Cordite Poetry Review

Elese Dowden Reviews Rebecca Hawkes and Claudia Jardine

Posted on October 26, 2023 by Elese Dowden

Meat Lovers by Rebecca Hawkes
Auckland University Press, 2022

Biter by Claudia Jardine
Auckland University Press, 2023

In her Cordite essay ‘What Blooms Beneath a Blood-Red Sky: A Year in Aotearoa Poetry,’ Rebecca Hawkes, author of Meat Lovers writes:

Poetry is so hot right now, the bright young rhapsodists proclaim (if largely to a devoted audience of each other). Are we just saying, we’re hot now, evidencing the glow-up since high school, the already-anxiety of what it will mean for our newness to fade when we’ve truly emerged and the first-book fetish fades?

(2023)

Good question. Hawkes, queer Pākehā poet and painter, raised in Canterbury and living in Wellington, concludes that no, the poets will always be babes, and maybe she’s right. Poetry is hot right now in Aotearoa and it’s hot in Melbourne too. From my own Pākehā observations across the Tasman in Melbourne, there exists an emerging class of largely millennial writers in Aotearoa revelling Dionysiacally in their post-high school ‘glow-up.’ Claudia Jardine, a Pākehā and Maltese musician, poet, and author of Biter, is also a member of this gleaming cohort.

Nearly all of Aotearoa’s best contemporary writers are alumni of the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML), based at Victoria University of Wellington, with Tayi Tibble, Chris Tse, Hera Lindsay Bird, Tusiata Avia, Eleanor Catton, and Rebecca K. Reilly among them. The IIML was established as an institute of Victoria University in 2000 with funding from US casino owner, businessman, and Iowa Writer’s Workshop graduate Glenn Schaeffer.

There is a definitive style arising from these IIML peer groups so curiously funded by American casinos (just as the Iowa Writer’s Workshop was funded by the CIA). Tinfoil hats aside, funding for the arts is rarely in perfect accordance with the conclusions we draw from art itself. But it’s worth considering: what interest might American capital have in guiding the flows of poetry in Aotearoa New Zealand?

Aotearoa New Zealand is a tiny country. This is not an understatement. I heard recently that the nation’s gross domestic product is half that of the state of Victoria, so if you think the Australian literary scene is modest, think again. Fellow poet and bookseller Ender Başkan writes in Overland, in his review of my review of Sick Leave co-director and poet (and not NZ politician) Gareth Morgan’s When a Punk Becomes a Spunk (2022), that reviewing is a difficult task.

You are navigating risk, you don’t want to piss your colleagues off, you want to build links, be positive because the scene is small and there are finite organs to publish in or perform with, limited funding. Which is to say that robust debate requires the safety of density—or tenure—a density we might often lack.

(“Poetry can already be free”, 2023)

This is my fifth literary review to date, and I find myself again writing in uncomfortably close proximity to the writers I review. Rebecca Hawkes and Nikki-Lee Birdsey published my first poem in Sweet Mammalian. Hawkes and I are mutuals on both Instagram and Twitter. Hawkes also appeared in one of Claudia Jardine’s music videos. They thank each other in the acknowledgements of their respective books, alongside a number of other IIML graduates.

Heeding Başkan’s caution, I approach this review carefully. In Naarm, or so-called Melbourne, as in Aotearoa, it feels imperative to engage in critical thought about our social standpoints when producing art, and to entertain our own possible investments as a safeguard against the furthering of the naturalised fascism of enduring colonialisms. Başkan prompts further: “Australia is being settled every day. Can anyone who has settled downplay a part in unsettling Australia?” (2023).

Poet and critic Jasmine Gallagher writes that “New Zealand art and poetry is increasingly marked by a form of New Sincerity” (“New Sincerity in New Zealand Poetry”, 2019: 122). She theorises New Sincerity as a cultural reaction to postmodernism, “away from cynicism, irony and scepticism towards a poetics of recovery, hope and sincerity” (2019). I wonder how much this style pertains to the increased access to global publishing afforded by the internet, and the “first-book fetish” acknowledged by Hawkes in her Cordite essay (2023).

The way we express ourselves online has in turn seeped into the way we write offline (if there is such a thing in 2023). There is an immediacy to typing thoughts into a blank field against the blinking cursor of the present, and writing with a pen or pencil doesn’t feel the same. Form influences content, and vice versa.

I can think faster and more freely when I type than when I handwrite, and anything I write on a screen is more widely circulated than anything I say or write by hand. Never before in global history have we been able to overshare so rapidly. Never before have there been so many prescriptions for speed. New Sincerity is a culmination of several world-historic shifts in literature’s form and content, in turn arising from our preoccupation with relentless micro-blogging and the changing conditions of experience.

The rise of internet culture has increased the possibilities for propaganda and power. It has also increased access to publishing, beginning with blogging and arguably never ending, given most forms of social media are essentially new forms of micro-blogging. Perhaps this, combined with the pressures of academic publishing, is where the first-book fetish comes from. In an age where anyone can publish a digital chapbook from their living room, the speed of print publishing makes us impatient.

Where previously poets in Aotearoa weren’t widely read outside of New Zealand, the internet age has provided the opportunity for global readership. Just ask Tayi Tibble, whose poem ‘Creation Story’ was published in The New Yorker earlier this year (2023). Hawkes’ work, too, is set for a North American reception, given her recently awarded (and well-deserved) Fulbright scholarship to pursue a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Michigan.

Stemming from this new reception for contemporary New Zealand poetry is an excitement and a naivety which has shifted away from the cultural emulation of the British empire towards North American modes proliferated in part by micro-blogging and the world wide web. Arguably New Zealand’s most canonised millennial poet, Hera Lindsay Bird’s writing has become emblematic of this IIML style. Oscillating gently between ironic self-contempt and surrealist Tumblr confessional, Bird’s work represents a certain mid-2010s affect which continues to bleed into the tone of young poets in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Opening her self-titled poetry book, The Spinoff agony aunt Bird writes in ‘WRITE A BOOK’:

Now I have a Masters degree in poetry and no longer wet myself
But I still have to die in antiquated flowers
Does this make me sentimental
Well, who’s to judge
You can get away with anything in a poem
As long as you say my tits in it
But it’s a false courage to be so………… modestly endowed
And have nothing meaningful to say

(2016: 7)

Rebecca Hawkes has something meaningful to say about tits, though she says it a little more sincerely than Bird, with a delightfully perverse flavour of South Island farmgirl sentimentality. Hawkes’ debut book of poetry contains 40 odd poems, separated into two parts entitled ‘Meat’ and ‘Lovers.’ Meat Lovers opens with a visceral conundrum in ‘The Flexitarian’: the poet is trying to be a good vegetarian, but finds herself in “the PORK section,” fondling “sheets of pig skin through their clingfilm” (11; 11).

As far as openers go, this one is queer lady-millennial as fuck: cast as objects under patriarchy, we are perturbed by our own bloody desire for the other. Hawkes discovers a strange horror tucked inside the plastic tray: a nipple, serving as a complex symbol for nourishment and sex, perhaps in service of posthuman mammalhood. The poet tries to cut the nipple out. She scores it and scrubs it raw, but ultimately succumbs to her bloodlust, cooking the nipple and burning her tongue.

What I like about Hawkes’ poems is the generosity with which she allows the reader to witness her coming-to-terms-with. This is a poet who is willing to interrogate the uncomfortable, in equal parts gentle and jarring. This slightly deranged demeanour lends well to a fresh treatment of the problem of meat. ‘Is it cruelty,’ for example, opens with “If the sheep has a broken leg?”, immediately enjambed by a line break which gives way to a series of short, uneven stanzas of questions (29). The poem refuses to look away, finally asking:

If the sheep tries to get up but can’t?
Can they walk away from it?
Can they still go swimming?

(29)

This and some of the other poems in Meat Lovers are difficult to stomach, but that’s a good thing. Poetry can be a portal to the sublime by breaking the little binaries in our brains and providing us with new possibilities. Hawkes does this by evoking a Mid-Canterbury settler posthumanism, drawing us into a truly mammalian bucolic where she blurs human subjectivity against various dichotomies to form her own ethics of ambiguity.

This is one of the most masterful features of the book, and identification with the non-human may well be a feature of an antipodean New Sincerity. Hawkes takes up the position of the dairy cow In “Hardcore Pastorals VII.”, originally published in 2021 as poem “VII.” in Cordite Poetry Review as part of Hawkes’ online chapbook Hardcore Pastorals.

The poem begins, “I am an astoundingly beautiful cow and I know my fate”:

and although you have not yet solved your problem of meat
you are something like me I think in kinship
you upright wolves you wet-eyed feeling fiends
sisters sisters sisters sisters
your tiny hearts swelling like bladders
take your place in the herd of dying things
let us jump all the fences and piss in the rivers
yes you already eat of these fields
now get down on all fours and graze

(53)

While poems about cows are not necessarily new, Hawkes’ particular identification is. She forces readers to examine their existing ideas about the inner life of cows, and challenges these inherited western representations of the animal. The farm is born to sustain the colony, and in the fenced-off paddocks we find everywhere the subjugation of nature by culture in a locked dialectical binary. By going ‘hardcore’ on the pastoral, Hawkes helps us to ask: is the colonial pastoral ever really about cows and wheat, or is it merely power masking its own illegitimacy through romantic obscurity?

Pages: 1 2

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged Claudia Jardine, Elese Dowden, Rebecca Hawkes

Christopher Brown Reviews Pam Brown and Nicholas Powell

Posted on October 10, 2023 by Christopher Brown

Stasis Shuffle by Pam Brown
Hunter Publishers, 2022

Trap Landscape by Nicholas Powell
Hunter Publishers, 2022

The last poem of Pam Brown’s Stasis Shuffle, ‘(fundamentals)’ begins with the lines: “make a distinction / between imagery / & reality” (103). As much as the distinction in question evokes the verisimilitude of the fake, a need to separate unreliable image from truth, Stasis Shuffle’s interest in reality and authenticity goes deeper. The lines above resonate with the book’s cover, a photo of an urban landscape so carefully constructed that the photo (especially its forward half) might be taken for a planner’s sketch or impression. Myth’s claim to truth has been an important part of Brown’s work, though a focus here is the way the real world comes to relate as something less than authentic.

In ‘(best before)’, Brown writes:

my feeling is
           the planet is losing its real
(like 
       everyone knows)

(11)

Beginning with the personal and possessive, such words imply a primacy of individual expression alongside matters of the planetary and existential. Alternately, if the kinds of things that everyone knows signal resignation, they can do with reiterating. The idea of the real is extended in ‘(last known location)’:

r.i.p

icon 
of blankness
       embracing 
inauthenticity

you will be 
         missed

(99)

This balances a timely scepticism (“blankness”, “inauthenticity) with an image of misguided reverence, idolatry. It’s the inauthentic in this case with which the world is enamoured. Brown critiques a culture of individualism in ‘(mme nhu)’:

how many eyes 
        go to the gym
its wall mirrors 
                       colliding 
         with lust

(34)

And this critique might be considered with the following on ecology, “earthmovers that never said, ‘sorry rhizome’,” if we think of self-sameness as monoculture (14). Together such examples suggest totalising political structures, according to which “the systemic management / of culture” occurs as much from a self-regulatory within, as from a governmental without (20).

Consumerism and digitalisation are presented as cultural forms toward the degraded experience of the real, which in ‘(next time)’ is mediated, literally diluted, juxtaposed to the sensory real of the poem:

        you licked a saltbush
        out in the scrub –
that’s the photo

that the taste
         wasn’t that good
isn’t ‘revealed’

(17)

As with the decontextualising image/photo, the passage

it beggars
           belief
that
ipad streaming
was all they did
beneath the campanile

(‘(I can hear your aargh from here)’,44)

ironically engages the diminished status of high culture yet points to the relocation of experience to digital contexts, with the effect that “there’s no history / there’s (only) allegory” (‘(best before)’, 8). It’s here in part, in a context of experiential inauthenticity, that the title Stasis Shuffle gathers meaning, suggesting a recombination of existing elements, perpetual sameness attended by superficial change, production and reproduction, “old […] faking new,” the kind of change implied by the streetscape on the cover (65). Stasis Shuffle’s 2021 publication coincided with COVID-19 shutdowns in Australia and internationally, with their impact on world production, and as much as the title calls to mind an unchanging political reality, it also hints at a welcome stasis, one “liberated / from the drudgery / of usefulness,” as ‘(best before),’ quoting Walter Benjamin, puts it (3). In this perspective

everyone
                   should just
                   leave
                   everything
&
  I do mean
  every thing
                   alone

(‘(I can hear your aargh from here)’, 46)

Brown’s work has often questioned poetry’s social efficacy. (See for example ‘susceptibility song’ from 2018’s click here for what we do, and its ambivalence around poetry’s agency for change.) While Brown writes “not a poet for nothing” in ‘(best before),’ the idea of liberation from usefulness alludes to poetry itself as a non-productive activity (4). Untethered from economic or cultural duty, poetry becomes a site where “nobody’s governing” – permissive, potentially anarchic – a sense conveyed in Brown’s tonal ease and delightfully irruptive logic (“eat barking dog”, “drink / your shingles / if all else fails”) (‘(best before)’, 4; ‘(plastic & tragic)’, 27; 27). There’s an air of abandon, a trust in impulse, intuition:

life’s more fun
                  when you
                  don’t know
what the hell
 you’re doing

(29)

Brown begins the poem ‘Might as well’ from her 2015 collection Missing up with the lines: “born in parenthesis / raised in an interstice” (42); she writes in click here for what we do of “interstitial thinking” (‘Susceptibility song’, 86). As if to consolidate an early conceptualisation of process, Brown parenthesises each of Stasis Shuffle’s poems’ titles – locating the poem at the gaps and apertures of systemic culture, while implying clarification, revision, an imposition of terms and conditions on the otherwise culturally acceptable or legitimate. In this revisionist space Brown can assert a value for poetry. If the phrase “daydreaming […] good for you” in (39) ‘(mme nhu)’ tends to the political, values for poetry are further communicated in ‘(the real)’ (39; 32). The images of Jack Spicer and experimentalism

    evil boy genius
             jack spicer
desired
    a peculiar derangement
            of experiment

(32)

critique the masculine, intellectual exceptionalism – a tradition of literary experimentation, and within which Brown herself can be said to write – it’s the ending that’s most interesting:

jack was right
            when he said
the imagination
pictures
the real

(33)

The underline highlights a concession, but a conditional, an ironic one, something like a backhanded compliment (he was right, for once). Poetry diminishes myth, as well as poetry’s myth-making (“not every / mundanity makes into a poem”) (‘(looks like)’, 85). But in ‘(the real),’ the rewriting of myth progresses to a truth or ontology (the nexus of imagination and reality) yet caveated by “the imagination” and “pictures,” whose connotations of the dream-like, and cinematic, shadow any transparent idea of the real.

Many of the poems in Stasis Shuffle use the divided shapes and forms for which Brown is well-recognised; there are also some key variations. The stepped lines of ‘(next time)’ and ‘(drinks)’ share a visual likeness with the poems around them. Their enjambment, line-by-line grammar, and reflective parenthesis build, however, to a more firmly cumulative impact. ‘(drinks)’ seems most notable in this sense. Picking up about halfway through, it reads:

kept up, & alert
              by an urgent
contingency
      &     (possible)  opportunism
that could be
  slowly dismantled
        by the friendship machine
or even
       (boring perhaps to some)
the very isomorphism
       agamben or derrida
or
   some other lacanian or other
warned us against
  before
              we desublimated
into a cool, casual enjoyment
             (though not without
                      emotional labour)
        of
        too many drinks

(59)

The later section ‘(pressure’s on) six mini double sonnets’ reflects further variation, only whereas ‘(drinks)’ extends the fragment through sustained grammatical impulse, the poems here reduce it. Lines are mostly stand-alone phrases:

memory seafoam
hidden expectations
keen accomplice
no provocation
exercise yard
ecco runners
pressure’s on

(72)

There’s the feeling of speed, at odds with or in response to the stasis of the title. Brown writes in ‘(fundamentals),’ “it’s insane it’s fast / it’s fun,” which perhaps sums up the spirit of ‘(pressure’s on)’ (105).

It’s fun but there’s also a keen discipline at work here. In their unstinting documentation of the moment, Brown’s poems read like maps of exemplary (sustained) concentration, both individually, and then together, as a rich and extraordinary oeuvre.

Pages: 1 2

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged Christopher Brown, Nicholas Powell, Pam Brown

Submission to Cordite 112: TREAT

Posted on October 9, 2023 by Tricia Dearborn

Ok, who’s up for a treat? Who couldn’t use a treat in these difficult times?

What, for you, counts as a treat? Where do you find joy, delight or amusement?

What subject or topic do you want to treat with the respect (or mockery) it deserves?

Who are you treating how? What gifts are you giving? What terms do you want to discuss or negotiate? Who or what would you like to heal or cure?

This is your invitation to treat Cordite readers to seriously good poems that engage with, respond to or explore the meaning(s) of ‘treat’.

This podcast sheds some insight on how Cordite Poetry Review (and Cordite Books) works.

Submission to Cordite 112: TREAT closes 11.59pm Melbourne time 4 February 2024.

Please note:

The guest editor(s) has sovereign selection choice for all poems submitted.
Masthead editors will also contribute to the issue.
We will only read submissions sent during our official submission periods.
Please place up to three (3) poems in one (1) Word, RTF or PDF document (unless specifically noted otherwise for special issues), with no identifying details in the document itself.
We are not able to offer feedback on individual poems.
Submissions will only be accepted via Submittable …

Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged Kent MacCarter, Tricia Dearborn

Will Druce Reviews Michael J. Leach and Theodore Ell

Posted on September 26, 2023 by Will Druce

Natural Philosophies by Michael J. Leach
Recent Work Press, 2022

Beginning in Sight by Theodore Ell
Recent Work Press, 2022

Published by Recent Work Press in 2022, the following two debut collections of poetry I’ve had the pleasure of spending time with are both stylistically and gestationally distinct from one another. Natural Philosophies by Michael J. Leach is an eclectic mixture of poetic experiments that nobly attempt to marry science and medicine with art and poetics. Theodore Ell’s Beginning in Sight, gracefully vintaged in its composition and heavily focused on the primacy of the visual, is a haunting and considered meditation on time as it unfolds beneath the eye.

Natural Philosophies is Michael J. Leach’s debut full-length collection of poetry, and emanates the excitement and enthusiasm of a poet who has, in discovering musical instruments, not only taken up learning the piano but the guitar, oboe, trumpet, flute, and marimba. While the themes of Leach’s book revolve mainly around the intersection of health-related bioscience and poetics – in particular applying his pharmacoepidemiological background to this encounter – the poetic forms he employs in the treatment of his subject-matter are diverse and eclectic. The pleasure which Leach takes in exploring such a variety of instruments is the central joy of this book – from concrete poems, ekphrasis, a villanelle, a variety of ekphrastic poems, and several variations of the acrostic to dual-stanza poems and sets of haiku. It is easy to tell that Leach is having abundant fun, which in its own way is deeply refreshing to witness. Leach has great empathy for readers who identify with feeling alienated by the use of specialised language and goes to great lengths to cater for his audience. The medical, pharmaceutical, and health-system lexicon Leach employs in many of his poems attempts to cushion language that can be difficult to navigate and discern as non-doctors.

While it is of course common for volumes of poetry to contain notes on their poems to acknowledge intertextual references, obscure terminology etc., Leach’s ‘Notes’ section contains an 8-page appendix that offers at times a play-by-play break down of more or less every poem in the book. With this exhaustive reference section Leach is more or less offering to do all the work a curious and enthusiastic close-reader would otherwise have taken pleasure in doing for themselves. Perhaps this is due to Leach’s concern that these poems may be overly strenuous for the target audience to interpret, or perhaps the concern is that they may be ‘asymptomatically’ read by some kind of ‘free-reader’ out there who Leach is worried may not uncover the ‘right’ mandible/cranium/femur when they do not fervently excavate for his true intention. Leach politely assists us in our efforts, freely or unfreely, to understand what he has decided is happening in his poems and, for example, which Bass Strait Leach he is referring to in his concrete wave-poem ‘Back to the sea’ when he describes “salty, curvaceous waves direct from Bass Strait” (the one north of Tassie FYI) (30).

Leach does not leave us stranded and alone with poems such as ‘Frida Kahlo’s Backbone,’ which before reading Leach’s notes, I could only assume was the miraculous ekphrastic discernment of the meat of Kahlo’s biography from her 1944 painting The Broken Column.

Frida Kahlo was born in July, 1907
in old Coyoacán, Mexico.
She was six years old going on 47
when polio struck her down.
She survived with a shrivelled leg
and threw herself into sports.
Proud parents stoked the bright fire
of young Frida’s quick mind.
At 18, Frida was in a motor car crash
that fractured her to pieces.
Though she was lucky to be alive,
her life goals burned to ash.
Frida went from aspiring doctor to
patient trapped in body casts.

(36)

While the poem is positioned as an ekphrastic response, it seems more like a chronologically ordered recount of important events in the painter’s life, embellished by a kind of Wikipedia format. The poem captures (according to Leach in his notes) the overlap between health and the arts that Kahlo’s paintings reflect. Perhaps Leach did indeed garner Kahlo’s biography purely from her self-portrait… in which case the poem is very impressive. Enthusiastic about concrete poetics, Leach page-centres the poem to emulate the appearance of a spine – a device he, again, faithfully lets us know about in his notes. As has become evident, Leach has made the job of reviewing the book at all somewhat difficult given that the books’ potential readers are able to garner more or less all the information I am passing onto them about Leach’s poems from Leach’s own handily attached notes. In this sense, the book has been self-reviewed, or self-treated, in advance, as it were. Leach provides a service for those readers confused by the symptoms of their reading and unable to address what perhaps has caused them to read the book in the first instance. We are left to feel a little like the patient with type 2 diabetes that Leach describes in his poem ‘The Second Type’ to whom the following line is addressed after being told to exercise and eat better; “I hand you a booklet while you stare at me” (45). Leach’s attached how-to booklet on his poems, unlike the one handed to his patient, does the ‘exercise’ of reading the poems for us, when presumably many poetry readers would prefer the exercise of interpreting these poems for themselves.

Leach’s poetry in this collection is at its strongest when it is most simple and least explained. A moving example is the closing poem of the book titled ‘Maternal Memories’ which explores the grief of Leach’s loss of his mother under the deeply estranged and emotionally abstract circumstances of the pandemic:

During this rare moment
with my baby sister,
I look her in the face –
lacrimal secretions
in familiar eyes
reflect mine
as we draw ever closer
to our final destination.

Here I am –
an off-duty statistician
wholeheartedly believing
in the beautiful spirituality
of synchronicity.

(63)

The only note Leach leaves us for this poem is a concise definition of the acronym DNA, as the rest of the poem rather poignantly needs no explanation – indeed it speaks for itself and Leach seems to be cognisant of this. Whatever allowed Leach to be confident enough to let this poem speak for itself is hopefully where we will see his poetic practice travel to next.

Pages: 1 2

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged Michael J. Leach, Theodore Ell, Will Druce

Dominic Guerrera on as First Nations Literary Editor

Posted on September 12, 2023 by Kent MacCarter

Image by Thomas McCammon

We are honoured to announce that Dominic Guerrera has joined Cordite Poetry Review as First Nations Literary Editor.

Dominic Guerrera is a Ngarrindjeri, Kaurna and Italian person who resides on Kaurna Yarta. Dominic’s artistic practice includes Poetry, Pottery and Photography. Currently works as a First Nations Producer for Regional Aboriginal artists, has guest produced and curated several writers festivals and art exhibitions and is currently undertaking a Masters in Gender Studies.

In 2021, Guerrera was the recipient of the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize for his poem ‘unwelcome to country’.

Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged Dominic Guerrera, Kent MacCarter

Nathanael Pree Reviews Mitch Cave and Rebecca Cheers

Posted on September 8, 2023 by Nathanael Pree

How to Eat Fire and Why by Mitch Cave
Rabbit Poets Series, 2022

No Camelias by Rebecca Cheers
Rabbit Poets Series, 2022

Your house burns down. You reconstruct yourself in elements. It’s how you emerge into a new world of coherence, through gathering and articulating the fragments. Your body merges with others: you are fluid and combustible at once. You dispense with time and exist in multiple layers of space. You evolve from the fire. A final resolution remains out of reach.

This is Mitch Cave, taking his burnt house even further apart; atomising the remains and releasing them into the elements within which the charred and splintered carapace and its dispersed particles attempt to find one another, recover, and cohere. His collection is aswirl with debris; it floats, never quite settles, instead accumulating over the pages to produce an upsurge of energy and luminosity.

Where do you house yourself after such loss? What has happened within the self? Here we have an internalisation and extension of the event all at once: its shifting and embodied immanence. The body seeks others and at the same time puts out its own its parameters:

hold raw flesh in one hand and
signal small fires to burn
around my body

(‘Splendid is the sun orbiting around you’, 5)

The heat is not quite at arm’s length and gives off in turn an uneasy sense of ongoing decomposition and liminal uncertainty: where and who to live with or within?

Cave ironically observes:

we never quite decided
on a vacancy
we will next inhabit

(‘How i got home from noosa last night’, 2)

He is unsettled. References to fire and burning are everywhere, only now they are potentially life-threatening triggers. Barbecues become a source of fear. Yet alongside this comes irony and resilience. And this is evident in the young poet in how he makes himself immediately present, singing at the crash scene and letting the fire, flame, and burning collocate with its salient components; other humours, other elements.

His collection is grouped and presented in those old-school humours or elements: the first of these is Air, the space for combustion (or vanishing), which Earth can put out, or literally ground it, as “red slides down the centre / of his cracked arrow mouth” (‘Observations from the balcony, barmore street, 18). Water and Fire are positioned as paradoxical yet apposite. At least, this is how the book appears to track and dip, before rising through a sustained crescendo to a succession of fire points on pages which assume a contoured, and at times contorted, face.

Air is combustible shockwaves, and Earth may attempt to ground these, and struggle with absorbing their aftermath. The Earth poem that stands out is ‘Panic room at a Party’: halfway through the section it disorientates and forces the reader to slow down with its suddenly irregular punctuation (23). What to do with a few disjointed, ad hoc, strobe lit sheets of aphasia? Run, crouch, hide, reconstruct, repeat. After that “the garden’s absolution” hands it over to the plants to take over and discuss this predicament (‘The garden’s absolution’, 24). A palm frond telling a flower: “no-one is going to make it out of here alive, that’s a given” (24). Earth is something that may be grounding, but also an element the poet must leave.

Water comes next. It absorbs and liquefies bodies to suit its own protean purposes: neither the sublime Venus (as a boy) nor a plastic cup of sugary slush avoid its processes. “The ocean is looking at us,” maybe willing us to keep changing, or as part of a shared construct involving ebb and flow. Tidal resonance and return are tropes that become more evident as the collection starts to show an accumulation of previously withheld energy and power, after having started in its overtly fragmented, dispersed and almost scattered way. ‘Supermoon king tides, noosa heads’ ends with such an instance, where wordplay gives way to something more powerful, luminous, and strange – akin to Lars von Trier’s melancholic musings:

before i go to sleep i lift  
a bucket over my fallible  
remains i tilt i pour  
fire over my 
body good night

(41)

In ‘swan song,’ the poet gathers shards from a nameless “apocalypse,” nameless apart from the man who is absent, whose invisibility forms another layer of elements to get through:

carrying nightfall in my palms 
i begin to remind myself
of your skull’s absence 
i look on as a lighthouse 
begins to burn 

(43)

Another building is on fire, oceanic, liminal but also literal: the light it gives when intact, the light it emits when falling apart, the lightness of its substance.

Following these aqueous bodies is Fire. This section begins with the poem ‘if we were burning,’ with smoke, breathing, asbestos – words separated like beings taking evasive action (46). Throughout these final poems, the narrator seems to be articulating the ends of his unrest, as if seeking some kind of a place or to be in some way reconciled with the elements:

do 
you have fire in your 
bathtub grieve 
in water you
whisper something 
about a phobia of burning

(‘I live with you’, 48)

Fire is the intruder, fire confined in a vessel for water, which when released becomes a repository for mourning. Fire insidious; slipping into intimate spaces, sliding in on the slightest of sounds, something that leaves a mark no telling can erase.

No surprise that this final section is marked by the prevalence of dreams, the presence of fire in landscape and in the bodies that traverse the dreamscape, such as “a man wandering in a forest / smoke exiting his shoulder blades” like an unquiet ghost from a nameless ritual within the subconscious (‘Nightmares or, side effects may include’, 51). There are tropes of falling birds in another evocation of melancholia and apocalypse. “Murky gold” shines through ashen skin, goldfinches appear for an instant of uncertain satori, tensile flashes of life in colours ascribed to burning and its aftermath (51).

Everything relies on heat, and although fire has its season, when it comes it is everywhere: “there was ash in my coffee yesterday […] wind shapeshifts into flame and we are all on fire” (‘Bushfire season’, 54). Our sensory apparatus is supported by warning alarms, but the animals fare little better, even when set free, “the way their bodies / bend and twist in glow” (‘Memory’, 53). Fire consumes everything in order of how elements, atoms, molecules, and substances align. It becomes the stuff of memory, dreamscape, nightmare. It is both immanence and evocation.

Cave’s final poem in this astonishing collection, ‘You, your light,’ is also in some way redemptive: “i know / how to breathe like lanterns / do,” he quietly claims, so maybe here the eating of fire is explained (‘You, your light’, 56)? Is this a form of transmigration, transformation, or evolution that has come once the house of his being, his carapace has burned itself to death? What does Gilgamesh say about this? Burn your house down and look for life, build for disaster up ahead. The poet appears to be preparing for something at once all too recognisable but also not entirely reckoned. As the ‘Fire Sermon’ from Buddhist theology may be paraphrased: everything is on fire, but a pathway to liberation can be made out once this is realised, accepted, and put into perspective (Christmas Humphreys, ed. The Wisdom of Buddhism, 1987: 45). It is to Cave’s credit how he takes on the immensity of this task.

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Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged Mitch Cave, Nathanael Pree, Rebecca Cheers

Emerging Malay Poets: Translations of Zulfadli Rashid, Sofia Nin and Hidayat Nordin by Annaliza Bakri

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Annaliza Bakri

Remnants of Grief by Zulfadli Rashid

Ah, the ink
is still wet

Witnessing
the cities
pacified
the bricks whispering
tall, touching the sky
imprisoning its occupants
impounding free movement
while the wind howls
inciting
grass to turn to weeds
foliage unfolding
cloaking the highway
nature’s cycle
raises his chin
and Man
bows
falling, face first
a safe distance
a needle prick
a mask covering

Then
we want to, swiftly
disregard,
rushing furiously,
lesson dismissed –
fist clenched –
punching the air
that we had once
feared

Hurriedly.
As I long for
The Norm.
Remnants of grief,
intertwined with wretchedness.

Sisa-sisa Duka

Nah tinta
belum lagi kering

Menyaksikan
kota-kota
sunyi
batu-batan berbisik
tinggi mencakar langit
memenjarakan penghuninya
merampas gerak bebas
sambil deru bayu
menghasut
rumput menjadi rumpai
dedahan merimbun
menudung lebuhraya
putaran alam
mendongak dagunya
lalu manusia
menunduk
jatuh tersembam
berjarak selamat
tertusuk picagari
dibalut pelitup

Lalu
kita segera mahu
lupa,
bergegas deras,
meninggalkan kuliah –
menggenggam tangan –
menumbuk udara
yang pernah kita
geruni.

Tergesa-gesa.
Dek rindu pada
Yang Biasa.
Sisa-sisa duka,
diadun celaka.

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Posted in TRANSLATIONS | Tagged Annaliza Bakri, Hidayat Nordin, Sofia Nin, Zulfadli Rashid

Choosing Sides: 7 New Poems by Adam Ford

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Adam Ford

Dog Day Afternoon!
Rom Spaceknight #6 (May 1980)

He sits quietly, his hand still warm
from electricity drawn out of the single

naked bulb that gently swings from the
pasteboard ceiling of the small-town garage.

The hidden photovoltaic process continues,
electrons tracing intricate paths inside him

as the coffee the man bought at the local
diner stands untouched beside the breakfast

special sandwich. He gazes at the man and
woman sitting against the wall, sipping from

their polystyrene cups, nervous, watching.
His new friends, his first on Earth, are brave

and resourceful, both drawn to the frontlines
of a war long waged in secret. He does not

know what it is about her that reminds him
of another he once knew, more than two

centuries ago, only that she stirs a yearning
for things relinquished when he agreed to be

grafted to this suit of futuristic battle-armour
and face off against a fleet of starships bent on

galactic conquest: a breeze against his cheek,
his own voice, the ability to eat, to cry, to sing.

The coffee and his hand grow cold. He stills
his circuits and drifts into an electronic dream.

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Posted in CHAPBOOKS | Tagged Adam Ford

Fuck Lectures About Sonnets: On Noor Hindi

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Brigid Quirke

You pleasure that which makes us fiction // while staring // into our graved eyes
—from ‘In Which the White Woman on My Thesis Defense Asks Me about Witness’

In December 2020, Noor Hindi posted a photo of her poem, ‘Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying‘ on Twitter, announcing its publication in a forthcoming Poetry. The response was prolific. Off the back of an initial, much-liked Twitter post, fellow writer Rebecca Hamas tweeted a picture of the poem, attracting 5,990 retweets and more than 25,000 likes. A few months later, when Israel bombed Gaza in May 2021, further posts and reposts on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr saw people from across the internet share, praise, critique, and discuss the poem. A 2022 Reddit thread features commentary ranging from celebration of the verse for its beauty, to castigation for its ‘lashing out’ at other writers. The poem’s reach extended beyond literary-focused circles, perhaps explained by its keeping with a viral-making formula for online circulation. Its snappy brevity, provocative ‘fuck you,’ and stripped-back, accessible language make it highly quotable and easily shareable. But this snapshot of reach is a sketch of visibility, not a qualitative summary. Tallies of likes, searches, and shares tell us only that the poem was circulated, not how it made people feel, or if these data points initiated any real-life mobilisation. As Claire Schwartz puts it, the no-space of social media sees refusal and collusion speak in a single voice.

Surveying responses to the poem, the loudest voices in this conversation tend to praise its simplicity, with comments in these online spaces herald the poem for its straightforwardness and clarity. Close Talking, the ‘world’s most popular poetry analysis podcast,’ introduces the poem as a critique of craft, a complete package in which ‘the title says it all.’ ‘You can’t miss what the experience of the poem is and contains,’ the hosts argue. In one sense, this online response realises the ‘fuck you’ from the poem’s title. It suggests a resonance that does not need to be affirmed by academic intervention, by a lecture on craft. But this idea of a ‘single impact’ both elicits a response, and stops the conversation after the first sentence. Outside of the context of 160-character write-ups and flattened ‘like’ and ‘share’ responses, this straightforwardness does not quite stack up. Does the poem not ask more questions than it answers? Who is the ‘you’ being addressed? How do we reconcile these viral, anti-craft reactions with the poem’s publication in the prestigious Poetry?

I want to suggest a different approach to ‘Fuck Your Lecture on Craft’ – an intervention into the online intervention, if you will. While the media discourse surrounding the poem sheds a light on questions of reach, circulation and audience; it has been broadly inattentive to further, knotty questions around craft itself. What happens if, rather than taking the ‘fuck you’ to poetics as straightforward, we address the tensions this challenge throws up?

From the outset, the poem is hostile to the ethics of poeticisation. In declaring ‘Colonizers write about flowers,’ the speaker dismisses poetry for its insufficiency to forge an otherwise. By extension, it rallies against the contexts which privilege this mode of abstraction, recognising how poems and the architecture of their discussion are both inadequate responses to the violence of settler-colonialism in Palestine. But the poem relies on craft, on poetry, as the vehicle for this message – caveating the apparent rejection of poems and their insufficiencies. On a closer look, the poem’s engagement with the lecture on craft seems more complicated than a simple ‘fuck you.’ The poem is structured as 14 lines, voiced by lyric ‘I.’ The conflicted allegiances revealed at line 11, ‘I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies,’ offer a volta-like turn. For all the claims of straightforwardness, these features cannot help but echo traditional verse forms, deepening a sense of the irreconcilable. Taking a cue from these elements, I want to bring the poem into the ‘lecture on craft’ and consider it as a sonnet. This is not pure provocation: rather, it seeks to meet the poem on its own terms of opposition, recognising how these formal qualities interact with the sonnet framework. I want to take up Hindi’s line of contradictions by paying close attention to the poem’s craft, unpacking its preoccupation with poetry’s insufficiency.

The American sonnet is a verse form that has sought to renovate, localise, and democratise its European Renaissance foundations since the late 18th century.¹ The sonnet’s formal design is fixed: it has 14 lines, a set rhyme scheme and rhythm, and a volta, with structural divisions marked out in Shakespearean and Petrarchan traditions. But while these are often framed as rules, it is more useful, I think, to consider these as reference points for conformity and variation. It is a poem’s engagement with these rules, rather than a strict adherence to them, which brings it into conversation with the accumulation that is the sonnet form.

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Posted in ESSAYS, SCHOLARLY | Tagged Brigid Quirke, Claire Schwartz, Edward Said, Faris Odeh, Louis Cabri, Noor Hindi, Philip Hobsbaum, Roy Miki

5 New Poems by Mindy Gill

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Mindy Gill

In the Oberoi, Two Days Before My Flight
after Frank O’Hara

We made all the right decisions. It’s what
we told one another. A high-walled garden and uninterrupted
air. The mahogany desk you claimed in an instant
pens, new pages, sunglasses, keys.
Books set aside for me when I leave.
You said, We love each other, we couldn’t have been
luckier. Then there was nothing left
to be done. So we ran
up the bill: room service, the suite upgrades.
Had the mini bar stocked with Swiss
chocolates. We decided to get tattoos
as if to say we were really committing
to this. Your tribute to Blake
mine to the Brahminy kite. Easier
to say they had no meaning
were just images we liked.

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Posted in CHAPBOOKS | Tagged Mindy Gill

borderlands

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Chloë Callistemon

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Posted in CHAPBOOKS | Tagged Chloe Callistemon

‘The Edge of Reality’: Paul Magee in Conversation with Paul Collis, Jen Crawford and Wayne Knight

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Paul Magee

The idea is to compose a whole book by speaking it. Spoken on Barkindji and Nyemba Country by a Barkindji elder, academic and poet (Paul Collis), in dialogue with two white poet-academics (Jen Crawford, Paul Magee) and five local Barkindji, Kunya and Nyemba interlocutors (Gertie Dorigo, Bradley Hardy, Margaret Knight, Wayne Knight, Brian Smith), taped and transcribed, A Book that Opens provides a book-based archive of oral intellectual practice on Country along the Darling / Baarka River in outback New South Wales.

Many of the book’s discussions concern care for that Country. For instance, in Chapter 9 curator Bradley Hardy of the Brewarrina Aboriginal Cultural Museum takes us on a tour of the stone Fish Traps at Brewarrina, which are older than the Pyramids (Heritage NSW 2014). Palpable evidence of the industrial aquaculture practised throughout the riverine environments of pre-Conquest Australia, the Fish Traps served to maintain gatherings of up to 5,000 people in their flourishing, and they did so sustainably (Dargin 1976).

But the book is also – because of the simple insistence of our work as poets, and the nature of the topics that arise when we chat – about poetry, and in particular about the relation of speaking to the emergence of lines on the page.

The question of transcription comes into this. Though it is popularly imagined to be an automatic act, a verbatim rendering of speech in fact makes subjects appear illiterate. A downside of the transcription of Aboriginal English is its tendency to platform just this feature, as if white speakers were not similarly ‘oral’ when conversing. In fact, repetitions, false starts, a-sentential utterances and filler words characterise speech in all registers, whoever the speaker (Halliday 1985). At the same time, oral dialogue at venues like academic conferences constitutes a key driver of new ideas (Jakobson and Pomorska 1988), in ways the printed word simply cannot. Witness how important academics and professionals everywhere found it to maintain oral interactions online in the face of COVID, through Zoom and other such albeit impoverished technologies. We are actually all from oral cultures, however much our ideologies, on the one hand, and our once radical stances on the topic of ‘writing’ on the other, tend to obscure the fact. For all these reasons, Indigenous conversational practices stand side by side with various modes of academic speaking through the length of A Book that Opens, blurring the artificial boundaries we place between them, allowing a new set of differences to emerge.

The book accordingly begins – Chapter 1 – in an improvised seminar presentation, given on the 29th of August, 2022 at the University of Canberra. Over those pages we and our various interlocutors on campus consider the strategies we have thought up to bring narrative consistency to A Book that Opens, given that the conversations that course through it are, effectively, being made up on the spot. But nothing is really made up on the spot. The rivers of story and pre-given phrasing from which everyday speech emerges, in European and indigenous cultures alike, contour that presentation, as much as they contour the chapters that follow. Chapter 2, taking to the road, is set on the way from Canberra out to Bourke and captures a set of uncannily postcolonial ghost stories told by the tow truck driver who rescued and then disturbed us, when we broke down past Dubbo. Chapter 3 is the first set on Barkindji Country. It begins at a turning circle, a few metres from the entrance to Gundabooka National Park. WK Knight, a Barkindji / Kunya man and former Parks and Wildlife Cultural Officer, joins us at this point. We discuss why we are standing outside Barkindji ancestral lands, and cannot go in. Chapter 4, which follows immediately below, was composed later that afternoon, when we stopped at an Information Shelter on the red dirt road back to Bourke.

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Posted in INTERVIEWS | Tagged Jen Crawford, Paul Collis, Paul Magee, Wayne Knight

‘The slippage of speakers’: Lia Dewey Morgan in Conversation with Shastra Deo

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Lia Dewey Morgan

Shastra Deo’s writing effortlessly transcends cultural rifts, striving from modernist allusion through indulgent fan fiction and out into something entirely unique. I met Shastra first via Instagram, then conducted our interview in a Google Doc over several months, spaced out to allow for other freelance work, literature festivals or burnout. Despite being the outcome of her PhD, her second book, The Exclusion Zone, brims with an unexpected bloodlust and spectral force. To my personal delight, her poems demand we expand our conception of what is deemed literature, reminding us how poetry draws so much of its potency from its rich network of connections.

Lia Dewey Morgan: First of all, huge congratulations on publishing your second book, The Exclusion Zone, and thank you for talking with me. My hope with this conversation is to draw out together some of the themes I’ve encountered while reading your work and delve into how you came up with such a compelling collection.

I thought we could begin with the title, as an initial launch point: an exclusion zone is an area barred from public access in order to avoid the potency of what is inside, to provide some sort of safety. Because we are told not to go there, there’s this alluring intrigue that gathers, particularly over several decades, which has captured the imagination of a wide array of filmmakers, game designers and other creatives – not to mention scientists! What in particular drew you to growing a book from the poetics of nuclear waste?

Shastra Deo: Thanks for making the time to interview me; I’m stoked! It’s so exciting to have this conversation with you.

The Exclusion Zone, in its current state, really began with the potential nuclear waste warning message from the Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, which I came across where I come across most things: on Reddit.

This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.

What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

The danger is in a particular location…it increases towards a center…the center of danger is here…of a particular size and shape, and below us.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.

The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

I still can’t help but read the message as a poem. I became obsessed with the nuclear semiotics problem: how do we warn future generations about the dangers of nuclear waste when the half-life – the time required for the radioactivity of an isotope to drop to half its initial value – of a nuclear isotope like plutonium-239 is approximately 24,100 years? How deep can we inter these materials to avoid harm, and how deep must our collective memories be to truly enact this burial? It was a task I could neither finish or abandon, and out of it came The Exclusion Zone.

But before nuclear materials metastasised within the collection, there was my obsession with phantom limbs – the ghostly sensation of a body part that is no longer physically present. My first book, The Agonist, was concerned with how we store memory within the corporeal body; body phantoms are this idea made literal. American Civil War folklore suggests that if you bury an amputated limb according to ritual, and leave its grave at peace, the phantom won’t rise to haunt the living body. Would nuclear semiotics and an atomic priesthood lead future generations to believe the same thing about this waste that resists its own disposal?

Just like body phantoms, ‘[n]uclear materials ask us to believe in the invisible’, says Peter C van Wyck. An exclusion zone asks us to believe the space outside it is safe. And where is safety in this current climate of uncertainty around social equality, political freedom, job security, and our ecological future? So much lives and breathes and thrives within real-world exclusion zones—I think often of Kunihiro Suzuki’s post-disaster Fukushima illustrations, one of which is titled This land may not need human beings anymore. I always envisioned ‘wastelands’ as scorched earth, hungry landscapes, but more and more the wastelands I see are vital and vibrantly alive.

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Posted in INTERVIEWS | Tagged Kunihiro Suzuki, Lia Dewey Morgan, Shastra

‘It turns into a new language’: Saaro Umar in conversation with Elyas Alavi

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Saaro Umar

And once you’ve gone, you can’t come back anymore. The almost-end of an exchange that comes close to passages between James Baldwin’s David and Giovanni; here between the voice of Magaye Niang and Marène Niang, as she glides naked across thick Alaskan snow, breasts upwards, the foreground close to the colour of the sky, she replies, I think I’ve already heard this song. She is shadowy, ghostlike, whereas he, head to toe in light denim blue, melts into the landscape, and seems four beats behind; they never meet; their voices, have the sense of travelling a long distance to be heard, like an echo.

Earlier in Dakar, filmmaker Mati Diop films a special screening of Magaye and Marène’s early roles in Touki Bouki (1973), a film made famous by her late uncle, Djibril Diop Mambéty. It’s been forty years since its premiere. Diop revisits the actors, what has become of their lives, whilst tracing inheritances – familial and otherwise, towards those who leave, and left and those who stay, and stayed – as threads troubling a coherent past and presentness to coloniality and displacement, and its subsequent entanglement in cinematic production for the filmmaker and her actors. Marène, like her role as Anta, has left Senegal and Magaye, like his character Mory, has stayed, a curious case of convergence, or destiny, or, this is, just as Diop has made it apparent. We see Magaye now, post-screening in front of the light of the projector, saturated in electric blue. Other men on stage with him, facilitate questions, their shadows forming silhouettes – tall against the sheet. The host turns to him; blue, everything blue and asks him, what has happened since then?

A close up on his face, it turns to sea. Total hesitation, anguish across his brow, then the camera moves to focus on the shadows directly behind the figures.

About this blue. Magaye’s anguished blue. I was in a gallery, a few years ago, and entered a room that glowed this exact colour. I walked in and took a seat on a white bench against a wall hugging the hallway. Tight across from where I sat was a blue wall. In the top right-hand corner a circular neon poem; blue. At the ground, and to the left, a tomb-like box, and within it, another neon-poem. Blue again, but red too; the ground shone with it. The way the light worked, I felt under a spotlight, I felt something pour. Dense with feeling, my own pain palpable and inarticulate. The artist, Elyas Alavi, a poet working across painting, installation, performance and moving image. I happened upon his work the day after seeing this short film, Milles Soleils (2013) for the first time; a film I now return to, as I do his practice. Both trace the materiality of crossing and not crossing a threshold. And sitting amidst his work, I remember seeing Mory turn away from the departing ship in Touki Bouki, I remembered Magaye, and his answer to Marène’s half-question. About what she heard.

And you will hear it again. There will always be someone somewhere to sing you this song. After spending time with Alavi, our talk drifting towards his grandmother’s garments, the life of neon and Hafiz as guide; I remember this dialogue as akin to a line he might gesture to, in a poem.

Saaro Umar: I first encountered your work at Hyphenated Biennial (Substation, 2019). I remember, you had two paintings showing, and also poetry-text in neon lights, and what I remember is being overwhelmed by colour. There was this blue. Blue of the walls, and too, a blue, and a deep red, from these light-poems that read: ‘Memory is a Dagger’. I sat for a long time, taking in this exchange of light and shadow and colour and metaphor. And, since following your work, I’ve noticed these colours – blue and red, repeat in your work and exhibition practice. I’m also thinking about the blueish and red thread that you make visible in the Ordugah/Detention Camp work. Where you unravel thread from a childhood jumper around the borders of a neighbourhood in Iran, where many Afghan refugees live, to make present the enclosure that the residents experience. To start, I wondered if you could speak to repetition and return as methods for your practice? And, what images, ideas or gestures do you find yourself revisiting and returning to?

Elyas Alavi: It’s beautiful to know these similarities. It’s not like forgetting, but once you look back, you see those connections through the eyes of the viewers; you re-find those connections. And, you’re right. In the work, Ordugah or Detention Camp, I used different threads that were undone by my mother’s hand from these old jumpers. Because, I find that mothers, especially mothers, are so creative in their way. My mother being a mother of eight children, she had to be resourceful. How creative she was, how she turned old jumpers into new things. Some of them were left in Iran, and on a visit, I saw them and I got permission to use some of them, especially those blue and red in colour. Ordugah means Detention Camp and I have always felt the suburbs that many Afghan migrants live in are lookalikes to Ordugah with invisible walls. In these suburbs, only certain people can live. People who are pushed out of society. There are Afghan refugees, people who are from sub-religions, gypsies, outcasted musicians, and people from Balochi and Kurdish ethnic backgrounds who are also pushed out. I feel we are a collective of many minorities living in one place. We are there as cheap labour, whenever there is work needed on difficult jobs, like construction or digging well. It’s a camp, but the walls are invisible, so I used those threads, trying to make those walls visible at least for a few seconds, a few minutes, a few hours.

That is a thread throughout all my works, through the works you mentioned, at Hyphenated Biennial and to a current work, now showing at the TarraWarra Biennial; that thread is there, wanting to make visible those walls. For the Hyphenated Biennial, the conversation was about the history of the cameleers, who were brought to Australia as cheap labour between 1860 to 1920, and how they were kept in certain conditions, in discrimination. Through my poetry and my art, I have this medium to try to show these walls. There’s so many beautiful things happening within our bonded community, through this shared pain, through discrimination, and also showing a mirror to the other side, that there is still so much force.

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Posted in INTERVIEWS | Tagged Elyas Alavi, Magaye Niang, Marène Niang, Saaro Umar

How to Be a Digital Artist in a Time of Climate Change

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Ben Abraham

John Berger’s famous 1972 television series Ways of Seeing opens with an argument that visual technologies like photography, and the mechanical reproduction and distribution they enable, free pictures from the confines of their singular location. By doing this, Berger argues, the photograph changed the very logic of vision itself. With images able to travel freely they can be seen from anywhere, by anyone. What becomes possible is seeing in a whole host of contexts previously impossible. He points out the strange juxtaposition that ensues:

Boticelli’s Venus and Mars used to be a unique image which it was only possible to see in the room where it was actually hanging. Now its image, or a detail of it, or the image of any other painting that is reproduced, can be seen in a million different places at the same time. As you look at them now, on your screen, your wallpaper is around them. Your window is opposite them. Your carpet is below them. At this same moment, they are on many other screens, surrounded by different objects, different colours, different sounds. You are seeing them in the context of your own life. They are surrounded not by gilt frames, but by the familiarity of the room you are in and the people around you.

If photography and the moving image exploded the logic of vision from one viewer, one image (both in a highly specific context) becoming many viewers and many images, across many different contexts, then the internet has clearly turned this dynamic up to 11. Audiences of digital art are just as likely to encounter it on their phones as in a gallery, to see the art while surrounded by the cacophony of the everyday and the familiar. As painter and illustrator David Surman discussed in a 2018 artist talk concluding his gallery show ‘Paintings for the Cat Dimension’, the effect of the internet has been just as profound as the photograph:

I think painting after the internet is a paradigm shift. I think internet culture has restructured everyone’s thinking, it has to be accounted for. But it doesn’t mean a technological aesthetic, it has more to do with the structural logic. If you think about a browser window with multiple tabs [open], and the incredible discontinuity of your banking, your amazon page, your social media, pornography, writing a letter to your friend. That cultural logic has to come into painting. Radical discontinuities within painting feel much more normal, much more suited to where you are at.

I suspect that we are also able to see the beginnings of another major shift or disruption to the dominant cultural logic. This time, however, the shift is not being driven by a communications technology so much as by the overripe, putrid fruit of two hundred years of fossil capitalism. This fruit is borne into the world as greenhouse gas emissions, altering the very chemistry of the air and seas that sustain life. The world is only just waking up to what it truly means to live through a time of climate change, and the profound way that it reconfigures our thinking, and the new demands it places upon artists, cultural practitioners, human beings.

For me, awareness began just over a decade ago, with a piece by Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone in 2012 about ‘Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math’. Despite being aware of the problem for years, living through frequent and intensifying Australian summers (including bushfires that came right up to our house), it wasn’t until McKibben quantified global CO2 that my own understanding started to take shape. The concrescence of a known quantity remaining in our global CO2 budget, placed alongside the equally quantified and much greater amount of fossil fuel reserves already discovered (even in 2012!), produced a dawning horror. That same creeping dread comes again with every reminder of the steady tick tick tick of higher and higher atmospheric concentrations of CO2, punctuated by moments of visceral horror in the form of climate disasters. It can either be paralysing or existentially motivating. I choose the latter, and pivoted my academic research to digital games and their intersection with climate issues.

Whatever the genesis of this feeling in individuals is, it’s becoming clear that more and more of us are having them, and trying to figure out how on earth to respond. How do we live and work in a context of a disintegrating environmental stability? What does a meaningful response to climate change and the CO2 emissions that are driving it even look like in digital media? What does a climate conscious digital art practice involve?

One of the earliest groups I became aware of attempting to answer this question was centred around the Italian based Low Tech magazine. It’s an online publication which rejects the default, high-tech solutionism on offer, and instead regularly performs archaeologies of forgotten techniques and tools, more and more pertinent in light of climate constraints. Well ahead of mainstream sustainability awareness in digital media, Low Tech has been publishing for over a decade on topics as diverse as the surprising return of DC power networks, as well as practical solutions like how to build a low-tech internet, as well as more controversial and esoteric takes that might struggle to find wide acceptance. ‘Why the Office Needs a Typewriter Revolution’, ‘Recycling animal and human dung is the key to sustainable farming’ and other stories like these will be a bridge too far for some. Digital sobriety (or sobriété numérique, where it seems to have gained the most traction) is perhaps just a bit too constraining, a bit too lacking in appeal, for all its virtues.

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Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged Alison Parish, Anne Pasek, Ben Abraham, Bill McKibben, David Surman, Jeff Geerling, Jen Liu, John Berger, Yolande Strengers

Ambot sa Essay Kwoah: From Swardspeak to Hiligaynon, What Queering Language and Forms Means to Me

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Austere Rex Gamao

Before I begin to talk about my poetics, I want to put everything into context first.

The Fight of the Bakla

I went to this year’s Pride March with the goal of just taking pictures for this essay and going home immediately. The event was only a couple of minutes away from my apartment. One more thing that convinced me to go was the convenience. Pride Marches don’t really happen near me. In previous years, I had to commute to them. I accepted that my participation this year was only artifice, that I cared about appearances and nothing else. Walking alone to the march, I felt a certain singularity. I saw my body as timid and anticipatory. Okay, I felt self-conscious. As in the self makes itself known to the body. I arrived mid-march, stopping before the parade to spot an opportunity where I can blend in with the crowd. I saw companies sporting their T-shirts and their banners rolling by. I wasn’t really interested in joining companies trying to hit their DEI goals for the year, even though I shared some of their motivations for the day. Then, Bahaghari (Rainbow) Philippines, a national democratic, non-profit organisation that advocates for LGBTQ+ rights in the country came into view. No, their voices reached me first, loud and ringing and direction-full. I was invited to their cultural night the year before to read my poetry along with other writers and artists. I immediately joined them.

My body in motion, in utterance, pushed my self-conscious-ness outward. I am a solitary person most of the time. The inwardness as my cave. I am a Virgo and, in the tarot, the Hermit card represents me. But it felt nice being out, in every sense of the word. It was nice finding a place in that crowd. It was nice knowing that there is room for me in the struggle. My voice doesn’t carry that much weight. I’m soft-spoken and don’t know how to express my anger. In that crowd, the other people’s voices carried mine. Yes, I got my pictures but then it didn’t seem important to have them. Being in the crowd, doing what we do, stripped my assertion of artifice away. I shouldn’t separate myself from what we have to fight for.

The Philippines’s and Asia’s first pride march happened on 26 June 1994 and was inspired by the Stonewall uprising in 1969¹. Despite being the first in Asia, the Philippines is taking its sweet time in passing into law its anti-discrimination and harassment bill or the Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, Gender Expression, or Sex Characteristics (SOGIESC) bill. It has been stuck in deliberation for 30 years with only this year’s house panel approval seeming to move it closer to legislation². But confidence in lawmakers to pass the bill is low, especially with delaying tactics, stiff opposition from religious groups, and disinformation campaigns against it³.

Pride is a protest. That’s reiterated in this year’s Pride March with organisations giving updates on the next steps to attain our rights and with the protest chants, ‘SOGIE Equality, ipasa na!’ (Sogie equality, pass it now!), ‘Makibeki! Wag mashokot!’ The latter is a Swardspeak version of the slogan. Swardspeak or Gayspeak or Bekimon arose in the community, particularly with gay men, as a coded lexicon⁴. Makibeki comes from the word Makibaka which means to participate in the struggle. Beki is the Swardspeak for Bakla which means gay. Wag mashokot comes from huwag matakot which means don’t be afraid. Wag is the shortened version of huwag and mashokot is the Swardspeak of matakot. I know it’s a lot to take in but once you get it, you get it. In ‘Gay Language: Defying the Structural Limits of English Language in the Philippines’, Norberto Casabal posits that it is a form of verbal sublimation of gay people against the domineering power of patriarchy. The Filipino gay community began coining words that can be associated with the original word, either by its literal meaning or denotation, or by using other shades of meaning or connotation. It also includes the collocation of words through their phonological resonance and resemblance. There are many-many words in the Swardspeak vocabulary. One can even say a full sentence with them. Because of its rising popularity, almost everyone outside the LGBTQ+ community can understand it. Part of its appeal is that speaking it is fun. It’s like taking something plain and putting glitter all over it, creating something exorbitant, an ornamentation. What I like most about Swardspeak is its musicality, how the LGBTQ+ community’s inflection turns playful, that language is a vessel for laughter.

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Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged Austere Rex Gamao, Conchitina Cruz, Lyn Hejinian

Notes on Bad Poetry

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Thomas Ford

Some poems are bad

Maybe we’ll always disagree about poetry – about how it works, and what it’s for; about its modalities and affordances; about what makes a good poem; about why you might want to write or read one. For as long as anyone can remember, the poetry scene has been characterised by clashing opinions. In this bewildering proliferation of disagreements, the sheer existence of bad poems offers a rare point of consensus. For as we all know, bad poems exist. I’ve read them. You’ve read them. Some of us might even have written a few. And we can all agree they suck. That there are bad poems is a critical fact so empirically incontestable as to verge on the axiomatic. It is as if, in our efforts to come to grips with poetry, we have here – at last! – touched on something irrefragable, recalcitrant, certain.

Maybe we’ll always disagree about poetry, Ben Lerner says in his The Hatred of Poetry, but at least we all agree that some poems are bad. ‘It is’, he states, ‘much harder to agree on what constitutes a successful poem when we see it than it is to agree that we’re in the presence of an appalling one’.¹ Lerner finds this spontaneous agreement reassuring. It’s a common-sense judgement that for him testifies to an actually existing critical sensus communis. It bespeaks the transcendental coordination of our critical faculties, despite everything that otherwise divides us from each other. With bad poetry, the universality so often promised in theories of aesthetic judgement appears finally at hand, albeit via a negative path.

Lerner takes as his Exhibit A of bad poetry ‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’ by the Victorian poet William McGonagall, which begins:

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

You can read about McGonagall on Wikipedia, our contemporary repository of common sense – which, as Lerner quotes, states that McGonagall is ‘widely acclaimed as the worst poet in history.’² But when it comes to McGonagall’s absolute badness, Lerner sees no real need for any appeal to such authority. Firsthand experience proves sufficient in itself, for the badness of this poetry will be obvious to all. Lerner remarks that ‘McGonagall’s horribleness is evident even to those of us who don’t read poetry’, and outlines a procedure for empirical verification: ‘recite this poem to a friend who has no interest in – or significant experience of – verse, who claims to know nothing about it, and I wager that she will concur, whether or not she can specify its failings, that it’s at least very, very bad’.³ If you don’t take my word for it, try it yourself. Even idiots agree: McGonagall’s no good.

McGonagall was not always acclaimed as the world’s worst poet. His rise to that bad eminence took place across two relatively discontinuous episodes of critical reception. For around two decades from his first published poem in 1877, McGonagall was essentially a local poet – an obscure figure, of minor notoriety only in the Scottish Lowlands industrial city of Dundee and, for a few years before his death in 1902, also in Edinburgh. Trips to London and New York were brief and ended in failure. Wider recognition did not follow until some decades later, when McGonagall was rediscovered in a series of print publications from around 1930 that introduced his poetry to increasingly expansive national and international readerships.

In early instances of this re-uptake, McGonagall tended to be characterised in intensely regional terms and treated as almost entirely unknown. In 1929, the English journalist and travel writer H.V. Morton observed there were ‘few who still remember McGonagall’, and noted that he ‘seems to have in some unaccounted way escaped recognition’.⁴ Morton’s comic discussion of McGonagall appeared in his best-selling travelogue, In Search of Scotland, where he was cast as ‘a genuine relic of Old Edinburgh’ randomly encountered while pootling about Caledonian byways.⁵ A few years later, Hugh McDiarmid took a more rancorous line when including McGonagall in his collection of Scottish Eccentrics. While Scottish ‘general opinion’ held McGonagall to be ‘synonymous with bad poetry’, McDiarmid was ‘not sure he is much known in the English-speaking world outside Scotland’.⁶ Despite being largely forgotten, McGonagall had nonetheless arrived at ‘the recipe which has made modern Scotland what it is’.⁷

From this initial 1930s moment, the reception of McGonagall opened out through ever more extensive pathways of mass print circulation. He was read in new contexts, taking on transformed critical functions. His writing began to be reissued: his Poetic Gems of 1890-1 was republished in 1934, and has never fallen out of print for stretches longer than a few years since. (Remarkably, McGonagall is now Scotland’s most widely published poet – ahead even of Burns.) Through the 1940s, he was a subject of comic reportage in literary magazines and weekend newspaper cultural supplements in the UK, the USA, Australia and elsewhere. In the 1950s and 60s, he provided a reliable go-to example of poetic failure for university literary critics; he was also serving as a butt of routine mockery for a new generation of English comedians. Writing in 1965, Hamish Henderson could go so far as to note that ‘McGonagall is in the news again – indeed, he is very seldom out of it’.⁸

In 1974, he was the subject of a feature-length biographical film, The Great McGonagall, starring Spike Milligan as McGonagall and Peter Sellers as Queen Victoria. Two years later, the critic Paul Werth sought to demonstrate the specious nature of Roman Jakobson’s structuralist method of poetic analysis by uncovering in McGonagall precisely the same kinds of linguistic patterning Jakobson had detailed in such unquestioned masterpieces as Baudelaire’s ‘Les chats’ and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129.⁹ So much for literariness; so much for the poetic function. Werth’s reductio ad absurdum was repeated a year later against another critical school in a tongue-in-cheek essay by ‘U.B. Leavis.’ There ‘Leavis’ claimed McGonagall as a central figure in ‘the Great (neglected) Tradition of English Poetry’ thanks to his capacity ‘to place experience in time and space, to establish order in the transient flux and upheaval of life, and to see that order in human affairs against the background of a wider, more all-embracing, almost cosmic, certainly metaphysical, universalistic order’.¹⁰ By this point, McGonagall’s badness had acquired the property of self-evidence so valued by Lerner: ‘most people would doubt that it has any literary merit whatsoever’.¹¹

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Posted in ESSAYS, SCHOLARLY | Tagged Alison Whittaker, Ben Lerner, Douglas Adams, Gord Bambrick, Kathy Psomiades, Keith Waldrop, Kirstie Blair, Norman Watson, Pope, Poute, Ramachandra Guha, Robert Graves, Rosmarie Waldrop, Thomas Ford, William McGonagall, William Power, William Wordsworth

POP! Editorial

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Rebecca Jessen

Welcome to the POP! edition of Cordite Poetry Review, in which Gatsby’s green light hovers over this text to tell you we are °º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø σηℓιηє °º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø, baybee. As pop connoisseurs, we already had a sense of where our tastes diverge. (Bec, in Zen’s words, listens almost exclusively to gay club hits of the ’90s, huge soppy ballads and whatever the soundtrack is this week on Grey’s Anatomy. In Bec’s words, Zen’s diet is androgynous sad-girl belters, cult documentaries and Star Trek by way of Star Trek podcasts.) But we were surprised that our survey of submissions from nearly 400 poets resulted in zero marital barneys; generally, we agreed, and the shape of POP! came together as easily as the Babadook became queer culture.

In our call-out, we asked contributing poets to enter the ‘Meme Cinematic Universe’ — to celebrate the pop poem as a dank-memetic smashing together of the bold and the mundane, the low-brow and the archly ironic. Think of these poems as a contemporary textual soup can — Warhol’s instantly recognisable simulacra of culture remixed, reprinted, reinterpreted over and over and over. A full quarter of the poems you’ll read in this issue are prose poems (proems?) of some kind. There must be something in the four walls of the paragraph that invites wordplay, assemblage, mucking about — that already rejects our ideas of The Poem. (Good fences make good paras?) The map is not the territory — or is it, after all?

Of no surprise was the torrent of ekphrastic poems responding to artworks (Warhol, Lichtenstein, Bosch); music (from Shania Twain to Pulp to the Topp Twins); movies (from Shrek to Star Wars to the oeuvre of Keanu Reeves); and television (Kath & Kim, Star Trek: Voyager and a poem in which an ‘apoplectic’ Dr Phil ‘tears off his shirt and screams’). A category full of welcome surprises were poems written after games: a cento from reviews of Zelda: Breath of the Wild; a concrete poem in the shape of a Galaga spaceship; and a WORDLE ode in only five-letter words.

Some poets saw pop culture’s adjacence to consumerism — that is, fandom as conspicuous consumption. There is a poem in which the speaker eats a painting; another in which a painting, in turn, consumes an entire ’90s boy band. And we were delighted by work that made pop art of pop forms: a template for Instagram poetry; a poem capturing the sensory acuity of ASMR videos; an MS-DOS-esque text adventure asking: ‘What would you like to do? >Submit a terrifyingly germane and mundane text adventure poem to CORDITE POETRY REVIEW’.

These ekphrastic-ish poems form just over half the issue’s bulk. Each, in some way, reaches beyond the reference point — becoming more than the sum of its fandoms. From there, we found our way to poems that popped in other ways: that just sounded great; that came at some kernel of pop psychology; that celebrate nan and pop; that punch up the list poem; that had ‘whiter than white teeth’; that ‘parade … our many splendid genders’; that confidently roll from zombies to the ‘glorious rococo towers’ of a thunderstorm; that ‘paddle through syntax’; that ‘rip bongs at the bus stop’; and that mythologise cheese. These poems are ‘plastic autopsies’ and ‘ekphrastic obituaries’ — but are undead, too, rising from the fertile soil of yesterday’s algorithm to put their warm fingers right on your pulse.

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged Rebecca Jessen, Zenobia Frost

Tīfaifai and Translation: Piecing ‘Nadia’ from Chantal Spitz’s Cartes postales

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Katherine Hammitt

In her 2006 collection of essays and poetry Pensées insolentes et inutiles, the pillar of francophone Oceanian literature that is Tahitian author Chantal T Spitz ruminates on the purpose of her writing: ‘This isn’t an autobiography but it now seems to me that my experience and that of many others could constitute the tifaifai¹ of our fragmentations for an alternative writing-reading of our story.’² Spitz, a foundational figure in the literary community of Mā’ohi Nui/French Polynesia, is most widely recognised for her first novel, the first published novel written by a Mā’ohi writer: L’île des rêves écrasés (published in 1991 and translated into English by Jean Anderson as Island of Shattered Dreams in 2007). In the three decades since this story was published, francophone Oceania – specifically Mā’ohi Nui/French Polynesia and Kanaky/New Caledonia – have experienced a veritable renaissance of autochthonous literary production. Throughout her career, Spitz has helped increase the visibility of writing from across her community, making space, as she says, for her experience and that of many others to tell their story, their history.

Implicit in this opening excerpt from Spitz’s work is the reality that she articulates explicitly elsewhere: that Mā’ohi stories have long been told from the outside and that the ontological violence of separating the story from its community is an aspect of European colonisation that is ongoing. What Spitz proposes, however, is that the literary work of her community constitute a tīfaifai: a patchwork quilt that is at once a means of artistic expression and tool of social exchange. The colorful appliqué cloths are, as Tahitian scholar Kareva Mateata-Allain explains, ‘a major artistic symbol of the island cultures … {and} an integral symbol of Ma’ohi cultural production.’³ These quilts are given as gifts to commemorate important life events and can be found in many forms throughout Mā’ohi Nui.

While Spitz has used this metaphor to describe many writers contributing to a unified if diverse project, her own writing reflects the intricate vibrancy of the tīfaifai as well. Her literary work uses a distinctive texture of writing; without punctuation or traditional capitalisation, Spitz structures her stories in a poetic prose that echoes the region’s long oral tradition of literary creation. In the same way, Spitz puts particular emphasis on the voice that comes through in her work, often weaving the individual perspectives of her characters in a pattern that performs the story she tells as much as articulating it in words. This method of literary performance is particularly central to her 2015 collection of short stories, Cartes postales.

Cartes postales (‘postcards’) is a slim volume comprised of seven stories that take place on the island of Tahiti. The stories are nominally unconnected to each other apart from their common setting, but they are thematically aligned in the picture of violence and despair. They paint an island largely seen elsewhere as an earthly paradise. The violence experienced by the characters in this collection – at once extreme and everyday – is striking in the contrast it presents to the picture-perfect postcards evoked by the collection’s title. As with so much of Spitz’s work, her most powerful intervention is performed, not explicit, an argument articulated not in the linguistic shallows of direct address but in the depths of readerly experience. The reader discovers her intervention as a consequence of their close reading.

The translator’s job, then, is to maintain this intervention from the depths while shifting the idiom of the shallows to make the story linguistically accessible to a wider audience. In my own translations from this collection, I have sought to maintain the careful patchwork of Spitz’s striking tīfaifai, a work of contrast and relationality that pieces together a complex tableau. I present here a reading of one story – ‘Nadia’ – from this collection.⁴

The second story of the collection, ‘Nadia,’ opens with a vision of Tahiti, grotesque where the historic exoticisation of Polynesia has taught us to expect paradise.

the swarm of flies shivers the smell of carrion that churns the air
choking the fifth-floor residents of the apartment building that’s gone to seed in this
neighbourhood crushed by heat by noise by dust
chipped walls rutted road broken up sidewalk
a stone’s throw from the waterfront newly arranged for cruise goers
who occasionally descend on the town like a settlement of twittering birds
in pursuit of the last noble savage from the last earthly paradise
a heavy slimy murky scent that stills the air stops the breath stiffens the mind
making the unthinkable palpable
human rot
unseen death
lonely decay

From this initial image, we are introduced (though no introduction or other contextualisation appears) to the eponymous protagonist of the story. Nadia is engaged in promoting Tahitian vanilla in a trade show in Paris when she meets Mathieu who is promoting the black pearl trade, and their romance promises her vast new horizons in Tahiti. This shift in perspective is unmarked within Spitz’s text apart from a subtle line break and the use of first-person pronouns.

I meet Mathieu at the Paris agricultural convention
he’s a black pearl trader
I hand out leaflets on French Polynesia’s brown gold
Tahitian vanilla the best in the world they say
his voice wraps me in a muggy torpor
as he blooms my imagination with the exoticism bursting from the stand’s photos and videos
he is my first and last love giving scope to my changeability
my life takes off
so beautiful you could die he promises me
sun sand sex
I’m not sorry as I leave my drabness for the end of the earth and he for a vast horizon
draped in unknown scents unheard music infinite futures
waiting for me with flower necklaces and two pearls
me the black one you the white one together for better he says with a kiss
bungalow on stilts champagne candlelit dinner over the water
perfect night

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Posted in ESSAYS, TRANSLATIONS | Tagged Chantal Spitz, Katherine Hammitt

Can Poetry Be Happy?

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Gareth Morgan

I’m reading Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country (1964) at the breakfast table, with instant coffee, toast, orange juice and green smoothie (spinach, banana, chia, milk). Dad’s taping the races, then going to Warnambool with his brothers. Taylor Swift is playing softly from the laptop speakers. I am idly scrolling through the Facebook group Fairy Floss Real Estate. I am reading a text message about a man who keeps saying he ‘loves Obama’ to impress a woman at the bar. He is saying ‘I love Obama’ and then putting his hands around his face or supporting his head from his chin.

My uncle named his retro-fitted army van after Field Marshal Erick Von … someone. I’m hesitant to Google. He’s laughing about my PhD stipend, which he (rightly) identifies as a scam. ‘You already know how to write!’ ‘Hahaha’ we laugh … and he goes, with dad and his many shopping bags of food and beer. I’m slowing down, working from home, trying to be a good son and friend. Will I succeed?

Horne writes: ‘The image of Australia is a man in an open-necked shirt solemnly enjoying an ice-cream. His kiddie is beside him’. Alone in my parents’ house on a Monday after a weekend spent partying at Melbourne’s best (and most pretentious, says my friend’s hairdresser) club, Miscellania. Looking around the club at my friends who seem, unlike me, to know most of the fellow clubbers, I couldn’t figure out what they were talking about. I couldn’t understand where they could find language at a time and a place like this, back at the club at 9am the next day after leaving at 3am last night and not sleeping. I watched a man pull the blackout curtains back to find an unopened window, then vomit onto the couch. He was wearing a straw country-style hat. He wobbled to a seat and sat with his head in his hands.

Money means a fair go and we did have a fair go of it. DJ Kitti came on and we danced and then I felt sick and we went home. The party was just starting but I had had my party the night before, dancing madly like a last hurrah, the finale of about 9 months of consistent binge drinking and staying out late on weekends. When I got home, I ate leftover microwaveable lamb shanks with mum and dad then went to bed, watched two episodes of Succession (BINGE, now with ads?) then went through my photo reel, then fell asleep. My room is cold and drafty. Draughty? I have two doonas.

There’s an Albert Tucker painting on the cover of my copy of The Lucky Country. A man with a feather in his hat, a white collared shirt, an ace of spades poking out of the left breast pocket of a black blazer, clutching a yellow mug. His face is riddled with harsh furrows and his hat shades his one visible eye in almost complete darkness. In the background, water and sky, shark-like fins of boats circling around the figure’s neckline in a muggy green sea. His chin is an upside-down triangle. I’m wearing my yellow Champion hoodie, a scarf by a Melbourne designer, and tracksuit pants with Crocs.

The weekend’s dancing was restorative, I say. But then what? What have I restored?

* * *

The leaves are falling from the small trees at RMIT University. I want to be happy, do I? I’m Googling ‘Corey Worthington’, then Discovery-ing and Google Scholar-ing ‘Corey Worthington’.

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Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged Corey Wakeling, Corey Worthington, Gareth Morgan, Gig Ryan, John Ashbery, Lucy Van

13 Artworks by Amala Groom

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Amala Groom

Amala Groom | The Cider Series | 2017 | glass, cork, wire, apple cider, ink, paper | 31 x 124 x 8.5cm
image courtesy of Amala Groom and Penelope Benton

The Cider Series is an iteration on an earlier series of paintings of the same name; a collection of a dozen bottles of Colonial Project cider where each bottle demonstrates a different way in which Aboriginal ontologies have been desecrated post colonisation.

As a play on words, -cide, meaning to kill, these seemingly attractive alcoholic beverages have been neatly packaged as a leisurely consumable; an intoxicating series of poisons brought to these many lands now known as Australia by the colonisers in 1770.

There are subtle reminders of the impact and devastation of colonialism in the overall label design. Each bottle bears the mark of its maker, the Colonial Project, and the ongoing philosophy of colonialism brought to Aboriginal lands on board the HMS Endeavour in 1770.

On the top left of each bottle is the imperial crown of King George III, the reigning king of Great Britain from 1760 until his death in 1820. The crown is symbolic to the imposition of the illegal, unethical and unfounded absolute authority and sovereignty of the monarch.

Featured across the series is a watermark of Lieutenant James Cook’s 1769 chart of the transit of Venus, sketched in Tahiti and historically documented as the official reason for Cook’s journey south. To the bottom right of each bottle is a banksia sketch, taken from native samples collected by Sir Joseph Banks, with drawings prepared by Sydney Parkinson on board the 1770 Endeavour expedition. No fewer than 76 species of this plant now carry his name.

The series includes:

Herbicider – Desecrating Plants
Facticider – Desecrating Truths
Deicider – Desecrating Gods
Linguicider – Desecrating Languages
Genocider – Desecrating Native Peoples
Theriocider – Desecrating Animals
Ethnocider – Desecrating Cultures
Legicider – Desecrating Laws
Liberticider – Desecrating Liberties
Spacicider – Desecrating Boundaries
Memoricider – Desecrating Collective Memories
Ecocider – Desecrating Natural Environments

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Posted in ARTWORKS | Tagged Amala Groom

Opinion Fatigue: Monochromatic Voids and Typographic Symbols by Sebastian Moody

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Sebastian Moody

For Opinion Fatigue, Sebastian Moody has produced a series of monochromatic voids punctuated by sparse bouquets of typographic symbols. Very occasionally, a lone word appears. Created via a playful navigation of a Microsoft Word document, the scatological constellations recall the all-over compositions of mid-century avant-garde painting – the canvases of Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock or Mark Tobey. Adhering to the rigid verticality imposed by digital technology, the typographic forms are all right-side up: a submission to the grid of culture, but one that doesn’t abandon chaos.

On one canvas, the word rome appears in lower-case Work Sans font. A neo-Grotesque typeface, the style derives from sans-serif variations of the eighteenth century. These were titled Grotesque due to their being perceived as offensive affronts to their more ornate Roman-inspired predecessors. On another canvas, loosely framed with a little dipper-like formation of colons and semi-colons, a tilde, and several exclamation marks, the word feather appears in italicised Times New Roman. Perhaps inadvertent, this typographic choice might serve as a subtle dig at Stanley Morison, the typographer who designed the font in the 1930s. Though he eventually relented, Morison loathed italics. He believed they should be abandoned due to their disruptive influence on the flow of continuous text. Indeed, his typography was created for efficiency: to maximise the number of words that could fit on a page while maintaining an easily readable typeface. Letters, he argued, should ‘neither be very ‘different’ nor very ‘jolly’’.¹

When written in the curly font, feather almost teases the semiotic status of the word as a signifier, blurring the distinction between symbol and icon. In its italic form, the f both ascends and descends – extending from the typographic baseline in both directions. On its own, the f might resemble the arch of a thin, free-floating feather or a quill. In the word itself, the flick of the italicised f corresponds with the downy tufts at the base of a contour feather. The midline carried by the horizontal strikes of the f and the t correspond to the feather’s shaft, while the voluminous swirls of the e, r, and f, and the offshoots of the ascending letters t and h, echo the de-shelled vane of a plumule. Indeed, italics create feathery words: words that operate as decorative plumage, indicating a title or differentiating spoken words within a text, signalling their light, ephemeral quality. As Morison feared, italics ruffle text, giving it literal and figurative texture.

A close observation of the canvases in Opinion Fatigue reveals barely perceptible bleeds, delicately feathering the edges of the elaborately stencilled white symbols: a detail that betrays their painterly status. To my mind, this painted typeface echoes techno-minimalist aesthetics, and the merging of traditional and futuristic materials and motifs exemplified by wooden digital clocks with subtle LED displays, glitched textiles, and touchscreen digital tablets with rough-textured screens resembling paper that converts handwritten text to Word documents. These gimmicky consumer products exemplify the contemporary emphasis on minimising the sensory disjunction between technology and organic textures and gestures. They cultivate domestic environments free of the aggressively sterile utility of appliances, instead favouring technologies that are covertly integrated, wireless, unseen, voice-activated or remotely controlled, an allegory of the inextricable and pervasive influence of technology today – the omnipresence of surveillance capitalism, data mining, and the concurrent hyperawareness of self-presentation mediated by clicks and keystrokes.

Concurrent with Opinion Fatigue, Moody’s work occupies the Open Studio – a space showcasing projects by contemporary artists in the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art complex. Moody has decorated the floorspace with large typographic symbols. A pair of brackets forms an open oval as the centrepiece. The room is walled with mirrors. Furnishing the reflective light-filled space are ottoman benches that recall the shape of orange slices. The arrangement, and the orange-slice shapes, are a playful reference to Orange Event no. 3 (1963), a Fluxus artwork by Bengt af Klintberg gifted to Queensland Art Gallery in the 1990s by Francesco Conz. In this conceptual piece, participants are asked to arrange the orange slices in a row – an act that transforms a spherical object into a line, imbuing an everyday gesture with creative possibility. In Moody’s large plush rendering, the arrangement takes on a new scale and interactive potential.

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Posted in ARTWORKS, ESSAYS | Tagged Sebastion Moody, Stanley Morison, Tara Heffernan

The MET After Being Fingerprinted

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Vanessa Ogle

I wish I could be in awe over statues

I wander stare wait for one to fill me

goosebumps wonder whatever makes us come

back to this idea of brilliance

but though they are human they are not human enough

I wish I could take in the stiffness

surrendering to these people and faces

instead I stare blankly at the folds & decay

shellac-colors reflecting light glow

like sweat this one the most human and therefore

the one I look at more than once

in a way that makes me feel less hollow

his ear hanging lobe

unattached eyes forever past me

Posted in 110: POP | Tagged Vanessa Ogle

On My Body As Proof

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Helena Pantsis

I eat paintings,
ingesting masterpieces
so they won’t fade,
eternally preserved in the gut of me.
I scrape paint chips from my molars.
a field of grass
or a sombre lady
imprinting on my skin from the inside out;
you can see tattoos stamped
inverse, in me.
van Gogh ate yellow paint
and made a self-portrait on his tongue
of a dying man.
his rotting bones remind me:
not every piece of art is paired with a description,
some walk backwards,
emerge from the soil,
or live on the body,
are handfuls of salt
and mouthfuls of sand.
you have to learn to spot them
without a label lauding them.
someday a man will cut me open and find
half of the National Gallery
caught in my oesophagus,
the stains of lead paints
and poppy pollen,
cave paintings in the cavern of my ribs;
my body a relic, peeling,
a testament to art and time.
the mortician will take one look,
and once they remove the blood
and the gas from me,
they will wonder,
like all great art
and sculpted things,
what I was thinking, and
what it all means.

Posted in 110: POP | Tagged Helena Pantsis

Issue Launches.Submissions Windows.

Issue Launches.
Submissions Windows.