Writing Threat and Trauma: Poetic Witnessing to Social Injustice and Crisis

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Meera Atkinson

This article explores creative responses to crises that are written and technologically mediated in a liminal zone between threat and trauma. In considering how poetic texts witness social injustice-related crises – henceforth referred to as social justice-crisis – I posit that this liminal zone produces a different kind of witnessing than the post-traumatic witnessing traditionally associated with literary trauma testimony, and as such, it is an emergent 21st-century mode of witnessing and testimony.

Literary writing between threat and trauma is not new; what is new is the speed in which writing can now reach readers while crises are in play because of the Internet. This enables a more direct mode of trauma testimony, arising in the present, the space between threat and trauma. For example, a text like The Diary of Anne Frank (published initially as Het Archterhuis in 1947) could only reach readers well after the event, casting the testimony as historic. Likewise, literary writing that communicates as a form of public health or social justice advocacy is not new; what is new is the increasing textual articulation and growing understanding of the two as inexorably linked.

My exploration of poetic witnessing focusses on the Australian 2019/2020 Black Summer fires and the COVID-19 pandemic, examples of crises with broad social justice and public health implications. Examining poetry responding to these protracted events makes clear that both climate change and the pandemic are proving traumatic, especially for those most affected and at the front lines. Both pose potential threat to individuals and society. Researchers warn that the stage is set for climate crisis to wreak havoc: security threats, social unrest, and potential wars (Barnett and Adgar). They also anticipate mental health deterioration due to the limitations of our capacity to adapt to climate extremes (Berry, Bowen, and Kjellstrom). The first global pandemic in over a hundred years has revealed the traumatic fault lines of neoliberal Western social organisations and global inequity. Both climate change and the pandemic have created conditions that increase people’s dependency on the Internet for information and as a shared forum for processing and acting out affect and trauma, and poetry has risen to fore as a form of witnessing that also serves as digital artistic advocacy. In a chapter published in 2010 that seems eerily – if metaphorically – to foreshadow more recent developments, Anna Gibbs stated that:

Contagion is everywhere in the contemporary world. It leaps from body to body, sweeping through mediatized populations at the speed of a bushfire. No longer confined to local outbreaks of infectious disease or even of hysteria, contagious epidemics now potentially occur on a global scale and, thanks to electronic media, with incredible rapidity. (‘After Affect’ 186)

But just as this has negative and damaging potentials, such as the rise of fake news and conspiracy theories, it also has positive and productive potentials, such as the capacity of mediatised poetry to testify to collective trauma in a way that provides connective tissue for grieving, empathy, and action in the (globally warmed) heat of the moment.

Scholars in media studies have productively drawn on media theory and trauma theory to tease out the mediatisation and mediation of trauma (Pinchevski; O’Loughlin). Some even call for a new field; “digital trauma studies” (Menyhért & Makhortykh). Even so, there is not yet a conceptual framework addressing the implications of writing that witnesses to social injustice-crisis during unfolding collective catastrophes. Understanding this is important because witnessing to social injustice is one aspect of how culture evolves (Louis & Montiel; Andrews; Giugni, McAdam & Tilly; Henderson) and the act of bearing witness and testifying to injustice and trauma is critical to the re-evaluation of social values, and, potentially, policies and practices.

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‘Energy is Art’s force’: Dan Disney in Conversation with Joyelle McSweeney

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Joyelle McSweeney

‘In a station of the vortex pick me up and hurl me’ writes Joyelle McSweeney in the poem ‘Oocyte’, appearing in their celebrated collection Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat Books, 2020). In this heady exchange of ideas, the author of ten books (poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction, translation) reveals a formidable erudition swirls through the heartlands of their elemental writing. This interview ranges over affect, ethics, utility, and community, and McSweeney’s responses to Dan Disney’s questions are as if still points in the moving eye of a storm, or anthropocentric compass, or image-haunted mind.

Dan Disney: Hello Joyelle, most importantly, sincerest possible thanks for agreeing to conduct this interview; I’m extremely grateful for your time (of which I will try not to steal too much) and am so pleased to be in contact. Again: thank you for being available to answer these questions!

Noting, with warm congratulations, that you have received this year’s Shelley Memorial Award, I wonder if I can cite from judge Calvin Bedient’s comments: they assert that Toxicon and Arachne ‘tightens up formally against invasive things, everything toxic, corrupting, spoiling, devastating … [McSweeney is] alert to every bullying thing’.

If, after Walter Benjamin’s famous chiasmus, we must respond to the aestheticisation of politics with the politicisation of our art, can I ask about your ethics? Broadly speaking, which energies / impulses underwrite your creative and critical contributions?

Joyelle McSweeney: I believe art has and should have force, but that force could be infinitesimally large or infinitesimally small – either can disrupt the universe.

On a personal level I strive to be something completely unabsorbable, that lodges in and inflames the tissues in which it lodges – a fatal splinter, a fatal flaw, a grain of poison, viral DNA. As a publisher I want to load the corpuscle with so much unlikeness that it capsizes in the vein and changes the blood.

I think of the vibrations of the porn actor Pajarito in Roberto Bolaño’s short story, ‘The Prefiguration of Lalo Cura’: ‘Back then you weren’t afraid – you moved so fast that only little creatures and fetuses could see you moving. Only cockroaches, nits, lice, and fetuses’. And I think, oppositely, of Raúl Zurita’s skywriting, his maxim on art: After the coup, we have to make art with the force of the coup.

Such contradictions define Art – simultaneously as small as the eye spots of nits, lice, fetuses, as big as the militarised sky, as small as a neutrino, as large as the Big Bang. Such contradiction releases a pulse, releases energy. That energy is Art’s force.

DD: When turning the gaze toward your work, I am struck by the sheer verbal force of your creatively deployed language, which seems as if seamlessly preternatural and yet startlingly hyper-modern, as if it has always been in (or waiting for) the syntactical units in which we find it. The sheer arresting power of lines such as ‘The bruisey weeds in the garden / ungoogleable / and eyeless, closed around their seedy code / nearby and remote as on the edge / of the galaxy’ (‘Morning Wants an Eidolon’) or, elsewhere, ‘[t]he joystick’d boys sink arrows into the ozone. / If we can’t have bees we’ll have drones’ (‘Oocyte’) compel immediate re-reading. Can you illumine your creative processes: by which methodological means does syntax like this arrive?

JM: My method is to ride the black skirt of sound as it curves in vantablackness. Its signs, its sins, its sinuses, its sines.

To dilate on this topic: sound is moving past and through us and, as language, carries with it the newness of inflection and the history of where it’s been. Etymology is my favourite form of divination, a scrying–an occult, possibly fictive arrangement of language to scrutinise for what it tells us about the past and future. What I call ‘hyperdiction’ bears the imprint of empires, histories, accidents and conflicts, as well as the svelteness of novelty shuddering into being. I want my language to be oddly familiar even as it morphs into something not quite ever heard before, even as it elapses, even after it’s gone.

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‘It’s no gift to have this kind of knowledge’: Indigo Perry in conversation with Dani Netherclift

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Indigo Perry


A photograph of Indigo Perry and Dani Netherclift’s brother and father.

Indigo Perry and Dani Netherclift are sisters living and writing in Victoria. Their father and older brother both drowned in an irrigation channel in 1993. Below is a conversation about the ways that this tragedy has shaped their creative practices both singularly and in dialogue with each other’s work. This exchange highlights how the intangibility of grief potently forms an invaluable insight into a how their experiences are forced upon their understanding of writing and poetics. Such an exchange trusts the reader to embrace their account tenderly when considering how to challenge elegiac traditions.

Indigo Perry: After I knew, I kept returning in my mind to the precise moment when they drowned. (But until now, I have not thought this through, that it is unlikely, impossible, truly, that they simultaneously stopped breathing after their lungs filled with water [the ingress]. Even though I have mourned each of them differently and often separately, I have always thought of them as having drowned together, always two of them, but as one. Of course, with their different ages and health, constitutions, shapes – their different matter – our father and brother’s lives would have ended at different times on a clock.)

We have been alike through it all in our desire for detail. Timing. Biology. Physics. The corporeal, yes, but more than that. Reconstruction leading to a kind of reanimation in the slowed, blurred light quality of dream or memory.

There came a moment that afternoon when both were gone, and you were standing on the bank of the channel and having the thought you have described to me, that nobody else knew what had happened yet. At that same moment, I was probably swimming at Brighton Beach. I remember being in the water, not simply that I was in the water; I recall the feeling of being immersed. It was hot and I have never liked hot weather. Being up to my neck in the cold water of the sea was a relief, but even then, the storm that would arrive by evening was beginning to show itself in the choppy waves and in the sand blowing into my face. Still a hard blue, the sky was the kind that my daughter, born many years after that day, would come to describe as noisy. But the storm was incoming. Also incoming was a cascade of knowing. The news of our father and brother’s deaths flowed through you and our cousin at the channel, the fisherman who stopped to help, the police, our uncle, our grandparents, our mother, me, our brother and onwards. Later, I would picture myself, immersed, oblivious, in the cold sea, hard sky blaring, and wonder how I could not have known what was happening. How was it that they – those two – were drowning and

               I didn’t know.

Dani Netherclift: Years later, my soon-to-be mother-in-law was fitting me for my wedding dress in faraway Kiama, New South Wales. She was talking about the wedding of her eldest daughter. This wedding took place on the day that our father and brother died. She said that everyone had been annoyed with my husband for turning up to the wedding with a black eye. Though we had known nothing of each other at the time, when I learned of it, I recognised that sense of a wound that marked space and damage for this day, carving out remembrance for the grief of a future wife. I imagine this black eye in the same light as your sensation of being immersed in water that day, un-knowing.

In one of Michael Ondaatje’s ‘Wells’ poems from Handwriting, he elucidates the location of the soul as being ‘always’ close to the site of a wound [A black-eye, water experienced as pleasure]. The practice of writing or poetics and the ‘practice’ of grief are at times like this seamless.

In the same way, vis-a-vis our talking, letters and writing, our grief and memories have been since the beginning something knitted together of fragments, observations,

               interlocutions,
               of a piece.

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‘Revolt and remembrance’: Joel Scott in conversation with Don Mee Choi

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Don Mee Choi

I’ve known Don Mee Choi now for more than 10 years. I got to know her work as a poet and a translator simultaneously, through her first book of poems, The Morning News is Exciting, and her first book-length translation of the work of Kim Hyesoon, Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers. I instantly became a fan of both writers, and I ended up writing about the two of them briefly in my PhD thesis, and we corresponded sporadically over the years. It wasn’t until 2017, long after I moved to Berlin, that we actually met in person for the first time, when Charlotte Thießen and I invited her to read at our artiCHOKE series, for which we translated her work into German and wrote a short essay on it. It was exciting to be able to talk with Don Mee in this format. I’ve read plenty about her writing and translation practices before, but throughout this exchange, I still learned a lot that I didn’t know. And it was valuable for Don Mee to generously ask about my own writing too, to be forced to crystallise aspects of it that might not have been so clear to me before. In this interview, we discuss the politics behind our work and our conversations span across more than a year due to the restrictions that paid labour tends to place on thinking.

Don Mee Choi: I hope it would be alright if I begin by tracing back to how we met. It was eleven years ago that I found your fascinating review in Cordite my translation of Kim Hyesoon’s Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers (Action Books, 2008) and my first book The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010). I was so thrilled that someone wrote a review of both books, making such interesting links between the two, let alone for an Australian literary journal. As you already know Australia is where my parents and siblings have permanently settled. I contacted you via your blog, and I think you told me that your sister-in-law was Korean. A few years passed, and you went to Berlin to do your dissertation research on Walter Benjamin. Then in 2017, you invited me to Berlin for the artiCHOKE international reading series, which you co-founded and curated. I had no idea then how being back in Germany, even so briefly, would trigger so many changes in my life. I remember us, including poet and translator Charlotte Thiessen and performer, poet and artist Tabea Xenia Magyar, meeting for dinner at an Italian restaurant next to Tempelhof the night before the reading. I remember you telling me a bit about how you grew up in a suburb of Sydney playing soccer—how your father was interested in Steiner’s theosophy. And I told you how my mother’s cousin made it first to Australia via Brazil. In my mind, I still refer to her as Aunt Brazil.

Joel Scott: I like that you chose this tracing back as a way to start. I have a terrible memory, and you’ve gone back more than 10 years, but I remember some of the sequencing differently in ways that might be interesting. I think you have forgotten our very first encounter, which is how I came to write that review in the first place. I was about to start a PhD (I can’t quite remember if I had already applied for it, but I was shopping around for supervisors at different universities and speaking to the people who held the purse strings for the scholarships), and I was asked to write some blog posts on the Three Percent blog. It was one of those tasks that should be paid but that universities get grad students to do. And what better person than somebody currently sniffing around for a scholarship spot for a PhD in translation studies? I was genuinely interested in the symposium, and back then I guess I imagined ending up in academia in some way, so it seemed like a good thing to do. I can’t remember what I wrote about the keynotes and other speakers on that blog, but I remember that I tried to behave. I didn’t want to be a ‘hand biter’.1 But there had been one presentation at the conference about contemporary Chinese literature that really irritated me. I was probably getting the complete wrong end of the presenter’s rhetorical stick and didn’t know enough about literature and certainly Chinese literature to know whether there was any sense to what he was saying, but I remember him saying something like ‘the use of language and metaphors in a lot of contemporary Chinese literature sounds like it’s written by people who have had literature described to them, but never read it’ (this of course now remembered through the haze of more than 10 years). And on top of finding this assertion suspicious, I really liked the passages he read as examples of these failed attempts at literature. They seemed exciting and bodily and obscene. And so, being as I am at least a partial hand biter, I wrote a rant about this talk on my personal blog, not bothering to consider that I had linked to my blog in my bio note on the professional blog.

And so of course people found their way back to my blog, including the presenter I had bagged out, who was needless to say a little perturbed to find my rant there. Immediately I felt that I had done it again, opened my big mouth where I shouldn’t have, and was a little mortified to have been caught out behaving badly. But then one of the people who commented on my blog was you, and you offered to send me your translations of Kim Hyesoon (Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers) and your own book, The Morning News is Exciting. And not long after the books arrived, and I was totally in love with them. It seemed to have taught me a very ambiguous lesson. I had acted out, but then partly that is how you found me, and I always thought (and only now does it occur to me that I might have been totally wrong about this) that you had decided to send me your books because I had been so critical (unfairly or not) of that presenter. Like: you’ll ruin your career but you’ll meet your true comrades in the process.

The other thing that you remembered which, I’m fairly sure, is not true, but is interesting, opens something up, is that my father was into Steiner’s theosophy. It’s funny because I’m sure I would have spoken about my father, his religion, the role it played in my upbringing. But (to my knowledge) my father is not into Steiner’s theosophy. But the thing is, he would be. Alongside his Evangelism he has become increasingly obsessed with nutrition, organic food, in quite an anthroposophic way. But rather than getting too deeply into my father’s idiosyncrasies, I want to kind of open this up as a topic. Fathers. Mothers. Your father is everywhere in your work. Your mother is less present to me. (And as an aside, thinking about the mother in particular in relation to Kim Hyesoon’s work). There is a kind of simple explanation in that your writing is constantly reworking history and your father was a war photographer/photo-journalist and produced all of this documentary material. But I’m just kind of thinking keywords at the moment. Moving families. You have Aunt Brazil. When I was a kid my family didn’t go further than country NSW. I don’t think I ever thought about the idea of going on a plane until I was in my teens or something. I’m just thinking about the different kind of families (as units of particular coagulations of class, race, etc.) as mobile, floating, or immobile and fixed things.

It’s been nine days since you wrote your first section, which was before Russia invaded Ukraine. War refugees are heading west, mostly towards Poland, but thousands of people are arriving in Germany all the time. Everything has shifted. Nothing has settled yet.

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3 Savita Singh Translations by Medha Singh

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Medha Singh

End

In Karnataka’s dark village,
a family prepares
to close the game
of life.

A mat is splayed out
on the ground & poison
mixed in a bowl.

Seating the kids in a corner
their mother caresses them,
watching her universe
for the last time. Wraps her sari
anew, settling her pallu;
and in front of itself,
a storm stilled: the farmhand.

They gaze at each other
man and woman, their silent eyes,
and a yawl explodes
in the throat
of the farmer
buries itself that very
moment. An emptiness
looking their way
and them at it. Neither
fears the other.

A pall of silence spreads
through the air,
the bodies lie, aquiver.

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6 Manoel de Barros Translations by Bruna Dantas Lobato and Flávia Stefani Resende

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Bruna Dantas Lobato

Translations from Country Boy.

II.
Our knowledge wasn’t from reading books.
It was from grabbing from touching from listening and from other senses.
Could it be a primal knowledge?
Our words leaned on one another for love
and not for syntax.
We wanted the arpeggio. The song. The chirping of words.
One day we even tried to cross trees
with birds
to get that chirping into our words.
We didn’t get it.
We’re still waiting.
Though we’ve since learned spells and songs
and chirrups are also born out of first perceptions.
Though at the time we much preferred dirty words.
Like: I wanted to touch the wind’s butt.
Father said the wind has no butt.
About which we’re still frustrated.
But father encouraged our way of unlearning the world
our way of sending away boredom.
We didn’t like to explain images because
explaining pushed the voices of the imagination away.
We liked disjointed senses like
birds chattering as they ate pieces of flies
off the ground.
Some visions didn’t mean anything but were
verbal strolls.
We always wanted to award the butterflies badges.
We liked the loitering of words better than
grammatical prisons.
When the boy said he wanted to bestow his
pranks to the words even the snails supported him.
We leaned onto the afternoon as if the afternoon were
a lamppost.
We liked words when they disturbed
the normal sense of speech.
Those boys belonged to the red sky
like the birds.

II.
Nosso conhecimento não era de estudar em livros.
Era de pegar de apalpar de ouvir e de outros sentidos.
Seria um saber primordial?
Nossas palavras se ajuntavam uma na outra por amor
e não por sintaxe.
A gente queria o arpejo. O canto. O gorjeio das palavras.
Um dia tentamos até de fazer um cruzamento de árvores
com passarinhos
para obter gorjeios em nossas palavras.
Não obtivemos.
Estamos esperando até hoje.
Mas bem ficamos sabendo que é também das percepções
primárias que nascem arejos e canções e gorjeios.
Porém naquela altura a gente gostava mais das palavras desbocadas.
Tipo assim: Eu queria pegar na bunda do vento.
O pai disse que vento não tem bunda.
Pelo que ficamos frustrados.
Mas o pai apoiava a nossa maneira de descer o mundo
que era a nossa maneira de sair do enfado.
A gente não gostava de explicar as imagens porque
explicar afasta as falas da imaginação.
A gente gostava dos sentidos desarticulados como a
conversa dos passarinhos no chão a comer pedaços de
mosca.
Certas visões não significavam nada mas eram passeios
verbais.
A gente sempre queria dar brasão às borboletas.
A gente gostava bem das vadiações com as palavras do
que das prisões gramaticais.
Quando o menino disse que queria passar para as
palavras suas peraltagens até os caracóis apoiaram.
A gente se encostava na tarde como se a tarde fosse
um poste.
A gente se encostava nas palavras quando elas perturbavam
os sentidos normais da fala.
Esses meninos faziam parte do arrebol como
os passarinhos.

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3 Xhevdet Bajraj Translations by Alice Whitmore

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Alice Whitmore

The following translations are republished with kind permission from Laertes Books. They were originally published in the 2020 chapbook Emergency Exit: Recent Poems by Xhevdet Bajraj.

The Spanish source poems for ‘Take Revenge’ and ‘The Peddler of Small Wooden Angels’ are from the 2018 volume El año que no trajo primavera (The Year That Brought No Spring); ‘Instructions on How to Write Poetry’ is from the 2019 volume Kur Qajnë Hardhite / Cuando lloran las vides (When the Vines Weep).

Take revenge

Come
let’s warm ourselves like magpies
on the rooftops of those abandoned houses
wounded
by mortars in the last war

Under the gap-toothed smile of the sun
let’s lie naked
and warm ourselves

Because we are poor
and love is the only weapon we have
with which to take revenge on life


Vengarse de la vida

Vamos a calentarnos
como las urracas
sobre los techos de las casas
abandonadas
heridas por los morteros de mano
en la última guerra

Bajo este sol chimuelo
desnudos
vamos a calentarnos

A los pobres solo el amor les queda
para vengarse de la vida

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Notes From Sick Rooms

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Lucinda Strahan

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Porous Walls, or, Why don’t you join me?: Poems from the Future of Health

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Andy Jackson

In Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart writes that the use of caesura or enjambment ‘bring[s] pulse and breath to the poem itself’, at the same time opening ‘the text to the excentric positions of unintelligibility and death’.

Perhaps especially these days, mid-pandemic (if implying ‘middle’ isn’t too presumptuous), we are accustomed to thinking of breath as intimately human, social. Breath as that tide of air we’re custodians of, that enters and departs our bodies, that exposes us to others, and others to us. Breath as both life and death.

When I began the Writing the Future of Health Fellowship at RMIT’s Health Transformation Lab, I was thinking of shared vulnerability and mutual inspiration. I invited twenty-two others to write with me and/or with each other.

For the last few months, this group of disabled, neurodiverse and chronically ill writers have collaborated on poems and essays. We have talked together as a group about our experiences, insights, dilemmas and dreams. We’ve diagnosed society, its systems, and imagined therapeutic futures.

These poems are a small sample. Heather Taylor-Johnson and Rachael Wenona Guy give voice to the uncanny experience of bodily instability in a world built for the (imaginary or rare) normal person. Kerri Shying and Esther Ottaway hold and amplify the small delights and pleasures that are in fact immense. Gemma Mahadeo and Anna Jacobson turn the tables on electroconvulsive therapy, watering a tree of resilence. Angela Costi and Leah Robertson reckon with their own internal others, presences who appear through trauma or the whims of the body.

‘Uncertain Parts‘ by Leah Robertson & Angela Costi
‘My Raucous, Singing Ear‘ by Heather Taylor Johnson & Rachael Wenona Guy
‘Joy to My World‘ by Kerri Shying & Esther Ottaway
‘ECT Tree‘ by Gemma Mahadeo & Anna Jacobson

These are poems of triggering places and shelter, of landmines and weeds, an unfurling and entanglement of voices. Why don’t you join us?

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UnMonumental: 20 Works by Matt Chun and James Tylor

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Matt Chun

UnMonumental is a collaborative project by artists James Tylor and Matt Chun. UnMonumental posts events from Australian history that are little known, hidden or commonly misrepresented, accompanied by original watercolour drawings. New posts can be found at its Substack site, alongside the full UnMonumental archive, resources and references. Chun and Tylor undertake community consultation for UnMonumental articles and illustrations and pay consultants for their time.

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Paper-feel and Digital Play: Note-taking and Videogames

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Claire Osborn-Li

Select the image below to begin the essay.

Read Paper-feel and digital play: Note-taking and videogames by Claire Osborn-Li

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged

Everything I Don’t Know How to Say / sve što ne znam kako da kažem

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Dženana Vucic

When I left Bosnia in 2018, my cousin gave me a book of poetry, Bosansko-Hercegovačka Poezija. It’s a slim volume, bright purple with a pale lilac square on its cover. From it, a woman sketched in dark blue, a wide-eyed and startled dove at her breast, stares out. It was published in 1983, and is soft with its years and the hands that have held it. I still haven’t read it. I can’t speak Bosnian. Or rather: I couldn’t. Or perhaps: I can’t speak it well enough for this. When we left Bosnia, we left the language too. I was five and naš jezik became simply: a language. Not mine. Definitely not ours.

It’s not entirely true to say that I haven’t read it. I’ve flicked through it, glancing at names as though I might find one I recognise. I am ignorant of most things to do with where I was born but I know that I do not come from a place famous for its poetic tradition. Bosnia is not Japan or India or Germany. That’s not to say we do not have poets. Every place has poets. But Bosnia is a small country, and, to most, insignificant. It is smaller than Iutruwita/Tasmania with two million less people, positioned on the south eastern flank of Europe and tucked into obscurity with countries like (North) Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania, Bulgaria, Moldova. It is very easily forgotten.

If people are good at history, when I tell them where I’m from, they make that sympathetic expression, their eyebrows folding like hands in prayer. They tell me that they ‘remember the war over there’, as though it were possible to reduce what happened to us to ‘the war over there’. Well. I suppose it is possible. Our genocide is obscure and attention is cruel. Case in point: they will then often ask, sometimes with morbid curiosity sometimes with the regular kind, what I remember of it.

When this happens, all I can think of is all the things that I don’t. My grandparents, for example. Their faces, their voices roughed with cigarette smoke, their papery hands holding me close as I grumble an escape in their lap. No matter how many times I look at the photos, they slip away from me. Even their names. Too, my father’s face unworried by grief. How it felt to be thrown in the air by him, caught in free-fall and tossed again, light as fog over Jablaničko jezero. My father, young and whole, clasping my hand in the tall grass behind our house, off to look at the bees. We had kept bees but they’re gone now. The bees. The sound of the word Babo. Our house without the ghosts. Our language without translation.

(No one is interested in this; they want to hear about the bombs, the camps, the hunger, the bullets; not my dead grandparents, the other dead, the interesting dead.)

I have not read the poetry collection that my cousin gave me, but my eyes have skimmed across certain poems and I’ve read others aloud, though with awful incomprehension. I did find a name I recognised, Ivo Andrić, and felt satisfied, connected to my cultural tradition even if I have only ever known him as a novelist and our novelists do not have quite as much trouble as our poets (Aleksandar Hemon, for example). Like our genocide, our writing is obscure. It does not cross the border. Or rather, when it does, it becomes diaspora, which is to say it becomes hyphenated. This is not the same as diluted, but it can feel that way.

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OPEN Editorial

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Jo Langdon 

‘to make
                  is to risk
making
a botch’
                                  —Harry Gilonis

As we sit down to write this introduction it’s reaching the end of winter in Geelong (Djilang), on unceded Wadawurrung Country – close to a year since we first considered the issue and its theme with Cordite’s Kent MacCarter. OPEN. What to say? Wattle’s blossoming in the park; magnolias are opening along suburban streets.1 The pandemic isn’t over, even if lockdowns have ended and, for many, masks are no longer. The government has changed, though as Behrouz Boochani wrote recently, in fundamental ways so-called Australia remains unaltered, seemingly unwilling to imagine itself anew. And so – amid continued violence across parts of the world including Ukraine, Gaza, and this colony – our approach to ‘Open’, at least thematically, remains an ironic, uneasy one.

Still. Open the balcony door and take a look: words and words … or should that read worlds? You pick. May the poem always be open and alert to whatever comes its way.

Our initial call-out for this issue suggested we were keen to see ‘crafted poems and crafty poems: writing conscious of its own making, unmaking, and making it new, of its contexts and antecedents’. We have – by design – been ‘open’ to how individual poems respond to our theme; we hope that makes for an eclectic mix of work that, in one way or another, makes for a compelling issue.

The poems we’ve selected caught and held our attention: they are poems that demonstrate an attentiveness to language and its possibilities (allusive, elusive, multivalent?), as well as paying close attention to the spaces they inhabit; spaces they both contribute to constructing and scrutinise through their presence. We were drawn to poems alert to their cultural and socio-material contexts; poems that opened conversations with other poets, artists and artworks, various other interlocutors, and new vantage points; poems that ‘opened’ as an action/verb, or whose openings – breaches, gaps, or breaks – provoked humour, joy, curiosity, discomfort, and/or surprise. Other poems here are ‘open’ in their frankness or candour, or – beyond theme or subject matter – also asked us to consider what an ‘open’ poem might look like, formally.

We were immensely humbled to receive submissions from more than 500 poets through the Submittable portal, and are grateful to each of the writers who generously submitted their work for this issue. We were honoured to read poetry of this magnitude and scope – and inevitably, we had to turn away many excellent poems. Had we opened the submissions portal at another interval in time, it feels possible that this issue might have comprised quite a different assortment of works – but this is the result of/at this juncture, and we remain appreciative and in no small part daunted by our part in bringing this issue together.

Thank you again to the poets whose works form this issue – for opening your words/worlds to us, and for the various pleasures and/or perturbances their poems offered to us as their early readers.

Thank you also to Kent MacCarter – a superb poet himself – and the rest of the Cordite team for continuing to create such a vibrant and inclusive publication.

We choose to close this editorial by deferring to the poems themselves, inviting you – the reader – to open (unfurl, uncork?) them next.

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged ,

Joy to My World

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Kerri Shying

here is the pleasure kitty-cat warm
on the sunny winter concrete just inside
the gate me an undelegated inconvenience
luxury thrown out the specialist’s window
day one clawed back this decade living crip

joy to my world

it’s not undone when you go do your thing
without me a sliver in the heart of compassion
a shard of glass in the regarding eye of country
freedom is your fairytale washed out with tears
melted why don’t you join me in the sun

tablecloth ripped out from under
happiness’ crockery
never trusted joy
cross-wired with dread
took years untangling the electricals but now

joy to my world

is my revelation: in life’s second half
I’m larking about letting off
delight’s fireworks in cranial sky
jackwiring neurons to sensory bliss
orchestrating razzamatazz

Posted in POROUS WALLS | Tagged ,

My Raucous, Singing Ear

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Rachael Wenona Guy

On the Train

I’m sitting on a blue seat, two red ones in front of me and a sign above them illustrating what priority seating looks like. Outside the window of the metro train, the day speeds past the planted trees, the parked cars, cottages, cafes, bicycles and prams. Red is for a person with half a leg and a crutch, and it looks as though the crutch has morphed into the person’s arm. Disability is all sorts of body parts, I see no need to linger. I am heading to the city, wearing boots that rise to my knees, protecting my ankles from excess atoms bouncing off one another with such fury they’re bound to trip me up. Red is for the person with a ball-tipped cane in one hand and lead attached to a dog in the other. The outline of the animal makes me think of my dog, and for a second I forget how fast we’re going. There will be a lot of people in the city, each one trying to match the other’s pace. As a group, it will look like they’re chasing after the rolling cars but haven’t the stamina or grace. I’m dealing with the sensorially complex; it doesn’t have to be rational. A red seat is for the person bent at the knees, spine at an angle, leaning on a stick shaped like a giant candy cane. And there will be noise in the city, invasive as rockets. Red for those with large bellies harbouring babies that haven’t a clue what they’re getting into, how each scream at the time of their birth will blast new light into their world. There will be traffic noise and footsteps and birdcalls and alarms and voices talking; the wind will mingle with every leaf; insects buzzing on the breeze. The sign says to please remember that not all disabilities are visible. The vibrations of the train are in my head, like the city will be with all those rushing feet, my knee-high boots in slow-mo, trying to catch the rotation. There is no image of what a person with invisible disability might look like. 

            my flannel dress
                        my mounded breasts
                                    my ever-growing beauty mole
                                    the holes in my ears 
				
my grandfather’s eyes 
my head-top bun 
                                    my thinking brain 
                                                my dimpled thighs 
these inner frights 
my just-cut nails
				
these eating teeth
                        this gobbled mess
                                                these pounds of flesh 
                                                                        this healthy tan
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Posted in POROUS WALLS | Tagged ,

ECT Tree

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Gemma Mahadeo

Posted in POROUS WALLS | Tagged ,

Uncertain Parts

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Leah Robertson

In my notebook, I record you each in different colours, hoping this will help me work out who
is saying what, and then why you are saying it.
You are not audible; I perceive you each
like a thought. Some of you brusque and unmistakable. Others needing stillness
and intricate mental work.

I do not know how many of you formed.
Your existence has come to make sense to me, but my awareness unsettles you. You have long gone unobserved. You suggest I have made
this up, or that I have not and I am insane.
You do not have full access to my intellect
nor what I have learned. I do not have
full access to your memories.

Other core facets of identity are challenged.
I am gay, but my certainty shifts when those taught young to please men suggest resuming. You obscure my centre. You fight to my forefront and rotate your versions of our politics and age and needs and direction. You flood with your emotion and manoeuvre my body.
I scramble for ownership.

My psychiatrist notes I am here more
frequently. These instances are a sharp
spring day. In the safety of these sessions
I refer to us as us. I am to have compassion
for you. I am to thank you for protecting me
and to help you understand that the
threats have now subsided.

Your threats have now subsided.
My neurosurgeon explains that as I’ve grown older so have you. You don’t push against my spine like you used to. No more spearing my back and legs. Still, you don’t give up, like a bully. Sniping my left foot. Denying me sleep. You’re supposed to be subtle, like regret.

I’m told to monitor you. Monitor. A word that contorts my brain into a knot. I know there’s at least twelve of you in me, but not exactly where and what you’re up to and if you intend to get nasty. One thing I’ve done is observe if any of you dare to bulge. Some of you have, like you want to spring out of me. My skin has been
good, holding onto you, but for how long?

You may remember, two of you had to be removed. Do you miss them? Do you visit the hole they’ve left behind? Were you close like siblings or estranged like siblings? Do you blame me for their death? I hope not. I tried to keep them, but they were destructive. You know how much codeine methadone and morphine I took to live with them. I hate surgery as much as
you do.

For too long I’ve compared you to weeds, worse still, I’ve written about you as landmines. But I don’t want the responsibility of a gardener or the fear of a soldier. For over fifty years you sit as I sit, you eat as I eat, you dream as I dream, when I’m cold so are you, when I sweat you are hot. We share this body. This tangled mess of thistles and thorns. An imploding grenade of screams. This body we share as a team of uncertain parts. I hope you can love my body when I can’t.

Posted in POROUS WALLS | Tagged ,

She’s 26

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Pete Spence

she’s 26 and may not reach Seoul with a comic novel
introducing a sliding scale of charge d’affaires
in caustically measured written characters
loose on an airliner folded into resilient rainforests
drummed in a minute’s arithmetic
promising to make something like a natural sound
a hint of dictionary from a local chorus
ripe for a nostalgic poll vaulter’s enduring grip
abandoned under abandoned covers

which is exactly how the plateau was mentioned
below the steamed up skylight of two of them falling there
rejecting the prized labels and headcount
the sonorous cube of someone’s descent
entering on their hands
choosing conversations of gradually adjoining landmarks
the cape and his bearded terrain
of conspiratorial windowsills
denying an ocean’s review
of timeworn phrases drastically repeated
treated to a tenement of rushing streets
until perspective caught up with it
ambling in the fast lane
humming a word’s tessellated mirror

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

Storm front, roll cloud

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Ali Jane Smith

“Maybe it’s a thing you could call the subgrime”
Jill Jones to Claire Albrecht


I’ve been looking at my hands holding the knife,
at the skins, pips, cores, stalks
at the sink filling
I’ve been looking at tiny writing on packets
I’ve been looking at daddy long legs in corners
at huntsmen stepping from crannies
the knotty hair of sleeping children
jar lids, special offers.

Angus Young plays the guitar.
It is his work, he wears a uniform.

Jodi lowers herself into the water.
“What even is everything,”
thinks Jodi.

My ordinary life feels like a dirty fleece
hard grease and soft grease
and dirt and burrs.
I’m hoping the energy to wash and rinse
that heavy, crinkled, mass
will discover me
one morning.

Angus Young
smoking a cigarette, wearing a jumper
talking to Molly
“we started as a rock n roll band
you never think you get that far
people
want you to soften it here
mellow it there.”

I’ve been looking
at the sky

clouds like Florentine wallpaper
clouds like crinkled staples
clouds like a frosty window. The sky with nothing
but a pewter-grey edge
coming in fast.
The sky cloudless. Every
fing
thing
ting
connected.

I’ve been looking at a hill of beans
and a damp coriander leaf wet and flat on the counter
feathery margins akimbo.

The knife, the wool
the sky, the burrs, the riff
the pool, the tapes, the taps.
Jodi pushes off the side
to start her backstroke
arms glittering.
Angus listens to the next question
answers with a cloud.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

Carcinization

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Damen O'Brien

This side of the water-line everything is beetles,
on the other, the kingdoms of crabs, all else
are sports, dead-end prototypes, and us.

The startling dominance of it, the inevitable
reordering to the type: un-shucked, re-burdened,
the great evolutionary retreat to the form.

I started this with a thought for shells, for
carapaces, their self-evident superiority; why
else would nature tend towards chitin?

I thought to write something predictable about
vulnerability, about the strength in our softness,
the triumphs inherent in our weakness. I might still.

But this week the news is full of tanks, the men
crowded in them, the men that have sent them,
their mud-mired convoys, the shells they discharge.

The news is full of stories of farmers hitching
their rusty tractors to tanks and dragging them off
the road. Second-hand tanks selling on eBay.

It’s funny for a day, but where are all the tanks
coming from? A phylum I’d thought abandoned
long ago. Extinct. Hammered into ploughshares.

No useful form ever fails if it fills a niche.
Turn over any log, scrape the ocean. So now
my Timeline is filled with hard shells rutting a field.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

Moon’s Étude

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Stuart Barnes

Pink balloon? Clewed wool?
Unsmooth supper plate?

Sinker of cliché
in cumulous seas.

I loose jewelleries,
unlike Saturn, a

gold-fattened linger
-er. ‘Monsieur Aloof!’

Again, you finger
-point. ‘Murderer!’ Oof.

‘When you’re full, you’re full
of yourself!’ you blaze.

I routinely skate
closer to the prot

-ostars. I am not
going through a phase.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

Privileging Space

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Robert Juan Kennard

We understand no love that is not in excess – Urvi Kumbhat

My sister.
Manang.
Kumusta? It has been
a moment
and I know you still feel stanzas
in words
fearing they will take us back
to a federation
where walls spoke. /

I never questioned why redemption
kept moving:
hilltop halls behind a yellow-
brick church, the Filipino congregation
evangelical in the valley
toward the river,
further west.

We tithed then
on stackable chairs, on knees
of kuyas and titos
our lips, tambourines
to sugared bread. /

By fourteen, we’d saved five hundred
for the Build2Reach fund.
The pastors were blue-eyed
desperate to own
second-hand buildings.

You were banking

forgiveness.

By then, we’d survived pesos

hand to mouth

in parking lots. /

And I earned too

a fiver

selling three-piece feeds
gravy, breast
rib and roll
to older people driving through
custom spoilers
and a muffler scraping
to clear the gutter. /

But I write this to you now
from a tiny house.
A residency on wheels.
(It’s a thing).

You see if I write the browner poem
I get distressed
linen, a compostable toilet
cassettes of
Joni Mitchell.

And aloneness.
We always wanted to be
this close.
The red brick flat. Two beds built in.
Eight of us trying
to model minority. /

(It’s been a long time).

And you’d be proud
I’m learning to squat
on Darkinjung country
Yarramalong
above a creek, inland from

MacMasters
Copacabana
Lake Macquarie
Names we were taught, but that leave
as memorial. /


There used to be so much more
cedar here.

Of course, I also grieve infinity
pools,

water births.

You are, in fact
pregnant –

I remember you called once

before you left these parts

a wreck.

I listened to you FaceTime and fret

your fingers would find
the child inside you. /

So let me cry uncle

for the dresser and vanity
the split-level living,
and for you
to take the room
to return a first-born
in full terms. /
Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

the village waves

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Barnaby Smith

pock marked
etfuls of crypto grams
currency can’t pro create
ceed along bo ring
ulevards & num skull
bers won’t fla grant
vour the build up
ings with

however many in denture
dexes thaw arc hived
tic snaps & flo rally
od the seeping mar shy
gins w/sub urban
liminal sug arcane
gestions acr id
oss cool dis own
array of lit muses
tle worlds

in obse crating
rving arrangement of fending
moon, Jupiter, Ven oms
us, Mars, see inte rest
stines & see saw
too much / se men
eds of ne gated
ighbours

to office wind less
ows to ma linger
ke friends trick shot
ed to com motion
mit to know ledge
able exo skeleton
dus

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

Kishōtenketsu

Posted on September 15, 2022 by E. J. Koh

I first notice in a poem the longest line
a place where I can lie down
come apart as a thing with no force of life

a place where a light has been left on
like in the other room
feels too far to switch off and how bright

whether or not someone’s there
Is this the merciful distance of disaster?

The earth senses me and I return
its light and tenuous silence:

I am on the brink of death and my lungs
I call them my wings
these wings were never a part of me

Say it might be dazzlingly bright
when it is over and I go the long way
home as the only disruption of light

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged