enabling the evocation of an object in language in such a way as to enable readers to respond emotionally, even viscerally to it. However, ekphrastic works were not necessarily highly descriptive or detailed. They were considered successful – much as imagistic poetry is today – when they gave the reader sufficient and apposite details to enable them to imagine a whole scene. Words were, in this way, understood to be transportive in their ability to activate the visual imagination. Ruth Webb comments that:

the emphasis given in the ancient definitions of ekphrasis to effect, over and above any formal or referential characteristics, is striking: an ekphrasis can be of any length, of any subject matter … using any verbal techniques, as long as it ‘brings its subject before the eyes’ or, as one of the ancient authors says, ‘makes listeners into spectators’. (2009: 8)

Although some ancient ekphrastic works are relatively brief, one of the most widely referenced ancient examples of ekphrasis is very detailed. It is the description of Achilles’ shield in Homer’s epic poem, the Iliad, including Hephaestus’s making of the shield, part of which reads:

And on it he made a herd of straight-horned cattle: the cattle were fashioned of gold and tin, and with lowing hurried out from stable to pasture beside the sounding river, beside the waving reed. And golden were the herdsmen who walked beside the cattle, four in number, and nine dogs swift of foot followed after them. But two terrible lions among the foremost cattle were holding a loud-lowing bull, and he, bellowing mightily, was being dragged by them, while after him pursued the dogs and young men. The lions had torn the hide of the great bull, and were devouring the inner parts and the black blood. (1998: Book XVIII: 478-608)

This brilliant piece of ekphrasis delivers complex descriptive and powerful narrative tropes. Like much ekphrastic writing, it makes use of literary techniques to narrate – and thus transform into notional action – the picture it references. In inscribing in language a still image, it transforms the ‘seen’ into a second and reactivated form of seeing, reinterpreting what it evokes in the act of rendering it in words.

Ekphrasis’s combination of tropes of seeing (or seeing again) and narrative has confounded some scholars who have interpreted it as embodying a tension between image and word – almost as if these strands of ekphrastic writing are in a struggle for precedence. And, more generally, ekphrasis is seen by some commentators as a form that contains its own contradictions:

Ekphrasis … has a Janus face: as a form of mimesis, it stages a paradoxical performance, promising to give voice to the allegedly silent image even while attempting to overcome the power of the image by transforming and inscribing it. (Wagner 1996: 13)

Ekphrasis is certainly very often a complex form of writing that tends to problematise the question of how art represents and ‘perceives’ things. It also emphasises, more directly than any other literary form, the perennial connection between poetry and the visual arts – a connection so powerful that in the minds of some ancient writers, poetry and painting were different expressions of the same creative impulse.

Certainly, both poetry and painting are able to give imagistic representations of the world and of experience, and convey aspects of narrative in ways that may be more similar than they first appear. The narratives of visual art – such as in a painting – are fixed, but they often imply a great deal of movement; and poetry’s restless narratives often suggest considerable stasis, as if time itself is held in the amber of its words. Both painting and poetry enable the receiver of the work to view things newly and, as it were, through a fresh lens.

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J S Harry’s ‘tunnel vision’, Vicious Sydney and The Car Story

Posted on March 1, 2017 by David Brooks

As I began this essay on J S Harry’s poem ‘Tunnel Vision’1 2 several years ago (2006) the radio drive shows in Sydney were full of opinions, mainly angry, concerning a report that a male teacher, in an English class, encouraging students to find as many words in ‘Australia’ as they could, had led the way by showing them how it contains the word ‘slut’, and then, when asked what that meant – it must have been a young primary-school class – had told them that it was a word used to describe women. An hour later I was having lunch with a visiting academic from Jaipur and we spoke about the recent spate of attacks on Indian students in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, and then of the appalling death of an aboriginal elder in the back of a prisoner transport van in Western Australia. No point in claiming that Australia is not a racist country. I did, sometimes, try to claim that, but gave it up long ago. We mask it, that’s all: here on the East Coast we keep much of it beyond the Great Dividing Range, where a lot of other things are kept, out of sight and mind. We then, this Indian academic and I, spoke about Australia’s much-vaunted multiculturalism, its naivety, its need to mature, the stages it has gone through. There is a gap between Australia’s ideas of itself and its reality. A chasm.

J S Harry’s remarkable 1982 / 83 poem opens with a set of graffiti, probably (though I maintain that it might also be the Cahill Expressway tunnel) from the Kings Cross tunnel, constructed in the early 1970s ‘to provide a route for through traffic between William St and New South Head Rd’ in the east of the Sydney CBD. Of course, we don’t have to be this specific; the tunnel might well be purely imaginary; but I think we owe it to this poem to be specific. Part of this poem’s point and power, particularly to those who happen to know or live in Sydney, is in its specificity.

The graffiti form a palimpsest, or rather the printed replication or representation of a palimpsest, which is to say that the messages put up here seem already to have been tampered with. Someone, say, has put up one of the oldest graffiti, ‘JESUS SAVES’ (or had this originally been ‘SAVE THE WHALES’?), and someone else, coming later, picking up on the pun in ‘saves’, has added / adjusted the text to read ‘AT THE WALES’, referring presumably to the Bank of New South Wales (which, speaking of palimpsests, changed its name to Westpac in 1982 (Jesus, this Jesus, has evidently not overturned the tables of the money-lenders)). We can’t tell from what is before us whether ‘SUPPORT SYD VICIOUS’ appeared first and someone has added ‘CUT A SLUT’, though we should note that the ‘Sid’ Vicious of the punk rock group the Sex Pistols has become ‘SYD’ as if to refer us now to Sydney, vicious Sydney.

There’s a back story. Sid Vicious had a long relationship with a girl named Nancy Spungen. On the 12th of October 1978, Vicious woke up in their room in the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan (yes, of that famous Leonard Cohen song about Janis Joplin) to find Nancy dead on the bathroom floor with a stab wound to her lower abdomen. Vicious was charged with the murder but was allowed out on bail. Although he never stood trial – he attempted suicide, was sent to Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, subsequently was rearrested for assaulting someone else, spent fifty-five days in prison, and died of a heroin overdose (as had Joplin eight years before) while celebrating a second release on bail – there were theories that it was not he who had murdered Spungen and one can imagine some Sex Pistols fan writing defiant graffiti at this time, just as one can imagine someone else, aware of how Spungen died, writing below it an ironic ‘CUT A SLUT’.

‘WHO ARE YOU IF YOU’RE NOT?’ is at this point a little more mysterious, as is the following ‘CREAMINESS CONTROLS YOU / OR YOU CONTROL THE CREAMINESS’. The implication that in the midst of what we assume is our being we might, in some way, not be being at all, and the idea that some process or substance may so overwhelm us that relinquish control of ourselves. But we should store these away, awaiting developments. I should probably have begun, in any case, not with Sid and Nancy but with the poem’s title. The pun – its double entendre – is quite obvious: that the oncoming motorists are experiencing, as they enter the tunnel, the vision of a half-naked woman running toward them (and are also – or is this she? as she runs? but I imagine she is far too traumatised to do so – reading the graffiti as they drive past or through them), and that ‘tunnel vision’, as a physiological condition, is an astigmatism, a restriction of one’s peripheral vision, means that one views the world as if through a tube or tunnel (you might note that Harry refers to ‘tube’ lighting). But of course this is not just double entendre. It becomes evident, as we read further into the poem, that the tunnel is our culture, the way that the discourse that flows around and through us, making us (the tunnel in the poem is lined with words, as if to present language and the tunnel as synonymous), at the same time narrows our vision. It – language, discourse – may enable us to see (there is lighting in the tunnel), but also curtails that seeing: we witness, as we move through the poem, habits of discourse, habits of words, habits of verbal containment, closing in upon the motorists, so close to their encounter with the apparition of the screaming woman that it might almost be simultaneous. (Note ‘apparition’ there: this woman is ‘picture’, is ‘image’, is ‘form’, as if, even in the midst of her crisis, she is being – has already been – ‘packaged’, rendered ‘news’, taken from herself.)

‘(S)creaming without words,’ the poem continues:

she runs through the tunnel
straight at them

‘Straight at’ what? The oncoming motorists (as I think we are at first likely to think), or the words? Both, of course – the words, since they are seen by motorists both coming into the city in the morning and going out of it in the afternoon, must be on the walls of the tunnel, rather than facing the traffic at its entrance – but (and although the opening graffiti have clued us) we may miss this latter vector in the forward movement of the poem; she assaults language as much as she assaults the visual field of the on-coming motorists, but not language per se; that would be too easy – or, rather, too easy for us to wriggle out of. One of the most evident of the several things this poem is ‘about’ is the way language and habits of discourse paper over (talk over, repress) what for want of better words (irony there) we might call our vicious reality. This woman has been raped, or so it seems, and straight away those who see her begin to smooth / soothe the monstrosity of the act by creating ‘fictions’ – to take away the pain of it, yes, to avoid responsibility for it, yes, to mask their complicity in it, yes. How is it that when there should be outrage, immediate assistance, horror, disgust, action, there are only people passing by? (They know they should stop – they want to stop to help her – but they have to make ‘a difficult decision’, for to stop, surely, in this speeding traffic would be ‘risking causing a chain of deaths’ – and there, they have done it: the ‘right’ decision, the ‘difficult’ decision made, they are absolved, they can continue driving. To stop, to get out of their vehicles, to help, to abandon their ‘motorist’ selves, would be, in effect, to cross a barrier, to move into a different dimension, almost to shift to another side of time: to ‘leave the stream’ and to ‘enter the moment’, to leap over a ‘gap’.)

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Ekphrasis as ‘Event’: Poets Paint Words and the ‘Performance’ of Ekphrasis in Australia

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Dominic Symes

Ekphrastic

To commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Newcastle Region Art Gallery (NRAG) in 2007, Lisa Slade and Peter Minter co-curated the exhibition Poets Paint Words. The two curators commissioned some of Australia’s best poets to write poems in response to a selection of paintings held in the NRAG archive. Gallery director Nick Mitzevich was optimistic about the potential of a mixed-media celebration of the NRAG anniversary, saying, ‘This exhibition will attract audiences of all ages, art lovers will be turned on to poetry and likewise poetry lovers will become lovers of painting.’

Historically, ekphrastic practice and theory has considered the poem subordinate to the painting, and yet – between 24 March and 17 June of that year at the NRAG – poems were placed beside the related paintings. Here the poems were presented at the ‘same level’, enhancing their literal and metaphoric equality (Kaplan 7).1

Slade’s and Minter’s curatorial decisions allowed for poets and audiences to experience ekphrastic poetry in what I contend to be ideal. Moreover, the caliber of poets from around the country who were asked to participate in this mode make Poets Paint Words a significant moment in the history of Australian ekphrasis. By exploring the conditions that made Poets Paint Words possible and how contemporary ekphrastic poetry can understood in a new way because of this Event, I offer a framework for conceptualising ekphrasis as a performance.

Here, I want to examine the concept of ‘Event’ on the public and private level. Adapting this terminology from Alain Badiou, I want to explore the effect of how the poets were able to view, compose and exhibit their work within a specific time and place. In Badiou’s terms, I am interested in how the exhibition transformed into an event via the set of conditions that encourage ‘chance once the moment is ripe for intervention’ (187). Focusing on process within an artefact invokes a poetics of performance that allows work to produce rather than represent reality (Bolt 89). This production clarifies the active role of the ekphrastic poet. Herein, I address theories of narrative, lived experience and Methexis, adapted from Australian art-theorist Barbara Bolt, using the poems contained in Poets Paint Words 1 & 2 to sketch a poetics of performance based Australian ekphrasis.

Beginning by listing the poets who contributed the exhibition – this reads like the dust cover of a Best Australian Poetry: Adamson, Fagan, Harrison, Jones, Kinsella, Minter, Murray, Porter, Tranter. Similarly, the list of Australian artists surveyed by the poets is no less significant: Cossington Smith, Dobell, Olley, Olsen, Tillers, Tucker and Whiteley. Rather than an exploration of a theme or an epoch, what is apparent from this incongruous array of painters is that this exhibition sought to be a site-specific sampling of the collection. There could be no pre-arranged outcomes from conditions like this. Instead of a utopic or hermetically congruous exhibition, the event of Poets Paint Words was, by nature, an occasion where proximity necessitated opposing forces to combine, or what Brian Castro has called ‘heterotopias’ (Castro 117). The spatial and temporal proximity of Poets Paint Words afforded these points of collision where new texts were able to be created.

This provides a spatiotemporal dimension to the public event; what Daniel Bensaïd, elaborating on Badiou’s ‘Event’, describes as the ‘propitious ripeness of the opportune moment’ (Bensaïd 96). As a test case, the controlled conditions of the exhibition give us the best examples of what an Australian approach to ekphrasis might be: Australian poets presenting at the ‘propitious’ event of Poets Paint Words.

Contributors to Poets Paint Words were selected on their reputation, not specifically as ekphrastic poets.2 Intuitive though it may seem for some, it would have been fair for any of the poets in the exhibition to first ask themselves: What is the role of poet in an ekphrastic engagement? The long history of ekphrasis suggests a straightforward answer: describing the artwork is paramount. Tradition suggests creating a rhetorical mimesis, attempting to replicate and re-present the visual effect of the artwork in language.

Yet given that the exhibition took place in this century, it is worth noting that the field of writing creatively about a work of visual art has expanded beyond this representational framework. As Genevieve Kaplan notes,

Ekphrastic writing may easily include elements of interpretation, meditation, interrogation, comparison, criticism, and praise as well as the more traditional description and narrative. (Kaplan 2)

For this there are two clear reasons: the improved access of works of art to the public and consecutive movements in Modern Art during this period that have explored Art beyond representation. Most ancient ekphrastic poetry was written about imagined artworks; a ‘notional’ rather than ‘actual’ ekphrasis (Benton 367). Poets Paint Words and the study of gallery commissioned contemporary ekphrasis is concerned with actual ekphrasis. Surveying the contemporary use of actual ekphrasis, Pardlo writes, ‘The initial rise in popularity of ekphrastic poetry corresponds with the evolution of museums as public state institutions’ (594). For an audience, being able to view or have knowledge of the artwork that the poet is referring to changes the ekphrastic equation; as the simultaneous presentation of poem and artwork represents a significant development in contemporary ekphrasis. Thus, an exhibition in the mode of Poets Paint Words allows the audience to cross-reference text and image. However, the temporal restrictions of the exhibition meant this lasted only while the paintings and poems were hanging.3 At present there are no permanent records of the exhibitions available to the public in print or online.4

The significance of Poets Paint Words 1 & 2 as public events is that the exhibitions captured the simultaneous and temporally specific nature of contemporary actual ekphrasis by creating a space for the poem to exist alongside the painting for continual cross-referencing by the reader / viewer, in the same line of sight. This curatorial decision determines how poets responded to paintings that were non-representational.

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‘Often Said Apologetically’: Merryn Sommerville’s Child of the High Seas

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Merryn Sommerville


‘Ghosts I’ve met’ | Photograph by Merryn Sommerville | 2016 | Soft pastel, pencil on paper | 56 x 76cm

I’m not a story teller. I’ve never been interested in bringing context to my portraits. They float in a dark absence of context, in vivid expression and psychological space. I recall some years ago, a lively discussion with another creative. Their supposition was that one should be able to be isolated on a desert island – a cultural, social and historical vacuum – and in that lack of art knowledge and context, be able to intuit its quality. In other words, art should have an inherent quality and merit about it that speaks to the viewer. I think this common sentiment underestimates the strength offered uniquely in the visual arts. While other creative disciplines may rely on the knowledge of the audience to pick up on references, in my work, I don’t require them to. Instead, I rely on the preconceptions a viewer has been indoctrinated with through consistent imagery they’ve been exposed to in advertising, television and movies and to some extent, literature. The notion of childhood innocence and lack of autonomy was created socially, in conjunction with images of children in white; barefoot and connected with nature, pictured with animals that share psychological qualities. Our conception of children continues to be linked to their visual representation – a diversion from this, whether the viewer is aware of it or not, will be disconcerting. Art has the capacity to move a viewer towards a feeling while also mirroring the society that has shaped their reaction and view, and illuminating preconceptions they may not be aware that they have – illuminating insight through an emotional experience of the work.

Art is the understanding of the world that you and I occupy. It’s understanding the moral narratives, the colour associations, the social and visual history we have inherited, and the response an image may engender inside of the viewer. That is what excites me about the art I admire and the art I make.

The subject of my work is one child, a family member in a seven-year series, and of her seven-year life. As a young woman of childbearing age, it might seem an obvious choice for me to draw children; there was a time in art history where women were limited to drawing domestic scenes of children and animals. But their social identity became synonymous with innocence and a lack of autonomy. It is this association and expectation of the depiction of children that has led many female artists (Marlene Dumas, Sally Mann and Cherry Hood) to use confronting portraits of children as a vehicle for unexpected emotion. I live for the remark ‘your work disturbs me, but I cannot explain why.’ This is often said apologetically. But the visual arts offer a pathway to communicate conflicting and ambivalent feelings and ideas that literal language cannot. A viewer’s reaction to a work often unfolds itself from the inside out, where emotion leads to insight.

Though I intend for the work to engage the viewer as they experience it emotionally and psychologically, it is also important to consider accompanying information to be consistent with the conceptual and atmospheric qualities of the work. I don’t want the title of the work to limit the way it is interpreted. However, particularly as an exhibition, I want the series to be able to offer more as it is revisited – to be more than just a visual communication, a succinct juxtaposition of ideas. For example, the February 2017 exhibition at Lindberg Galleries, Child of the High Seas. It draws its title from a collection of short stories for children on the subject of death, written by French writer Jules Supervielle. The title story, ‘Child of the High Seas’, is a haunting and ambivalent fable of a child who lives on an island in the middle of the ocean, with artefacts of a life yet no memory of it. This child is the echo of a child that once was, and is suspended in this situation as a manifestation of the intense grief a sailor felt for his late daughter. This story has influenced my work significantly. I discovered it through one of my greatest art influences, Joy Hester – in fact, I’m influenced by her entire circle of post-World War II portrait artists, The Angry Penguins. Hester named a drawing after Supervielle’s Child of the High Seas. As French poet Paul Valery noted in Things Left Unsaid, ‘Nothing more original, nothing more oneself than to feed on others. But one must digest them. The lion is made of assimilated lamb.’ We are all broadly created by the assimilated lamb that has been available to us in the society in which we live. Artistically, Hester digested the work of Supervielle, and seeing something of herself in it, created something new. I, in turn, have been granted with both Supervielle’s work, as well as what Hester gleaned from it.

And so we return to the matter of giving a title not only the exhibition as a whole, but in naming portraits individually. Each title is a disembodied fragment from poets that influenced Supervielle, giving a nod to a creative lineage that led me to Child of the High Seas. I isolated lines that relate to the corresponding themes of the short story and my work more broadly – death, and the way it transforms us as living beings, change, regret, absence, grief and gender. Also in these titles are references to the ocean, acting as a symbol, and a link to the exhibition title. Each line transformed through the context of its pairing with a portrait, drawing further meaning as a list of titles, and as an exhibition as a whole.

The works have a dialectical nature, and a tension between being disconcerting and appealing.

They also sit between categories when it comes to the disciplines of drawing and painting. They engage with colour, form and layering in the way that painting does. And yet, they also encompass the impulsiveness of sketched line and mark-making, the treatment of absence and negative space, as well as the celebration of organic, skin-like paper – all qualities characteristic of drawing. It is the immediate purpose for which it is being used that will define their category. If, in an exhibition of paintings, they would be paintings. So, too, if curated with drawings. However, contemporary art practices rarely land in one discipline, with many artists that could be described as sculptors / drawers or drawers using paint. Perhaps such distinctions are relevant predominantly for administrative purposes. Whether my portraits are described as drawings or paintings may depend on the person viewing them.

My luminous soft pastel portraits of a child emerge out of black paper. There is conflict between colour and form, absence and sketched line. At my inaugural exhibition at Lindberg Galleries (March 2-18, 2017), you will find yourself surrounded by these disconcerting figures. The colour palate is bruised, bodies are poised in strange positions, visceral fur crawling up shoulders. From some portraits, eyes will watch you intently. In others, there is an absence of eyes. Each work engages your personal baggage, thoughts, your feelings. As a series in exhibition, they will create the experience of different entities haunting you from all sides.

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Posted in ARTWORKS | Tagged , ,

Tunnel Vision

Posted on March 1, 2017 by J S Harry

SUPPORT SYD VICIOUS
CUT A SLUT

JESUS SAVES AT THE WALES

WHO ARE YOU IF YOU’RE NOT?

CREAMINESS CONTROLS YOU
OR YOU CONTROL THE CREAMINESS

screaming without words
she runs through the tunnel
straight at them
shock opening like flowers
on the faces of the oncoming
motorists
her purple dress is ripped
to the waist so it has
become skirt only
her bare round creamy breasts
assault the pity
& the rapist
behind the many
masks of ‘motorist’
her face is contorted in
the scream everything
in her life is concentrated
behind it

she is either stoned out of her mind
just raped
so hopeless in her life
that whatever happens
will be better
drivers make
stories up
to fit some fiction
to the picture

it is 12 o’clock noon tube
white fluorescent
inside the road tunnel
she is running on
into the citybound traffic
cars part noiselessly
around her the traffic
streams into the city &
her bare feet & bare
breasts & scream
continue outwards towards
rushcutters bay & later
on to rose
bay if she makes it

drivers leaving the tunnel
blink at the sunlight
her image is off
their eyes but she is running
inside them as they enter
the city
all day they wonder
did somebody
rape her? again?
did she find
shelter?

her feet were busted
by the road – they were
bleeding
did some christ-of-the-tunnel
get out of his car
& kiss & wash her feet? risking
causing a chain
of deaths
to do so?

she is gone… going home
through the tunnel
drivers see
SUPPORT SYD VICIOUS CUT A SLUT’s
become ‘feminised’:
SUPPORT C.S.R. ROT
SYD VICIOUS WITH SUGAR

& JESUS FUCKS AT THE WALES
WHO ARE YOU IF YOU’RE NOT
MY GREAT AUNT FANNY

a female
form
its flesh & rags
in fragments
sea-sucked
purple
is fished
out of the
gap-
wash by the calm
voice-of-the-evening-news
a fortnight later

Posted in 79: EKPHRASTIC | Tagged

Interview with Sidney Nolan (Ella O’Keefe edit)

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Hazel de Berg

Image courtesy of Art Gallery NSW

Hazel de Berg’s recordings take place in the homes or work spaces of the subjects rather than a recording studio. This allows something of these places into the recording whether birdsong, traffic or an r&b song playing in the background. In the recordings, de Berg remains enigmatic, the ghostly presence operating the machine.

Interview with Sidney Nolan (O’Keefe edit)

2017 edit by Ella O’Keefe

‘Sydney Nolan interviewed by Hazel de Berg in the Hazel de Berg collection’
Courtesy of the National Library of Australia, TRC 1/58
Special acknowledgement to Duncan Felton, NLA Oral History & Folklore Branch

Posted in INTERVIEWS | Tagged , ,

Is Contemporary Australian Poetry Contemporary Australian Poetry?

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Corey Wakeling

Poet, if you’re looking for your name in this essay, jump ahead a couple of pages. There I begin talking about poets collected in this anthology. Those of you interested in a review about contemporary Australian poetry, let’s begin here.

Contemporary Australian Poetry (CAP) – an anthology of Australian poetry at present, in other words – comes introduced as a ‘survey, and a critical review, of Australian poetry between 1990 and the present (2016)’. What kind of document to this significant time-period does CAP constitute, and what bearing does it have on the question of an Australian contemporary? Most importantly, how do we now read Australia differently? What new forms of reading has contemporary poetry inspired in this country?

i will reinvent the game
jon bon jovi comes to mind
i met him once in a dream there is a
spring in my step i will
move at speed across my crease
no the direction does not 
matter only the leap itself

(Nick Whittock, ‘Michael Slater 2’)

To begin, consider images of the modern leading up to Australian poetry’s contemporary moment. In the Australian Book Review, David McCooey notes that John Kinsella’s Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (Penguin, 2009) shows contemporary Australian poetry’s chief setting as being the suburbs: ‘this suburban scene is the stuff of modern Australian poetry’. Numerous critics agree. But let’s extend this argument further than setting. The suburban is a preeminent register of the Australian contemporary: of its inheritance of Fordist economic expansion in a country of exceptional space; and its inheritance of a threatened native cultural sovereignty, disregarded until 1960s constitutional land reform at the very same time that suburbia becomes ubiquitous. The suburban also reflects the inheritance of a pliable bourgeois majority without much cultural competition of a homogenous landowner class; as well as Australia’s remaining reliance upon the ghost of British imperialism and the fire of American neoliberalism to define its geopolitical membership in the post-war West. Alternative cultural positions are often defined by some form of opposition to these paradigms.

I feel two radically different and complex reservations about the idea that poetry could be more suburban, however, and thereby more relevant to a majoritarian audience in Australia.1 First, like McCooey, I think much Australian poetry already seems embedded in a suburban condition: from the most committedly literary, to works of light verse or popular fiction, and all the more so when suburban writers romanticise a rare location or imagine a political alternative to the present. Of course, not everyone lives in the suburbs, nor all poets. However, for reasons I will explain, the mainstream of Australian culture is embedded in a pervasively suburban condition.

Importantly, colonial formations of impenetrable wilderness, isolated pastoral districts, and privileged town and city centres are now fantasies, for the most part, given the vast majority of residence lying in suburbia, the sustained dominance of telecommunications over the discourse of the Australian public sphere, the surrendered economic and regional sovereignty of the rural to the international trade interests of a suburbanised majority, and the socio-economic and cultural generalisation categorising national belonging for subjects living thousands of kilometres away from each other.2 As a national question, then, suburbia is a cultural predicament always to be negotiated. Adopting it or otherwise is a moot point. In the twenty-first century, city and country are defined by cultural logics of suburban desire.

A second consideration is at odds with the first. A wager: the suburban condition of Australia is not what avowedly suburban writers such as Bruce Dawe have been writing about. Dawe’s suburban condition poses as modestly universal, with the human condition defined by a middle-class domestic sphere as the stage of general truths. Yet, this post-war economy called suburbia has in fact been the stage of cultural turmoil, self-parody, and contemporary crisis. Among many possible ways to convey this reality, consider the general connotation of shelter in Australian cultural imagination: the concept of home ownership, what is now an exclusive bourgeois fantasy, the battleground for heroic reality TV narratives, and the place where Australia’s youth enter a new Thatcheresque age of housing alienation. Such alienation drives characters as early as Barry Humphries’ suburban Jekyll and Hyde, Les Patterson and Dame Edna, or characters in Patrick White’s The Season at Sarsaparilla, as well as informs prominent twenty-first century examples such as Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap, or TV show Kath & Kim.

Australian cultural life’s concerted engagement with the suburbs has meant radically different strategies than Dawe’s assumptions of modest universality. Instead, memorable writers of Australia’s suburban condition point to intercultural unrest, commoditisation, paradoxical prosperity, conflicts of connection and isolation, cultural indistinction, questionable belonging, and anxious compliance as its real conditions. Therefore, the supposedly direct encounter with a suburban identity seems to me to involve deception as a putatively direct engagement with an ambient condition. Or, when most consequential, to assess the condition of Australian culture as embedded in certain socio-political problems stemming from suburban life, involves a somewhat calculated performance.

As a cultural problem for poetry, a suburban condition is at once impossible to avow and ever present. Given the attention brought to the subject in Australian literary scholarship in the 1990s, especially by Andrew McCann and McCooey, and renewed interest at present in recent works of scholarship, the category of the literary itself in Australia means some negotiation of the suburban. The literary in Australia does not require a suburban intervention as it lies aloof in some urban ivory tower; from the most challenging to the most conventional, the suburban sits prestigiously at the table of Australian literary subjects.

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Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

An Extra Oyster for the Doctors

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Elizabeth Smither

Entrée: raw oysters on the shell. Price
on application but they will be raised high
on a bed of ice and lemon slices.

A dozen and a half is not available
so we take a dozen, abashed
that oyster eaters cannot have their number

which would have given us three each.
Who forks the first and slips it down his throat
would like to seize the rest and lick the platter

or hurl the oyster shells over one shoulder. An
alumna of the University of South Carolina proposes
the final three go to the most distinguished scholars

first to the one whose golden thesis sits beside her plate
another to a prodigal undeserving Hon D.Litt., the last
to an unassailable Distinguished Professor. The moon

looks down on three tipped-back throats
once tugged by gowns and Gaudeamus notes
processing stagewards to receive the precious oyster.

Posted in 79: EKPHRASTIC | Tagged

John Woodcock Graves the younger [with] Truganini

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Geoff Page

So often reproduced and yet
the message so elusive.
John Woodcock Graves the younger,

lawyer, writer, poet, ‘friend’,
is standing high beside her,
not quite profile, looking down,

frock coat reaching to his knees.
Truganini, Trugernanner,
also known as Lalla Rookh,

is sitting in a stiff-backed chair,
the lines of which her long-sleeved, white
Victorian dress obscure.

What looks to be a scarf with tassles
reaches to her knees;
it’s white as well, her captors’ colour.

She’s thought to be the last, she knows —
of interest to Science.
She knows too that related women

are living in Bass Strait with sealers.
Graves, it’s said, was genial,
learnèd and eccentric,

something of a sketcher and
a well-known greyhound breeder.
Although the photograph’s undated

some say it’s 1876
and just three months away
from Truganini’s death

and five from that of Mr Graves
at only forty-seven.
But all of this is mere description.

It doesn’t read the code between them:
Graves, full-height, arms folded,
pensive, sad and somewhat

proprietorial;
Truganini with her hands
clasped across her lap.

Her woman’s eyes are wary embers;
they blaze at her ‘protector’’s belly.
Are the two of them aware

their photograph must prove symbolic?
Truganini knows her bones
will be displayed and sent to London;

she cannot know her ashes
will take just on a century
to regain D’Entrecasteaux Channel.

Graves knows too that he is powerless
for all his knowledge of the law.
He can’t foresee, we must assume,

his own death is so imminent.
Each knows, but in a different way,
the moment of this moment.

The future’s sepia already.


Notes:
In response to John Woodcock Graves the younger [with] Truganini,
Photographer unknown, Date unknown. Sepia toned, 15 x 10 cm Collection: Allport
Library and Museum of Fine Arts.

Posted in 79: EKPHRASTIC | Tagged

Lament

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Sam Keenan

The earth runs through you, brother.
You are constellations of clover,

the watercolour green
in willow weed,

the red inflorescence of sorrel.
I listen to the wet soil

as if your voice could find me
through buttercups and their dark arteries

or the looping roots of lilies.
They are undoing your body

and my grief blooms.


Notes:
In response to Ka pinea koe e ahau. Ki te pine o te aroha.
Ki te pine e kore nei E waikura e. A lament. (Trans. ‘I will
pin you to me. With the pin of love. With a pin that will never
rust away’). By Shona Rapira-Davies, 2011, Dimensions: 136 x 136 cm,
Victoria University Art Collection.

Posted in 79: EKPHRASTIC | Tagged

Eye

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Penny O'Hara

across the room from nolan’s soldier
scooped into lumpen slouch
the cow

nosing itself tenderly
notices its guts
missing

and its clam‐maraca hands
jam mid-clack

it gapes

at the hollow scraped
by asbestos winds
licked by rust

we know the look
learnt it as kids before the box
laughter blasting like acme tnt

when sky showed through
frizzled coyote

the crack‐up’s
in the dumb creature’s eye
the cartoon o of surprise

the headshake
at one’s own impossible demise


Notes:
In response to Drought by Sidney Nolan (1953),
91.1 x 121.4 cm, National Gallery of Australia.

Posted in 79: EKPHRASTIC | Tagged

APOLLON MUSAGÈTE

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Jessica L Wilkinson

Critic: Tell me, Mr. Balanchine, where did you ever see Apollo on his knees?
Balanchine: Tell me, Mr. So and so, where did you ever see Apollo?


I. Prologue
All good art begins with a weird birth unseen,
or seen as dotted rhythms knocking hard on high: here
a mountainous mother, heaving a landslide
to cushion the fall
out of the swaddling massive. Quick—coupé
turning point to quaver weedy limbs.
There will be no dead spots anywhere.


II. Variation of Apollo
The problem of the poem—like the problem of the lute—
can be thawed with play. Instructions:
~ present outwards, unsure of score or strength or harmony;
~ pitch arms wide for a full circle strum;
~ learn the sting of withered efforts and proceed
body over neck over body with youthful generosity.
These are studied revolutions in attitude and grace.


III. Apollo & the three Muses
A choreographer may tell you this: it always pays
to reinvent oneself, surrounded by women
adept at odd lines—women who grand battement
on pointe and stretch their blistered toes to the sun.
Women who insist a flat-footed shuffle, a turned-in leg
or bent pirouette; sharp educators in civil disobedience
offering tutorials in filigree counterpoint:

Variation of Calliope
These hands conduct ecstatic verse from the ribcage
through an over-thought Alexandrine density.
When vision is thin, the chest caves in. (This I know).
If you turn your head, I’ll scribble in your sidelines.

Variation of Polyhymnia
sh| gesture can be taught at great speed;
a saucy pirouette with one finger to the lips—
the imagination goes wild. sh| The fun of mime
can be a tonic for new movement; the danger is
(mouth flung wide) O ||

Variation of Terpsichore
One must use the stage wisely to reveal
the body’s jigsaw precision: here are the hips,
twisty as a soda top; the arms breezy; tendons flexed.
The dance is lean-revelation and pluck; the body is a neat thing.

Apollo is opening, closing his fist—neon
flashing lights—and now he knows this
about kick and control; subtle liaisons
of language and line. Let us go, he says,
for a slow walk, or a swimming lesson, or frisky
diversions in the troika. Bounce the strings
fast and strong enough to test our laurels without
fear of fall or rest within the score.
His attention is drawn wide as a curtain
on a New York apartment window.


IV. Apotheosis
Adolescence is a half-hour exertion—so it seems
what’s hard is best learned fast. To dare not use
everything but draw together certain family relations
in one’s art: music, movement, humour—
humble pie and vodka with a side of disagreement

cut short. (We’ll continue the conversation upstairs).


Notes:
Based upon the choreography of George Balanchine, 1928 and music of Igor Stravinsky, 1927/28

Posted in 79: EKPHRASTIC | Tagged

after infatuation—ross bleckner—oil on linen

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Katie Prince

imagine desire as compressed heat, as a star,
a supernova—place it inside a box

wrapped in stripes of warm colors,
red black orange gold and white

like a gift on your birthday. a wounded red bow
toward the left, toward the top, to say:

I am for you—open me. if it were only so easy

to feel that large, to fill a room
and still keep your heart

contained—but like any gift,
what you want is to touch

the thing inside. all you need is an edge
to rip, but in the end you’re too small

and it’s too big—


Notes:
In response to Infatuation by Ross Bleckner, 244 x 508 cm.
At time of viewing, housed at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, MA.

Posted in 79: EKPHRASTIC | Tagged

Gouache, Sheep Skulls, Fence Bracket

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Susan Fealy

I

Animals in Venetian masks
stare through floral constellations;
a strange surfacing
of herbal machinations
and cloven-hoof memories;
a fondness, somewhere
for droughtless green.

Look closer.
The skulls are singing,
more like bird-beaks than sheep.
Forget-me-nots break
across bone
as if souls commune,
call back,
jigsaw a collective self.

II

This is about a rasp of sheep;
a four-cornered star
shining the sacrament
of limited diagonals,
and yet, in sockets of dark,
a kind of backward birthing.

How to place gouache
and not annul the souls of sheep.
How to stamp passports
of those who dream the inner side
of crates—
a floating, rocking panic.

Their flowers are dispensed.
Ragged edges stumble
into blackened bone.
Quietly, they bleed
in palest pink.


Notes:
In response to Steven Holland, Monaro, 2001 Gouache on sheep skulls,
on welded fencing wire bracket 40 x 40 x 15.0 cm at Canberra Museum.

Posted in 79: EKPHRASTIC | Tagged

Anatomy for the Blind

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Andy Brown

Beneath the languid nudes of Ingres and Renoir,
the Odalisques and Venus on her couch –
the skeleton is already reclined
against the lectern as the doctor starts:

‘Gentlemen, explore tonight your sense of touch.
Let the warmth of your fingers and palms
caress the cool crest of this ivory planet.

From the summit of this fragile sphere, glide
across the bumps and ridges; understand
the subtle fissures and the secret cracks,

the domed expanse that disappears beneath
itself. Now, press your ear against this blade,
which creaks like a ship on shifting waves:

that’s the sailboat of the scapula
hitched onto the clavicle’s safe cleat.
And here, beneath, as broad as any barrel

the ribs – your maker’s hoops and staves.
This chilly shaft’s the femur, Sir, just like
the cane you’ll use to guide yourself away…’

And when the talk is done, the blind depart
and only the mute skeleton remains,
sole tenant of this vacant gallery
with paintings neither she, nor they, can see.


Notes:
Old black and white photograph of a ‘talk-and-touch’ session for the blind,
about human anatomy, held in an art gallery, 1913.

Posted in 79: EKPHRASTIC | Tagged

The Pioneer

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Paul Cliff

McCubbin, in his great, ambitious, historical-narrative work
The Pioneer, invokes the in-vogue creed of nation-building:
with the colour green (forest/tent/dress/shirt) locking this in,
waltzing across the three big panels —

in the first and left-most of which the young wife is seen,
sitting slumped (dreamy? despondent?)
before a slackly pitched tent; with her husband crouched
setting kindling, behind.

In the second-and-middle panel, the bush is part-cleared:
the husband rests weary on a log with his axe,
while the wife stands before him, shouldering a babe-in-arms,
and a slab-hut smokes in tender contentment to the rear.

Then climactically, in the final-and-third of the painting’s panels
(with a taint of the comic, even,
in its sudden, dramatic, faintly hammy reverse),
the sky leeches blue through the green-dun frameway of the eucalypts
to reveal a distant city-view
which brandishes real estate signs almost …

as an innominate youth (the grown child, or someone entirely else?) —
is crouched parting ferns, to disclose a simple bush grave.
Resting place of the pioneer-husband —
of his wife, their child — or who? …
left behind at the previous century’s turn,
as he kneels in the glittering scar of cleared ground,
pledged to the bright-shiny new.


Notes:
In response to The Pioneer, 1904 by Frederick McCubbin. Oil on canvas, triptych, 225.0 × 295.7 cm, National Gallery of Victoria.

Posted in 79: EKPHRASTIC | Tagged

Interior with Figures

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Betina Telegaru

It’s in your mouth corners—
two lips clamped tight
and gently curved to hide it.

It’s in the way you hold your hands
not quite together,
fumbling with an uncertain future
as it clings
to your third finger.

It’s in your glance—
the search for answers
you will not get, perhaps,
until it is too late to go
back.

It’s in the trees
beyond the glass, who
seem to know more, though
they turn their heads
in spite of you.

It’s in his leaning body and
the chair that supports it;
both of you stand –
it’s quite impossible to sit.

It’s the silent conviction
in her hands, rested
half open in her lap.

It’s in the careful crease
of the curtains,
who shake hands with the sun
behind your back:
they make their bets.

It’s in the blue of your dress
that places you, unwillingly,
at the centre of
an unconscious universe.

The only anxiety I know
tingles my teeth
and squats to tie
its laces on my chest. I don’t
know how you feel, though somehow I think
I do.


Notes:
Based upon the painting, Interior with Figures, by Chester Earles, 1872

Posted in 79: EKPHRASTIC | Tagged

Miro’s Eyes

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Jane Frank

There are sweeping views
from the Gardens of Montjuic,
a city of coral
streaming as far as the sea,
constellations of migrating birds,
spirals of dragonflies,
night, music and stars
webbed in red, blue and black.
They held the balance –
canvases of connection
in the face of war –
carob trees, animals and insects,
emblems of hope
still holding back the melt
of Spain’s corners.


Notes:
In response to Joan Miro’s The Nightingale’s Song at Midnight and the Morning Rain
(Constellations Series) 1940. Miro Gallery, Barcelona, Spain.

Posted in 79: EKPHRASTIC | Tagged

Autumnal Cannibalism

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Kristin LaFollette

The trouble, the issue in the system

like clockwork,
every orange October.

Comfort is a pillow in his back, unlike
a dentist

pulling. A tooth—

foggy, purple in his gaze.
Nothing.
Can I do nothing?

Blood.
Black bile, the yellow …

And I believe they’re
all
there.

It’s a fork, a knife.
I won’t let it reach for him—

Reversed, a crooked turntable,
and I am his
protector now.


Notes:
Based upon the painting Autumnal Cannibalism by Salvador Dalí

Posted in 79: EKPHRASTIC | Tagged

Narrenschiffen, a Collage Sonnet

Posted on March 1, 2017 by John Kendall Hawkins

Hero? anonymous bosh tacking luffing gulls
Ophelia swims up the river in a swoon
Hades moonsick Hamlet laments captainless coup
reflections sun buttered breasts glutt’nous mutineers
Leander hoiked into his own spittoon sees Light
Old Queen Margot plucks glockenspiel, and albatross
tone characters in search of the phosphorous straits
persimmon masks stretched tight as shaky chandeliers
Karl snaps selfies flush full of Facebook likes
Mary counts voices the origin of consciousness?
days numbers Shostakovitch the archduke trio?
riddles monuments to fear toccata fugue state
And thus thou art my love the Lesser Fool
A swim many one river fishing school


Notes:
Based upon the triptych painting, Ship of Fools, by Hieronymous Bosch,
on view at the Louvre, dimensions: H: 0.58 m, L: 0.33 m.

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Cubed

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Michelle Wallace
sit around table silent transparent heads family gather wood together
iron frames exact misery cracked bolt on end fractured coop
cubed cubed cubed
black space condemns trap enacted in through window pain
cubed cubed cubed
rattle the mesh chain above hangs isolate to the power of
perfect smooth round teeth hair skin don’t at hands self portrait

Notes:
Based upon Cell (Glass spheres and hands), by Louise Bourgeois, glass, iron, wood, linoleum, canvas, marble, at the NGV in Melbourne.

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Calling All Shadows

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Charity Gingerich

The birds on the brown-and-floral wallpaper in the kitchen at the old folks’ home are someone’s idea of parakeets in repose. Again and again, they stare over one wing at a trailing vine, or look straight ahead at a huge poof of bronzed peonies and more trailing vines. They sit, their wings folded like tuxedos of uncomfortable men at an opera. Outside, the world is framed in snow—slanted, determined and driven snow. Just beyond the window, a bush whose flowers are unknown to February, twitches under the weight of house finches. They come and go, little brown flames scattered up in haste. But one sits a long time at the top of the bush, sways as it holds on, its gaze steady, conscious. In the intense light of sun-on-snow, its shadow seems to multiply and mingle briefly with the shadows of the wallpaper birds, a sort of alchemic dance. I imagine it is calling the wallpaper birds—and me—to come stake our places too, on branches that will soon be piercing green and flecked with yellow stars. I like to think it only takes one to call us back from the edge of the world.


Notes:
This is a notional exphrastic poem, in response to The Dance Lesson, by Edgar Degas, 1879. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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