CONSTRAINT editorial

When given the license to constrain what is otherwise perceived as instinctual, inadvertent, unconscious, and innate, the supposedly authentic centres of creative practice, constraint appears to become a kind of permission to release responsibility to the personal and towards expedition to machines of the sonnet, the page, the code, the number, the constellation, the collage, the palindrome, the algorithm, or the aphorism. Is this a sign of a persistent binary at the heart of creative practice, or of a persistent desire to debunk the binary? Continue reading

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged

Against Colony Collapse Disorder; or, Settler Mess in the Cells of Contemporary Australian Poetry

Colony collapse disorder describes a phenomenon whereby worker bees suddenly and inexplicably disappear from a hive. It has recently been identified as a syndrome following the rapid vanishing of Western honeybee colonies across North America and Europe. Justin Clemens also uses the term to describe an aesthetic collapse, whereby poets can only demonstrate their existence as ‘being caught dead’ given the fragile conditions of poetry and the inevitable, deadly effects of the past. Continue reading

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged , , , , , ,

What We (non)Believe: Reading Poems by Charles Wright, John Burnside, and Kevin Hart


Image courtesy of NPR

‘What will become now of art,’ asks Maurice Blanchot, ‘now that the gods and even their absence are gone, and now that man’s presence offers no support?’1

Imagine that three poems are delivered to your door. They come without note, explanation or sending address. The first is Charles Wright’s ‘Appalachian Book of the Dead’2. The second is a fragment called ‘Pilgrimage’, which is the title of section three of John Burnside’s poem ‘Roads’3. Continue reading

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged , , ,

Notes on her ‘Gibson’s Folly (Tambo River)’

The Benambra mine is located on the headwaters of the Tambo River which flows into the Ramsar listed Gippsland Lakes. See Louise Crisp’s poem ‘Gibson’s Folly (Tambo River)‘. The Wilga ore body was mined by Denehurst Ltd. from 1992-1996. The tailings dam destroyed 90% of the largest and most unique example of a rare montane swamp. The company went into receivership in 1996 and walked away from the site leaving a leaking tailings dam which cost the Victorian Department of Primary Industry $6.9 million to remediate in 2006. After rehabilitation, the tailings dam was re-named Lake St. Barbara, after the patron saint of miners. It is still leaking polluted water containing cadmium copper and zinc through the dam wall embankment. The dam also operates as a flow through system depending on rainfall.

Independence Group proposes to re-open the Wilga mine and develop the nearby Currawong mine. The company plans to expand the tailings dam to store up to an additional 7 million tonnes of toxic tailings. The dam wall will be raised another 25 metres above the valley floor (to a total height of nearly 45 metres) and increase the surface area of the dam from 8.5 ha to approximately 35 ha.

Another section of the nationally endangered sphagnum swamp will be destroyed along with 320 Banksia canei and a number of other rare species also affected.

SPZ = Special Protection Zone. Under current legislation mining is not excluded from these zones.

Rare & protected species in order of occurrence:

    Purple eyebright: Euphrasia collina subsp muelleri
    Purple waxlip: Glossodia major
    Sphagnum moss: Sphagnum cristatum
    Strawberry buttercup: Ranunculus collinus
    Kiandra (Blue tongue) greenhood: Pterostylis oreophila
    Spawling knawel: Scleranthus fasiculatus
    Montane grass-trigger plant: Stylidium montanum
    Dusky violet: Viola fuscoviolacea
    Mountain banksia: Banksia canei
    Sun orchid: Thelymitra sp.

Other species:

    Bluebells: Wahlenbergia sp
Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged

Comics Poetry: The Art of the Possible


‘MUSIC OF SHAPE’ | from, HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE, 2007 | Warren Craghead III | pencil on archival paper

In 1979, Cecilia Vicuña (Chilean poet, activist and artist) tied a red string around a glass of milk and spilled it on the pavement. ‘El Vaso de Leche’ (The Glass of Milk) was simultaneously a ‘precarious’ poem and protest for the 1,920 children who died as a result of drinking milk thinned with white paint in Bogotá.1 The work was silent yet its question echoed; ‘What is possible with poetry?’ More than two decades later, it’s a question poets continue to ask.

Continue reading

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

Excerpts from Graphic Novella

What vision? This thought breaks the borders of the book by an interior implosion.
It is impossible, really, to go anywhere, as there are some places that you cannot imagine. Still trying out of the loss, forgotten, obscured, for one more mille-second not to leave something lost, forgotten, obscured. And not everything can be saved, salvaged, arranged, remembered. And if there is excessive "system" set over and around the detail, it seems as if we have lost touch with the necessary delicacy, the smallness of the local and intransigent. There is scattering and an unidentifiable feeling. I think it is pools and swamps of sadness. There is brightness, darkness and no genre enough for it, though we have some general names even for gray and cloudiness, even for the swooping of raptors even for texts of philosophy.


91. Gloss 46. What vision.

Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT | Tagged

Between the Silences (for 9 strings and 9-channel 1-bit electronics)

[audio:http://cordite.org.au/audio/between-the-silences.mp3|titles= Between the Silences (for 9 strings and 9-channel 1-bit electronics) – Tristan Perich] Between the Silences (for 9 strings and 9-channel 1-bit electronics) (29:29)
Written and produced by Tristan Perich

Image courtesy of Tristan Perich

Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT | Tagged

Machine Drawings

Image courtesy of Tristan Perich

Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT, ARTWORKS | Tagged

Peregrine

what do you till
of your grass roots?
bay mud & mescal
the jejune litanies,
webbed to the windsurf
briefly – the tissue of a tea
leaf potion for my past
i misread always
the open sesame
& so too life an immigrant
in a stormed boat as it
drifted from
coast to coast
without oars
without mast

Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT | Tagged

No limit to the resources

no limit to the resources I can draw together
to make my neman arch mausoleum ossuary
the bird fly put paid to economy and now
burning torches sit comforted atop pyramids
of the human skull which are so full of
pethadide to be terrorism for a near goblet
warming us to hide, and don’t drink, it’s not
in no way good for you, pill instead, stop the
spread of regrettable architecture, use bone

Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT | Tagged

Star Wars in the Garden

beyondthewindow&intogreen-
as-envybushbleepsatui
chucklewhistlestoppal
issuingroboticshrillliker
2d2i’mexpectinga
displayholographicimage
abeamingontheleaveswiththose
isosceleanlinesthatcometo
touchonabluebeckoningprincess
Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT | Tagged

Frames (part 6)

At the bottom of the painting,
write any word (for instance, “mother.”)
Now wait for more words, more names, for requests or invocations, to
fill the perimeter of the frame.

As in nebulous blooms of mold that featured, like repeats
of the Great Wave, coursing backwards,
forwards, inwards & outwards over
the studio walls and ceiling.

Left overs of Christmas virtuosity:
an entire orange
peel removed
in one go.

A picture’s virtuosity is in its coherent exchange
of one set of values, known to be valid,
for another as yet un-
known & unvalued.

Old lenses seek or find finite space.
Drop off clothes, drop off recycling, stack clean
bottles by the edge of the recycling bin in
case the old man is there, watching from his car.

Space fills up with sounds like water plunging into a glass.
The yard fills up with light. The clothes fill up with person. The bed
fills up with lint, dust and dried skin. The follicles fill up with adverbs until
the scalp fills up with nectar…

The relics will never fill up
with veneration; it settles around,
on top of and under-
neath them.

Bubbles in old
glass windows travel
towards you at
the speed of landscape.

A body in a cold room,
under a sheet or in the back
of a car, minds or is minded, sews
confusion among the living.

History permeated:
the coffee table, the dinner table,
the air implicated
in invisible smoking.

Add one cup of coffee to zero cigarettes to equal minutes of acquaintanceship.
The basement’s full of traps we must check on soon; meanwhile, old clothes
threaten to turn you into a new old person,
providential for painting.

Swimming, painting, soldiering, writing, smoking
or going to museums: things
he did that required a
degree of strength.

Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT | Tagged

Sand Caught by the Wind

tothinkofatoms:mightbe
brownianmotionhererandom
asloveorloversinbumper
carslurched thiswaythenthatbut
issour-sweetdirectionless
tossedonastrongnortherlylike
drawnpaisleywispsonseasidetarmac
adancingcallingcardit
isaslightshaftingthrough cornereddust
Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT | Tagged

Later Star, Late Blackness

Linden shadows toss the room. An old creosote. Or bland window. Now against the stairs. To a place one passage is drawn as a figure of stillness. The night is thinking, as a lark scars the sky bound sleek into sun’s hush. O darling. O, eridanius. No, the furthest river does not recognize us.

Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT | Tagged

Unitary Pleasures: Masturbating in Space

The day Apollo traded his pipe for an appearance on the
Eurovision Song Contest: “Living on Borrowed Time.”
Absolutism isn’t the solitary pursuit it once seemed.
Out of hours, display receipt. There’re other words for con-
tainment
, she said, but none of them fit the way you do.
We used to go down to the border & look at El Salvador,
faint memories of a Golden Age. Forty years in the wilderness
& this’s all they’ve got to show for themselves?

Her granddad was on the Kent State firing squad.
Later they built vertical ghettos to the moon –
“cash-for-chaos” package deals to the dark side
(EVERYTHING’S PERMITTED
BECAUSE NOTHING’S POSSIBLE).
And all that, knowingly, in full view of their god.

Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT | Tagged

Chinese Silence No. 40

After Hayden Carruth, “Of Distress Being Humiliated by the Classical Chinese Poets”

Hey mister, can you tell me where to get a good mock duck in Syracuse–you know,
the kind consumed by Chinese vegetarians
Willing to make a great display of their virtue at the expense of taste?
I miss the one they used to have at Yu Hu’s New York Chinese Café.
What’s the matter, cat got your tongue? Oh, I forgot your language consists entirely
of silences;
Your minds are the minds of men who think you can eat duck without meat in it.
I can see in your eyes the serenity of an ancient culture contemplating the white
man’s sterility.
Even now the headless horseman of progress is galloping down the interstate toward
you, reeking of hamburger.
You will sit there quietly and let yourself be trampled.
Bummer. But before you die, tell me
Where I can find an orange chicken that is so good that it will fly forever through the
nauseous twilight
Of my endless appetite.

Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT | Tagged

What’s more

Nature, to give due credit, was deeply abducted by the 1960s.
Betty and Barney, for example, revealed under hypnosis how they
got Barney’s binoculars to dot UFOs: it was simply a matter of
training science to spot their amazed eyewitness accounts.
Studying the interior of their ship, one is struck by
the “Oz factor” which often sets out to accompany such encounters,
only to abandon them to their fate. Or if not them, someone:
a small being with whitish skin and large, cat-like eyes.
After conducting various tests, said Betty, the aliens,
joined by dotted lines in ways that drove her batty, just
couldn’t be described. But properties could be ascribed to them,
and Barney could have his penis inserted into their suction device,
if it helped. Maybe that way they could get down to Bedrock,
take nature along for the ride.

Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT | Tagged

Fifteen Façades

i.

things you say, when
corner of primavera and invierno
and you, in black and white
and you, all sunglassed up

lintel on crumbling
adobe jagged shore line

and is a facade something for
saying here, look, again

ii.

through this suspended
dinosaur backbone and you know
like albino rainbow
into the ravine some kind of steel

when it suited, let’s not have a scene?
don’t you remember that coffee table didn’t
go over the edge and nothing was broken
when you returned black on black

a hundred spindle splinters, stars

iii.

hypocritical, lying bastard
that i am, and then …?

i would like to lick you rub you
against my cheek, eat off you
and fall asleep next to you forever

iv.

whereas i look for the line, the shape
stick legs and brussels sprout knees
elbows, fall to my

how they carry those barrel
bodies let alone people
to the waterfall
if you can conceive of this

v.

plumed serpent and i was more than one
of my throws away from the river
trickle. the ring went into the bushes
and dirt down there. whereas i wondered

what does green look like to you
who grabbed my hair in your fist
like a clump of grass or a puppy
what is it?

but you were an unlikely guru man
but there is more not your more my more

vi.

or shiny kettle drum
tail swish bridle swoop
and how it picks its footing

like sorting apples or how
it will not run at a life. i never

knew, what you thought
somethin’ stoopid but for sure

vii.

i knew you could be touched by
some of these passing things

i said, holy rooster, with custard stripe
beer fumes and feathers
crack pipe charred, alley rolled
catherine wheel sparking

you were gone but still with me
like alabaster and hazy bay. throws
like this are anticlimactic
gravitational force i mean
they just plop and what an object

i divined from a small piece of crystal

swamp goose, last thing i knew
she went to puebla to get her kids
and she already had two by the river.

i couldn’t understand it. i have
no children.

not every year
but sometimes it rains here
even in december

viii.

bucerías is not just highway hardware stores
and gas stations although that’s where
i waited for you and once we broke down
and you got peanuts there

ix.

i think, something for feeling thumb
joint and finger cradle grazing
palm how like candle, sacrament
blackened rooster hands

i would like to lick you,
rub you against my cheek, eat off you
and fall asleep next to you forever

x.

too big too little too happy too
sad too alive and too dead, starfish
when you sing this is what

you do to us. too soon it’s over
even as warming beers cigarettes
and the dying of our hopes
of someone, gliding in some
seascape with stripes and bubbles

xi.

i do not regret the craziest things
i’ve done or the dumbest, but how it got
after, all that grey

xii.

who knew us once
with tales of regenerating

arms or reminiscing
but you were a wild man

in some kind of preserve
gleaming toothless, pickled

xiii.

slow motion arcing past
guava trees and red roof sand

knocking over driveway posts
spinning wheels and what the hell.

xiv.

ducking your hit and waiting for your beckon.

xv.

or if you would tell me
this green is not god

Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT | Tagged

No title (Last year at Marienbad)

The fur and glue were not enough. They were pretty
enough. Just not clear enough. Or maybe
too clear. No. It was the blind glue they used. The kind
preservatives and artificial sweeteners know best
how to avoid. It was the opaqueness of the trees
along the path. It was the déjà vu; the maze of Modernist,
lost shadows stuck structurally before a phase. It was
intensely tender – too tender – little bits of fur
kept coming off. The glue stuck to my hands
like blood, the feet wldnt stay down, beside their own
shadows. My hands were literally not mine any more,
only the coating of hands.
Little stupid hands.
It was enough to fill a whole night
with the memory of grief, but not a whole year. Definitely not two.
and it was treasonably sweet. It was a glimmer,
then a squeak of hope but, finally, snuffed out in daylight
with a simple ‘Would you look at that!’

Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT | Tagged

Colosseums of the Future

i
through time-lapse, rivers twist like worms to lure
a catch, procured up-tide of futures brooked
mouths open —look!— in lust-spawned fury, hooked
intent by crook of dawn to leap ashore
in writhing force, pursuing dusk’s endure
and swim no more, thus, cursèd, men forsook

ii
one river watched them scrabble up its banks
dispersed in frantic, atavistic cull
from minuscule beginnings, mud-dripped, dull
to sift through sullied genes and thin their ranks
while proving blank the canvassed air, give thanks
where, trinkets dangled, pressed the living skulls

iii
soon, buildings flanked the river, tall and proud
a mingled, crowded smother, curling true
behold! what views, we said, floor thirty-two
besotted, truant, leases forged in cloud
we sped, empowered, grand, selection cowed
through empty boundaries, swelled to ponds anew

iv
its temples empty, still the river flows
no cult on show, just husks of worship spent
old condos, penthouse must, bare, stripped of rent
cast ghosts in bent despair through passing motion
fools’ tinctured, gold-dripped bloodlines, new-born oceans
man chortles faux where ripples blind are sent

Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT | Tagged

Cosmic Primness

They settle on me like a dress, or lobby. The more gestures
Manners of an astronaut? The richness comes out eventually.
The close star wood promises being and eternity, but turns
managers. Princess talk turns into legislation; knowledge is
coming out his ears, he digs a passageway for retired hens.
the more there seems to be only one. I’m in the park where

Something grows: a grey primrose. Gamble everything. Head
out it’s the prawn-coloured toothpick in your eye. There’s
a form of poison. A bed of jonquils or a new variety of yoghurt
The fox can somersault for olives for all the lovers care. Perhaps
no one does; the days of a pink moon. We’re all driven together
witch or wicked musketeer trades an apple for a robin’s gear.

no one that you know of in the sky. Serve the ground or the
named after Justin Bieber. Harmony’s when you want different
they were born that way, with the face of Mark Twain reversing
like employees, if this was allegory, or Mass. ‘Oh, art’, galahs
We’re in Disney country, where the pain is so slight it lasts
whisper of a health axe in your mind (a whisper from today’s

things. The old man will be united with the old woman but
from a bush. After a month, maybe. Anyone can walk there.
say, or ‘O heart!’. As if there’s humility in thinking everything’s
for hundreds of years. Colour is another word for coldness
newspaper). When I move a brick it’s like moving a hero’s
this is the icing on the bird’s back. There’s no coast either.

Even in the centre of town there are no donkeys or virgins.
for my benefit. Why else spend years on the toilet reading
I think. Use your judgment. The rogues are at your cheeks.
thigh, or tired dolphin through the forest of apprentice wealth
When it’s safe the sentinel does the rounds. With 7am steam
You try the thing Obama said was bad. A booking for something.

They settle on me like a dress, or lobby. The more gestures
the more there seems to be only one. I’m in the park where
no one does; the days of a pink moon. We’re all driven together
like employees, if this was allegory, or Mass. ‘Oh, art’, galahs
say, or ‘O heart!’. As if there’s humility in thinking everything’s
for my benefit. Why else spend years on the toilet reading
Manners of an astronaut? The richness comes out eventually.

Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT | Tagged

Is This

high end fascism or
bomb blast nostalgia
at the season’s shoulder
each day an analogue
of the one that came before it
as though we could somehow
avoid spring’s litigious blue skies
or those evening stars like talk show
applause alongside a bewildered
moon who arrived too early
and now has to sign off on
terms and conditions he has
hardly read you know they
are important these ninety seven
pages because language is
important copyright is important
intellectual property law is
important surveillance
and privacy are important
your rights are important
click here
and here
and here
if you agree

Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT | Tagged

Words such as Ordinary or Ordinate …

Words such as Ordinary or Ordinate to Begin and Clog/
Sieve Towards Construction Constraint

after Finnegans Wake

Prop boundary portal node
enfant incorrigible cohort
slather porous nascent inordinate

slouch for uncoordinated
haberdashery treacle irrelevance.
Pulchritudinous lovers mock

fuck on soldier whirr &
sales role boules prop-
ortionate wrestle only

rusted unsentimental illusory
vested participant shore direction
float pack pebble socket

arm pitch reference muscle.
Half pitch encyclopaedic
oration stand up

or pitch dark half after-
noon correlation psych
stitch up? Blue wick scar

hours tone dig three
section carpark
anecdote which, over

secretariat blunder, for
shibboleth coronary flake
shop newspaper

inarticulate, comes for
ache-ended titter
section aggregate sum up.

Parlour armour, ours
tourers, fox lick irregular nail
polish ordinate ocular stop.

Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT | Tagged

from Jerilderies









Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT | Tagged