Birthplace | 出生地

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Feng Na

Translated by Henry Zhang and Amelia Dale

People always bring up my birthplace,
a cold Yunannese place with camellias and pines.
It taught me Tibetan, and I forgot.
It taught me a tenor; I haven’t sung
That register is a hard pine nut, hidden somewhere.
There are Muntjacs in the summer
and fire pits in winter.
The locals hunt, harvest honey, plant buckwheat
because it’s hardy. Pyres are familiar:
we don’t ask about the private life of death
or ask comets striking ruts in the earth.

They taught me certain arts
so that I might never use them.
I left them
so they wouldn’t leave me first.
They said that loving should be like fire
so that ashes needn’t need to burst into life.

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Posted in HOMINGS & DEPARTURES | Tagged ,

Canton Holiday | 广州假期

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Iris Fan Xing

Translated by Iris Fan Xing

1

thirty-nine thousand feet above
a thin blue line runs across
an unknown island on the map

on the other side of the equator
another pair of eyes
lead you through
peak hour crowds

old memories replaced by the new
some names match
their faces, others don’t

on a descending escalator
you see people ascending
for the New Year countdown

2

she said
when representing history
you need to defamiliarise

does she mean we should see
through the eyes of that stray cat?

sliding my hand into my pocket
touched two one yuan coins
except one slightly bigger

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Gin, Poetry, and Slaying the Devil: Joel M Toledo Interviews Lourd De Veyra

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Joel M Toledo


Photo by Annette Willis.

I caught up with award-winning writer and frontman of the jazz outfit Radioactive Sago Project as he prepares for the launch of his new book of poetry, Marka Demonyo. It’s the poet-journalist first collection since 2011, and the title alone (which translates to ‘Mark of the Devil’ in English) begs a closer inspection of what lies in the abyss of the book’s contents, and the impetus behind the verses.

Marka Demonyo is Lourd’s fourth collection of poems; the previous ones were Subterranean Thought Parade (1998), Shadowboxing in Headphones (2001), and Insectissimo! (2011). He’s been quite busy generating journalistic pieces and broadcast TV political commentary of late, as well as hosting his weekly music show/podcast Chillax Radio in one of the country’s local radio networks.

I, myself, have been a co-fellow of Lourd for a week-long national writing workshop ran by the University of the Philippines back in the early 2000s, his poems of the time buoyed by a growing fascination with local politics and phenomena, amid a backdrop of jazz and rock that has been a staple in his work. The latter made sense, too, as he had worked as a music writer for various Manila newspapers and magazines in the ‘90s.

We had wanted this online back-and-forth to come across as a more formal exchange, but the ongoing pandemic and too-much time quarantined at home (might have) messed with our heads a wee bit (the cases of COVID-19 in the Philippines continue to multiply, no thanks to shoddy government work).

At any rate, Lourd talks about how current politics in the Philippines informs his work in this quasi-banter. And why naming his new collection after a slogan from a local drink seems most symbolically apropos.

Joel M Toledo: It’s been a while since your last book, 2014’s Espiritu. What have you been up to?

Lourd de Veyra: What the hell are you talking about, Toledo? In 2018, I published a book called History with Lourd based on my pop history television program on (local news channel) TV5. It’s Philippine history without the academic avoirdupois. You don’t watch TV do you, you filthy snob?

JMT: Sorry, not really. My TV’s stuck on sports cable.

LdV: The dang show is regularly uploaded on YouTube. What the hell do you watch, Joel, endless Billy Collins readings and Anne Carson lectures?

JMT: Well, those and videos of llamas and cats. But I do like the several YouTube videos of more contemporary poets like Dean Young reading their poems. Anyway, tell us more about History with Lourd?

LdV: It’s like learning about Philippine history over a bunch of drunken gossips who happen to have PhDs. And it turns out that while the presentation is light, humorous, and oftentimes sarcastic, we make sure to counterbalance the blithe narrative with insights from real academic experts on certain subjects. So we’ve managed to tackle everything from debunking or confirming urban legends about certain presidents and revolutionary heroes to serious historical questions. The facts are there – names, dates, places – but we often discuss the context and the relevance of, say, seemingly esoteric 19th century events to the presently lovely shithole we’re in.

JMT: Hey, no cursing.

LdV: Sorry, sorry. I know Cordite Poetry Review might censor that. Let’s now try to make this sound like a Paris Review interview. And, since we’re all mostly jobless because of the pandemic, let’s just call it Writers with No Work.

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Conjuring Merlín with an ‘í’: Shannon Maguire Interviews Erín Moure

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Shannon Maguire


Image by Karis Shearer

Erín Moure is an internationally recognised, award-winning, poet and translator. Drawing upon multiple languages – including English, French, Galician, Spanish, Latin, ‘MacProse’, and Portuguese – her nineteen collections of poetry (including a collaborative collection with Oana Avasilichioaei) shift the margins of possibility in thought, language and feeling. Moure is the recipient of two honorary doctorates: one from the Universidade de Vigo, Spain, 2016, citing her ‘contribution to poetry and translation and Galician culture’ and another from Brandon University, 2008, citing her ‘contribution to Canadian poetry’. She won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry (Canada) for Furious (House of Anansi, 1988) and she is also multiple finalist for the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize for Poetry (in 2002, 2006 and 2008) for Sheep’s Vigil By A Fervent Person (her translation of Alberto Caeiro/Fernando Pessoa’s classic long poem ‘O Guardador de Rebanhos’), for her collection Little Theatres, and for Notebook of Roses and Civilization by Nicole Brossard, translated with Robert Majzels. While her own poetry is mainly published by Canadian publishers (such as Anansi and Book*hug), her translations have found homes beyond the border at publishing houses in the United States and the United Kingdom among others. Moure has translated sixteen volumes of poetry and four of creative non-fiction by writers working in French, Galician, Spanish and Portunhol. She has also translated six further collections of poetry in collaboration with other translators. She is twice a finalist for the Best Translated Book Awards (University of Rochester), in 2018 and 2020. Three of her books have been translated – into French, Galician, and German, attesting to the significance of her work for readers abroad as well as at home. My Beloved Wager: Essays From a Writing Practice, edited by Dr. Smaro Kamboureli (Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature, University of Toronto) in her Poets as Critics Series (NeWest Press, 2009), gathered Moure’s poetics essays written over several decades. Moure’s translation of Québécoise poet Louise Dupré’s Tous Comme Elle (Just Like Her) received a critically acclaimed production at the Luminato Festival in Toronto in June 2010 and featured an ensemble of fifty women on stage directed by Brigitte Haentjens. The versatility with which Moure moves between and among languages and genres sets her apart.

Erín and I first met and struck up a lasting poetics conversation a decade ago (in the summer of 2010) when she was my one-on-one summer mentor during my MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Guleph (Canada), where she helped bring my first collection of poetry to its final draft amidst the hardcore reading she assigned me in theory, feminist, and translation poetics. Since then, she has edited my second collection of poetry and I have edited a forty-year selected retrospective of her poetry, Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure (Wesleyan University Press, USA, 2017), for which I also wrote a critical introduction. I was honoured and delighted to have been asked by Kent MacCarter and Autumn Royal (with many thanks to Matthew Hall) to interview Erín on her enchanting most recent collection of poetry, The Elem:ents (House of Anasi, 2019), which we conducted by email in July and August, 2020.

Shannon Maguire: In your essay ‘Staging Vernaculars,’ from your book My Beloved Wager, you tell us: ‘In my own work in poetry, I often try to first think out a shape or physical presence, spatial, to advise me for each book … or: the book comes to me as spatial entity. Or: language itself for me is already spatial. Your most recent book, The Elem:ents (Nam:loz) (Anansi 2019), traces structural and even linguistic lines of flight between a father with dementia and his lesbian daughter who is a poet. Listening to the title in just English and French, we can hear ‘The Elle laments’. On the surface, the name of the book to me also evokes the Alexandrian mathematician Euclid’s magnum opus, ‘The Elements’, a text that defined the field of geometry for a couple of millennia until hyperbolic and elliptic geometry brought a non-Euclidian approach to the field in the nineteenth century, and which on an all-time bestseller list (at least in the West) comes in at second only to the Bible. But when I cracked your book open and saw its division into eight parts, and noticed pages like p. 90 where the page is explicitly dimensional (I know you have said elsewhere that all pages are dimensional, but you very clearly show us that in giving us Saskatoon Mountain, for example), I wondered if you wrote this book with a particular shape or ‘spatial presence’ in mind?

Erín Moure: My idea was to create a kind of day-book of writings in which poetry and thinking could both exist without hierarchisation, as the poem ‘Purpose’ sets out (p. 24). And a book that would see my Dad’s way of thinking, through dementia, as also a valid way of thinking, one way of thinking. This was important. I was coming to Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and my father (who lived in Edmonton) had wanted to write the book with me (it was a ‘demented’ idea but I accepted it and told him he could write it too), but he died ten days before I arrived to take up the residency. The acknowledgements end with an envoi that describes my reason for writing the book: In the absence of poetic razón: / To make wording for my father, / and to retrace my own meridian. Of course, my mention of ‘meridian’ evokes Paul Celan’s 1960 speech on writing poetry, The Meridian, in which he says, in part, that poetry is ‘homage to the majesty of the absurd which bespeaks the presence of human beings’. Celan says that this actually has no name, but he thinks of it as poetry. Further on in the same speech, he says, and I shorten here: ‘the poem has always hoped to speak on behalf of an altogether other’.

A person with dementia is, in themselves, I think, experiencing world and self as an altogether other at almost every moment. People in general try to ‘correct’ them, or quiet their fears with pharmaceuticals (the disconnective reasoning of dementia is extremely anxious and fearful). In dementia, I observed, though ongoing thinking is based – as is all thinking – in one’s current condition, you can’t take that condition as in any way settled or stable; you can’t even take notions of time as grounded and settled! Basic notions that most people take for granted that keep us settled as beings is unsettled in dementia. This makes thinking very different, as even time is constantly in question.

I call the book The Elements as it is about one of the elements of life, the good, bondade: goodness, which in Galician also means kindness. I talk about this on the copyright page, and the cover image speaks this as well: on the cover, in a famous photo, the allegorical image of goodness on the Dresden City Hall is intact and staring over the bombed city as if the city, in turn, were the allegory of dementia and the physical state of the demented brain. In a sense, though my father was far from the perfect human, and was early on not a father you always wanted in the house (he didn’t like being a father and was too often an angry person), he ended his life as a good man. Goodness won him. Namloz enters into the title as a counterpoint to the element of goodness, of kindness: for despite these basic elements, we are all fundamentally nameless. Altogether other. Even if we have names, we can lose those names. We are always losing our names and regaining them.

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‘Chops and surrender’: Nam Le Interviews Jaya Savige

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Nam Le

Jaya Savige was born in Sydney, raised on Bribie Island, and lives in London. Jaya has lived overseas since 2009, when he received a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to read for a PhD on James Joyce at the University of Cambridge (Christ’s College). Since 2013 he has lectured in English Literature and Creative Writing at the New College of the Humanities in Bloomsbury, a block from the British Museum, where he founded the Creative Writing degree. His first poetry collection, Latecomers (UQP, 2005), published when he was 26, won the New South Wales Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for a number of other awards; his second, Surface to Air (UQP, 2011) was shortlisted for The Age Poetry Book of the Year and the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry. He is the long-standing poetry editor for the Weekend Australian, the recipient of travelling fellowships from the Marten Bequest and Brisbane Lord Mayor, and Australia Council residencies at the B R Whiting Studio, Rome, at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.

Jaya’s third collection, Change Machine (UQP, 2020) was released earlier this year. We’d planned to do at least part of this interview in person but the pandemic didn’t cooperate so we were forced, from our London and Melbourne lockdowns, into email excursus about uncanny automata, zombies and nanomorphic killer-bots.

Nam Le: I should put my cards on the table. When I read Change Machine in proof last year, I wrote this in an email to you: ‘You know that Justice Potter Stewart throwaway about porn – that he doesn’t know exactly how to define it but knows it when he sees it? – I felt that strongly reading Change Machine that it’s got it. “It” being, I guess, sensibility: which is, in this case, this compounding combo of candour and courage, intelligence and play, rhythm and humour and blues. This is a full-spectrumed collection, ranged through geography and history, self and other, claiming every register in a way that’s super rare nowadays. The poems of ‘daddydom’, especially, slayed me. Bravo to you – if this is the fruit of nine years, it’s to my mind more than well worth it.’

Nine years. It’s a long time, in which a lot’s happened. To, in, around you. A lot of this comes out, in various ways, in Change Machine. (I mean … the title!) So, a couple of easy warm-up questions: How has your poetry changed in that time? How your poetics? And (pushed to hazard) why?

Jaya Savige: Thanks for these kind words Nam. How has my poetry changed? I find that a tough question to answer. I’ve been thinking lately that a book of poems is a bit like a shed snakeskin, or a moulted spider-crab carapace; it’s true that nine years is quite a while to spend moulting. A snake expert apprehending a shed snakeskin, or a marine biologist a moulted shell, can probably make accurate inferences about the creature who shed it – its genus and species, age and habitat, and idiosyncrasies such as scars or markings – and the changes it has gone through. But if you were to ask the creature itself how it has changed, the answer would surely be different: my guess is that it would focus more on the protracted feeling of tightness, stretching and chafing in the skin or shell, the struggle and pain of birthing yet another iteration of itself, and the mixed feelings of radical possibility, vulnerability and precarity (in its broadest sense) that attend the process.

Alternatively, I sometimes think of an author’s books as the growth rings seen in the cross-section of a tree trunk. The reader of tree-rings, a dendrochronologist, might infer that at a certain time a tree lived through a drought, and would speak of changes in the tree’s biomass, nutrient uptake and morphology, as well as externalities like the levels of rainfall, acidity of the soil, and so on. But if you were to ask the tree for its account of the period marked by such a ring, I’d expect a description of enduring thirst – I’m thinking of parts of Patrick White’s Voss, or J M Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K – where privation takes on metaphysical dimensions.

So, I can attempt to be the creature that speaks to its own shed skin or shell, or the tree that speaks to its own growth rings – with the caveat that a biologist or dendrochronologist (reader, critic) will do a better job of identifying and illuminating what changes might have occurred in this book, while I can speak to the experience of that change.

NL: Can I jump in here? You’ve called my chicken, to mix metaphors: you’re right – my question was flagrantly overbroad. And deserves your answer that beautifully forestalls answer. (What’s more poet-like than to offer up the pleasures of metaphor – surprise; shapely figuration; rightness of fit, with slack enough to invite adjustment – in order to free up one’s own authority? (Including – or especially – from itself?)) I love these metaphors (and want to come back to them) although I suspect we could talk to them all day –which was probably your dastardly intention! – so let me ask you more specifically: what’s gone on in your life these last nine years that might particularly have bent your pen?

JS: Ha! You’re right, I’ve succumbed to the poet’s age-old defence against self-accounting! Perhaps most obviously, the poems in Change Machine were written over the last decade, while I’ve been living abroad, mostly in London, with stints also in Cambridge (UK) and Paris. The sheer passage of time, together with my distance from home has undoubtedly had an impact on my writing. It’s fair to say the book is the product of someone with a decade’s more life experience, uprooted from subtropical South East Queensland and Moreton Bay, and replanted loosely in the UK and the European continent. With that comes a whole host of changes, from the minute to the overarching. Relocating to the UK does not involve anything like the culture shock of moving beyond the Anglosphere; the differences are subtler, but no less perplexing – there is an uncanniness to it, the unnerving similarity-with-difference. Anyone who moves abroad is constantly recalibrating their understanding of their source-culture and their present one, both at a relatively trivial level – e.g. the different set of constellations in the sky; jarring divergences in idiom – and at deeper levels too. In the latter, I’d include differences in historical, cultural and geopolitical perspectives and attitudes, not least of all those concerning the legacies of European imperialism and colonialism.

In terms of the book’s more personal themes, as you say, I’ve also become a father. On the flipside, serial pregnancy-loss endured with my partner was also a feature of these years. Both find their way into poems in the book. For the vast majority of this time, I was a signed-up member of the academic precariat, working as a sessional lecturer in London; I think of these as pretty dark years really, characterised by hard graft, exasperation and at times, frankly, despair. I’d say the existential effects of being cut from the familial, social and artistic ecologies of home were compounded by these things. All were part of the weather and soil of this book, but their impact is often felt in combination. To take one example, a poem like ‘Tips for Managing Subsidence’ would not exist without those losses with my partner, and also the tendency of very old houses in England to subside and crack (which I’d never encountered before). So, these changes have a way of being bound up together.

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Poetry Against Neoliberal Capitalism in Ali Alizadeh and Melinda Bufton

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Julia Clark


Image courtesy of Literary Minded

Poetry has a long history of disruption, resistance, and revolution, overlapping the concerns of politics with literature and the boundaries of language. In globalised, late-stage capitalism, the place of language as a tool for propaganda, denial, and romanticisation is ever shifting to accommodate online engagement metrics and algorithms that alter and manipulate one’s lens onto the world. ‘Late’ as a qualifier for capitalism is used here to loosely encompass the end of the 20th and into the 21st century as a period over which the individualistic ideology of neoliberalism has grown and prospered. Rather than address systemic or structural inequality, neoliberal individualism instead charges the consumer with endless self-improvement tasks purported as a way to use systemic oppression to one’s advantage. For Australian poets Ali Alizadeh and Melinda Bufton, writing into and around capitalism means subverting the figure of the individual by positioning the lone poet against the systems of power that uphold inequity and oppression. Both Bufton and Alizadeh identify the hollowing out of language as a key component to capitalistic dominance whether through jargon as elitist gatekeeping or sexism in-built to corporate culture.

In their criticism of capitalism, each poet approaches the issue with a different focus. Towards the End settles amongst Alizadeh’s varied literary career of novels, non-fiction, poetry, and hybrid texts that reflect Alizadeh’s interest in traversing boundaries of content and form (‘Profiles: Ali Alizadeh’). This new collection continues his work of ‘documenting and exploring literary works … which oppose the discourses of the ruling class’ (‘Profiles: Ali Alizadeh’) with a specifically Marxist critique of capitalism rooted in class struggle and the distinction between the working class and the professional class in creative spaces. Some poems like ‘What We Want’ and ‘Thus Capital’ use a sardonic tone to explore commodity desire as a distorted sexual subjugation while ‘Alphabet City’, ‘The Academy’, and ‘The Point’ directly engage with the intersections of profit-driven capitalism and poetic practise.

Moxie, Bufton’s third poetry collection, builds on her previous publications’ interest in the side-lined and denigrated realms of girlhood and womanhood. In this collection, a centring of femininity in corporate environments leads the poetry through neoliberal postfeminism and the unique experience of navigating gendered labour. Bland corporate-speak is manipulated into a witty critique of structures of power that would usually hide behind the allusions and inexactitudes of project management and team meetings. ‘Always Collect You Earned Medallions’ and ‘In your Spare Time you Climb the Ladder (Competition Is the Prize)’ present disquieting scenes of sexism in workplaces and the expectations placed on women workers to adequately perform femininity. These poems use examples of physical comparison and self-policing by women to demonstrate the effects of neoliberal individualism as they manifest for women in consideration of their clothing, hair, makeup, and even their voices. Additionally, Bufton reclaims the language of the postfeminist ‘girl-boss’ to undermine an empty message of empowerment that further burdens women as solely responsible for escaping their oppression.

Both poets imagine poetry as the last bastion of meaning, the final opportunity for change, which is particularly poignant in the current national and international climate. In Towards the End and Moxie the figure of the poet arises against neoliberal capitalism and its degradation of language. Institutions and systems of power have been revealed as inadequate in the face of climate change, COVID-19, and anti-racism activists. The language of these very institutions and systems are unwound and reimagined with poetry and language as tools for change in the new work of Alizadeh and Bufton.

Alizadeh’s style of poetry reflects his personal investment in investigating philosophy and politics from a radical Marxist perspective. In interviews Alizadeh has spoken candidly about the intention of his poetry and his self-description as a ‘philosopher-poet’ (McLaren) with an interest in directly injecting writers like Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou, and Michel Foucault into contemporary Melbourne scenes. When positioning himself amongst Australian poets, Alizadeh defines himself with two concerns: a disinterest in naturalistic imagery and ‘excessive grammatical playfulness and verbal sophistry’ and as writing in resistance of ‘Australian survivorism’ (Brennan). Alizadeh conceptualises this framework of ‘survivorism’ as

the hegemonic expression of the will to be seen as a survivor, this ‘survivor’ being some sort of Lacanian imago – a coherent image one wants to identify one’s messy ego with – produced by certain historical, political and economical factors, and maintained by cultural and, in this case, literary forces (Brennan).

Rather than operating like the myth of the Aussie battler, ‘Australian survivorism’ is ‘a systemic and inconspicuous mechanism of representation’ through which Australian literature has been engaging since the early twentieth century (Brennan). From this perspective Alizadeh can be described as cognisant and resistant to dominant discourses and power dynamics within Australian colonialism and its relationship with Australia’s literary identity. He is interested in the collective rather than the individual, speaking to movements and ways of thinking that strive to reject capitalistic self-interest. As a result, his poetry engages with grand concepts of war, revolution, and global social and economic forces.

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

Direct Action on Things: Harry Hooton and Artist Film in Australia

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Giles Fielke

Let your soul stay cool and composed before a million universes.

A line from 1855, first published by Walt Whitman in the poem ‘Song of Myself’, appears again at the beginning of a film produced during a Creative Arts Fellowship at the Australian National University in 19691 Out of the 19th century transcendentalism of New England, the film’s subject emerges as ‘Anarcho-Technocracy’, specifically as it was theorised and transmitted by expatriate poet Harry Hooton (1908-1961). Hooton had died in middle age in Sydney, celebrated as the ‘poet of the 21st century’ by his friends and devotees. In this way, the trans-mediation of his poetry and philosophy onto film seemed strangely appropriate for his ambitious idealism: Leave man alone, man is perfect. Concentrate instead on matter.

In post-War Australia, Hooton’s vehicle to this future was titled 21st Century: The Magazine of a Creative Civilisation. It was first reviewed in December 1955 in the following way:

While there is much that may be pure 19th Century about most of Australia’s literary magazines (in, say, the ‘liberalism’ of ‘Meanjin’, the stuffiness of ‘Southerly’, the rough-neck-ism of the ‘Bulletin’, and the inverted Henry Lawson unionism of ‘Overland’), ‘21st Century’ in this, its first September issue, is at least 20th Century. (Fleming)


Figure 1: 21st Century: The Magazine of Creative Civilisation (September 1955). Edited by Harry Hooton. Design and Layout: Brian Ford and Margaret Elliott. Circulation: Corinne Joseph.

But only two issues of 21st Century would appear (the second in 1957, Figure 1). Following Hooton’s death, yet unbeknownst to them at the time, two of Hooton’s 21st Century collaborators would separately go on to have a significant impact on filmmaking in Australia: Corinne Joseph and Margaret Elliott. Joseph was in charge of the distribution of the inaugural September 1955 issue, Elliott the designer (along with Brian Ford). In 1969 it was Corinne Cantrill (née Joseph) who would make Harry Hooton with Arthur Cantrill, while living in Canberra, after having returned from a four-year stint in London. The Hooton film was intended to be a realisation of the poet’s materialist polemics: using direct film techniques, monochromatic light and hand processing, more than simply a biographical homage to the poet or a retelling of his life, it was an application of his thinking to the medium of film. In Harry Hooton, matter is the issue, the film-strip precedes the projection of light and the amplification of sound in the expanded field of the cinema as an audio-visual environment.2 Alongside the images, Arthur Cantrill composed a series of musique concrète using reel-to-reel tape processing – on a Revox A77 – whereby they understood the recording of sound as an instrument in itself. Their Nagra and Ferrograph machines allowed for feedback to mix into the synthesised sound. 3 Interspersed throughout the heavily abstracted and post-processed montage which organises the film, are audio clips of Hooton speaking as if from beyond the common grave in which he was interred; he had recorded 510 minutes of his poetry and philosophy to tape from his death bed, now available as digital audio through the National Library of Australia. The film, made 50 years ago, has since faded into historical obscurity. However, like the figure whose influence reached far beyond the poets and polemicists of Australia’s east coast (as Sasha Soldatow set out in the editorial introduction to Hooton’s Collected Poems in 1990), the Cantrills’s films have made a significant impact on a form of cinema variously known as ‘avant-garde’ or ‘experimental’ not only locally, but around the world, as recent retrospective screening programs of their work in Spain and Germany attest.

Artist-film and its relation to poetry is a principle concern of their early work, But the links existing between the practice and production of the two in Australia during the 20th century have not yet been established (see Laird). This may be because the Cantrills prefer ‘particular screenings’ of the hundreds of films they produced over five decades, and they have tightly control their distribution. Yet Harry Hooton remains important in that it represents a way into their fiercely independent work. It was screened in public as recently as June 2019 at the Arsenal in Berlin (see Stein). Furthermore, other than for the occasional presentations of the film, there is very little literature examining Hooton’s concerns for the 21st century, his poetry and philosophy of ‘Anarcho-technocracy’.


Figures: 2A & B. Front and back covers of Cantrills Filmnotes, Nos. 49,50 (April 1986) featuring images from Harry Hooton (1970) by Arthur & Corinne Cantrill.

Cinemapoetry

In 1986, on the occasion of the fiftieth issue of their journal, Cantrills Filmnotes, Arthur and Corinne Cantrill returned to Hooton, placing stills from their feature-length work on the front and back cover of the issue (Figures. 2a & b). The decision was self-referential: in the same year as they’d made Harry Hooton, they’d published a ‘Cinema Manifesto’ in the first issue of what would become a 30 year publishing project, by quoting Hooton there too: ‘LOVE MATTER TO DEATH, LET IT FEEL YOUR BREATH’ (Arthur Cantrill, ‘Cinema Manifesto’, 3). In 1970, the Hooton film had premiered at the Canberra Film Society, screening in the Copland Lecture Theatre at ANU on the 2nd of September. This was five years after their first ‘overview screening’ by the Brisbane Cinema Group, run by Stathe Black, which occurred before they had headed to London to work in film and television.4 The Cantrills’s first films appeared in 1963, cautiously navigating the conventional documentary and pedagogical forms (one early film, Mud, was shot in New Zealand at Rotorua’s thermal springs).5 In 1969 they had returned to Australia, resolved as to what they needed to do, the first issue of the Filmnotes appeared in March 1971, not long after the Hooton film’s premiere. In it they declared: ‘We want to make films which defy analysis, which present a surface so clean, so hard, that it defies the dissector’s blade’ (Arthur Cantrill, ‘Cinema Manifesto’, 3). Fifteen year later, inside Issue 50 of the Filmnotes, the Editors’ Comment reprinted the first lines of Hooton’s ‘Poetry’:

There are no rules for poetry
Necessity makes, and breaks all rules. (Hooton, ‘Poetry’, Poet of the 21st Century, 101).

Their aim for film was the reconciliation of form and content, and the enduring influence of Hooton’s unique mixing of poetry with philosophy presented itself as a significant and local model for how to do this. Furthermore, they’d both seemed to coalesce around and figure out how to articulate the energies emanating from the unique conditions that had produced the amorphous scene known as the Push in post-War Sydney.

During the Second World War, Hooton had come to believe artists were the truly anarchic figures who could thus be the ‘technicians’ required for the benevolent administration of things in the industrialised dictatorship to come. At the same time, a teenaged Corinne Joseph had taken the chance provided by the wartime economy to study botany as an unmatriculated student at Sydney University. Australian cinema during the war years was dominated by the films of Charles and Elsa Chauvel, and the adventure documentaries of Frank Hurley. Yet, as Danni Zuvela has shown, there are also a number of early films made in Australia that ‘illuminate the conditions leading into the development of organised systems of experimental production, distribution and exhibition’ of film here, leading to the moment in the 1960s when experimentalism would take flight (2).

Arriving in Sydney in 1948, the Czech artist Dusan Marek began to produce short films in the early 1950s, which were directly influenced by European Surrealism, in turn an aesthetic response to the totalitarianism from which Marek had fled (7). Corinne had travelled in Europe after the war – at one point working with the International Youth Brigade on the Dobuj-Banja Railway in Yugoslavia – before returning to Sydney and eventually working in childrens’ creative leisure centres (Pinguim). Meanwhile, Arthur Cantrill had met Hooton through his work in the same programs in Sydney in the late 1950s. By that stage Corinne had already been associated with Hooton through his publishing projects, and when, in 1959, she and Arthur were both moved to Brisbane to work with disadvantaged children during school holiday programs, they moved in together and turned to collaborating on filmmaking, which followed from the theatrical activities they had devised for children (Arthur had for some time worked in puppetry).


Figure 3: Front cover of Cantrills Filmnotes, Issue 1 (March 1971).

The other figures listed alongside Hooton in the first issue of the Cantrills Filmnotes (later it became simply Cantrills Filmnotes) are more recognisable as the artist-film luminaries that one would expect as reference points for such a journal. Fellow expatriate from the South Pacific, Len Lye, is there. The Cantrills had encountered Lye in Europe in the 1960s, and the link foreshadows their concern for the growing idea ‘pan-pacific’ artists in the global imaginary. Other canonical touch-points include Marcel Duchamp, whose Anémic Cinéma (1926) appeared on the cover of the first issue of Filmnotes, beside images from the even earlier artist-film Perfido Incanto (1917), directed by Anton Giulio Bragaglia. Bragaglia was associated with the Italian Futurists, and the manifesto of 1916, La Cinematografia Futurista, was translated at ANU and included by the Cantrills as the final text of the first issue of their journal (Figure 3)6 It therefore remains a quirk of this moment that the man they celebrate as one of their ‘mentors’ has since that time all but succumbed to the vicissitudes of a minor history. Hooton, as well as contemporary poets like Jas H Duke, Garrie Hutchinson, and Charles Buckmaster would come to provide the Cantrills with direct links to the performance of poetry in post-war Australia, even as they continued to explore new media, particularly on film and video. Most significant for this development, it seems, were the events held at The Maze, a countercultural venue for artists, for selling crafts, books, and even food in Flinders Street, Melbourne.

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3 Amir Hamzah Translations

Posted on October 1, 2020 by James Scanlan

Amir Hamzah (1911-1946), the greatest Indonesian poet of his generation, was born into the ruling family of Langkat, a Malay sultanate within the Dutch colonial government’s East Sumatra Residency. Amir’s love of his native Malay language and its literary heritage, as well as his Islamic faith, developed in the cultured atmosphere of his immediate family circle, where recitations of the classics of Malay literature were a regular occurrence and where Islamic devotion was tinged with the mystical perspectives that had been fostered in the sultanate. This cultural background was enriched by a formal education, conducted principally through the medium of Dutch, which began in Sumatra and continued in Java, where he was sent to a Christian secondary school in the colonial capital Batavia (Jakarta). His secondary education was completed in Surakarta, a centre of Javanese culture, at a school specialising in Oriental Studies (including language studies in Javanese, Sanskrit and Arabic).

While at school in Surakarta, Amir was elected leader of the local branch of Indonesia Muda (‘Young Indonesia’), a youth organisation that supported the rapidly developing nationalist movement and the adaptation of Amir’s native Malay language (bahasa Melayu) as the national language of a unified and independent Indonesian archipelago (the Indonesian language, bahasa Indonesia). Despite his membership of an indigenous aristocracy maintained by the Dutch colonial government, he continued his active support of the nationalist movement and the development of the Indonesian language throughout the rest of his life.

Returning to Jakarta at the age of 21 to study for a law degree, he began publishing poems and prose pieces in literary journals and immersed himself in a literary environment dedicated to the development of a truly Indonesian literature. Quickly becoming a prominent representative of this generation of ‘new writers’ (pujangga baru), he was co-founder of the influential cultural and literary journal Pujangga Baru, launched in 1933.

Amir Hamzah’s vision for the new Indonesian poetry was for the revitalisation of a Malay poetry that had lost the spiritual and emotional potency of its traditional symbolism, as well as its inspirational connection with the heroic era of Malay history and legend. Impelled by that vision, and with a profound poetic sensibility shaped by the cultural, educational and linguistic influences outlined above, he produced a corpus of 68 poems, principally written in the decade between 1928 and 1937. Most of them were originally published in two special issues of Pujangga Baru: the collection titled Nyanyi Sunyi [Songs of Solitude] in November 1937 and the collection Buah Rindu [Fruits of Longing] in June 1941. Although first to be published, Nyanyi Sunyi is a collection of his later work, and is generally regarded as his greatest achievement.

While many writers of his generation found inspiration for the new poetry in Western (particularly Dutch) models, Amir looked to the East. In its October 1939 issue, Pujangga Baru published a collection of his versions of poems from Persian, Turkish, Indian, Chinese and Japanese literature under the title Setanggi Timur [Incense of the Orient], many of which are on the theme of the poet’s relationship with the Divine – a prominent theme in Nyanyi Sunyi. Pujangga Baru also published Amir’s translations (from Dutch versions) of the Bhagavad Gita and sections of the Biblical Song of Solomon.

Love and longing are at the centre of much of Amir’s poetry, in which the symbolic correspondence of romantic and spiritual love is raised from the level of poetic convention to that of visionary experience. The deep romantic relationship of Amir’s early maturity was with a Javanese girl whom he met when they were fellow students in Surakarta. That relationship – the inspiration for some of his most beautiful poems – came to an agonising conclusion when he was summoned back to Langkat in 1936 to enter an arranged marriage with a daughter of the Sultan and to fulfil his princely duties in the administration of the sultanate. Devoting himself to the faithful and compassionate performance of those duties, he abandoned the writing of poetry.

Amir Hamzah died in 1946 at the hands of militant revolutionaries. During the so-called ‘social revolution’ in East Sumatra, aimed at the dismantling of the sultanates, dozens of Malay aristocrats were indiscriminately and brutally killed in the sultanate of Langkat alone. Amir’s death, at the age of 35, has an aspect of tragic irony considering his active involvement in the nationalist movement, his prominent role in the promotion and development of the Indonesian language, and his outstanding contribution to Indonesian literature. In recognition of those achievements, he was proclaimed a National Hero by the President of Indonesia in 1977.

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PROPAGANDA Editorial

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Mez Breeze

Loaded term: propaganda. Hardly the mild descriptive tag of its origin, the word now invokes visions of cynical manipulation, grand conspiracies to turn entire populations against their own interests and against each other.

Sure, plenty of coordination between bad actors is necessary to create and operate echo chambers algorithmically crafted to bum-steer misinformation directly through [to] individuals or the rampant incitement that disinformation spawns. But so much of the pervasive stench from today’s propaganda stems from the banality of dumb profit as greed and cowardice combined to form a most useful idiocy. At every turn in today’s social-media-directed [dictated] news cycles we get to observe and understand propaganda’s machinations in real time.

Lucky us.

Indeed, so pervasive is today’s machine that it may be useful to conceptualise poetry itself as a type of anti-propaganda because although it exists outside morality, poetry’s emotional hooks capture and funnel attention more towards cohesion than division. The urge to explore and craft language in this way is in itself progressive. Poetry can be seen as the rendering and promulgation of an interpreted shape of truth, where propaganda is a backwards-firing truth engine, one that smears us all with a rotten illusion of reality through a dreadful merging of information, manipulation and biases.

This distinction—of poetry manifesting as an antithesis to propaganda—can lead to the hopeful harnessing of poesis as a counteraction agent: a salve, if not a panacea. Works such as Sarah Temporal’s ‘[91 days]’ act as a clever neutralisation of logo-spin where the reworking of form is crucial. Meanwhile, Victor Billot’s ‘How good is this?’ helps to counteract the taste of abandonment during a recent national crisis where Australians were left bereft of leadership, truth, and info-transparency. Failure of leadership also informs Pascale Burton’s piece ‘There’s a Boom Up There (After Scott Morrison)’, which turns language manipulation into an absurdist toy, exposing the indifference of entrenched power. And then there’s the moment in Alisha Yi’s ‘Film #6: Eve in Vietnam, July 8, 1968’ where the haunting turn of phrase ‘No bodies mark our stay,’ stirs emotions well outside any propagandist’s range.

This issue is filled with such moments. The works here by their mere existence seek out propaganda, expose it, neutralise it, counter it. If you need reassurance that we are not beholden to our basest instincts, these poems are a good place to start.

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3 Antoine Emaz Translations

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Luc Arnault

The French versions of these poems were published in the anthology Caisse Claire. Thank you to Charles Rice-Davies for his help in proof-reading, and Anne-Sophie Petit-Emptaz for her kind words and encouragement.

A Poem, Without Moving

I

Within the limits of possibility, the sea. But already, with this desire for swells and air, like an improvement, a breath a bit wider.
Glued to the summer, a provincial town, whatever its name, far away in motionless lands. And the sea, up there, vast, due north, waiting.

A jar of grey sand: nothing else to find one’s way. Most often, it is enough: a jar of sand and a few rough grains stuck on the tip of fingers or on the table: one gathers these crumbs, making small heaps, and if the sea does not come on the table, it is not far, called out by the sand – maybe a movement in the sand again – one just needs not to see anymore.

//

A pinch of salt and the sea comes back in the body, the whole body, from the hand.

Not a memory, a swell made of waves; some seen, some gone from sight, an ebb of melted images, blended… From memory, a wave comes to the front of the head – past turning into desire – a head wave is going to break, one can feel it breaking, the limit of the image now, also dynamic, the hollow of a muscle, very quickly broken.

//

Another day here, a new patch of sky and it all starts again, bleak blue, dead quiet, summer. Lowering. Inertia. A limp head under the blue, and muggy air.

Wimereux, Ambleteuse, Slack… names of places, indeed, what else but mere names, without the water?

stark countryside packed town
heavy oak forests in a corner
truly
a lack of air

//

Here, without a movement. One keeps cool, inside, blinds shut.
The summer outside continues: stubble-fields.
In the north, tight rain, grey, the dyke and smell of seaweed. Drenched.
Or the flat sea and, sitting in a hollow of sand, a dune cheek, let the sea stir, brood over, far ahead.

Here, the heat on the town packs the already low and tidy houses a bit further down, their slate roof burning. The body flowing. One dreams of being close to deep water, to see its thick dark green, tightening the eye. To be on water, almost sleeping in a fresh muscle, curled up in tight and clear fibres.

//

Cliffs in the eye: dull colours, dominant brown, ochre, dirty beige. The story of a land broken here, clear-cut: at its foot, the sea beats slowly. Patience of a hand passing, and using. Like the limit of a body, the birth of a skin. Masses of green, masses of brown, some motionless, some moving, limiting each other, containing each other, this is roughly what comes to the eyes when, without seeing, one looks at the small garden, by the window.

the sea against
the summer

Very little grasp in fact of what happens in the eye. An image superimposing itself on the outside until it is deleted: it is almost mute except for a lapping sound, light, and far away in the silent house.

//

Sea: a mane of hair of course, undone plaits heavy locks unknotted slow train of a jellyfish, so easily, breathing water. Rippling, throbbing, moving hair, vast foliage… the image draws away, drifting out of reach.
A landscape out at sea: what cannot be grasped and embraced. Shapeless sea, neutral mass, moving. The image of a jellyfish comes back, with its long suite of thin hair.
Curls of murmuring sea foam.
Wrack, kelp, dead mane of hair.

Green seaweed, short loose hair, waving in thick water. Children’s words come back through these supple seaweeds in clear water. Currents, long invisible muscles grasped when the body meets them: a brisk cold, a warmth.

Here comes back more clearly and unquestionably what is experienced up there like a disturbing infatuation, a confusing pleasure.

//

The sea without a grip. Obstacle.
Somehow, no desire to cross through. A halt without any pain. Indifferent, and yet blocked off.
The wall, the sea.
Short-circuit-contact, there.
Was it the energy carrying? The sea has erased the summer: the sea is erasing itself now, losing itself within the forces. In mind, a neutral space remains, barely beaconed by stakes.

Strange journey, as if the image had come out of the eye but the town had not, nor the garden either, outside.

II

whatever the name of this town
far away in motionless lands
the summer holds it
fast
a street towards the sky
and the sun
tackling to the ground

down this street
empty
one waits

//

comes the wind first
and salt in the air
then water
words without a sound
in deep water
in mind a swell
lifting a large cradle
and memory weighs moves slow
swell of memory
a mute moving image

words the sea
fold
the street the sky

the summer bows

//

a wave another
erases

the heart calms down
and the body becomes air
in slow ripples

green water
here
nowhere

no further words like
the breeze
undone out at sea
in water and air
free

//

slow is the night coming
and resting the town

ebb

one gathers

the street is blue

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Excerpt from In the Time of the Manaroans

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Miro Bilbrough

Miro Bilbrough’s memoir, In the time of the Manaroans, is set in a remote countercultural milieu in Aotearoa in the late seventies. At 14, Bilbrough fell out with the communist grandmother who had raised her since she was seven, and was sent to live with her father and his rural-hippy friends. Isolated in rural poverty, the lives of Miro and her father and sister were radically enhanced by the Manaroans – charismatic hippies who used their house as a crash pad on journeys to and from a commune in a remote corner of the Marlborough Sounds. Arriving by power of thumb, horseback and hooped canvas caravan, John of Saratoga, Eddie Fox, Sylvie and company set about rearranging the lives and consciousness of the blasted family unit. – Joan Fleming

*

John of Saratoga

Returning from school one dusk I find John of Saratoga cleaving to the ancient rolled sofa arm, ankles crossed, the soles of his long feet black with road filth. The stranger’s gaunt physique draws what light makes it through the clouds of smoke that billow from the wood range as my father rattles its chimerical damper and curses. He is preparing a combination of the usual soya bean omelette and garlicky salad, and fresh peppermint tea in a heavy-spouted teapot. Potatoes, sliced into rounds in the cast iron frying pan, are doused with cream and dusted with paprika before being shoved in the oven in honour of the visitor. My sister has taken the opposing arm and is reading The Blue Fairy Book. Coming through the door I am magnetised by the dark-hued human buoy bobbing up the other end of our unstable sofa.

I quickly establish that John of Saratoga doesn’t speak much but comes to warm himself in my father’s sooty kitchen where the most recent flood-line stains the timber interior a metre up the wall, his utterance upstaged in equal parts by extreme diffidence, an ever-ready irony that operates at his own expense, and a hacking cough. From what I can tell, he is a wanderer seeking the next crash pad, the next hospitably expiring couch whose subsidence draws polite New Zealand bodies towards the vertiginous ditch in its centre. He favours broken-down Salvation Army coats, which enhance his concavity; is dark-haired, nicotine-fingered and carries a dog-eared physics text in his coat pocket. Everything about him tea- and tar-coloured, right down to his teeth, he is like a deteriorated relation of my first love, Cold Tea & Coat.

*

Mundane biographical details are disdained in the hippy world, direct questions frowned on. When, in Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper insistently asks a fellow traveller where he is from, and is just as insistently deflected, self-conscious credo is elevated to taboo. From my father, who thinks Easy Rider macho and silly, I learn that John’s medieval-sounding nickname is derived from a tiny fishing settlement deep in the Pelorus Sound, where he is based, and that in a former life he was an engineer who migrated from Darwin.

I learn from Dee, from whom my father subleases the Floodhouse, that John of Saratoga periodically goes missing from the hippy circuit. Then, more often than not, his breathing situation will have reached crisis and he is, eventually, to be found in intensive care. Despite being acutely asthmatic, he is known to sleep in a damp swag by the side of the road. That is the sum of available facts. Whoever wrote that romance thrives on an economy of scarcity might have been thinking of Saratoga John.

Despite my school uniform, white socks at half-mast and puppy fat, I have a taste for suffering and a disdain for lifestyle. A chronic asthmatic smoking himself to death, how stylish. My eschewal of the lifestyle category is fortunate because my father’s dump is off the dilapidation chart. The kitchen doesn’t even sport a tea towel, just a stub of bath towel ingrained with stove grime.

*

Although she is in the process of setting up house with her lover, Dee maintains the best room in the Floodhouse as hers, visiting it but rarely. This is the light-flooded front room in which I camp on first arrival before reluctantly moving across the hall to its darker sister. Originally, my father and this statuesque potter with serious drapes of gold hair thought they might build a kiln together and share firings. They soon revealed themselves ill suited: Dee accustomed to homage; my father disinclined to render. When their collaboration failed to take my father ended up sub-leasing the house instead.

In Dee’s room I can lie in bed and see chinks of cornflower-blue sky or occasionally a star between the wide unlined boards of the walls. Here and there tufts of rose-trellised wallpaper cling like relics of a more couth former life. Blue perforations and chilling draughts acclimatised to, the room is a space in which to brood on the unexpounded facts of my new life, of which there are many.

*

Sometimes John of Saratoga honours us with a solo visit. Sometimes he turns up in a small party of the Manaroans, commune-dwellers from the remote Pelorus Sound. Once, John of Saratoga arrives accompanied by Eddie Fox, a flashily handsome Welshman, both mounted on Lenny the Horse. My father dreads – and embraces – every option. Fuck. Visitors! And he’s off in a spin about the catering. More mouths to feed! What will the horse eat, fuckit? On the subject of John my father pronounces, with depressive savour, He’s just waiting for death to come along and knock him on the head.

Personally, I think John of Saratoga looks like a woodcut, or one of those linocuts that are a feature of school curriculum art in the sixties and seventies – only made with graver intent. Hacked out by trowel, ink in deep-cut grooves, graven. It is clear to me that none of it would come together without the cheekbones.

His visits, in reality few and far from forthcoming, are enlarged by my inner saucer-eye, my teen-sorcerer eye. I attribute the magic to John of Saratoga, of course. And I am half right. He is a beautiful riddle modestly stalking the highways of our island. It helps that in my father’s house I am inoculated against boys my own age, barely exposed – unless you count the shy, bombastic clods on the school bus, which I don’t.

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The Surveyed Vision: 36 Meditations on 3 Books by Barry Hill (Peacemongers, Grass Hut Work and Reason & Lovelessness)

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Javant Biarujia


Image courtesy of The Australian

Writing, because it can’t help but be critical, might help make peace
— Barry Hill (R 463)

Deep criticism is a kind of poem […],
or at least prose that delineates the poem that is trying to surface from the analysis
— Barry Hill (R 255)

Criticism must attack form, never the content of your ideas, of your phrases. Do as you
please. Sentiment is the most incomplete imaginable form of reasoning
— Lautréamont (Poésies)


Fire

a. Justice is Barry Hill’s overarching leitmotiv.
b. We need a collective narrative. This narrative of unfinished business involves truth-telling, an acknowledgement that what happened (massacres, stolen generations, etc.), happened. Taking ownership of this in the present does not mean accepting guilt or responsibility for what happened in the past, the past of our ancestors (if you are second- or third-generation Australian, you may be absolved when it comes to Aborigines, but do not think your past is pure), except in practical measures, such as reparations or compensation. Hill noted in his essay on Judith Wright that ‘Indians in Canada seem to have made general progress both with the principle of a treaty and land claims, whereas [in Australia] the general failure was signed and delivered when the Hawke Government proved to be like previous Coalition governments in bowing to ‘the States’ (Conservative Premiers acting as joeys to Development cowboys). Hence the crying need for the treaty, argues Wright’ (R 201).
c. Gap as a kind of caesura, like gap in a hedge.1 Gap as porous. There are two Australias — what makes Australia, Australia? Hill asks.
d. The Japanese for ‘gap’ (space) is ma (a part of mu).
e. Hill does not mention the word ‘gap’ at all in P, except in a quote in an essay titled ‘Dogs and Grog’: ‘In this way we are inducted into the depth of Craig [San Roque]’s broodings about ‘the loss of integrity in indigenous culture life’; the nature of people’s ‘peculiar kind of depression’; ‘the web of memory-systems developing too many gaps …’ ‘ (R 345). He does not need to.
f. From the outside looking in: the impossibility of crossing into Aboriginal culture. The risk of cultural appropriation, as in Chatwin’s Songlines, more English than its subject, as Hill observed (R 229), or T. G. H. Strehlow, who ‘translated Aboriginal song under the heading of Desire’ (R 227). Hill ‘spent about ten years on the [William] Buckley poem. I was going towards Aboriginal culture, but equally I was deepening my sense of inhabiting my own place, which was once their place’ (R 228).
g. Travelling is not necessarily knowing, either. ‘I did learn about listening, about silence, and layers of silence, characteristics of the White idiom, as we know from Henry Lawson, among others, and as I knew anyway, having been brought up in a small, reticent working-class household’ (R 229).
h. Indigenous songlines are in P (‘black men and women making their way into contemporary songs of their own’ 204), but mostly in R (‘shared singing and dancing — the best metaphor I know of cultural tolerance and understanding’ 56, Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia).
i. ‘What did I care for any crews, / Carriers of English cotton or of Flemish grain!’ (AR 93).

Bones

a. The violence of ignorance (‘I hated the whole business of being the intruder, of taking up people’s time with my notebook and never-ending ignorance’ [R 229]).
b. ‘[T]he mediocrity of Buddhist ceremonies, especially when the sutras are chanted too long by monks who are not good-looking’ (R 400 — Hill is repeating one of Sei Shônagon’s complaints).
c. Bombs often score a direct hit; criticism is not a weapon but a dance.
d. They say truth is the first casualty of war; it is also the first casualty of ideology.
e. They say peace is hard to achieve. Perhaps peace is an illusion?
f. The atomic bomb, by which I include the hydrogen bomb, must be the most evil invention ‘humanity’ has ever come up with. Even Dante only mentioned the end of the world three times in The Divine Comedy, twice in hell and once in heaven.2
g. Chemical and germ warfare has been used in a limited sense so far, for the perpetrators can easily lose control and find that such weapons can have an inverse effect.
h. The last line of Rabindranath Tagore’s last poem reads: ‘the unwasting right to peace’ (quoted in P 270).
i. ‘[Hersch Lauterpacht] suggested that the word ‘Aggression’ be replaced with ‘The Crime of War’ and that it would be preferable to refer to violations of the laws of warfare as ‘War Crimes’. Titles would make it easier for the public to understand the actions being prosecuted, useful to garner support, adding to the legitimacy of the proceedings’.3
j. I once wrote in a poem that history was a crime against humanity, which seemed to confuse a lot of people. The above is what I meant.

Naked

a. The poem is. The choice of words. The evanescence of words but the ever-presence of poetry in the mind. The poetry of metaphor, images and tropes. Perhaps topics (utopia — from the Greek, where the first vowel refers either to absence or wellness, and topia, place, whence ‘topic’ also comes).
b. Ontological: ‘I am the poet of the body, / And I am the poet of the soul’ (WW 56).
c. ‘But he was characterised by piety as much as poetry’.4
d. Eternal values. ‘A man heretical, he can’t be lost / To that point where eternal love can’t save / His soul, if hope keeps love free from the frost’5
e. Painting, like poetry, often is.
f. Chess is emblematic of order, the opposite of chaos.
g. Being as godhead.
h. Being as mystery. Fay Zwicky in ‘Hokusai on the Shore’ wrote: ‘Who keeps / a steady eye on mystery?’ (FZ 302).
i. Hill uses ‘Reason and Lovelessness’ as the title of Chapter 6 in P.
j. As Nabokov said, ‘the marvel of consciousness—that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being’.6

Thousand

a. Thousand is a nonsense (magical) number. It is not meant to be taken literally.
b. Taoists like to use the term ‘ten thousand’, when the term is nonsense.
c. Hill works for truth intellectually as did his father, Neville Hill, as an activist (‘My old man never seemed to tire in his activism’ [P 566]), even though he knew that an ergatocracy would always remain utopian. Working for truth may necessitate nonsense in some but not in Hill (who knows the difference between nonsense and meaninglessness). He may turn to Aristotle (in R), Brecht (in G, P and R), Einstein (in P), Jesus (in P and R), Kant (in P and R), Marx (in P and R) or Nietzsche (in P and R) as equally as Buddha (G, P and R), Laozi (P and R), the Dalai Lama (R, where he asks why his holiness laughs so much) or Confucius (P and R), as have many other writers, including Akutagawa and Voltaire. Neville Hill was a major influence in Hill’s life and, therefore, in his prose.
d. As Norman Mailer said more than sixty years ago: ‘It is likely that the survival of capitalism is no longer possible without the creation in the consumer of a series of psychically disruptive needs which circle about such wants and emotions as the desire for excessive security, the alleviation of guilt, the lust for comfort and new commodity, and a consequent allegiance to the vast lie about the essential health of the State and the economy, an elaborated fiction whose bewildering interplay of real and false detail must devil the mass into a progressively more imperfect apperception of reality and thus drive them closer to apathy, psychosis, and violence’.7
e. ‘High time to crack down hard / Once more on trade within the temple walls’.8
f. The father as shadow, as representative of the previous generation. Neville Hill haunts the pages of P; he is not someone to be metaphorically killed, as Freud would have it, but the fount of wisdom, a force of nature, someone who strove for peace.
g. ‘[I]t was the very tenor of the revolutionary slogan: the workers will liberate themselves’.9
h. Tagore is one of the subjects of P, but he is also mentioned extensively in R. He travelled in Tagore’s footsteps in Japan. He is — and was used, when he was the toast of London society in the early twentieth century — used anachronistically as a counterfoil to Saidian orientalists, who adopt everything Eastern as an outer clothing without any deeper understanding.
i. Work is the labor of the factories, not the labor of colonialism.
j. Masses of people migrating in the hope for a better life. Displacement. The myth of being a pioneer. Transatlanticism (a transposition of European culture — my word for ignoring what goes on in the world other than America and England). Hill writes:

[Robert Manne]’s defence of Middle-Eastern refugees is partly based on the political horrors they have been through, which the policies endorsed by relaxed and comfortable Australian leaders callously ignore. [R 85].

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Music Becomes Memory: What Listening to Music Does to the Poetic Voice

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Jess Zanoni

When I think about the music that’s closest to me, that’s an inextricable part of my identity in how unwaveringly I have carried it through time, it’s music that has made me see the world – or maybe feel is the more accurate word here – in a way I never have previously. Listening to this music, I’ve always felt like I’m shifting into an altered frame of consciousness. There’s a playlist of songs I have this relationship to, and when I listen to it, it’s also as if I’m revolving through different textures of being, different avatars of self. I listen to ‘Constant Surprises’ by Little Dragon, and I’m reminded of how it coloured life at twenty-one, inducing an embodiment that facilitated extraordinary dreaming.

Reflecting on my constellation of thoughts about music and its connection to language and personhood, I’m reminded of a meme that circulates in different iterations every so often. The meme depicts, and also jests at, the common experience of listening to music in solitude while you’re moving around in the world, staring out a car or train window, feeling like you’re the main character in a film. This meme encapsulates a phenomenon I spend so much time thinking about, and trying to understand – it illustrates how music can soundtrack our lives, while rendering the perception of our reality as ultra-vivid, heightened, emotional.

I’ve lately been immersed in Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest, an album I first heard in 2011, and then felt consumed by five years later. Like poetry, music can evade your grasp when you first encounter it. Then it reappears, meshing perfectly with your experiences. A once-opaque inner space clears, and there blooms a newfound appreciation of something that had felt inaccessible. I like to think the reason for this shift is that part of you becomes newly sensate within the object, and is then reflected back to you.

I discovered Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds when I was contemplating music’s influence on poetic composition. I sensed that if poetry enables play and experimentation with language, then music provides an emotional palette that primes that very undertaking. Night Sky with Exit Wounds opens with the poem ‘Threshold.’ The first half of it goes:

In the body where everything has a price,
I was a beggar. On my knees,
I watched through the keyhole, not
the man showering, but the rain

falling through him: guitar strings snapping
over his globed shoulders.

He was singing, which is why 
I remember it. His voice – 

it filled me to the core
like a skeleton (3)

‘Threshold’ shows how music imbues our perception with another sentience, making it almost otherworldly. This inflects the way the poet remembers: the water from the shower is imagined as rain, then as guitar strings plucked, snapping on the man’s ‘globed shoulders.’ Later in the poem, Vuong repeats: ‘He was singing. It is all I remember’ (3). I kept coming back to that mirroring of lines: ‘He was singing, which is why / I remember it / He was singing. It is all I remember.’ Vuong conveys, in the pull of his tunnel-vision memory, that actually he remembers because of the man singing. The poem is suffused with emotion through the memory of song.

Vuong processes an aural encounter by writing about its associations with a memory. The poem’s pace evokes the action of remembering – slow, short flashes of images, revisiting the same thought again and again. I’m reminded of a stanza from Martin Langford’s long, fragmented poem ‘Minums,’ which reflects this merging of the pace of music with the ‘pace’ of memory:

Slow is the tempo of interiority –
body has slowed down enough
to be conscious – self conscious

now we can measure the weight of things –

now we can grieve (87)
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Fox Mask Children

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Gregory Kan

Exactly one year ago, foxes appeared in the forests and towns around here for the first time. In muscular structures, trauma or damage to the fibres is the very condition of growth. The body responds to damage by overcompensating, replacing the damaged tissue and adding more. A line, a scar, a something on paper.

You thought you’d scream, but you didn’t. You just stared. You just stared like an idiot. The freshest and newest memory appears first, and last of all comes the memory with which the series began. The deeper you go the more difficult it becomes to recognise the emerging memories, til near the centre you come upon memories you can’t recognise at all, even as you reproduce them by running your hands over them.

By the time you reached him, he was already disappearing. You asked him about his life. The place where he grew up. What he had for dinner. Your nephew’s birthday party where he’d taken the photos. You wanted to know how much of him was still there. What he could remember. At times it felt only like the shell of an interaction. Like he knew the parts, and could still play them, but not what they meant. Like he could remember where to put each piece, but not why.

He seemed afraid to say or do the wrong thing. He talked about walks he had taken. He talked about glaciers, the advancement of ice and how you could tell how far a glacier had moved. He talked about walking, but not dwelling. You talked about dinosaurs, and how some of them turned into birds, flying above the massive clouds of ash. Then he was tired and wanted to sleep. Foxes arrived softly around him. He did not notice them.

Writing attempts to draw a straight line through the world and each of the entities within it, a line that ideally would stretch from an origin, through a centre, and finally to a terminal point. But it is never clear where something begins or ends. There is a hole at the centre of the earth. The more one digs inside something, the more one is led outside of it. The world, and each entity within it, is a blur of ongoing interactions, traces of past interactions, and potentials for and constraints on future interactions.

Exactly one year ago, foxes began to appear in the forests and towns around here. People believed that foxes could possess them, entering under fingernails and through nipples. Exactly one year ago, people began to notice the cities in the sky, seemingly made of glass. Drifting, swaying, turning slowly on some pivot whose placement was a mystery. It is believed that the glass cities have been up there as long as we have been down here. People have been wearing fox masks, hoping it would confuse the foxes.

**

You sit down at the table. You fill a bowl with water. You take off your fox mask. You eat the red and white fruit. The spirit of a tree begins to move. When it speaks, you can see through the window of its mouth, as it flies up to the sun. In your mind, you try to hold a door open for the disappearing man, as though an immense pressure threatens to enclose him for good.

In our simplest model of the world, there is an answer to every question. There is a reason for every event. Something that happened before causes something that happens after. Things can always be explained, and, ideally, anticipated and controlled. You reassemble yourself. Reassemble your walls, defences, your mental models that govern the things you experience. You return to the old house inside your mind.

Segmenting your reality makes you feel safe. Instead of something so vast it’s indefensible, your reality is divided into many tiny rooms. You think this means that nothing will get in, and that nothing will get out.

You tell yourself: I won’t feel a thing.

**

This town no longer exists on any map. When you asked others what they saw a year ago, you were told many different things. A flash or flashes of light above the ridge. Green eyes floating amongst the darkness of trees. Faces that came crashing down like mountains of salt. Shadows that refused to fade from the sidewalk. A smell like hot metal, or mineral.

The disappearing man was telling you about a walk he’d taken once. He was telling you about a glacier, and how to tell how far it had moved. You believe that his memory was somehow becoming melded with the earth’s. And that the earth itself was a kind of museum, a form of an organic memory, an archive, a resistance against the eventual dissolution of bodies that could, for a time, stay coherent, solid, and that held together as one.

Every stone, every event, every person is a momentary interaction of forces, a process that for a brief moment manages to keep its shape, to hold itself in equilibrium for a finite duration before being lost to the air. The desire to model or write of the world as a thing and as a collection of things is a dream of being beyond finitude. To be able to capture anything and hold it outside of its network of relations is a dream of immortality, and stasis.

**

It was believed that the many people who disappeared were taken by the foxes, turned into glass, and flown to the city above. And so, others would say, so-and-so has gone to the city of glass, where they will be outside of time, and free from pain and violence. What the real conditions are for the persistence of the glass city you do not know. Whether simply some ghostly echo of the world, or an architecture that exploits it to exhaustion.

**

A year ago, you felt a prickling on your neck, the brush of eyes on you. Soon enough you identified the source, hanging back, shadowlike, padding on soft paws.

You knew it was happening when it was happening but couldn’t do a single thing about it. Some things are so big it’s hard to believe that they are real, and that they are happening to you and others around you. It was always easier to blame the foxes, and to say and write things that were easy to say and write, and to change things that were easy to change. And then to get angry when none of those things really changed anything.

You wanted what happened to be something that you could know. And you wanted what you knew to be something you could describe, something to which others could say, I know this, this happened to me also.

You float off to dreams of foxes. At the centre of the earth is a hole. At the centre of the earth is a parking lot. The foxes are playing in the empty parking lot and yapping and yipping and taking turns disappearing into the peripheral darkness, only to reappear again somewhere else, as if it wasn’t a trick of the light but instead their blinking from place to place.

Then one fox stops to stare at you, and you know it as one that had shown up beside the disappearing man. And you remember then, what he told you, about how to tell how far a glacier has moved, by comparing, over time, the positions of debris stuck in the glacier with the surrounding boulders, which didn’t move.

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CREATURELY: In Praise of New Poetry from Aotearoa

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Joan Fleming

We are living in uncanny, uncertain, and uneven times. It is difficult not to feel undone by it all. I began writing this piece in January of 2020, when it was still feasible to make plans. Now, I am finishing it off in August in Madrid and the days are sluggish and friable. The bricolage bunting that neighbours fashioned from dishcloths during the 70-day lockdown still flutters in the brick shade of apartment buildings. It’s a gesture of celebration, colour, and movement in a summer prohibited from the fiestas del barrio that used to make the heat bearable. I first visited Madrid in August. I drank coca-cola mixed with red wine and ice in a one-litre cup called a mini and got sweaty (sweatier) dancing to cumbia outside a tiny bar that was mounting its own street party. A genial water fight was going down in Plaza Nelson Mandela. An eight-year-old kid ran up and asked, politely, if he could spray me with his water gun. I said yes.

What is life for? Could it be true that ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ has no point, no end-point, no outcome, no result, no purpose, except to live? To be alive. The most hopeful thing that a pandemic or a recession or a climate collapse can tell us is that we are animals. We need to feel. We need to be aroused from the trance of our automatic participation in the machine. Reading the most arousing new poetry books to come out of New Zealand last year felt, to me, like being consensually blasted with a water gun by a child on an intolerably hot day. I don’t know that I can pin the rōpū of poets I survey below to a trend or a movement, although definitions have been floating around. Is this ‘The New Sincerity’? Is this ‘Maximalism’? Some of the poetry is unrestrained, it’s true, with shocks of lustiness and grotesquerie. Some, though, has a refined candidness that is pinned to the page by sexy craft. All of it carries out a deep inquiry that is felt and expressed bodily, and for this reason, if pressed to give my own definition of this tendency in Aotearoa poetry, I’d call it ‘Creaturely.’ These poems are strange. They have claws. They think. They are hot-blooded.

~

Prize-winning fiction writer Tracey Slaughter’s first collection of poetry is difficult to read and impossible to put down. Slaughter has long been the queen of brown-and-orange kitsch suburban atmosphere, and the longish poem ‘it was the ’70s when me & Karen Carpenter hung out’ is a menacing set piece. Remember macramé? 

The brown
lounge swung in
its chorus 
of gourds. 
Hessian 
cradles wore out 
our hands, their 
roots gone rigid 
in the cross-hatched 
umbilicals.

Slaughter renders with unbearable accuracy the weird conflation of childishness and adult pretension that is adolescence. The speaker and her best mate KC 

crouched 
on the lino with our 
underworld dolls. We liked 
them buoyant, handicapped 
at the crotch…
Their outfits 
fizzed in the shoebox 
we doused & lit.

Narratives of love and failure, the posturing of the teenage years, and the threat of God, all of this is rendered in an unwavering consistency of tone. The fiction writer is present, but the narrative is in fragments, built through taut lists of imagery. Sex want and damage are nailed through every poem. Language is sticky and sharp. Nouns strong-armed into being verbs (‘Slats / of shadow groove / our vanishing’; ‘Currents eel / the light into / muscled canals’) jump off the ends of the lines and stick in the throat. Furious, unholy enjambment slayed me. By the book’s end, I felt exhausted and alive.

Essa may ranapiri’s book ransack performs a visceral preoccupation with biology, its limits and spectrums. Fingers are dug in and they come out bloody. There are moments in the book when poems wrestle with rhetorical agenda. The prose-poem ‘the nonbinary individual’ is a manifesto addressed to those who live comfortably in either wing of the gender binary. The longish poem ‘Con-ception’ is a sensation. It charts the growth of a foetus as it takes shape in the womb with startlingly lumpy description: ‘it will suck and touch with these not-things’; ‘wet leather stretched to membrane over a light’; ‘a dress of flesh’. The poem accomplishes an estrangement, a de-familiarisation, of the body. It is, at the same time, a song of complex praise for an exhausted mother. At its best, ranapiri’s poetry is wounded and triumphant. They unstitch language til it wriggles and stains: ‘a bab/y stil/l born/n rattling i/n the mutton skie/s chubby in the loa/m’.

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A Poet’s Progress in the ABC: Reflections on a Life in Radio

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Mike Ladd


Mike Ladd at ABC studio 520 in Adelaide, circa 1986. Photo by Cathy Brooks

On my job application to the ABC in 1983 I mentioned that I was a poet, even though the job advertised was for a purely technical position as a trainee sound engineer. Positions for technicians were all that were on offer at that time in Adelaide. Landing a job as a sound engineer was a way into the monolith.

An interest in poetry seemed to count in my favour in the job interview – or at least not against me. It also helped that I’d done some short-term contract work archiving recordings I’d made in Senegal in 1982 – of street music, and the traditional poet praise singers known as les Griots – at the BBC in London and at The British Institute of Recorded Sound. The ABC was a much more Anglo organisation in those days, and the BBC was seen as a sort of paragon.

I already had a keen interest in recording and mixing voices and sounds. I’d been part of the Adelaide poetry scene since the mid-seventies, and had run a poetry program on 5UV (Radio Adelaide) at the University of Adelaide – established in 1972, as Australia’s first community radio station. In the early eighties I learned how to multi-track sound by making demo tapes with my band The Lounge, and then in a performance poetry outfit called The Drum Poets. Anyway, I got the job. My technical trainer even bought a copy of my first poetry book, though I’m not sure he liked it much!

At that time, the ABC was much better funded in real terms than it is today, and it was a more broadly cultural organisation, supporting many ‘non-mainstream’ art forms – like poetry. It also had composers, artists and writers in residence, and in-house orchestras and bands.

*

Poetry had been part of ABC Radio from the beginning. In the 1930s the ABC was broadcasting Shakespeare and Shelley, with voices imitating British accents; a decade later it started featuring verse dramas by Australian poets like Douglas Stewart and Rosemary Dobson. The first weekly poetry program, Quality Street, was founded in 1946 by producer John Thompson, himself a published poet. When I joined the ABC, the current poetry program was called The Poet’s Tongue and was produced by Gwen McGregor from the Radio Drama department in Sydney. It had an amazing run, nearly thirty years on air from 1957 to 1986. It was replaced by a succession of poetry programs of varying longevity: The Poetry Feature, The Box Seat and Poetica, as well as other cultural programs that featured poetry, such as Radio Helicon, The Listening Room and Inner Space. The point is, poetry had a home, a regular broadcast, a place where listeners could find poets and poets could find an audience and even be paid for their work. Contrast that with Radio National today, where programs like Earshot or AWAYE! might do the occasional one-off feature on a poet, or an obituary for a well-known poet like Les Murray or Clive James, or a poet reading a Friday poem for free on Radio National Breakfast. But there is no regularly broadcast poetry program, and no real commitment to poetry from the management.

When I graduated from my traineeship I didn’t get to record a lot of poetry at first. I did news items, talkback radio, lectures, children’s education, religious talks – some of the jobs were very boring, but others were fascinating. I was enmeshed in voices. Weary Dunlop, Plácido Domingo, Bob Hawke, Barbara Hanrahan, Bryce Courtenay, Joan Sutherland, Max Harris, Vladimir Ashkenazy: these were just some of the people I met and recorded as a sound engineer working for a range of producers. Dorothy Hewitt, Margaret Atwood, Tom Shapcott, P.K. Page, and Miroslav Holub were some of the poets I remember recording for The Poet’s Tongue and The Poetry Feature.

While I welcomed recording poets for other producers, I often felt itchy to produce the programs myself, and to make them differently. Rightly or wrongly, I sometimes felt the programs I was working on were a bit too straight: the poet introduces the poem, the poet reads the poem, and repeat. Or worse: the presenter explains the poem and the actor reads the poem as an illustration. There was not much other sound in the programs – perhaps some interlude music, but almost always kept separate from the words. I didn’t think they were using the radio medium to its full potential.

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Anti-Doodles: a Dada-ist Game for Long Pandemic Afternoons

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Ray Briggs

As 20th Century Europe erupted into the chaos of the Great War, Dadaists responded with art forms that reflected the fragmentation and the unintelligibility of the world around them. ‘Some people,’ wrote Tristan Tzara in his 1918 Dada Manifesto, ‘think they can explain rationally, by thought, what they think. But that is extremely relative’ (Tzara).

Now, as the world grapples with the threats of pandemic, totalitarianism, and environmental destruction, Anna and I (Ray) are prepared to set aside traditional, orderly methods. Hugo Ball’s 1916 Dada Manifesto proclaims saying dada as the way to ‘get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanised, enervated’ (Ball). While I’m skeptical about this sweeping conclusion (a few sentences earlier, Ball has touted saying dada as the way to ‘achieve eternal bliss’ and ‘become famous’), 2020 feels like the perfect time to say dada in our 21st Century voices.

I found it impossible to write literally about the COVID-19 pandemic. When I tried, I felt tired, tiresome, and didactic. Anna said that it was hard for her too; she was looking for a distraction rather than a reminder. So together, we sought a way to be random, playful, and chaotic. At first, I wrote poems to accompany a few of Anna’s surreal drawings, which she’d created on a tablet by overlaying ordinary figure drawings with bizarre details (the head of a hog or a giraffe in place of a human head, a hole in the chest with a bird’s face peeking out, a magnificent flower sprouting from a crotch). But this wasn’t a true collaboration (too much of Anna, not enough of me), and it didn’t feel truly alive.

Finally, Anna discovered a scheme that worked for both of us. First, each of us emailed the other one a list of three words. The lists had to be generated independently – no peeking allowed! Once we’d pooled our six words, I would use them in a poem, and Anna would incorporate them into a drawing – again, with no peeking! When our creations were complete, we shared them with each other and exchanged comments.

Although we’d initially framed this approach as a playful escape from reality, we noticed our drawings and poems returning to themes of confinement, catastrophe, and disruption. All of Anna’s scenes were set in closed rooms, and three showed threats: floodwaters, flames, or mysterious intruding tentacles. My poems depicted characters frustrated by their confinement or overwhelmed by a threatening and difficult-to-predict external world.

We picked up on a few thematic resonances that were specific to individual poems.

**

Anna: ‘One of my drawings shows characters from Alice in Wonderland. I think there is the sense of surprise in Alice in Wonderland. You never quite know what’s happening, which chimes with the current situation.’

Ray: ‘The poem that accompanies that drawing is all about the contrast between a cramped, constrained reality, and sweeping, ambitious daydreams. I love how that contrast between dreams and reality shows up independently in Anna’s picture, where the “real” backdrop of a burning city is offset by a picture of an idyllic castle hung on the wall.’

Anna: Titmouse was the easiest one to come up with for me. For the first time in my life, I heard that word, and I was like ‘wow this is a weird word.’ Initially, I was just trying to put all the words into a coherent picture, but eventually, I realised it was about the creative process – that part when you’re all alone and trying to create something, and you’re not sure if anybody’s listening.

Ray: Yeah, I was really captivated by the language too – especially when you told me, ‘A titmouse is neither a tit nor a mouse.’ That sentence stuck in my head, and I designed the whole poem around its rhythm.

Anna: I love the fact that it is never revealed what a titmouse is.

Ray: Speaking of mysteries, where is the axis in that picture?

Anna: The pole is an axis around which the mouse dances. I was like ‘I don’t want to draw any math-like things.’

**

In the end, my poems and Anna’s drawings reflected reality in their formal elements, not just in their themes. Our separate but parallel method of creation is a lot like social isolation: two people in their own separate bubbles, still working with the materials at hand to create a shared artistic universe. Just as we’ve adapted to teaching and socialising over Zoom, we adapted to writing and drawing around the constraint of our randomly chosen words.

We tried not just to make the best of this constraint, but to use it to make our project better. I believe that in the best cases, formal rules can actually serve as an aid to the creative process: while the rational, conscious mind sits in the corner gnawing on the ropes of constraint, the creative, unconscious mind is free to play unimpeded. Maybe that’s why both of us added more structure: I decided that each poem would be a sonnet, and Anna built 3D models to design the layout of the last three poems.

Anna writes, ‘I had a teacher who said that “uncontrolled creativity leads to idiosyncratic wackery.” With us it was controlled creativity and even though it was idiosyncratic, I hope it goes beyond wackery.’

After six drawings, with six words each, it felt like we’d reached a suitable endpoint for this project (although Anna will be continuing in the same vein with randomly generated Pictionary words). When I proposed the title Doodles, Anna responded:

‘Doodles means mindless sketching or writing. What we did, or at least the way I approached it, was almost the opposite: taking something nonsensical and making sense out of it. That requires quite a bit of mindfulness and peculiar awareness of uncommon connections. I found my process very therapeutic because it reflected the current situation, which is unpredictable and doesn’t quite make sense. The only way to live with it is to make my own kind of sense.’

So, these are Anti-Doodles.

References

Ball, Hugo. ‘Dada Manifesto.’ 1916. Wired, 11 July 2016, online.

Tzara, Tristan. ‘Dada Manifesto.’ 1918. Dada Painters and Poets, 2nd ed., translated and edited by Robert Motherwell, Belknap, 1989, pp. 78–9, online.

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Motherhood, Language and the Everyday During the Poetry of Astrid Lorange, Amy Brown and L K Holt

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Melody Ellis

For a long time after my daughter was born, I looked for representations of motherhood everywhere. I looked for it in casual interactions with other mothers in the park and on the street, I looked for it with friends, in mothers’ groups and on the screen. I looked for it in my memories of mothers (including my own), and I looked for it in books. In the first six-weeks or so after my daughter was born I tore through Elisa Albert’s After Birth and Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work. I remember them like balm, even though I cannot remember much of the content of either book now. I read and re-read Maya Angelou, Marguerite Duras, Julia Kristeva, Maggie Nelson and Adrienne Rich all of whom I had read before but reading them as a mother felt different. I read Elena Ferrante for the first time and was in awe at the way she wrote about mothers. I read Deborah Levy’s fiction and nonfiction and thought her novel Hot Milk would have been more satisfying had it been a nonfiction account of the central mother-daughter relationship (reading into that novel Levy’s complicated relationship with her mother). I heard the poet Rachel Zucker interviewed about her book MOTHERs on a parenting podcast and when I bought that book, I tore through it too. Again, balm. I read Jacqueline Rose’s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty and though aspects of the book annoyed me, I was grateful for it.

This year, I have been reading Astrid Lorange’s Labour and Other Poems, Amy Brown’s Neon Days and L K Holt’s Birth Plan all of which are oriented by the writer’s experience and observations of motherhood. I use the present perfect continuous ‘have been’ deliberately, because in many ways the reading of all three of these collections has been characterised by dipping in-and-out of, circling back, and re-reading. Lorange’s book I read cover-to-cover quickly and was filled with the desire to read it again, and again, and again, since it felt like exactly the account of motherhood I have longed for. While Brown’s I read slowly, pen in hand, savouring the parenthetic footnoting used to pause and unfurl some of the key verbs used in her diaristic verse; beginning with: to admit, to push, to sate, and to repeat. I marvelled at Holt’s dexterous poetic range. Her ability to take me in one breath, it seemed, from a tender prosaic observation, to colloquial description, to literary/philosophical/historical reference, as if I were a friend to whom she was retelling the various anecdotes of illness, fear, joy, love and play that characterise those early years of motherhood particularly. These three writers all reminded me why I have found books written on, or about, motherhood by poets particularly satisfying. Since one of the things the poet does so well, is shift between registers – from the abstract to the specific, from the large to the small – often in just a few lines, or words. As Jessica Wilkinson writes ‘[I am reminded] on a regular basis of the extraordinary capabilities of poetry, its malleability, openness to experimentation, contrariness, performativity and complex aesthetic palette.’ These books ‘on motherhood’ could be characterised just as easily as books about writing, love, mortality, marriage, politics, co-parenting, literature, and language.

No doubt, and as described, my seeking out of accounts of motherhood are related to my own subjective experience as a mother, though this also tends to be how books describing an experience of motherhood are marketed. As if they are only for women, only for mothers. Zadie Smith writes in her book of essays Changing my Mind, ‘Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.’ This is the balm of reading. It is to do with connection, with recognition, and at its best we can find in the writing of others something we knew but did not have language for; or indeed an articulation of something we had never before considered but which makes so much sense.

I have found that since my daughter was born motherhood has influenced more than my reading. It has influenced how I teach, relate, love, and write too. In my writing so far about motherhood (being a mother, being a daughter) a question I have asked myself often is: ‘how can I write about motherhood without falling into obvious description or cliché?’ Which is more broadly a question of how to write about the every day. A screenwriting colleague recently told me there has been a flurry of ‘please don’t send us your COVID-19 screenplays’ on Twitter and elsewhere in 2020, and while you can see why, this pre-emptive assumption that the ordinariness (even in its utter extraordinariness) of the pandemic means that it should be off bounds, encourages the writer to self-censor rather than to engage with the more difficult – and in my view appropriate – question of how to find language for the life we are living that is surprising, even as it is written. I think many of us will be influenced by the pandemic in everything we are thinking and writing about for some time, and why not? The problem, if there is one, is not so much to do with writing about an experience that is so immediate for everyone right now than it is about how to do so. In an article on writing for Kill Your Darlings, Holt writes:

In Randall Jarrell’s poem ‘A Sick Child’, the child says: ‘If I can think of it, it isn’t what I want.’ The writing process, for me, necessarily involves such discontent.

Discontent is such an interesting way to characterise the experience of writing. It suggests that writing is an act of getting beyond what one can think of right away. That it is a process of excavation, of thinking through, and going beyond the immediate.

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On Speaking and Unheard Women: Interrogating Classical Silence in the Poetry of Anna Jackson and Helen Rickerby

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Anuja Mitra

When we meet Cassandra in Aeschylus’s ‘Agamemnon’ – this stolen princess, this famed beauty turned ill-starred prophet, hauled onstage as Agamemnon’s prize for victory over the Trojans – she is silent for 270 lines. The first sound she emits is a cry, torn from her as from the throat of an animal. Transliterated from the ancient Greek, as classicist-poet Anne Carson does, the crash of syllables appears as ‘OTOTOI POPOI DA!’ (Untranslatable, Carson explains, yet not meaningless.) Then the future spills out of her in a rain of fragmented clauses:

KASSANDRA Godhated so

                                      then too

                                              much knowing together self–

                                                          murder man–

                                                                    chop blood–

                                                                               slop floor

(‘Agamemnon’ in An Oresteia, trans Anne Carson)

This is the moment Cassandra foretells the bloody deeds to come in the tragedy, but when she starts to speak, her voice splinters; our ears unable to receive these shards of pure divine insight. The effect is terrifically unnerving.

KASSANDRA [scream] [scream] look

                                  there look

                                     there keep

                                              the bull from the cow she

                                                                   nets him she gores

                                                                                  him with

                                                   her deadly black

                                                                  horn he

                                                     falls he's

                                                down he bathes in

                                      death are you listening to

                                      me

I wanted to write about women and silence. Yet I kept circling back to Cassandra, perhaps not unlike how Cassandra kept circling back to herself: ‘What is it like to be a prophet? Everywhere Cassandra ran she found she was already there.’ (Anne Carson, ‘Cassandra Float Can’). I wanted to write about silence, and Cassandra speaks – quite famously in fact, still screaming to us down the hall of all those years. But one can speak and be unheard. Says Rebecca Solnit in ‘Cassandra Among the Creeps’: ‘The story of Cassandra, the woman who told the truth but was not believed, is not nearly as embedded in our culture as that of the Boy Who Cried Wolf – that is, the boy who was believed the first few times he told the same lie. Perhaps it should be.’ Apollo had granted Cassandra the gift of prophecy, so the myths say. When she refused to sleep with him, he twisted this gift. There’s a cruel irony in giving a woman words of power in a culture that muzzles her, then warping her speech so that it will not be heard. It’s not silencing, not exactly. Apollo ensured that Cassandra would not be quiet. She would speak and not be believed. She would speak and be met with silence.

In the first poem in Helen Rickerby’s collection How to Live, ‘Notes on the unsilent woman’, Rickerby references the #MeToo movement that shook the world to attention:

50. Since I began writing this poem, women have begun to speak. No. Women have begun to be heard. I don’t understand what happened, but suddenly things that we all knew – all women at least – became big news. Suddenly women’s words had the power to take down a Hollywood mogul, and who will be next? Suddenly the Law Society is shocked. ‘Why didn’t you say anything before?’ Why weren’t you listening?

What is speech when it meets a refusal to listen? Rickerby records the anecdote of Hipparchia, Cynic philosopher of ancient Greece, standing firm while a male rival tried to strip off her cloak at a dinner party, as if her woman’s body told an incontrovertible truth to invalidate her intellect, her wit, her words. Hipparchia was not the only ancient woman to be a philosopher, but ‘few had the opportunity, the education, the space, and of the few, fewer are remembered.’ It is the old story: history is the province of the Great Man, its parameters defined by that other man behind the pen. With its numbered stanzas, ‘Notes on the unsilent woman’ echoes a succession of footnotes; appropriate for a woman like Hipparchia, relegated to the margins as women too commonly are. Nothing is left of what Hipparchia wrote. But silence, Rickerby reminds us, is not always reflective of intention, of reality. ‘[S]ilence is sometimes an erasure. We don’t know much about her, but we know she spoke.’

It is a poem that both emphasises and compensates for Hipparchia’s silence, as Rickerby dialogues with Hipparchia (or with her missing voice) by interspersing observations about the philosopher’s life with her own. We watch as female poet interacts with female subject: ‘But I do have something to say. I want to say that she lived. I want to say that she lived, and she spoke and she was not silent.’ The poem captures this act in motion: this reclamation, this recognition – and yet, this lack of resolution, as conveyed by a final line coloured by wistful defeat: ‘Oh, but I still wish I knew what you said, Lady Butterfly. I wish I could hear your words.’

Where does it leave us to merely know that Hipparchia spoke, when we who want to hear can salvage nothing from her silence? Hipparchia’s writings are lost to us, though sometimes, of course, women’s words are not erased but mutilated. They are reviled because she is angry instead of ‘nice’, dismissed because she invited the well-worn epithets for female feeling: mad, dramatic, hysterical. ‘You’re mad – godstruck godswept godnonsensical’, the Chorus of ‘Agamemnon’ tells Cassandra, again in Carson’s translation. Mythology tells us little about pre-curse Cassandra. Did she laugh too loudly, talk too much? We see Apollo’s version, the raving witch. Cassandra may have refused to be violated by him, but she had a sliver of divinity lodged in her anyway. She had been given the art of prophecy, remember. The Christian God created man after his own image, but gods of ancient myth were always making things after themselves: they pursue and impregnate women who bear half-divine sons, sons like them. The sons set off to achieve great things, the mothers stare worriedly from the shore. Apollo failed to invade Cassandra’s body in this way, so he made her like him; exceptional, able to see what mortals could not. He possessed her mind so that prophecy was pain, poor godstruck girl. If her tale tells us anything, it is that being gifted is another kind of invasion. The way that being worshipped, being molded into muse or lover, is a kind of surrender.

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12 Artworks by Teena McCarthy

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Teena McCarthy


Teena McCarthy | ‘Bilyera’ Wedgetail Eagle Totem | 2018

The main theme running throughout my work is related to my grandmother, an Indigenous woman of the Barkindji Tribe from Broken Hill, NSW. I work within narratives, based on her life story, her Dreaming, The Darling River, her Country. Within that context, her story exposes layers of meaning about Australia’s ‘hidden history’: the impact that humanity has done on the natural environment; the effects of Colonisation that have led to the loss of Culture and Spirituality; and, in recent times, the unfortunate events of the Stolen Generations, sadly resulting in much intergenerational pain.

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What They Said (While We Were Sleeping)

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Alan Bigelow

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Addictive Media

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Philip Muir
The little bird, it flutters near
Just beyond the cognate sphere
The rhythmic thrum, imposed regard
Punctures wisdom’s noble guard

Through the portal, clean escape
Where I control, dictate, reshape
Abstract correlation reigns
Blissfully disregard mundane

The sedative placates the soul
Submerged in isolation’s bowl
Thoughts culpable to self alone
Restrained, soothed, senseless drone

Dystopia beyond the seal
Distinguished with a passive zeal
A hollow realm of faceless ghosts
Of cold, inconsequential boasts.

Muffled pulse of passing hope
Subsumed by this kaleidoscope
That dazzles in my tunnelled view
Omnipotent, it will subdue

One, to two, to three, to four
Each action here has gone before
Complacent sigh, a warm caress
Freedom from hope’s cruel duress

Hung grapes fade, the fox relents
The mediocre represents
A life divided; charged, inert
Waiting for that next alert.

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Anthem

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Matthew Louttit

lines written upon remembering the opening ceremony of the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, after a long illness

Tell me again how you came to be here,
ringed by burning rains
alone, brown-coat zombies
pummelling Long Plain
in ranked surges of union jacks.
Where’s your ticket for jostling
so the structural steel decks –
the belle dame raises her chin –
ecstatic that the sea has hemmed you
in? We are ready to sing.

Beneath the scalpel-thin cross
hairs searching hearts’ pipe-
work for dissenting iodine, hiss
her indrawn breath and gape
for the first bellowed syllables.
The blue and the white, by flooded stairs
must face the elders on this night
of capes and tights; of jaws.
She salutes, her flame sets
down to foaming applause.

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On Day One, We Will Begin Working

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Natalie D-Napoleon

Cut-up created from Ron Nixon and Linda Qiu, “Trump’s Evolving Words on the Wall”, published in The New York Times, January 18, 2018.

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