Leaf of Fall Back and Rise

Posted on May 1, 2021 by Kwame Dawes

The heart of darkness is not Africa.
The heart of darkness is the core of fire
in the white center of the holocaust.
–Derek Walcott

In Kingston, the sirens fill the twilight air—
the curfew begins with casual ease
and the slow emptying of the street
before the staining of streets
with the mute lights of a city hiding from itself.

The people are stoic:
“If a dead we fi dead, den a dead we mus dead.”
Or perhaps this is resignation. Down in the market,
the strugglers announce themselves,
they say “Look around you, look around you,
who do you see, face-to-face,
if not we are the strugglers, while the safe
hide in their mansions and wait.”
This did not begin as a song of class and power,
it began as a pastiche of sorts,
a strained pastoral of an island waiting for the chaos
of bodies falling away. And the older women
are in their gardens gathering
ginger root, cerise, thyme, mint leaf,
shame-old-lady, and the poetry
of invention in the names of the leaves
that will stave off death—
Leaf of Refresh My Lungs, Leaf of Woman Power,
Leaf of Forgive My Sins, Leaf of Charity and Grace,
Leaf of Africa Vengeance, Leaf of Fall Back and Rise.
At dawn the roll call—the ritual of obituaries;
the men are slipping away;
the veteran artists; it is as if their persistence
is an affront—Ellis Marsellis, Bob Andy,
Bill Withers, the mourning arrives in feeds,
tiny bytes of dispensable lamentations—
blue lights, green lights, white lights,
the scrolling screen of images flashing,
the truncated sentiment, the pocket grief;
where will the slow march to the funeral be,
and where the high-stepping,
the weeping, the performance of joy
under spinning, gleaming umbrellas?
This is how a culture is made.
“Bring out your dead!” Ecuador, Iran, “Bring out your dead.”
In Kingston, they have taken to calling
the police The Virus, and, “It a come, it a come
it a come.” To think that beside the dispatches
from Kingston, Aba, did you think
it could come to this?
Did you think it could come to this?
I read Saint-John Perse’s lament to Friday,
and pray never to be an alien to the earth
I long to rest my soul in. But all of this is a vanity,
a deep misguiding vanity, while the world
collapses around us. All these contagions,
and the American President chuckles at his soaring numbers:
“My TV Ratings last night were higher
than the Super Bowl, did you see that?”
What monstrosity have we wrought
that we have no language to speak of it?
And here come the sirens,
the Virus are turning the corner,
in their masks and with their batons,
“Ba-by, Ba-by-lon, Ba-by, Ba-by-lon, Ba-by, Ba-by-lon.”
Here, in the cave of my study, here where I study
the necromancy of verse,
and horde my secret fantasies—
I can’t share this hidden ration with anyone,
I simply hide and chew, lick away the residue
and face the family. Here on the soft fabric
of paper pulled from wood, preserved between
sheets of soft-beaten cotton strips,
I confess that the virus may have arrived
in the tender embrace of love, a friend
or a stranger, or a tainted breeze
in the daily rituals of labor and living,
and I search out the economics of death—
will my family owe the taxes I owe?
Will they be free to step out into the new season,
protected, kept, debt free?
What must I do to prepare? What instructions?
How to be clear that these are the ordering of a life,
not a note of a suicidal depressive? You see why
I dare not shout this from the roofs?
This is what Babylon the Virus has done to us.

Posted in 101: NO THEME 10 | Tagged

Song of the Andoumboulou: 304

Posted on May 1, 2021 by Nathaniel Mackey

To be bled into by this or that borderless
event while the birds were away, the very
ones that were never not there. They had
flown
the fall of Troy, what Huff had been call-
ing the fall of Troy, loath not to euphemize the
knife he’d gone under, the cyst on his ilium,
pel-
vic dismay. Playing loose with fate, mak-
ing fun of it, making light, was prophecy, what
Huff meant, what Huff the Prophet meant…
A
light rain was coming down in Low Forest, a
drape or a veil of sorts, a curtain of beads it
looked like. One lay back or one looked out, an
eye
on each drop if one could, Nub at the torpe-
do prez’s mercy, a harder rain eventually
to fall. Why were we there, I was asking Huff, of
all possible places why were we there, another
feel-
good cop show on the tol’you in front of us.
I thought of my niece and my nephew, long since
gone, never not no way I was over it, never it
was
only the way things go… We were watching the
tol’you reminiscing the times we’d been in Hous-
ton, a static song of not yet readiness, a street or
a
neighborhood we knew. What will being dead
be like the abandoned boy was asking. The a-
bandoned girl was asking as well, a disconsolate
duet
thereby enacted, static itself grown sonorous,
an articulate brogue regret. Between them and
what being dead would be like there were nearly
nine minutes, a floating coffin had been leaving
the
church when we tuned in… A light rain was
coming down, a harbinger of rain to come, col-
loidal song of the not yet ready, Nub’s oncoming
collapse. We born with a knee on our necks leaned
on
the what-it-was window, a safety pin hummed in
the ground outside. It was a wet, gray play on words,
the reign of our lives not mattering coming down,
no
more not mattering we yelled and clamored for, the
numberless days of outrage it would take… The
word “moment” was on every tongue, we who’d’ve
rath-
er been mystics or philosophic pissed off, so vi-
cious we could see Nub’s way was. The birds had
come back having never left, a certain way they had
of being not being there. We sat with big books open
upon
our laps. It was we who had gone in search of Mount
Qaf, a cyborg or a sunbird said to live there, the Simorgh
they said it was… Where had we been when the birds
who
had never left got back, we ourselves who had nev-
er been birds? How was it to be back having never
left? So went the questions against the walls of our
heads.
But for the pictures the books on our laps bored us,
quizzical couplets it was too late for, unsurprising
rhyme. The word “moment” cut everyone’s lips and made
them bleed, pecked by beaks it seemed, the birds having
left
and come back, the birds who were never not there…
It was all another day in photo-op Nub, another day a-
mong the so-called colorless ones. The birds were back
hav-
ing never gone, lives not mattering no matter, soul no
one spoke of anymore. The abandoned boy was a white-
haired lad raised among nestlings, all atop the earth atop
the
bull atop the fish, not what had been said but also that, no
sign
the only one there
was
 








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Posted in 101: NO THEME 10 | Tagged

These Old Bones of Mine

Posted on May 1, 2021 by Peter Minter

at first
I carried them
back to her
that pile
of old white bones
I found
in the pocket
of a river’s meander
high in a dry
floodwater bend
a shoal of
ten thousand river stones
the marbling shade
of elder casuarinas
knots
of roots
& smaller stones
eddies of earth
patched by
grass

having stumbled
upon
a farmer’s Boeotian
slaughterhouse
set back
from the river’s
cascade
quarrel & din
a silent
place for a bullet
the infirm
& broken
cows
led down
from
the paddock above
shot then &
their
scattered white bones
sculpted
by the high
sun
moving through
bleached
horns & the dark eyes
of their
forebears

I had only
my own eyes
to see
small zones
here & there
old bones
where bodies
drop
over time
&
then
down a bit
a rust brown
hide
taut over hollow ribs
stuck out
jaw open

forgive them
sacred cows
white milk
blood
& hard-baked
shit
the hide arched
over bone
into
a fly-blown
temple

who
would forgive me
though
when I
looked around
wandered yonder
& found
a remote pile
of bones
away
by a tangled pomegranate
scattered
dry
old white bones
the
skull first
resting
forward of the rest
two
clean bullet holes
resonate
with a
deathly cool
refrain
in the solid
resting
brow
& in
the skull’s wake
a wreck
of vertebrae & ribs
their empty
cacophony

who
would forgive me
if I
took them
with me
all the way home
& out into
the world’s
wide
tomb

my fingers
ran
along the smooth
dead
bone
& in a crack
I saw your
break
all the darkness
held inside
& so
variously figured
I should
indeed
take the bones
back
as the cracked
darkness
shared
might resonate
between us

so then
I first held the skull
up
brushed off
leaf muck
put it
aside
& over
time
picked
over
the dead
made a small
fine pile
of the best bones
& then
held
the deceased’s
naked clatter
in an
armful
picked
up the skull
with my
remaining
hand
& walked
back down river

I held
my cache of white
like a baby
by the
welling, turning
water
took a narrow
path
over rock
by the rapids
where the
river spilled
the story
witnessed
all the dead
danced &
cried
in the cataract
of death
reflected
in the transparent
glissade
of water
then I rested
at a wire
fence
pushed all the bones
beneath
& crossed a wide grass
paddock
tall
seed-heads
licking the bones
as I passed
down by another
pomegranate
thicket
& then by the river
again
down
a dark tunnel
of trees
beside
deep black water
blue sky
mirrored
dead leaves sailing
through
a gallery
of overhanging she-oaks
& gums
maiden-hair ferns
the water’s
hushed
movement

I came up
from
the river
out from the tree
shadows
holding the baby
load of bones
the skull
& when
I arrived at the house
she said
how when at first
she saw me
walking
from the distant corner
of the paddock
she had
panicked in horror
thinking
I was carrying
a dead child
up from the
river

we
laughed at this
as I lay
the bones at her feet
with some
dignity
for the substantial
presentation
of the dead
and we
looked at them
wordlessly
eternally
not a child
just bones

it was Easter
so we had time
to begin
making all kinds
of new
conditions
found
an old
bicycle wheel
rim
& tied
the ribs in
a hanging
circle
for the wind
to reanimate
& hallow
as her break
grew
wider
darker
& for a while
I broke
alongside her
was perhaps
even broken
by myself
but

I kept the bones
whole
the whole time
in a box
I bore
from house
to house
over the years
the skull
always
nailed in the wall
above
my writing desk
the vertebrae
placed
delicately
on windowsills
& bookshelves
their
long thin arms
white
angelic souls
dead
wombs
full of the river’s
echo
silent letters
on the book spines
unknowingly
radiant

that’s how
there are still
all these
old
bones of mine
on my desk
on bookshelves
& today
after a dream
where I
measured out the years
in bones
laid out
one
after the other
I held
the same vertebrae
I brought up
from
the river that day
& in its dead
light weight
gravity
I knew in fact
after all
it was a child
all along
not a bone
we held between us
then but
a child of the hollow
centre
where love like
marrow
of the same
flesh & blood
grew & grew
by the altar
of our bones
&
when they broke
they all
dried out
a river of dark blood
escaped
into the atmosphere

& so now
all the bones
are empty
corridors of dust
the child
a pile of bones
offering
as it did
back then
to be nothing

Posted in 101: NO THEME 10 | Tagged

Alexis Late Reviews Felicity Plunkett’s A Kinder Sea

Posted on April 23, 2021 by Alexis Late

A Kinder Sea by Felicity Plunkett
University of Queensland Press, 2020


The writer Phillip Hoare, celebrated author of The Whale and self-confessed sea obsessive, once wrote: ‘Our bodies are as unknown to us as the ocean, both familiar and strange; the sea inside ourselves.’ This quote might also describe acclaimed poet and critic Felicity Plunkett’s latest book of poetry, A Kinder Sea, which takes writing about the sea – or through the sea – to whole new depths. This collection of 29 poems, published by University of Queensland Press (2020), reveals more than just a fascination with the literal sea. As any seasoned ocean swimmer or sailor knows, a calm surface is no indication of the sea’s nature, or of one’s journey across it.

The cover, an exquisite Sandy Cull design, is as undulating as the sea itself, and the contents page reveals such oceanic titles as ‘Becoming the Sea’, ‘Underwater Caulking’ and ‘What the Sea Remembers’. They conjure up exploratory visions of the often-fatal human obsession with the sea – the sea as both grief and hope embodied, and as a locus of loss and longing. A Kinder Sea is all of these and more, dextrously rendered – for example, through Plunkett’s singular neologisms – but it is ‘the sea inside’ that is the collection’s focal point. We each have a sea inside, as Hoare muses, but when a person experiences hardship, grief and unspeakable loss, what becomes of that sea? And how does one keep from drowning? Plunkett seems to suggest that one way is to hold on to a craft, whether literal or metaphorical, as explored in ‘Becoming the Sea’. The persona is anchored by a craft of words, despite her grief:

I have unreeled sentences
from my spine’s spool
to free my bones: cast words
into the depth of your response.

The long vowels and spondees such as ‘spine’s spool’ and ‘cast words’ make the lines sonorous, and the poem itself seems to ‘unreel’ on the tongue as a result. This kind of prosody is prevalent throughout the collection, lending it an aural beauty reminiscent of the lyric poetry of Sharon Olds, Sinead Morrissey and Tracy Ryan. Plunkett goes on to write: ‘I want my disappearance to be untranslatable’ – that is, paradoxically, untranslatable into language and difficult to articulate, which would be evidence of the depth of love. ‘Becoming the Sea’ is reminiscent of a key aspect of Plunkett’s award-winning debut collection, 2009’s Vanishing Point; her preoccupation with the extended metaphor of language as tangible and human physicality as linguistic. In that collection, the poem ‘Learning the Bones’ extends her father’s love of Latin grammar into her very being. She confronts her grief over his death by utilising this extended metaphor: ‘my hands writhed, alive – a tangle of nervous verbs / untranslatable’. Earlier in the poem, she writes, ‘my feelings’ syntax made no sense’. Plunkett’s poetry foregrounds the fact that often feeling is untranslatable, and that this a universal human difficulty, even for a writer of poetry.

In another poem from Vanishing Point, ‘After the Park’, a sort of sequel to Gwen Harwood’s infamous ‘At the Park’, Plunkett again renders emotion linguistic: ‘. . . my swollen skin, my ungrammatical want’. This technique is carried over into A Kinder Sea and works well in poems centred around longing and grief, such as in the affecting ‘Glass Letters’. Plunkett speaks of words as tangible things:

Shaken wordless, I wash syllables
in salt, trace remembered promises to
the place they rolled in foam.

Words become flowers: ‘froth-skirted roses in an old garden / each syllable discarding its petal / under my ribs’, part of the sky: ‘you / study clouds’ thesaurus for one close word’, and fabric: ‘knotted and frayed, our words / a smooth braid in sky’s hymnal’. It’s thrilling to see language conceptualised and crafted in this manner. Above all Plunkett is a word-lover, or collector of a ‘word-hoard’, as Seamus Heaney described the work of a poet, and this is evident throughout the collection. Her use of wordplay is particularly luscious in the poem ‘Syzygy’, from the book’s second section, where Plunkett seems to revel in adverbs:

Edge, swerve, disturb, you’re all
verb: pressed to you, wilfully,
irresistibly, like ivy, sighingly, I climb like
an adverb unattached.

Another interesting aspect of Plunkett’s poetry is her propensity for neologisms – specifically, her coining of compound nouns, including kennings. This was a highlight of her first collection, which contained such gems as ‘whisperthrill’, ‘breath-light’, ‘love-warm’, and ‘violet-soft’. ‘A Kinder Sea’ adds to this lexicon. In the poem ‘Three’, she writes:

All threads in a weave of kin, all roots
that take you down
to glasswords sandbroken
ground small beyond sound.

‘Glasswords’ could be a kenning for promises, for example. Like Heaney, Plunkett is drawn to this interesting Old English device, and the piece ties in nicely with the earlier ‘Glass Letters’, which makes a motif out of the idea of words being transmuted from sand into glass. Additionally, if glasswords are promises, then glass letters might be the specifics.

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John Bartlett Reviews Kevin Brophy and Linda Adair

Posted on April 14, 2021 by John Bartlett

In This Part of the World by Kevin Brophy
Melbourne Poets Union, 2020

The Unintended Consequences of the Shattering by Linda Adair
Melbourne Poets Union, 2020


Despite the publishing limitations in 2020 caused by the COVID-19 restrictions, Melbourne Poets Union remarkably released seven chapbooks last year in its new Blue Tongue Poets and Red-bellied Poets series, all under the auspices of the soon-to-retire editor, Tina Giannoukos. These chapbooks included In This Part of The World by established poet Kevin Brophy and Linda Adair’s first collection, The Unintended Consequences of the Shattering, the latter continuing MPU’s long-standing tradition of nurturing new poets.

Kevin Brophy is a prize-winning poet with nine collections of poetry, as well as works of fiction and collections of essays. His experienced and deft poetic eye is on display in this current collection. Brophy’s poems are of movement and journeyings, dedicated to a type of travel that pays particular attention to the interiority of the observable world, not merely its surface impressions. He looks at the ‘underworks’ of things, searches out what is hidden behind emotions, landscape, history and particularly the natural world.

This dynamic movement between the observable and the visible can be seen in how the collection itself is structured into three sections. The first section, ‘Here’, concerns itself with poems that explore Melbourne and regional Victoria before moving outwards to ‘And There’, which takes the reader to Italy and parts of Europe before returning to ‘And Back’, where we began. But there is another movement or dynamism at work here, beyond the obvious geographical one. It is apparent particularly in Brophy’s poems of the natural world, observing but moving quickly on to deeper significances. In ‘Dog on the Road’, “the dog must be forgotten as quickly as possible” because:

Inside you is a world where lives come and go like days, like wrappers, like novels, like meals, 
like buses, like birds, like seasons, like you.

These exterior motifs are indications of inner worlds that the poems are interested in. In ‘No Mistakes’ there’s one concrete, observable world of alarm clocks, spiders and moths but more importantly an inner world of love and weddings as ‘a story about the world as it’s turned out to be’. In ‘What the Finch Knows’, the finch knows inexplicable mysteries which fascinate the poet but do not have to be solved. Mystery itself is at the heart of this poetic experience.

While the poems in this collection adopt a free-verse style (with just two prose poems), this particular poem is structured as a series of couplets, each a complete, separate observation. The enjambment allows the reader to pause often, observe and take a slower journey, allowing images to linger.

This poem also stands out in the collection for its bold alliteration, the repetition of the consonants ‘f’ and ‘s’, which lends a musicality and a robustness to the reading, emblematic of a finch’s song perhaps.

                                            The finch is loved

for being small, bright, neat, fast
It knows every seed and spring

in every wrinkle of its fearful songful world
The finch knows how to live

in joyful fright and fret, knows
every shadow in every corner of its world.

The natural world for the poet hides other mysteries, even attributing human emotion to parts of nature as in ‘Winter’ where trees struggle to solve mysteries, a river is impatient, and the mist knows despair. The poet’s mind and imagination are drawn to these hidden parts of nature, imbued with emotion, as in ‘What We Walk Towards’:

Inside us and inside the mountains what lasts
is dark, too dark to know about or dare
imagine where the dark inner liquid
rock might be flowing as we walk the paths.

The word ‘inside’ is a recurring motif in this collection where the poet is concerned with hidden meanings. The poems of Italy and Europe are in no way mere travel poems, for these poems concentrate specifically on the ordinary, the everyday, which could be anywhere. Take the poem ‘Mind as Hive’, whereby in walking the streets of a town, history becomes transparent to the poet, indeed transports the reader back to WWII when ‘German soldiers once attended Mass in the town cathedral while local people hid in their wine cellars.’ The poet’s eyes are trained below. The underground realities, even though now in the historical past, still dominate the imagination. The title of this poem too, ‘Mind as Hive’ suggests a metaphorical insight into how the poet perceives the intricate, hidden workings of the human mind.

‘Driving in Central Western Victoria’ reads like a metaphor for how the poet views each new poetic experience – a long journey through the countryside, revealing continual new towns and new experiences; ‘it goes round and round’, the poet says, until

I feel as if we can see all the way
to the horizon from here
amazing isn’t it
it makes you want to just keep going.

Such attention to each experience, not matter how apparently small, seems to expand the work’s poetic vision. This poem employs an interesting enjambment where lines are short, employing few words.

Empty
when you drive through it
at this speed
in winter it’s green
in summer it goes yellow

The result is like driving through the countryside with truncated images flashing past the car windows in quick succession, giving an onomatopoeic, evocative effect.

In a poem such as ‘Appian Way’ the poet asks, ‘why does each step feel like a new sorrow left behind?’ The poet ‘sees’ and as a result carries away an emotional attachment to what has been seen. Small images – rock walls, cowbells, weeds, pines –all carry a need to understand much more.

We stop and read about the quality of late afternoon light
try to find the lit edges of moving shadows.

The task it seems for the poet lies in searching out the deeper signs, the inner meanings of things ‘with a story about the world as it’s turned out to be’. (No Mistakes) The poems in this collection move like beams of light falling on hidden places, illuminating what was not obvious. Even the title of the collection, In This Part of the World, is not so much about a specific location but just wherever the poet happens to be the observer at that time. ‘This part of the world’ is fluid and mobile, not geographical but attached to the poetry’s optics.

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Claire Albrecht Reviews Jennifer Mackenzie’s Navigable Ink

Posted on March 25, 2021 by Claire Albrecht

Navigable Ink by Jennifer Mackenzie
Transit Lounge, 2020


The blurb of Jennifer Mackenzie’s 2020 collection Navigable Ink (Transit Lounge) begins by introducing Indonesian writer and activist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who died in 2006. Mackenzie had been offered Toer’s novel manuscript Arus Balik for translation back in 1993, but it seems this translation was never completed. Navigable Ink is described as a ‘poetic exploration of Toer’s tragic, visionary and ultimately triumphant life’. At first glance a reader could be forgiven for thinking that this is the translation of Arus Balik, but Mackenzie’s acknowledgements clarify that this is not the case, rather the poems ‘created out of episodes from the novel are based on my own translation (with interpolations) of the text’.

From the first poem, ‘Before Nightfall’, a European sensibility affects how we are invited into the scenes of the poem:

a bucolic radiance
which a painter trained in genre 
might have pronounced
                                              timeless

Imposing a European-style gaze on a muddy Indonesian rice paddy sets the tone for the book. It’s actually an interesting mirror for the steady infiltration of colonial forces that Navigable Ink catalogues, from the Dutch East India Company, through the French, British, Portuguese and Japanese and into the move towards independence amid the terror of the twentieth century. Mackenzie jumps between these historical moments adeptly, using the source material of Toer’s novel as well as documentaries, essays and interviews. The comprehensive notes section explains the sources of the poems, but there are no markers or footnotes throughout the text.

The language is at once spare and vivid, aiming at the spirituality and potency imbued in natural scenes: ‘on the road / a mudslide / on a high peak / gleaners.’ Gig Ryan described these as ‘lyrical descriptions of unvarnished nature’, though the descriptions themselves run the risk of becoming the varnish when they stoke the senses to embellish:

the colour is luminous here
memory is of pastel
blue, pink, lemon robes in the marketplace
dwellings a slash of yellow & mauve
a constellation of red roofs
dimming only for star showers
	              (‘Maluku Pristmatic’)

Pared down to its base nouns, this passage is of ‘robes’, ‘the marketplace’, ‘dwellings’ and ‘roofs’, but Mackenzie coats these with such ‘luminous’ colour as to render the scene painterly, and forms the background for far more menacing events. These seem distanced from such a metaphysical and aesthetic context, operating in a different material realm. The disparity between the vibrant natural world and the ‘unnatural’ death and destruction of colonisation and ecological destruction is palpable.

Mackenzie’s choices of historical moments are not always political, and the work comes alive when revealing smaller stories. The poem sequence ‘Bogor’ uses Mackenzie’s own research to tell the story of Samida, a manmade forest established by the ruler of the Sunda kingdom in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The sequence begins again with the plural first person, as ‘we’ are shown the king’s forest and told of its later burning and haunting, with the sole remnant an orchid destined for ‘a lifetime behind conservatory glass’ – just one of the many references to captivity and confinement that mirror Toer’s multiple incarcerations as an activist. The poem then moves through history and imagery as we are left only with ‘one last row of banyan trees / providing shade / for tigers’.

‘Anger’, another short sequence, evokes the destruction of art and letters under Suharto’s suppressive New Order regime:

                                                      a paintbox 
                                                      thrown onto the path
                                                      paint, brushes scattered
                                                      painting ripped from the frame
                                                      made of the wood of a jackfruit tree 
                                                      left out in soaking rain
                                         it could no longer be called a painting

the painter flees, finds safety in a friendly state

This imagery effectively captures the physicality of suppression, the act of violence against culture. The italicised line reminds us, too, of the reality for artists and writers in Indonesia like Toer, whose choices were jail or fleeing the state in fear of persecution. Such ongoing persecution is perhaps not well known to Australian readers, who are treated now with a diverse stream of contemporary Indonesian poetry, despite ongoing political conflict in the country. As one such ‘friendly state’ to which Indonesian refugees fled over decades, Australia seems to have been largely ignorant of the literary culture of Indonesia. Perhaps this book is a step in the right direction to redress that lack, offering Mackenzie’s long relationship with the country as a means of entry, and pairing it with her translation and interpretation of Toer’s life and work.

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Introduction to Alex Selenitsch’s Look!

Posted on March 18, 2021 by DJ Huppatz

BUY YOUR COPY HERE

To situate the work contained in Look!, it is worth recalling the rich but neglected Concrete Poetry tradition. Even in the twenty-first century, its challenge to the transparency of the word as a medium of communication is still provocative. From the mid-1950s, led by artists and poets such as Eugen Gomringer in Switzerland, Haroldo and Augusto de Campos in Brazil, and Ian Hamilton Finlay in Scotland, Concrete Poetry spread as a global, yet peripheral, phenomenon. In Australia, Alex Selenitsch joined others such as Sweeney Reed, Peter Murphy and Richard Tipping in the burgeoning Concrete Poetry scene of the late 1960s.

Selenitsch’s cross-disciplinary practice over the past five decades has encompassed installations, prints, sculptures and books, and habitually blurs the boundaries between poetry, visual art and design. There is a consistent line of development from his early works to the more recent compositions of Look! He continues to use single words, for example, abstracted from their usual place in sentences, to create compositions structured on the graphic space of a page, though these have now expanded into series. A word such as ‘absolute’ – a visual mark and a sign of an idea – functions as a generator of formal and conceptual variations. Here, Selenitsch exposes the elusive goal of art (which is supposed to disclose truths about the world by revealing the absolute) through a series of slippages, renegade letters that descend (or ascend) the page in ladders. Elsewhere, a boat becomes almost indistinguishable from the sea that contains it, and ‘air’ dissolves into atmospheric fields.

Selenitsch is also an architect, and we could see these compositions as akin to an architectural typology, a pre-given form that architects sometimes use as a generator for practice. Subject to endless variations and meanings, types can be forms (columns or arches) or recurring patterns, small characteristics that architects order, repeat and vary to form a house, then a row of terraces, a street, or a city. Selenitsch uses letters as modular units to displace, repeat and reconfigure, each time resonating alternative sounds, sights and meanings. In Look!, this process of repetition with variations results in the permutations of ‘perfect’, for example, while ‘palm’ mutates to ‘psalms’. An extension of his earlier ‘monotones’ (the first version appeared in 1968), ‘monotrees’ evolves spatially as a series of structures, while ‘Rarrk’ riffs on the cross-hatching of Aboriginal bark paintings, both look and sound rippling down the pages.

The unusual graphic symbols of ‘weeds’ pop up within Selenitsch’s composed landscape of letters, like their botanical namesakes that threaten our careful ordering of nature. Even the book’s title – Look! – features the simple device of an exclamation mark, which alters the meaning of the word. By using such subtle marks, Selenitsch’s practice focuses our attention on our habitual mode of looking and reading, our thoughtless daily filtering of thousands of marks, letters, words and images. His compositions invite us to look, hear and conceive our designed world afresh.

Posted in INTRODUCTIONS | Tagged , ,

Introduction to Catherine Vidler’s Wings

Posted on March 18, 2021 by Amelia Dale

BUY YOUR COPY HERE

Catherine Vidler’s Wings are in your hands: here’s 66 of them from a series of 100.

At the beginning of this book is a black-and-white image of what appears to be an insect with six, or perhaps eight, wings; some stretch beyond the page.

Then, across subsequent images, the same shapes and patterns re-appear: multiplied, rotated, twisted, flipped, stretched, spaced, snipped and spliced.

Here, as elsewhere, Vidler works with series and seriality.

Erupting from the cursor tracking across the screen, and from the copy-and-paste of the computer clipboard, Wings encounters the complex erotics of the cosmos via the pixelated maneuverability of Microsoft Paint and Microsoft Word.

Rippling and folding across these pages, these wings – like lines, like words, like syllables, and indeed, a bit like letters – speak to wings before and wings to come.

In a diary entry, Vidler observes how ‘a single brick in the wall of my college room contained more than enough poems to last me a lifetime … it contained infinite potential poems!’

Necessary for this contemplation of the infinite within the finite is the vastness of Vidler’s visualism: the more wings there are, the more Wings can reach a magnitude beyond that which can be contained within the printed book.

Every shape, line, spiral, swirl and squiggle opens up what Vidler calls ‘sheer quantum’; inviting the reader to observe the folds and variations between each wing, to explore how 1 becomes 100, then becomes 66, and then becomes something far more expansive, because in the spaces or overlays between adjacent wings there darts a multiplying swarm of yet further wings.

Vidler describes experiencing intense affective states, ‘flares’, which ‘trigger, and power, the creation of visual poems’.

Identifying the embodied nature of Vidler’s work is crucial: her writing is deeply felt, not simply on the level of its own construction, but also on the level of somatics – the click and drag of the cursor driven by her hand, yes, this is part of it – but also the propulsion of the work via ‘flares’ and fevers, and then during the event of its seeing and reading, when it is sometimes like a Magic Eye appearing.

DL (downlink), the link from a satellite to a ground station, could be an analogy for where Vidler’s wings go, how they appear to mediate between a far-reaching cosmos and earthly bodies.

Let’s put it another way: Wings evokes shapes of stars, nebulae, galaxies, galaxy clusters, transmitting their shapes here: zoom in and zoom still further in, and these patterns can appear also as cells or viruses reproducing and mutating.

Eradiating out of this book’s winged folds is something more than can be articulated in this brief space, though issues of space and scale, of flying forth from a zone of containment, are some of the ever-mutating meanings Wings awakens.

Reader, read Vidler’s viewing as reading: totally wordless work, but every bit euphoric as charged-wondrous language.

Posted in INTRODUCTIONS | Tagged , ,

Chewing on a Ruby Passport

Posted on March 12, 2021 by Zenobia Frost


Image by Jackie Ryan

I think often about the quality of light in Brisbane, how clean it was, and also of the big storm I experienced while I was there, which shook rooftops and transformed the sky. And most often I think of the faces of my friends.
–Kate Durbin

In its 15 years so far, the Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence Program has brought internationally acclaimed poets to the Sunshine State from the USA, UK, Ireland, New Zealand, India and Canada. For locals in Brisbane and regionally, these extended visits spark new work, forge friendships, and annually raise the bar for Queensland poetics.

So many past Poets in Residence – from Poet Laureates like Joy Harjo (USA) and Selina Tusitala Marsh (NZ) to viral poets like Warsan Shire and performance innovators like Emily XYZ – have left their imprint in the voice of Queensland through performances at Queensland Poetry Festival and on tour, workshops, and mentorships.

And Brisbane – its poets, its landscape, its storms, its light – left a mark on each poet.

With travel out of the question, Queensland Poetry Festival (QPF) had to get creative (don’t say pivot!) in administering its 2020 Poet-in-Residence program – to capture that cross-cultural exchange and to transcend Zoom fatigue. For that reason, we engaged four different writers – storyteller Ivan Coyote (Canada), poet and conceptual artist Kate Durbin (USA), poet Nick Makoha (UK), and poet Amina Atiq (UK).

Two of these guests – Coyote and Durbin – are no strangers to Brisbane. A tireless touring storyteller, Ivan Coyote sold out the Judith Wright Centre during QPF 2016, while Kate Durbin was Arts Queensland Poet in Residence in 2015, adapting her live performance work Hello Selfie for Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley mall with the help of local poets. These two seemed perfect for a QPF redux: Coyote’s tender, direct address can reach through any screen, dissolving the Zoom fourth wall, while Durbin’s generous, collaborative approach to poetry makes her the perfect literary pen-pal.

Chosen in consultation with UK’s Speaking Volumes live literature organisation, Yemeni-Scouse poet, performer and activist Amina Atiq and award-winning Ugandan-born poet Nick Makoha ‘visited’ Queensland across the airwaves for the first (and hopefully not last) time.

Across four time zones, Coyote, Durbin, Makoha and Atiq delivered performances and workshops, and mentored emerging Queensland poets and performers. And we posted out as much of Brisbane as we could: recent poetry releases from UQP, local Bee One Third honey, and Knowledge Sharing pins by Goreng Goreng artist Rachael Sarra.

Amina Atiq: Golden Eagle

Ivan Coyote: Last Train Out of the City

Nick Makoha: 2 Codex

Kate Durbin: Folio: Brisbane

Four response poems to ‘Folio: Brisbane’

  1. Kylie Thompson: Pre-heatwave Interlude
  2. Pascalle Burton: then is now is then and here is there — a forecast
  3. Zenobia Frost: Severe Thunderstorm Warning for Heavy Rainfall and Damaging Winds
  4. Rae White: Wheelie bin


And, without setting foot on a City Cat or breathing the green pre-storm air or watching an Ibis perform its delicate bin-surgery, Coyote, Durbin, Makoha and Atiq have responded to their uncanny experiences of being ‘resident’ in a far-off city during a pandemic. This digital chapbook collects this commissioned work, and reflects their diversity in style and approach. Their new work evokes these paradoxes of distance and closeness, isolation and connection, travel and memory.


Image by Jackie Ryan

Posted in CHAPBOOKS | Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Golden Eagle

Posted on March 12, 2021 by Amina Atiq

After ‘Lead You to the Shore’ by Steven Oliver (Fire Front: First Nations poetry and power today, UQP 2020)

I’m a dark horse

beating down the door somewhere childhood
escaped the streets etching three syllables of my name
beneath the old city of Bab Al-Yemen

a woman dressed in black found me shackled to the gates
it was my mother, chewing on her ruby passport

it’s time to leave.

Goodbyes passed the Northern valleys
greeted the Southern blue waters unlocking
the fishermen’s Red Sea-

colony crown reeked of death
buried in my foreign blood, martyrs will meet life
justice will dance on the heads of snakes

it turned cold quickly, over the Mediterranean.

This Yemeni girl sings British anthems
between her terrace walls, i lost a part of me.

I forgot the taste of my mother’s milk
with her nipple gritted between my teeth.

I taught my mother how to speak English
translating her hospital letters, cold is eating her bones.

I skipped school to escape the scouse boys
lurking at bus stops who sing riddles
of camels, curry and Bin Laden headlines.

A heartbreak worth to be torn
between two homes if my racist neighbour

daydreams our women in two-piece sets golden
headbands white polished toes
in the sand? I deserve my honour.

I lost a part of me in this dining room
learning to use a knife and fork

we don’t eat Sunday roast fish and chips
porky pie or go to the pubs

i like my fingers in my food, coffee before I sleep.

I lost a part of me in this corner shop
gran-dad left selling Mokha
beans broken dreams broken biscuits for a half a penny.

Why here, why here?

This Yemeni girl sings British anthems British bombs
between her terrace walls she wears home

and this dress fits perfectly.

Posted in RUBY | Tagged

2 Codex

Posted on March 12, 2021 by Nick Makoha

Codex

SAMO© first appears as a tag on a New York city wall in 1978
two blocks down from Aswad bookstore. It is a kind of Codex
to speak the unspeakable as if it were a confession on redbrick
or brownstone in the hard years. Downtown, was Jean’s street
studio so was the fridge, TV, wall and floor in our apartment.
He saw no division between earth and sky. To call it graffiti
is to call hieroglyphics gibberish. That’s ignorant. This is Jean
ordering a tequila to test his outer limits. It is a summer night
and we have rented two 35-mm cameras. He has figured
out that a painting is stronger than memory, passports, planes
and nicotine. The curtains are drawn but still no money for
canvases or rent. After red wine he swears he heard the wall
say – let your wrists be free. In the face of all this, he was kin
to me. This is a photograph of Jean after the ten-minute set
at the Mudd Club. He says – It’s not him and shows more
interest in streetlamp above us. Look the camera is guessing
Being a self, is a controlled hallucination generated by the brain.
The night is a black moon. The Empire State building has always
been a lead character in his inner movie. From the loft, it glows
orange. This Jean and he says – If you can’t see his three-point
crown you should see a doctor. He is divided and dying for
a piss. He presents as an image of a man and as matter in motion.



Have a listen to this. (Distorted voice)
The transcripts of both men. If you give me
A day or two. I can clear out the background
noise. You can change your dollars at the bodega

Pages: 1 2
Posted in RUBY | Tagged

Folio: Brisbane

Posted on March 12, 2021 by Kate Durbin

I first spent time in Brisbane as Poet in Residence for QPF back in 2015. I came up with the following poetic exercises for my 2020 residency, as a way of being there again, if only in my mind. I also wrote them to do with the attendees of my QPF 2020 Everyday Conversations Zoom Workshop, and now share them with you, in hopes that you might find them generative, whether you are in Brisbane or not. The first set of exercises are intended to be walking exercises, poems that can be created while moving through Brisbane, or any city you find yourself in. The second set are for inside the house. The third are for writing through our online lives. The final exercise, about Brisbane’s weather app, we came up with together in my QPF workshop. I think often about the quality of light in Brisbane, how clean it was, and also of the big storm I experienced while I was there, which shook rooftops and transformed the sky. And most often I think of the faces of my friends.

–Kate Durbin, January 2021

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5
Posted in RUBY | Tagged , , , ,

Severe Thunderstorm Warning for Heavy Rainfall and Damaging Winds

Posted on March 12, 2021 by Zenobia Frost

it’s dog hour
UV finally set to rare
getting in walkies before the Bureau
sends in the BOM squad

earlier sun by the kilo
off the back of a truck
buy one get one sun free

glare neon-tips the flame trees
bright new already scalded

the kookaburra’s spooky vibrato
lorikeets in their lottery
faint cross-town chooks
unsubtle cicadas
the usual southside cop chopper

sweating for a storm

upwind bbq snags make the breeze
even more precious

checking the BOM radar
its lava-lamp ultrasound
edging its bets
in anti-climatic foreplay

home to sapphotrophic anomalies
hyper-lemon mushrooms
inflating in the bedroom
calatheas

as far as forecast
a dry argument

Posted in RUBY | Tagged

Wheelie bin

Posted on March 12, 2021 by Rae White

Day softly overcast. Breeze
pushing back 8am humidity.
Lined up on next door’s rooftop:
8 honeyeaters, 1 kookaburra.
Easing the day forward with
squabbles, preening &
morning-soft banter.

At 12pm, clouds shiver
& threaten clean laundry.
The rush to close open
windows when we hear
the thunder-like rumble
of a wheelie bin
returning home.

Posted in RUBY | Tagged

Last Train Out of the City

Posted on March 12, 2021 by Ivan Coyote

In 2011 I got a chance to go to Belfast for a queer arts festival, and largely because those two words – Belfast and queer – don’t appear in sentences together nearly enough, I jumped at the chance, and I jumped on a plane, and found myself telling stories in a small theatre in the heart of the city on a Thursday night.

At about nine pm, partway through the second half of my show, decidedly mid-story, I heard an untuned orchestra of gymnasium style metal chair legs skreaking against the concrete floor in concert, and about ten or fifteen members of the audience all got up together and left by the back door. Streetlights and a car horn bled into the silent dark for a long breath, and then they were gone.

I took a breath, waited for the rest of the crowd to settle for a couple of seconds, and continued, wondering exactly what it was that I had said to offend. The artistic director of the festival shook her head after the show and explained to me what had happened.

Maybe I should have told you about it before, sorry love. Nothing to do with yer set, that was lovely, it was just the last-train-to-the-country crowd that had to bugger off on time, so they could get home and be up early to feed the chickens and the sheep and such.

She told me more about it over a shot of Jamieson’s at the bar. Rural Northern Ireland was suffering from a brain drain of youngsters, she explained, who had grown up in small villages or on farms out in the country but had been pilfered by London and Manchester and the like by the promise of jobs, and nightlife, and shopping, and an end to the hard labour and perceived drudgery of rural life. This often left aging farmers without their children or grandchildren around to take over the family business, and these now elderly farmers were increasingly unable to maintain their properties and look after their animals. This had birthed a kind of recent tradition now, of single, often butch lesbians, who took jobs on these farms, helping out in exchange for a nominal wage and free housing. The trade-off, in this conservative and catholic part of the world, was that there was an unspoken law that these women should live alone, without partners, and remain quietly in the closet.

This struck me full in the chest, like the flat and hard side of a pair of fists. That’s who had left the theatre just after nine pm. A bunch of butch farmers who had to take the last train out of the city to get back to their empty farmhouses so they could shutter up the sheep and check the chicken coops before the moon set behind the rolling hills of someone else’s farmlands.

I just dug around in my Facebook past and found a post from earlier that same day, posted right after I had taught a workshop to a couple of those butch farmers, but before I knew about the last train to the country:

13 November 2011:

Just finished teaching a workshop. Got to see a big old butch with steel-toed work boots on cry quietly in her chair while writing something down. She said at the beginning that she always wanted to write but never did on account of her terrible spelling, yet there she was, cranking it out. Ever seen anything more beautiful than that? I haven’t, not for a while, anyway. Belfast, you move me, you do.

Five years later I was in Brisbane, Australia, at the Queensland Poetry Festival. A dream gig. Beautiful venue, warm, humid night, sold out crowd, standing ovation. There was a long line-up in the theatre lobby after the show, folks wanting to hug or shake hands and buy books and take pictures.

I will never forget her, even though I can’t remember her name, and there were about a dozen people that looked a lot like her lingering in the lobby of that big theatre that night in Queensland five years ago.

She was wearing a striped button-down dress shirt and faded jeans with frayed cuffs and a worn leather belt and hiking boots. Barber shop haircut. She smelled of tobacco and Old Spice deodorant. She needed to talk and so I listened, even though there were people waiting and growing restless behind her.

She told me how much she loved the show, and that there were at least ten places where she would have cried, if she were the crying in public type, which she definitely was not. She told me how she grew up on a farm in the outback without community, without role models, without pride parades or flags, without ever holding hands in public with her lover, without books or movies that contained characters that looked anything like her, nothing, no one, never not ever.

She told me that Queensland, of all of the states in Australia, had historically been the most brutal to its queer people. Consensual sex between gay men was illegal in the state from 1895 until 1991. The maximum sentence was seven years in prison. And that all through the 70s and 80s (which happened to be her formative years), Queensland was governed by the socially conservative National Party, led by a real piece of work something something Petersen, and during that time gay men were not permitted to be schoolteachers, and the government actively used homophobia as a hammer to forge electoral advantages, linking being gay to pedophilia, and moral deviancy. They even passed a liquor law making it an offence to serve alcohol to ‘perverts, child molesters and deviants’ or to allow them to remain on licensed premises. Though most of the laws were targeting gay men, Peterson’s ‘homosexual deviance laws’ specifically allowed bar owners to call police on patrons suspected of being lesbians. Nothing changed, legally, until 1991, she told me.

Imagine trying to find yourself in that climate? She asked, her eyes wet with tears that she blinked to control. We weren’t allowed to put posters up or place ads in the papers that even used the word homosexual, or gay, or lesbian. And transgender? She shook her shorn head. I don’t even. They tried to make it impossible for us to find each other, but still, we managed it. But it was dangerous, you understand me? So, to see you up there tonight, telling me my story a little, under those lights and all that, looking a lot like I did twenty years back, with all of these people gathered here, well, I’m trying to even find the words for how I feel right now. Look at us, eh? Here we are, and fuck em, I say. Because here we fucking are, y’know?

So. I’ve written a few words for those older Irish butches, and the Aussie ones too, and the ones living in a one bedroom in Barrie, Ontario and under pandemic lockdown in Pakistan and an inherited townhouse somewhere in Arizona. All of you. All of us.

You might use the word butch, or trans man or genderqueer or non-binary. Maybe you are masculine of centre, or a stud, or maybe you shirk any and all of these labels. All of these are only words, and words are never big enough to hold all of us all of the time. All I need to do is catch a glimpse of you on the street, in the grocery store, in the park walking your stiff and trembling old dog, and I see you, and know you are my brother, my sister, my sibling, my family.

We belong by not belonging. They have always tried to disappear us. To force us to fit. We have forever been the second left foot, the mother wearing army boots, the bearded lady, the black sheep in the back row of everyone’s family photo, the bruised and sore thumb that cannot help but stick out of a clenched fist.

We deliver the mail and teach gym class and work the night shift at the hospital and shear the sheep and mow the lawns and answer the phones and take care of someone else’s grandparents.

They tried to un-invite us to the feminist discussion circles in the seventies, and they ousted our trans sisters from their collectives and shelters and music festivals too. They have divided our ranks but never truly conquered us, never all the way.

I see some of my future in you. I always have. I want us to gather together somewhere when we are able to again, because now we know how much this time together must never be taken for granted, never wasted. We will lean in close and tell each other where to get a second-hand suit altered, where the friendly barbers are in this town, and where to buy pants that do not accentuate these hips.

I am sorry that we all built ourselves on crumbling foundations and modelled our versions of masculinity on the only examples we were provided, the heroic and stoic and damaged and damaging, on handsome like Han Solo, on our absent or unavailable fathers and our problematic uncles, but I know between us we can help ourselves be better.

I want to let the tears flow and talk about the hurt some of us still hide under booze or beards or bravado.

I want to talk together about how we have sometimes skirted (no pun intended) just under the violent eye of the state. That the laws and lawmakers that seek to police and punish queerness almost always aim and fire at our queer brothers and our trans sisters, that they often target our queens and shoot over the heads of kings. I want to speak about the consequences of this, because though we are sometimes invisible, we are never bulletproof.

I don’t want us to ever draw lines in the sand based on what we call ourselves, or our testosterone levels. Breast or flat chest or M or f or x or Bind or pack or pluck or who you fuck I promise I will not line up separately for justice or be divided by shifting categories or imposed borders or imprecise pronouns.

Because it is not true that words will never hurt us.

Tonight, when you catch the last train out of the city, I want you to know that you are part of a multitude. I want you to know that your family is waiting, and that we will recognise you when you get home.

Posted in RUBY | Tagged

Pre-heatwave Interlude

Posted on March 12, 2021 by Kylie Thompson

6am

They say the world sleeps
but this is rarely true for people
the white noise traffic lingers eternal
drowned by morning rituals
of turtle doves and lorikeets
perpetual feuding with mynahs.

The cool breeze isn’t quite awake
drags its dusty feet through the grass
its hands through leaves
the smell of bacon heavy on its yawning breath.
Yet somehow,
inexplicably
it has energy enough to carve mountains
into a faded grey depression-blanket sky.

Midday

The stench of uncleaned skip bins
Stalks the day with an axe and a smile.
Lorikeets gossip above
perpetually angry about something
their discarded seeds
drop
like
hail.
This yard is a jungle of too-long grass and wild trees
the perfect hunting ground.
Mosquitos declare me their victim
until blood spatter patterns
line my legs and arms.
I sound the retreat.

6pm

Parents yelling at their children
is as close to a choral performance
as this town gets.
One family shouts a symphony
perfected over months,
the next begins in the momentary lull
until the sounds of dysfunction interweave
with the screech and blare of enraged traffic.

The grey blanket sky has been battered by the heat
wisps of cotton all that remain.
The never-enough breeze has calmed
still wearing garbage like cologne
enthusiastically applied before a date
no one actually wanted to go on.

Posted in RUBY | Tagged

then is now is then and here is there — a forecast

Posted on March 12, 2021 by Pascalle Burton

this morning I feed the neighbour’s cat
I’ve done it for the past few days and nights
it feels like we’re pretending that this is our life now
the first time I fed her, her fur bristled at my touch
now she wipes her body against my calves and her purrs are little rolls of thunder

I drive my mother to the doctor
wonder what it feels like to have an overcast mind
it’s not too warm, still we wind the windows down
practise breathing, sitting up tall and strong
the air ripples bone-deep against our faces as the clouds pass

at this time of year, dusk can feel like morning
perhaps an afternoon nap kept going until tomorrow
I walk to get ingredients for a dinner that won’t exist
I’ll spend an hour cooking then drop it on the floor
it is morning in other parts of the world and in a handful of hours, it will be here, too

it was overcast today, the sky wiped blank like a whiteboard
and I can’t wait to take a shower
it says it’s 24 degrees and really feels like 24
like that Hawaiian scene in ‘Punch Drunk Love’ where it really looks like Hawaii
in Hawaii, it’s presently 28 degrees, it’s 10pm yesterday, and I can’t imagine how that feels

Posted in RUBY | Tagged

Kiran Bhat Reviews Graeme Miles’s Infernal Topographies

Posted on March 10, 2021 by Kiran Bhat

Infernal Topographies by Graeme Miles
UWA Publishing, 2020


In Infernal Topographies, Graeme Miles traverses mythology, landscape and notions of selfhood to reveal moments of approachability and tenderness that are rare in Australian poetry. The poems are not so self-referential, nor overtly ambitious. Miles wants to get lost in the musicality of the moment, or the surrender of a second, and so his poems tend to read like reflections on an event that would have otherwise been lost to the everyday eye. Such is the charm of his words. When one reads Infernal Topographies, one reads them not to witness an act of innovation, or sound and image taken to completely new directions, but to meditate on one singular Tasmanian’s relationship to selfhood and tradition.

Let us start with what I consider the strongest poem in the collection, ‘Dunes’. Divided into three shorter poems, ‘Dunes’ peers deep into what appears to be the childhood memories of tan unnamed narrator. The invocation of the poem is a coalescence of memory into landscape.

The dunes perform the same 
mutations. In sands like these:
first swigs of furtive whisky
to dull a bit the self-consciousness
of adolescent kisses. You could come home
with insect bites or love bites
vivid on your neck. Always the same smells
of coastal scrub: acrid, yet food-like,
inhumanly elevating like an incense. Intimate
as bodies newly mature.

It’s hard not to imagine the swirling sands while reading these lines: note the wiggling of the sentences caused by the enjambment, the words toppling over themselves. The organisation brings the ups and downs of the dunes into the structure, and yet the language is fundamentally about memory, with ‘love bites vivid on [the] neck’, moments of ‘bodies newly mature.’ What else causes the feeling of being in a sand trap? The chugging of Miles’ language, its perfect combination of mundane household words (‘smells’, ‘food-like’ ‘incense’) with the topographic (‘coastal, acrid, elevating’). The poem imprints the reader in a dust storm by hurling honest lived experiences with no stop for reflection. It acts as an excellent exemplar of how to keep a poem grounded in a specific ecology while writing about events that have nothing to do with that space at all.

The second poem in the suite moves on to being eighteen, the narrator imagining the life he has lived is in fact a dream. 

It  began
with waking, dragging my nauseous body
to the thin, buffalo-grass lawn
and seeing the remorseless blue sky pulse
with the rhythm of blood-vessels
behind the eyes.

These lines summon not only the sensations of sight but also the beats of music. Comparing ‘blood-vessels’ to the colours of the sky immediately renders a certain image into the reader’s mind, but then we remember that we are comparing ‘pulse’ with ‘rhythm’, and so we think of the thudding of blood vessels against the arteries, that velocity, that urgency, coupled with the quotidian suburban lawn. The line exists to remind us of the reality behind dreams. Despite the language being lofty, filled with all of the opacity of the ad-hoc clacking of words, Miles seeks to ground us in the corporeal. He is attempting to do justice to not only the surrealism of being inside of a dream, but also the very real parameters of it.

The final poem in the suite brings us to a Tasmanian street – boys partying, getting into fights. One feels fully immersed in the teenage years of suburban and self-destructive Australia. And yet, the ending does not personalise the boys further, nor does it give the reader a chance to delve into their hearts. Instead, Miles takes a cosmic glance upwards.

sky , stars
and everything, and all the sharps and flats
and in the cool out on the patio 
the bruises on those mangled boys.

Miles’s poems reflect on vastness and the meaninglessness of individual experience. Sometimes this is done through linking the daily with the divine, the lordly with landscape. Other times, it is through referencing the traditions of Greek mythology and Hinduism. In ‘The Iconoclast’, a discussion takes place between the narrator and a sculptor who has been hired to fix damages done to murtis outside a house.

The  sculptor
tours us through the damage in the morning,
shows us where he’s repaired
the impossibly spherical breast of a Lakshmi,
one finger from the Ganesh they’ve been doing puja for
twice a day for weeks, and the snake-head
curled around the neck of an ascetic Shiva
outside our door.

The language is simple yet descriptive. The pared-back words give the narrative a sense of reportage. The point of the poem is not to beautify words, but to render a scene, and engross the reader in it. The resulting poetic effect comes, then, not from the language but from the gravitas of the story itself. At the end, the sculptor says, ‘I don’t worry about punishing him, the god will punish him’, implying that those who do bad to others will inevitably receive their comeuppance. And yet, the poem ends not by turning a circle to the conceit, but by sacking the premise entirely: 

And  after four months he’s gone,
this bearded American, taking
the stolen pieces like a bag of teeth and charms.

The rhyme between ‘gone’ and ‘charms’ solidify what is a strong ending to this fable masquerading as a poem: often, those who preach justice are the ones who act unjustly the most.

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Ivy Ireland Reviews Alice Savona’s Self ie

Posted on February 22, 2021 by Ivy Ireland

Self ie by Alice Savona
UWA Publishing, 2020


Reading Alice Savona’s Self ie feels a bit like taking a vacation inside a palindrome. It’s a wonderful escape, albeit sometimes fraught with all the rocking movement, backwards and forwards, until you aren’t sure what the runes and symbols that make up the words even mean anymore. The deconstructionist postmodern poetics are evocative and relentless throughout Self ie and the self-awareness threaded throughout the entirely intentional linguistic activity is at times dazzling to the point of dizzying.

Throughout Self ie poems often take up all the space of the page, ignoring any idea of traditional line spacing entirely. Other times they seem to rely on negative space, leaving the page sparsely populated with words. The result feels like fine artwork. Words scrawl across and out of the page, with misspellings and fragments sometimes seeming unintentional (until they slap you across the face with poignancy), and sometimes feeling directed right at you (until you realise they are a mirror, referring only and always to themselves). Self ie is, perhaps, primarily concerned with the visual, and is exactly what it says in its title: a captured image of the performed self.

There is, however, so much energy in Self ie that the poems seem to impact deeply, somewhere in the gut. At times the collection feels like an experiment in embodied responses to language: so much of reading Self ie seems to be almost visceral, a felt sense. In fact, the poignant lines, the repetition of those lines, the italics and symbols and spacing and line breaks create such an embodied responding that sometimes the instinct is to stop. Make a cup of tea. Sit back and let the sounds of the words as you read them in your mind just wash on over you.

Potentially, we see a whisper of the process of composing moments of complete absorption in the poem ‘Prognosis’:

Our good days & bad days & fuss mutters God
our hiccup of peace | bit of this | spit of odd

In poems like ‘Prognosis,’ where the syntax shifts to fragments, revealing Haiku or Zen-Koan-like morsels of meaning, we can see that Savona’s text is refreshing and innovative and all those things, yes, but it is also very deliberate and clever. Furthermore, the text is at times almost surprisingly emotive, as revealed in lines such as, ‘He finds your tears more alien than your anger.’ from ‘Verisimilitude’. There is of course depth of knowledge here (one doesn’t have to read too far to ask the question: is the author also involved in some science of the mind? Answer in bio: resounding yes), and clear mastery of a technique that seems to be creating a nouveau experiment of the avant-garde. And at times the result is laugh out loud hilarious. The irony, word play, optional syllables, in ‘Hypothesis’, for example, ‘Father (f) (h) (ch) ucks mother,’ is utterly affecting, if in a droll, sarcastic, perhaps taboo sense. Tragicomic springs to mind. When I first started reading, I immediately started thinking of Charles Bernstein’s A Poetics and his insistence that ‘poetics is the continuation of poetry by other means’ (Bernstein, 1992).

Bernstein’s ‘other means’ abound here. Lines of poems double up, exchange meanings through movement and repeat themselves seemingly ad infinitum for emphasis. Discombobulation abounds. Fonts change, symbols enter and exit, things stand in for words, which are already standing in for perceived signification. By the time we arrive at the entire final poem sequence, ‘Honey’, we discover that the entire collection is, perhaps, a practicum, a science experiment masquerading as a collection of poetry. The abstract seems to be something about uncovering underlying, deeply human uncertainties: 

when it is really her own fears &|& 

anxious attachment to discovery 

that she needs to (f) (h) (ch) uck.

In ‘Honey’ we have a cut-up, a found poem discovered in the collection itself, a festival of reframing, which perhaps conveniently dissects the collection for us. Or perhaps it’s merely meant to display the Cliff notes to the collection: the important take-aways, the pith, the skip-to-the-ending revelation. And though this type of unveiling process might seem trite or forced anywhere else, in this collection the self-reflexive naming practice doesn’t ever make the reader feel that the writer is attempting to be coy, nor trying to explain anything away. This example of unveiling is also from ‘Honey’:

Results

Me, A. (2020 →) I love people so they’ll do what I want.
he. B. (2020 →) You don’t have to be perfect for me to love you.
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Submission to Cordite 102: GAME

Posted on February 9, 2021 by Jini Maxwell

We are celebrating 25 years of publishing throughout 2021. Milestones include the 100th issue of Cordite Poetry Review, Cordite Books’s 40th print title and the free anthology 40 Poets, soon supplanting 20 Poets.

For 25 years we have kept Cordite Poetry Review free, credible, lively, diverse and ethical: paying authors and doing all we can to pay producers, commissioning and guest editors – careers equally as critical to make our publications happen – against daunting realities. It is a relentless endeavour, but necessary.

We’ve always been known, and will remain, simply as Cordite. The world knows who we are and what we contribute to literature.

Please consider making a DGR tax-free donation.

–Kent MacCarter

A game is an environment navigated by apparent rules and structured by invisible rules. All of these (and the game) can be broken if you know where to look.

A game is only ever a suggestion. To play is to choose to follow the rules as they are set out, or to break them. Language is a game for two or more players.

The language of play is powerful and not always positive. Playfulness can be a weapon: a refusal to engage, or worse, a coy abrogation of responsibility. We are interested in the way playfulness can be used to conceal power dynamics, or distort reality. Hours in front of a screen pass in an instant; two parallel colours become a horizon. A conspiracy theory is promulgated by apparent arguments, and structured by an invisible indifference to the facts.

We welcome experimental, interactive and multimodal submissions, from interactive literature, bots and small games to Oulipian and other constraint-based poetry, comics, fan fiction, folk games, performance and sound art. Submissions must not be password protected, and should not rely on accessing other sites for engagement.

For this issue we want to celebrate interaction, curiosity, surprise and play. We want work that unlocks something for you; we want you to look at the fork, and see the whole bird.

Submission to Cordite 102: GAME closes 11.59pm Melbourne time Sunday, 9 May 2021.

Please note:

  1. The guest editor(s) has sovereign selection choice for all poems submitted.
  2. Masthead editors will also contribute to the issue.
  3. We will only read submissions sent during our official submission periods.
  4. Cordite maintains a hybrid submissions policy. This means that the guest editor(s) may invite five (5) Australian and five (5) overseas authors directly to submit to the issue. In addition, the guest-editor(s) will anonymously select an additional 40 works from Australian authors and use their discretion to select further overseas works. For each issue, the guest editor does not know the identities of the online contributors (via Submittable) until after the final selections have been made.
  5. Simultaneous submissions or previously published material will not be considered. This includes works published in print and web journals but does not apply to material first published on personal blogs.
  6. 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.
  7. We are not able to offer feedback on individual poems.
  8. Submissions will only be accepted via Submittable …

submit


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James Jiang Reviews Duncan Hose’s The Jewelled Shillelagh

Posted on February 5, 2021 by James Jiang

The Jewelled Shillelagh by Duncan Hose
Puncher & Wattmann, 2020


‘HELLO FAERE CUNTIES!’ we are hailed in the opening lines of this rough-and-tumble volume, which swings between the campy and the choleric, the vatic and the venereal. The voice is sometimes that of a feral troubadour with pretensions to the lordly libertinism of Rochester (that ‘witty equivoque’):

Being too Bastinadoed for dancing tonight I’ll take my intol’able pleisure right here.
Would you rather get plucked off by elsa martinelli
or watch sian roarty clear a little bit of your warm live shot from her lip?

—at other times that of a poet-shaman evincing an Artaudian fascination with pagan cosmology:

It is the season of Xipe Totec (Sheep-he To.tek) Our Lord the Flayed One
            Alive to the tiniest thing by being ritually turned inside out
            In all dead forms the impersonator of life ...

A shillelagh is, as the back cover informs us, ‘a blackthorn club used variously as a walking stick, a companion, and a weapon’. Accordingly, these are combative poems and the ‘haranguing quality’ that Hose (who is also a literary scholar) has detected in John Forbes’ work (‘one is always being upbraided, or at least addressed’) provides a key to understanding his own. This poet does not mean to leave his readers alone:

I ought to take my wages in kisses I know bot
Headbutts are the major bullion 
                                   So come here ............

The tone of companionability edged with aggression closes the possibility of a polite distance between addresser and addressee. Hose’s shillelagh is thus an emblem of not only the rhetorical efficacy of his poems, but also their distinct modes of sociability – modes which reach both higher up and lower down the social order than the conventions of bourgeois respectability. We are as liable to be challenged to a chivalric duel as we are to be honoured as a fellow denizen of the demimonde (or simply another person on the pub crawl), but we are never allowed to settle comfortably into the position of the gentle/genteel reader.

Hose’s verse – what he dubs ‘Duncanpoiesie’ – takes some getting used to. It is wildly discontinuous in ways that the poems themselves seem to recognise: ‘Certainly what we see in operation is the Science of Motley’; ‘Mixa:mitosis ought to mean thinking and making in a ragedy fashion / Thinking in rags’. The raggedy edge of Hose’s wit makes ‘a sonic riddle for the human voix’ pulled in one direction by an appetite for rhetorical extravagance (‘-GET THE GOLD- I tell my disciples / Open up the ancient blue jets of rhetoric’) that brings to mind the pungency of Carlyle (‘Our fervid bio-squalor burned down to n egg-cup’s worth of snuff’) and pulled in another by a fidelity to the cadences of demotic speech:

Feelin so bolshie which means being
                        Like an uppity peasant as felt
                                   By the Bourgoisie
            Like the fat fuckin farmer who talks tender
                                    To his workhorse
                                              O’er the phone (Yr. a darling)

The erratic orthography and dynamic page prosody are crucial to the disheveledness – ‘a little shabbois (de- shabbie)’ [déshabillé?] – of Hose’s characteristic pose; they also contribute to an implicit privileging of the contingencies of oral performance over the fixity of the published text. The sheer pleasure of phonemic drift (‘Begatten Begettin Begotten’ or ‘Betelgeuse … Betelgeux … Betelguise’) in these poems is a testament to the vagaries of pronunciation and the richness of such imprecision (especially at the mongrel linguistic intersections of the Arabic, the Romanic, and the Anglo-Celtic). So is the unpredictability with which words such as ‘Bunratty’ are spelt (is it with one, two, or three ‘ts’ this time?) All of this means that Hose’s lines are more easily memorised and recited than transcribed with exactitude on the page, and it is with specifically oral traditions of songcraft that Hose is prone to associate his ‘chanteys’, which channel both the sea shanty and the medieval chanson.

While bracketing the obvious stylistic differences, it’s useful, I think, to consider Hose alongside PiO; these are two poets who consciously position themselves outside the mainstream of Australian poetry and one significant way in which they do so is by aligning their work with genres of oral performance. Long considered the doyen of ‘performance poetry’, PiO has nevertheless pointed to the parochialism of such a label when it overlooks its connection to one of the originary practices of Western poetics, namely, the recitation of Homeric epic by itinerant performers called ‘rhapsodes’. Hose’s work can also be considered ‘rhapsodic’ – not in the Homeric sense, but in the early modern usage of the term to mean a compilation or medley of verse riddles or slang rhymes. Rhapsodies such as The Hye-way to the Spyttel-House (composed in ‘cant’ or criminal jargon) and the Bannatyne manuscript (an anthology of medieval Scots verse) tapped into the obscure and sometimes disreputable registers of the vernacular, their linguistic esotericism tied to their speakers’ social marginality. In his study of lyric obscurity, Daniel Tiffany observes that in addition to an aesthetics of the miscellaneous, ‘the rhapsodic paradigm encompasses … various recurring waves of “indigent” poetry’ including ‘infidel oaths, thieves’ carols, beggars’ chants’ which ‘present a side of the rhapsodic tradition associated with profanity, malediction, and enchantment’. Compendia of shady language, rhapsodies record the songlines of a maligned if at times malignant shadow society.

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Tim Wright Reviews Sarah St Vincent Welch and Juan Garrido Salgado

Posted on February 5, 2021 by Tim Wright

OPEN by Sarah St Vincent Welch
Rochford Press, 2019

Cuando Fui Clandestino / When I Was Clandestine by Juan Garrido Salgado
Rochford Press, 2019



The achievements of the poets who started publishing in the early 1980s in Australia have tended to be overshadowed by those of the generation immediately prior to them. Rochford Press was started in 1983 by Mark Roberts and Adam Aitken, catching the tail-end of the little mag boom of the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1980s it was the imprint of the poetry little mag P76 and also published four collections (by Mark Roberts, Rob Finlayson, Les Wicks and Dipti Saravanamuttu). The press wound down activity in the early 1990s, and nothing more was published until Rochford Street Review started up in 2011, a neat demonstration that poetry makes its own time. Alongside the Review, which will shortly publish its 29th issue, there have been a handful of publications, mostly retrospective: the ‘best of’ compilation drawn from Rae Desmond Jones’ little mag Your Friendly Fascist, and the wonderful festschrift for Cornelis Vleeskens. More recently, with Linda Adair as publisher, the press has focused on current poetry, specifically a series of chapbooks that includes the two books under review: Sarah St Vincent Welch’s OPEN and Juan Garrido Salgado’s Cuando Fui Clandestino / When I Was Clandestine.

OPEN is a first book, though as the biographical note indicates, the author has been writing, both poetry and fiction, for many years. The chapbook consists of ten poems and an untitled prologue. An initial overview will give a sense of the range in what is, after all, a short book. The first four poems evoke a semi-magical atmosphere; the next two, ‘Nintendo’ and ‘He won’t be any trouble’, offer gentle, comic, parental realism, the latter in the form of satire; ‘Archaeology of Gardens’ continues the parental theme in addressing the poet’s own mother; ‘Fox’ returns us to some of the strangeness of the earlier poems, evoking the figure of Vali Myers; ‘821.3 in the old Civic Library’ offers observational, suburban realism (and incidentally is not the only Australian poem to reference that call number in its title: David Prater’s ‘A821.3’ begins, ‘that place where we all someday hope to die / or rot at least’); and the book closes with a freewheeling prose poem on the theme of openness.

It would be fair to say that OPEN took this reader a while to properly appreciate, partly, and somewhat contradictorily, because of this theme of – and the book’s entreaty towards – openness. The emphasis on openness came across, at first, as tendentious, an attempt to shepherd one’s reading of the book in a particular direction, and at worst as a kind of special pleading for the openness of these poems, which was in any case unnecessary. But on further reading, these misgivings were not borne out; only the prologue and the final, title poem could be said to labour the theme, and the rest are left to do their own thing. ‘Open’ is invoked by St Vincent Welch also in a different sense, that is, different from the way we might think of all poetic language as having the quality of being ‘open’, this being open as an imperative. In other words, the book contains a call towards openness. This comes through in a number of ways: the cover image, slightly reminiscent of a Magritte, depicting rustic windowshutters thrown open to reveal an interior ocean; the title poem’s refrain of ‘open me’, and in the prologue, which aestheticises the appeal – the magic – of opening a book specifically, seeming to position this book almost as a grimoire. This latter sense is also apparent in the poem ‘Story Time’, in its evocation of the speed and inventiveness of children’s games, their ability to create worlds: ‘We are old now, he says’ – and then they ‘are’. The boy’s bedroom, in this poem, becomes the interior of a ship, and it’s here the story time of the title begins, embedded within a story already created by the boy, ending: ‘He says, This is where / the old man and woman / left their books. // We read them.’ The interesting thing about this poem, and others in the book with the same theme, is that play is not deprecated or merely observed from an adult’s perspective, but taken seriously and participated in.

The first poem, ‘Half Moon Bay’, alerts the reader to St Vincent Welch’s fondness for chiasmus-like repetitions: ‘we waded out / out through . . .’; ‘so many people waded back / waded back / through the bay’. These read as ‘urgings on’ of the poem as it continues, a way for the poem to go on by folding back on itself, something like a cobbler’s stitch, wherein the thread is doubled-back to strengthen the stitch, before continuing. This poem introduces the atmosphere of the semi-magical mentioned earlier. Things happen – ‘we waded out’, ‘I found you singing’ – but the connections between them are permitted to remain vague. The title’s evocation of incompletion, of midpoint, might connect to this poem’s most irresolvable lines:

in the old year’s night
in blue violent haze
so many people waded back
waded back
through the bay
to me

Who are these people? And why are there so many of them? By these lines a poem that, from its first stanza, a reader might expect to resolve into a lyric commemorating a day at the beach with family or friends, turns strange. Are the people revenants? And is there any relation to the HMVS Cerberus hulk, mentioned in the first stanza, grounded as a breakwater in Half Moon Bay a hundred years ago? This poem exemplifies the double aspect of a number of these poems, on the daily world (‘quiet kitchens’) and a more mystical one, which Melinda Smith in her back-cover blurb describes as the poet’s ability to draw on ‘memory, myth and dream, while remaining tethered to life’s dailiness’.

‘Vasko asks me to play, and so I do . . .’ is influenced, as a note indicates, by the Serbian poet Vasko Popa. It begins:

in line we step now
now some out of line
long long toe steps
some now left behind

Which would go anywhere. It continues:

the wolf puffs, he
stills a statue, he
checks the sky
counts the shadows
we shout and totter
are chased
and eaten
we scream and question —
what’s for dinner?

From this point – while keeping its pace, even speeding up – the poem moves into a mode of fragmentary impression, the pronouns of the first stanza (he, we) disappear, and it veers into a form of concatenated sound sense, commingling with nursery rhyme:

polished bone raps
bone poked skin
throw it missile straight 
toss up hair high
high to pick up
quick a twelvsie
scatter
sweep
a onesie
a twosie
dead sheep

Without particularly wanting to challenge the old truism of the personal being political (by placing St Vincent Welch on one side and Garrido Salgado – of whom more shortly – on the other) these poems are personal, their meanings sometimes private ones. Something about the poems evokes for this reader the word ‘cherished’, which is definitely not to make a sly implication that they are over-esteemed by the poet, but rather the word is offered to try to communicate the sense that they feel lived-with, carefully selected, important for the poet, sometimes turned towards a realm of meaning and images that are intimate or private. While it is a reviewer’s cliché to conclude of a first book that it will be ‘interesting to see what the author does next’, in this case it seems justified; being a chapbook, OPEN provides only a glimpse of St Vincent Welch’s work, and yet within that, different directions are suggested, from the experimental to the more conventional.

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BROWNFACE editorial

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Winnie Siulolovao Dunn

I was 12 and in Year 7 when Chris Lilley’s mockumentary Summer Heights High aired on ABC for the first time. A few weeks after, an Anglo-Australian classmate – who looked like Eminem – came to school in a tupenu whilst strumming on a ukulele. He told everyone he was an honorary Fob. When I tried to explain to him that he was pālangi, a White person, he just flicked back his blond hair. ‘If Chris Lilley can do it, I can do it.’

Chris Lilley, an Anglo-Australian comedian, is best known for his shows that depict gay men, high school students of various racial backgrounds, Asian mothers, African American rappers and gossips. He has donned brown and black face paint, afro and blonde wigs and even slanted his eyes to portray these characters through racial and gendered stereotypes.

This issue of Cordite Poetry Review in particular focuses on the racist act of Brownface, especially in Australia. Brownface stems from the dehumanisation of Black people in the form of Blackface. Award-winning Afro-Caribbean-Australian author Maxine Beneba Clarke writes that Blackface was created when ‘White performers liberally applied black greasepaint or shoe polish and used distorted dialogue, exaggerated accents and grotesque movements to caricature people of African descent’ in the name of ‘art’.

Brownface and Blackface also disguises itself as many micro-aggressions: a Māui Halloween costume, spray tan, golliwogs, The Kardashians, ‘Australia Day’, AAVE and other forms of cultural appropriation.

In this 100th edition of poets across the globe come together to speak back to, reflect on and dismantle the systems of racism and White supremacy that have dictated our lives, our stories and our cultures. Award-winning Wiradjuri poet, filmmaker and educator Jazz Money calls out the White man’s shit. 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize winner, Sara Saleh, reminds us how colonisation and illegal occupation also has roots in the history of Brownfacing. Tokelauan and Fijian storyteller Emele Ugavule finds comfort in the Ancestors. Sāmoan Australian poet Christine Afoa struggles between her culture and White men.

As the editor, I was astounded and humbled to have accomplished and award-winning poets such as Annie Te Whiu (Te Rarawa), Eileen Chong, Thuy On, Rashida Murphy, Saba Vasefi and Yu Ouyang contribute. As a student of these writers, I am honoured to have their words grace and elevate this edition.

Cordite 100: BROWNFACE is also blessed to published perspectives from Aotearoa – where Māori and Pasifika voices have guided us in Australia to learn how to be empowered by our faces and voices. Dr Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Atiawa, Taranaki) centres us with a small yet powerful e-chapbook and Tongan, Niuean and Sāmoan poet and playwright Leki Jackson-Bourke confronts Brownface like a true Islander.

From Australia to Aotearoa to the Philippines to India and to the United States of America, we declare: If Chris Lilley can do it, we can undo it.

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged

maar bidi: Carving Sovereignty and Desire in Indigenous Youth Storytelling

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Elfie Shiosaki


maar bidi editors Rachel Bin Salleh, Elfie Shiosaki and Linda Martin. Image courtesy of UWA.

When will I be able to learn?
I’m weary of waiting
I’m told by others to be the best version of myself
but how can I, when I don’t know my full self
–Serena-May Brown, ‘Navigating home’1

Academia has inherited a long history of non-Indigenous people speaking for Indigenous people and defining Indigeneity and Indigenous cultural heritage – each recurring act erasing Indigenous voices and agencies to speak. Within the discipline of Indigenous Studies, scholars are carving out new transformative pedagogical spaces to create Indigenous-determined stories and storylines. We advocate that, now more than ever, next-generation Indigenous storytelling is needed to nurture intergenerational story cycles which imagine and enliven Indigenous-determined futures.

We gather at Bilya Marlee on Whadjuk Noongar boodja, where Kaart Geenunginyup Bo (the place from where you can look afar) meets the beeliar.2 We acknowledge the Whadjuk people of the Noongar Nation, their ancestors and Elders, and Whadjuk story cycles held in the land-, water- and skyscapes on boodja. We thank Whadjuk Traditional Owner Len Collard for creating the Noongar language phrase maar bidi for our collaboration. Maar bidi means to carve out a pathway with your hands. It can be translated as handwriting.

Plains Cree and Saulteaux woman Margaret Kovach teaches us that ‘we know what we know from where we stand’.3 Our knowledge is grounded in our own standpoint, and sense of place and belonging to place. We acknowledge our diverse standpoints on Whadjuk boodja. Elfie Shiosaki is a Noongar and Yaruwu writer. She is Lecturer in Indigenous Rights at the School of Indigenous Studies (SIS), and Editor of Indigenous Writing at Westerly. Linda Martin is a non-Indigenous lecturer in creative writing at SIS, an editor, and co-publisher of Night Parrot Press. Nadia Rhook is a non-Indigenous lecturer in history at SIS, and a published poet.

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