Submission to Cordite 93: PEACH

Posted on May 7, 2019 by Lucy Van

Our PEACH edition is named in memory of Blair Peach, a teacher from New Zealand who was killed by a member of the Special Patrol Group, Metropolitan Police, while protesting a racist gathering of the National Front in the immigrant suburb of Southall, Middlesex (UK) in April 1979.The memory is bitter: reports acknowledging the cause of death were only made public by the Metropolitan Police in 2010, and no person has ever been brought to justice for this crime.

In writing PEACH we remember the gentleness and dedication of an ordinary man taking a stand against oppression; the legacy of anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-fascist solidarity that continues to resonate in popular memory; and the inspiration for the work of poets including Linton Kwesi Johnson (‘Reggae fi Peach’) and Bhanu Kapil (Ban en banlieue).

PEACH is an abundantly poetic word, connoting border-crossing – peach is derived from the Latin, persicum malum, the Persian apple – and transgression: did Prufrock dare to eat a peach? A ripe peach may seem the embodiment of the good life, but in this issue, PEACH also stands for the bitterness of brutality as well as the richness of resistance. PEACH, a synecdoche for struggle, a poetics of vitality and subversion prone to bruising, is your invitation to engage with the planetary solidarities expressed by the memory of Blair Peach. We welcome text and sound poetry, as well as microfiction, that complicates and enriches the poetics of resistance.

Submit poems (prose, comics, visual, concrete) or works of micro-fiction (500 words maximum). Read more about submitting to Cordite Poetry Review. Please note:

1. We will only read submissions sent during our official submission periods.

2. Cordite maintains a hybrid submissions policy. This means that the guest editor may invite five (5) Australian and five (5) overseas authors directly to submit to the issue. In addition, the guest-editor will anonymously select an additional 30-35 works from Australian authors and use their discretion to select further overseas works. For each issue, the guest editor does not know the identities of the online contributors (via Submittable) until after the final selections have been made.

3. Simultaneous submissions or previously published material will not be considered. This includes works published in print and web journals but does not apply to material first published on personal blogs.

4. Please place up to three (3) poems in one (1) Word, RTF or PDF document (unless specifically noted otherwise for special issues), with no identifying details in the document itself.

5. We are not able to offer feedback on individual poems.

6. Submissions will only be accepted via Submittable …

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Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged , , ,

MONSTER Editorial

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Nathan Curnow

MONSTER

I’m writing this after news that W S Merwin has died. His Selected Poems still sits on my bedside table, never far away in case of a spare moment. The poem ‘Leviathan’, was something of an inspiration for this issue, a rolling, musical masterpiece that echoes, for me at least, Tennyson’s ‘The Kraken’. It was first published in Merwin’s Green with Beasts in 1956, and speaks with memorable power and control, like Darth Vader.
Joseph Campbell said things about Darth Vader that I think Darth would probably agree with now that he’s a redeemed, smiling apparition of the Force.

Darth looked pretty happy there at the end of Return of the Jedi, standing beside Yoda and Obi Wan, receiving a wink from Luke before Luke returns to the Ewok party. I’m talking about the original scene here of course, not the updated one with Hayden Christensen. That was unforgivable!

I’m not sure if redemption is real. Does killing the Emperor make up for Darth’s monstrous acts? Do the acts make the monster, or does the monster make the acts? Last night I dreamt that I killed Chris Hemsworth. I dropped him down a stairwell and broke his back. It sounded like the landing of Russell Crowe in Les Miserables, you know, when he played Javert and finally threw himself off the ledge. That was the best noise Russell Crowe made in that movie. Anyway, I didn’t feel bad about murdering Chris Hemsworth, I just felt really anxious about covering it up. More than Thanos would at least. But then again, I don’t know. All I know is that Joseph Campbell said a lot of good things, and I honestly wish I could keep banging on about it like this. But I can’t.

Because we’re living through daily events that seem impossible to understand – horrific news of massacres and domestic violence, the scapegoating and vilification of entire communities by politicians and online trolls. I’m writing this from Ballarat, in the days after Cardinal George Pell, once the third highest Catholic in the world, was found guilty of child sex abuse. My city, like Boston and so many others around the world, lives with the trauma caused by these perpetrators, and with the cover up that went on for so long. Now our fences here are draped in colourful ribbons, one for every victim. They hang on the gates of our cathedrals and schools where the offences took place, even down at my local pool.

In light of this I’m inviting you to read. Not because reading makes us more empathetic. I don’t think it does. Look at how quickly we turn on an audience member who asks a long-winded question at a writers festival. The quiet, seething anger spreads instantly around the room. Reading doesn’t make us more empathetic, in the same way that reading doesn’t make us more creative. What matters is the daily practise of empathy, like the daily workout of creativity. It’s in practising these qualities, usually under pressure, that they develop.

I’m inviting you then to read toward this exercise, to read for a tiny crack in your echo chamber. Because we need to read voices of anger, confrontation, pain, as well as humour and play, all the angles we have to express and understand our times. We need to stay sane, courageous, informed and in love, then practise it as best we can. It’s not easy. We’re not heroes. We mess up. But if there’s an Ewok party going on in some treehouse in a galaxy far, far away, then I want go, even if I have to show up as a creepy, smiling apparition of the Force.

So here are poems from established and emerging writers about monsters in all guises and forms. We have gorgons, mutants, politicians and lawyers, crime, myth, art, technology, toxic culture, pop culture and protest. We have apocalyptic visions, small town stories and dark, domestic secrets. I’m particularly excited to present the work of American poet, Christopher Patton, who gives us a home office scanner translation of a Donald Trump tweet. Also, ‘Eurydice: a triptych’ by Kirstyn McDermott; ‘Wait But Do Not Consider’ by Carmen Leigh Keates and ‘camping underground’, a striking dark sequence by Greg Mclaren. There’s so much good work here, poetry of all sorts of method and design, names you might know and new names worth following in the future.

In 1971 W S Merwin won the Pultizer Prize and took that opportunity to oppose the Vietnam War. He was also a dedicated conservationist, and like our recently departed friend Judith Rodriguez, directed his life toward awareness and compassion. We need this now more than ever. So I ask you to do the same: read, write and act with power and control, kicking against the pricks, facing Leviathan, practising however you can, daily and under pressure.

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Poetry, Whatsoever: Blake, Blau DuPlessis, and an Expansive Definition of the Poem

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Ali Jane Smith

William Blake pinches himself. Yes! He is alive, not in heaven or hell for all eternity, but on earth, for just as long as I need him for the purposes of this essay. In the almost two hundred years since William Blake died many things have changed. William Blake knows very well that he was not all that successful last time he was alive, definitely not famous. He was hardworking, but also pretty weird, and not great at self-promotion. Luckily, William Blake has a smart phone so he can look himself up on Encyclopaedia Britannica (William Blake avoids Wikipedia because it campaigned to weaken Australian copyright law). William Blake reads that after he died the Pre-Raphaelites got interested in his work, and so did Yeats, T S Eliot, and Northrop Frye. William Blake does a quick vanity search on duckduckgo.com. There are a lot of entries. Wow, his drawings and paintings are in the Tate! And his poem ‘Jerusalem’ is sung at rugby matches, cricket games, and Women’s Institute meetings. You can even buy collections of his poetry in the bookshop in Wollongong Mall. And then an ad pops up for a Dr. Martens boot that features his painting ‘Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils’. William Blake thinks a pair of Birkenstocks would suit him better, but he’s not sure of his shoe size, so he has to leave this essay and wander down to the shops to try on sandals, where he will discover that if you say ‘tyger tyger’ to a person of a certain age, they quite often say ‘burning bright’ back to you. Goodbye William Blake. Enjoy the shoe shopping. We’re going to stay here and talk about poetry.

Specifically, we’re going to talk about poetry when it gets out of the house and involves itself with, sometimes even becomes, other things. Things like theatre, sound, visual art, sporting events, community organisations, and conversation. But how do we know poetry is still poetry when it’s not in a book or at a reading? Can we find a definition for poetry that still works when poetry is sung at a meeting or in a stadium? O poetry, you big lump of phonemes, so obvious, so unknowable, what are you? What distinguishes you from all the other bunches of phonemes? Perhaps thinking about poetry when it gets involved with and becomes other things might even help answer that question. Especially if we think of poetry as something that has no natural or original setting.

In his book The Hatred of Poetry, Ben Lerner says he is pirating poet and critic Allen Grossman’s reading of the story of Caedmon (you know Caedmon, English poet from six hundred and something, mentioned by the Venerable Bede, Caedmon the humble cowherd who was visited by an angel who taught him to write poetry? Oh yeh, him.). Lerner tells us that, ‘Grossman … abstracts from this story … a harsh lesson: Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical – the human world of violence and difference – and to reach the transcendent or divine’ (13-14).

I’m including this quote because I want to say very clearly that I disagree, I do not think poetry arises from a desire to reach transcendence or divinity. Some poets, and whole cultures of poetry, are for sure about transcendence and/or divinity, but I reject the idea that poetry is always about a desire to reach the transcendent or divine or that a desire to reach the transcendent or the divine is sufficient as a definition of poetry. William Blake might disagree with me. But he’s out shopping, so. I’m looking for a definition that I can point to, something that is right there, in poems themselves. It’s not going to be an essence. It’s going to be a set of features. I want a definition I can use as a tool, so I can recognise poetry when I see or hear it, the way I recognise a kookaburra, a blue tongue lizard, or a ladybird.

Poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis was present at a discussion between the poet Xi Chuan and scholar Chris Lupke. Luckily for us, there were some other people in the audience who questioned whether Xi Chuan was writing poetry, or some other kind of text. Blau DuPlessis wrote an account of the conversation, and because of these questions around the boundaries of poetry, she included this brief and lucid definition, a definition that I would like to both use and think about in this essay. Here it is:

By the way, I’d define poetry as a mode of writing in chosen rhythmic segments that are culturally read as poetry. (‘On Hearing’ par. 3)

All the best definitions start with the phrase ‘by the way’, by the way. I note the point Blau DuPlessis makes about poetry being that which is culturally understood as poetry – a way of thinking about definition that encompasses context and leaves borders pleasantly blurred – and also what might be opened up in her use of the word ‘rhythmic’. If I was going to discuss Jennifer Maiden’s idea of poetry as a binary system of stressed and unstressed syllables, this would be the place to do it. But in this essay, where I hope to offer tools for poetry when it gets involved with and becomes other forms, it is really segmentivity that I want to take up and carry with me, as though it were a loaf of bread or a useful knife.

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On Being Sanguine: Two Years of Panic and a Response to Terror in Christchurch

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Charles Olsen


Self-portrait by Charles Olsen in Wellington, NZ (1991)

One Sunday, when I was an art student in London, I got on my bicycle and left my parents’ vicarage in Surrey for my room in Murray Mews, going along the River Thames and through London’s parks: Bushy Park, Richmond Park, Hyde Park and Regents Park. I was stung by a bee or wasp somewhere around Shepperton which got my blood up and I raced towards the city, perhaps a little too fast for my own good; a reaction to adversity.

*

I didn’t know how to respond to the Christchurch shooting. It was so out of the blue. By chance a few days after the attack happened to be the launch in Wellington of a collection of poems by migrant and refugee poets in New Zealand called More of Us from Landing Press. It includes my poem ‘When you least expect’, about a series of terrorist bombings near places I was staying in London, Cairo and Madrid. The most devastating for me was back in 2004 where I live in Madrid, about six months after I’d moved to Spain. A series of explosions on the local train network during the morning rush hour killed 193 people and injured around 2,000. I was on a train heading out of Atocha station as the backpacks containing the bombs were abandoned on packed trains heading towards Atocha. I must have heard one of the explosions in the distance lost in the noise of the train but it was only when I arrived at 8.00am at the company where I gave English classes and found my students huddled around the radio and online, searching for the news, that I learned what had occurred. They were surprised I’d managed to get to work. We didn’t have the class that day and I made my way into Torrejón de Ardoz and found where to catch a bus back into Madrid.

Life went on but little things had changed. The day after the bombing over a million people made their way down to the Paseo del Prado, a principal boulevard in the city centre, and stood together in the rain in quiet solidarity against terrorism. A few days later I was in a company workshop but felt it wasn’t valuable for me so I made an excuse about still being affected by recent events and left. In the mornings, once the trains were back up and running, there were fully armed military on the station platform. I thought it was unnecessary after the event and only added to a feeling of unease and insecurity, although it was supposed to reassure the population I guess. I wonder how people in New Zealand are noticing the changes in both society and themselves? Sometimes these feelings are more an emotional upwelling inside than something that can be explained. This could be anger, fear, sadness. Like a physical trauma, it will take time to heal.

As a parent this situation must be particularly difficult. A friend in Christchurch, Michael O’Dempsey, shared, ‘When the earthquake came it wasn’t personal, there was no malice in it. It just was. We were able to explain it to our children. The mosque shootings are so much harder to rationalise because of the malice and intention involved.’ I think back to my childhood in New Zealand, growing up in Culverden, Dunedin and Wellington before we moved to London in 1981 when I was almost twelve. Our church sponsored refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia who were escaping violence and poverty in their own countries. In my other poem in the More of Us collection, ‘The chess game’, I reflect on making friends with a Cambodian boy my age and him picking up English as we played together. He and his brother and sisters had lost their father and risked their lives trying to get fresh vegetables to eat, living in a refugee camp. Perhaps as children we adapt better than as adults to change and difficulties? But then again, the levels of violence children are exposed to on television, through social media, friends and gaming – where the graphics have become so much more realistic, and being online can expose children to other challenges – have increased since then, as have anxiety related illnesses in children. Parents are also finding it increasingly difficult to process all the information and make sense of an international interconnected landscape with its multiple political, corporate, and religious spheres, and often don’t have the time or the skills to help children reach a better understanding of the world. As my sister said to me, ‘Much of the time we don’t understand the world ourselves, so how can we explain this without adding more fear to our children’s minds’. Perhaps we shouldn’t try to rationalise the irrational but just tell our children how we feel and make time to listen to them as they express how they feel. Empathy with each other, whether our own family or with people from different cultures from ours, is a valuable skill we can practise.

I was recently at a book presentation in Madrid, of Metamba Miago (Our Roots), by a group of Afro-Spanish women writers. Psychologist Marjorie Paola Hurtado spoke about the anxiety that is accumulated over years growing up black in a predominantly white society through constant comments or asides. From always being asked where are you from, to overt racism, all the writers had multiple examples to tell. She explained that this anxiety is not something that can be cured in a day but needs work and support. Some people become so accustomed to the situation they find themselves in they no longer question it and it takes an extreme event to trigger an attack of anxiety for which they may not understand the cause. This rang a bell for me. I had a period of acute panic attacks not long after finishing university when I was living in Camden Town, London. They seemed to come out of the blue and it wasn’t immediately obvious to me what had triggered them (or even what they were); and the underlying cause of, or propensity to, anxiety was much harder to comprehend. At the time, I read a number of books about panic attacks which, although they gave advice, were not especially helpful, except in knowing that others have gone through a similar thing. I see with dismay that the recently published Headlands: New Stories of Anxiety (Victoria University Press, 2018), like the books I read in the ‘90s, has an anxiety-inducing cover design. I’m all for dark humour but – publishers take note – I was not in a good place when I had to read these books and the off-kilter text or cover images depicting depression didn’t exactly say ‘relax, I’m here to help you’. But I digress. I have been meaning to write about my own experience, but perhaps I needed a push. The trigger to set me writing could have been the Christchurch attack, the insight of psychologist Hurtado, or a friend confiding to me recently that they are on tranquillisers, but as I said, this has been on my mind off and on over the years and in the end it would perhaps surface in my writing anyway.

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Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged

A Deaf Rough Trade: Defending Poetry to ‘regular people’

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Alice Allan

Difficult to know what one means / —to be serious and to know what one means— – George Oppen, ‘Ballad’

I snap a picture of a poem and send it to a friend. I send it because this friend says he is newly interested in poetry. I send it because this is a poem that intrigues me.

The poem is from page 37 of Michael Farrell’s latest collection, I Love Poetry. The poem on page 37 has no title, so I will refer to it from here on out as ‘37’. Not only is 37 untitled, but it is also without words. It is a full page of forward slashes, full stops, back slashes, square brackets, underscores and vertical bars or pipes. This is my attempt to replicate the first line of the poem: 

///. \ /   \ | // [ | _ ___| \____///. \ /  \|//[| _ ___|

Now that I have sent 37 to my friend, I wait for a response, focusing hard on the rippling ellipsis that signals someone tapping on their keyboard elsewhere. In a minute his reply arrives: ‘Can you tell me what it means?’

Only a very few of my close friends are poets. I started writing late, did the wrong degree and ended up working in the wrong jobs. ‘Whenever I see line breaks, my brain just glazes over,’ a colleague said when I admitted my poetic tendencies at work. ‘I like the idea of poetry,’ another friend said when he saw me carrying around a collection. ‘But then I read it and I just feel confused.’ ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand it,’ my mother said as she handed back a copy of the journal that gave me my first big break. (The published poem was inspired by the way she used to point out how early a particular cherry tree near my high school would bloom each year.)

It is in these moments that I position myself in a role I only faintly believe in: Defender of Poetry.

I suspect a great many poets understand this frustrating, liminal terrain. There is this thing you love – this thing you give time to, spend money on, lose sleep over – and then there are the people you love, not all of whom ‘get it’. ‘Regular people’, as US poet and critic Craig Morgan Teicher put it on a recent episode of the New Yorker’s poetry podcast.1 ‘Poetry – for better and worse, but mostly for better – has become something that can speak a lot closer to the mainstream than ever before,’ Teicher tells New Yorker poetry editor Kevin Young. ‘A poet like Danez Smith can actually talk to regular people who didn’t decide to dedicate their lives to poetry.’

(I’ve leafed through Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead in bookshops multiple times, intending to buy it not for myself, but for friends who are new to poetry and might be open to it. Perhaps this is the book that will show them what poetry can be, I think while looking over its contents.)

No one has asked me to defend poetry. No one has told me it is my job to muster an argument not only for this poem or this poet, but for all poems. No one is handing out gold stars to people who successfully make the case for an art form that appears to revel in asking too much of its audience. But I, too, love poetry. I want to share it with others. I want everyone – especially ‘regular people’ – to know poetry is for them. And, selfishly, I want to be less lonely.

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12 Panels by Chris Gooch

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Chris Gooch

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Posted in ARTWORKS | Tagged

5 Translated Yosuke Tanaka Poems

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Paul Hetherington


Image courtesy of The High Window.

For a Person Suffering from Air-Conditioning Syndrome

Because Japan is located at the edge of Asia
you can enjoy great soup noodles there
Let’s start with that as an introduction

When you enter a small door from the hot road
there’s steam rising from an L-shaped counter
and bearded middle-aged men are working.

First, put salty fermented beans into a ramen bowl
then sieve soup from an unholy mess
In a cauldron the water convulses violently—
a handful of noodles is boiled in each small basket.

The noodles are roughly disentangled in a bowl,
and when you eat them with soup, red meat, a yellow egg, black seaweed and
small green

vegetables
your body is fully warmed from the inside,
and you will never relinquish summer.


冷房病のひとに

日本はアジアの東のはずれだから
大変よいスープ麺を食べることができる
その紹介から始めよう

暑い外部の道路から小さな戸口を入れば
湯気のあがるＬ字のカウンターがあり
そこでひげのおじさんたちが働いています。

まず豆をベースにした塩味のたれを
背徳的なごった煮の汁で割ります
一方の鍋では水がぐらぐらと沸騰していて
麺のかたまりを小さなかごに投入してはゆでて行く

ゆであがった麺を丼にいれラフにほぐし、
つゆ、赤い肉、黄色い卵、黒い海藻、緑の小さな野菜とともに食べれば
体はその内部から十分にあたたまり、
決して夏負けしないのであります。1

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A Buzz in the Retina: On Translating Luljeta Lleshanaku

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Ani Gjika

Permissions Note: By Luljeta Lleshanaku, translated by Ani Gjika, from NEGATIVE SPACE, copyright ©2012, 2015 by Luljeta Lleshanaku. Translation copyright © 2018 by Ana Gjika. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

So much of my process of translating Luljeta Lleshanaku’s poems is the story of my relationship to language and writing. I have always loved and felt at home with both. My favourite class in high school was literature, though I didn’t particularly like reading. I hated poetry and didn’t understand it. The Albanian poetry we read in the 1980s and early ’90s was always patriotic, praising the party, hermetic; I couldn’t relate to it. But I loved the exams in this class, which often included compositions. I couldn’t wait to find out what the topic was going to be, and my favourite thing was facing the lined paper and the whole class going quiet.

When I moved to the US, the shift to using another language to express myself presented a new challenge, but a welcome one, because as I was learning and becoming more confident in English I was also beginning to love literature – poetry, in particular – for the first time in my life. However, everything I learned about poetry and writing in those years in college, and throughout my MFA, paled in comparison to what I learned about it through translating Negative Space. I have learnt that I have something to say, and can articulate myself best when I have a pen in my hand. I have learnt that the person I am when I write poems is the same person I am when I translate, or write an essay, or an op-ed. My goal is the same: to distil the truth I receive through a text, or through the imagination, rather than attempt to capture it accurately, although I must always take utmost care to be accurate.

I have always enjoyed the revision process, although it’s not my favourite thing about writing. I take all the time I need with revisions until I think the piece is done. But when I became a translator, I discovered I hadn’t been patient enough. Instead of labouring over what to say, now I must pay more attention to how I say something. Translation has made me a better negotiator of thought, more attentive and more sensitive toward each utterance.

What first drew me to Lleshanaku’s poetry was its kaleidoscopic effect. Whichever page you read in the book, you get the same sensation – there is the possibility of seeing deeply into a subject, an opportunity to look far ahead, then up close again, a clarity you arrive at only by looking at something from many angles. I am not a photographer or a filmmaker, but in reading Lleshanaku I have become more aware of the visual power of her writing: I have learnt when to zoom in to capture a still shot (the situation) and when to zoom out to capture the whole panoramic view (the implications of the story that situation is trying to tell). Some poems begin by first building a mood that draws you in. Such is the case with the opening of ‘Fishermen’s Village’. You want to know what happens in this world where all the windows look seaward. What happens inside those houses? At the end of this poem, the narrator zooms in on the characters’ lives, only to zoom out again to show that, historically, we all suffer more or less similar fates.

Some of the most challenging parts of translating Negative Space involved Lleshanaku’s use of similes, imagery, and line breaks. Lleshanaku is an original and masterful simile-maker. And, because one image builds on another to construct a simile (to construct a world) I had to slow down through the many drafts of my poems to capture, recreate, sometimes even to lose, wilfully or not, a particular image or phrase for the sake of the overall message. I experienced lots of failures in the process. First of all, because English is not my mother tongue, there were some instances in my first drafts where I had translated too quickly, and therefore was too close to the original, so a phrase sounded foreign, or translated, or not idiomatic. I am grateful to my editors, Jeffrey Yang and Neil Astley, and sometimes Luljeta herself, for catching some of these translation bloopers.

I became Luljeta’s translator because I fell in love with the work and wanted to share that work with a wider audience. But in the process, I discovered what hard and humbling work translation is. Humbling in the sense that, at first, I came to translation thinking I had two advantages: Albanian was my mother tongue, and I already wrote poetry, so I thought I had all the skills I needed. But Albanian is a difficult language to begin with, and my English, although proficient, is still far from smooth when it comes to quickly finding the right idiomatic expressions. And the fact that I wrote poetry, although very useful, was not an automatic advantage: being able to write poetry does not mean much unless you are willing to take the time to listen to someone else’s voice and render that voice believably in another language.

When I read Luljeta’s poems I could hear her argumentative voice clearly, though at times this voice is quite subtle. What helped me to recreate that voice, in a way I hope sounds authentic, was paying careful attention to her line breaks and punctuation, and really listening to the shifts in the syntax. When Luljeta puts a question mark somewhere, will the same punctuation create the same ironic tone in English? Or do I need to be more direct, and change the question mark to an exclamation mark, or even make the sentence declarative? Indeed, what is ironic in one language may come across as absurd in another. All of these questions emerged without warning from the poems, and suddenly I had to start paying attention to things I hadn’t given much thought to before.

But I also discovered joy, mainly in the liberty Lleshanaku gave me in translating certain challenging images. In one image from the title poem, the author imagines the night her parents conceived her. A literal translation reads:

It’s hard to believe
that in the genesis there were some romantic evenings
with wasps in the retina
and the red magma of candles
spilling decadently like underwear
over a silver candlestick.

‘Wasps in the retina’ sounded too literal in English, and probably absurd to a reader. The image of wasps isn’t meant to be read literally, here; it is understood in Albanian in the same way we say grerëza or miza-miza, if your foot or hand goes numb – you feel ‘flies-flies’ – which suggests both a rhythmic sound and a vibration. In this instance, ‘wasps in the retina’ was a metaphor for orgasm. I didn’t want this metaphor to be lost, so I translated it as ‘a buzz in the retina’, hoping this was both as fresh and suggestive as the corresponding image in Albanian. My other challenge lay with the word ‘underwear’. The English term is so banal, and alternatives like ‘lingerie’ sounded superfluous and not at all natural; they failed to capture the casual sense of the Albanian word mbathje, used in the original. So I decided to cut the word altogether, allowing the power of suggestion (and a subtle addition of red lace) to do the work for me. The published version reads:

It’s hard to believe 
there were a few romantic evenings 
when I was conceived, a buzz in the retina
and red-laced magma
decadently peeling off
a silver candlestick.

In his citation for the International Crystal Vilenica Prize, which Lleshanaku won in 2009, Forrest Gander (who has just won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry) beautifully described what I see as Lleshanaku’s line break trademark: her lines “stretch out and suddenly retract into fragments with the sensitivity of snail horns.” I tried as much as possible to stay true and consistent to this aspect of the form of her poems.

In The Woman with the Five Elephants, a documentary on Svetlana Geier (Dostoyevsky’s German translator), Geier memorably describes the mind in the act of translating. ‘A translation,’ she says, ‘is not a caterpillar crawling from left to right. A translation always emerges from the whole. One has to make the text entirely one’s own. Internalise it. Stick your nose up in the air when you’re translating!’ It’s one of my favourite moments in the film. I think when translating someone’s work for so long – or, rather, translating so many poems by the same poet – you learn to be more patient and more sensitive with language. This isn’t so different from the patience and sensitivity I seek, as a writer, in rendering my own experiences on the page. This is something the art of translation has given back to me.

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‘That is some crafty bite’: Trisha Pender Interviews Melinda Bufton

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Trisha Pender

In her eagerly awaited second collection, Superette (Puncher & Wattman, 2018), Melinda Bufton delivers dramatically on the promise announced in her 2014 debut, Girlery (Inken Publisch, 2014). Girlery performs a provocative en guard to a literary culture overly sanguine in its dismissal of all things ‘girl’. In it, Bufton subverts the charges of superficiality and irrelevance that are often levelled at the popular culture of girls and instead celebrates this culture in loving, defiant detail. Fans of Bufton’s poetry, among whom I happily count myself, will be delighted to know that her second collection does not tone down, or retreat from, the concerns of her first. If anything, this collection is louder, smarter, deeper, and more glorious. Superette is Girlery’s dark and dangerous big sister.

As the back cover blurb of Superette (further discussed below) announces:

Superette’s speaker assumes the guise of an audacious flaneuse with a practiced eye for detail. A combination of Dorothy Parker wit, burlesque, and punk, this citizen stylist observes urban life anew … Be prepared to surrender to Superette’s artful turns and city pockets, as Bufton leads us through a contemporary expanse with effortless flair.

This is a book that insists with renewed force, with intensity and bite, on the centrality of the ‘girl’ and her manifold concerns, on the sometimes saccharine and sometimes strident dialects of popular culture, and on the need for a rambunctious, even raucous resistance to the practice of putting girls, and their cultural productions – poetry collections included – in limiting boxes.

Superette offers a beguiling combination of poetic insouciance and sprezzatura: ‘Would that / something could shock me like a television’, mourns the jaded speaker of ‘Tangerine Crush’, and yet in the same poem: ‘Never … Never say it can’t be done’. These are poems that refuse to play ‘nice’ even as they offer compelling new takes on classic genres like the Ars Poetica and the Defense of Poetry: ‘When a piece of music’s good it starts with / a simultaneous burst in my throat, heart and nethers’ (‘Tangerine Crush’). In a third-year English course I co-teach with poet Keri Glastonbury at the University of Newcastle, we assigned Superette to the class, eager to hear what our students would make of its feisty attitude, its pop cultural capital, and its artful verbal play.

Trisha Pender: I want to start somewhere superficial (or maybe ‘material’ might a better way to put it) and say that Superette is, pants down, one of the most physically stunning books I’ve seen in a long time. The cover is a work of art. Or very good advertising. It says: ‘Me! Me! Me! Me! Buy Me! I’m Beeaauuutiful!’ Was that part of a deliberate strategy? Is the design part of your design?

Melinda Bufton: This is funny and gorgeous … and all true. There is also little point to my world without the visual. This is why there are eyes within my poems, and why the cover presents a glittery eye.

The book is checking you out. But of course, it’s very ready to be looked at, also. One of my frustrations with poetry books has been that they are full of the most beautiful, twisted, earthy, elegant, brittle, lyrical, explosive content we could be reading nowadays and then they are wrapped in brown paper. Essentially. Actually, worse, brown paper is quite pleasing and tactile. There are a million reasons that poetry books are not what they could be, in term of production values, and most of them lie with the cost; I understand this. However, if I’m buying a book, I myself would like to keep looking at it, get into its thing-ness, show it to people. Stare at the cover, etc. It is superficial and it’s also part of communing with the book. I was really fortunate that my publisher and commissioning editor – David Musgrave and Ann Vickery – engaged Newcastle designer Miranda Douglas, who understood exactly what kind of cover (and then some!) that I’d envisaged.

I love that you say ‘A work of art. Or very good advertising’. It’s actually both. I was heavily into TV as a kid, I mean I was born in 1973, which meant peak TV world and peak advertising industrial complex (unless of course you were one of those unfortunate children who were only allowed to watch the ABC, or had a daily allowance of twenty minutes, or something). Here I would just say, please see the written works of David Foster Wallace: *the end*. I am deeply, deeply enmeshed in wanting my book to operate as my proxy, via being a product. So therefore she – Superette – must go forth in her best look.

TP: The back cover blurb, as well, is like this ridiculously distilled cocktail of the concerns the volume pursues. Ridiculous in that its genius, I mean. I don’t think I paid much attention to the blurb before reading the book, but then when it came around to preparing to teach it to a class I teach on contemporary literary cultures, I thought, what do we have here? The blurb of the year? You would be hard pressed to find a more apropos description of the contents of a poetry collection. It is meticulously en pointe. So with this book, the outside reflects the inside in a way that is very canny, and which seems very deliberate. Was it, or am I just making this up?

MB: No, you’re not making it up! And maybe this pops the bubble a bit (because, my god, I love the idea of ‘meticulously en pointe’…!), but the blurb came first…some of the poems had already been written, but the publisher needed a blurb early on in the process, and so I wrote one that was used to create the final copy. It was very deliberate, and was a useful ready-reckoner as I worked on the poems and wrote new material. I could hold the poems up to the blurb (like a photographer holding up a print as it develops) and see what I had. The blurb was not in charge of the show, you understand, but was in conversation with the emerging poems. There was room to move, but a nice, fuzzy, contained bomb of aesthetic suggestions to work from.

I guess the other thing that is true, both for this question and the one about the book cover, is that I’m one of those people who cares about books as objects but also as part of an eco-system of publishing. Early in my career I worked in the book-trade industry and I have respect for sales tools like blurbs. I can’t help this; my relationship to books is very multidimensional, for me they are a product as well as cultural, personal, artefact. This is not about me recruiting others into this view; I’m not attempting this; if I were, I’d be a gift-book talent agent scouring Instagram for the next Rupi Kaur. It’s simply that I’m nostalgic for other parts of my life, like when I was a twenty-two-year-old bookseller with a sales target. So, ok, blurbs can be deeply wrong, for sure. But I think they can operate as a kind of charm. They’re like a spell. I mean, how can we not consider them the most enticing, distilled, miniature poem in their own right?

TP: Right! I’d like to ask you a bit about your poetic intertexts and influences in Superette. Does your poetry talk to other poems or poetry styles being produced in Australia right now? Perhaps, specifically, to other poets? I’m thinking about your inclusion in the 2016 collection Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry, but not only that association. You are also identified as a Melbourne-based poet. Are there other coteries that this collection is in conversation with?

MB: Yes, the root of my work and its influences initially came from – and enduringly continues to come from – the Melbourne poets I know and love. Michael Farrell invited me to a poetry-reading group in 2010. Everything – and I mean, everything – has happened since that one thing. It’s like a well of goodness, and the way that this operates for me is via the conversations I can have with these people. It’s a shifting and evolving population, but it also isn’t. There are really three important ingredients here: there are the conversations and friendships – it’s kinship, really – there are the bonds that mean people keep coming, in person, to hear each other read (or launch books, or perform), and there is the work on the page, that arrives later, in the form of books, mostly. When I was younger I assumed that being a writer was about the visible – the book on the shelf in the bookshop, public profile etc. – and now I know that for me in this world, what it looks like is actually groups of people chatting and then writing things, and then sharing them with each other. It doesn’t look like anything, it looks so low-key; but it’s the deepest, most mystical and most important thing. It’s this exchange that electrifies the work; it allows you to work vertically with ideas as well as horizontally (that is, you might go to work on a half-finished poem with new intentions, having learnt of something the night before in a chat…maybe you don’t follow the path you were originally going towards, horizontally, when you blocked out the initial parts of that poem).

In addition to this, all of my work is deeply influenced by the 2010 Gurlesque anthology (Saturnalia Books). Possibly to the point that I need to stop mentioning it, ha! But the curious thing about this book is the way that I discovered it after I’d started writing the poetry that would be included in my first collection, Girlery. I had no knowledge of the style of ‘Gurlesque’, and, at that time, I also hadn’t discovered any Australian poets doing this kind of thing. In happening across Gurlesque, while browsing in Collected Works bookshop, I found a description for my style and also a repository of dozens of outrageously punky works. Collected Works, the Melbourne poetry bookshop that so, so many poets were lucky enough to know and inhabit, has just closed (at the end of 2018). Kris and Retta Hemensley, who created and tended this den of excellence, so much deserve their retirement – it’s impossible to state how much they have done, for so many people! But of course the shop is deeply missed. I would never have found this book, without Kris’s curation of stock; when I took it up to the counter to buy, he said, ‘Oh I thought that looked interesting – something for the young people …’. I loved this, and I wasn’t young. So, I really should say the Gurlesque style was a key influence once I knew about it…at the very least, it can be a way to explain my work as feminist, because the anthology exists as an example of a very specific third-wave, performative feminist poetry. The editors, Arielle Greenberg and Lara Glenum, wrote an introduction that traces the lineage of the style as they see it. It describes the kind of girlhood that I had, or at least the kind of pop culture diet I was raised on.

Being included in Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (Hunter, 2016) was a beautiful thing, because this is a markedly different anthology to previous anthologies of feminist poetry in Australia. This is also addressed by this book’s editors, Jessica Wilkinson and Bonny Cassidy, when they survey previous anthologies in the introduction and remind us that they all had their own political and literary strategies (as does any anthology), but that this new one was asking the poet to define contemporary feminism to them, the editors. They also emphasise that this book’s purpose was to open the questions; that the anthology should open the way to responses, by way of other anthologies. To me, considering feminist poetry as an energetic and wild space, while paying attention to its past, is the most important thing.

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‘You’re never disembodied from the action’: Dylan Frusher Interviews Judith Beveridge

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Dylan Frusher

Judith Beveridge is the author of six collections of poetry and throughout her writing life she has received multiple awards, including the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. As a teacher of creative writing at Sydney University and the University of Newcastle as well as the poetry editor of Meanjin, Beveridge is undoubtedly one of Australia’s most engaged, dedicated and supportive writers.

Beveridge prefaces her latest collection Sun Music: New and Selected Poems with a statement regarding the poets she admires which synchronously also expresses exactly which attracts me to her writing as a reader. Beveridge states: ‘I’ve always been drawn to poets who move through looking into vision, not of a mystical kind necessarily, but into some enlargement or transformation while still keeping tenancy with the extrinsic world.’ In many of the new poems of this collection the environment is observed with an attention that is both empathic and reverent, without being blind to suffering, even ecological horror. In the title poem Sun Music the narrator remembers her father and how his discovery of the world, as seen through a ‘gift pair/ of binoculars’, expanded his vision, which in turn expanded his being:

                                                        ...how his eyes drank
in the sky, those light-filled cylinders giving
him weightless soaring of kites and eagles.
After that he was a changed man.

Returning again to Beveridge’s opening reference to ‘looking into vision’, the above excerpt demonstrates how the concentration looking closely becomes a state for ‘vision’ and thus this vision transforms:

                                                        No more
am I squinting into the monocular bottom of the bottle,
or into the myopic base of a liquor-filled tumbler,
but filling my sights with beauty and distance.
Now I listen as a pied butcherbird, like a jazz flautist
in the trees, work on syncopated chimes and ensemble
phrases, its liquid crystal voice - music from sun.

Sun Music: New and Selected Poems brings together poems from over four decades of work along with thirty-three new poems. Behind the personae explored in Beveridge’s dramatic narrative verse, there is a deep subjectivity and lyricism. Concerns about ecocide, cruelty and the shadowy complexities of human motives are discussed with a diplomatic and often gentle distance and subtlety. And yet, Beveridge’s poetry is not merely emotional, but is also delivered with craft and immediacy. There is a humility in Beveridge’s dedication to poetry and in her reverence for artistry and craft: ‘… its the challenge of trying to write a good poem rather than feeling that I have something unique to say that motivates me’. It is this gentle power of Beveridge’s steady gaze, the sense of vision tethered to the world that drew me to seek out an interview with such a poet.

The below interview was conducted in person at the Geelong Library after Beveridge appeared for 2018 Word for Word Non-Fiction Festival. As I sat with one of Australia’s major poets, I noticed Beveridge’s tendency to carefully weigh each response before speaking just as often as she would ask me to excuse her ‘waffle’. In person I found Beveridge’s company like the title poem ‘Sun Music’; bright and harmonious. Generous with her time and considered with her answers I felt that while speaking with Beveridge it was easy to be fooled by her kind demeanor and forget that for her, no word was insignificant enough to avoid scrutiny.

Dylan Frusher: Are you a poet that enjoys talking about poetry?

Judith Beveridge: I don’t particularly like talking about my own poetry, but I do love to communicate with others about the joys of poetry, about the writing process and about writers that I admire. Everybody’s processes are different, and I enjoy finding out from other poets how they go about their writing and how they manage their writing lives. For me writing is a life style which involves many serious choices. These choices can be tricky. You see many talented people opting out because the pressures of maintaining a serious commitment can be very daunting in as much as you need to spend a lot of time learning craft and technique, so you often end up making substantial financial sacrifices in order to give yourself the time needed to learn how to write. This is why Government funding is so important as it can provide a writer with financial aid. It’s hard to be a serious writer and maintain a full-time job. I made a decision early to only work part-time so that I could devote time to writing, but of course you’re often struggling to pay the bills.

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Excerpts from Neon Daze

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Amy Brown

In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates likens pleasure and pain to nails binding the soul to the body, resulting in a heavy, stained, monstrous identity, ultimately incapable of achieving the spiritual transcendence due to a true philosopher. Neon Daze is a raw record of the days when my mind dissolved into my body, or rather into my son’s brand new body. The footnotes, added a year later, attempt to explain the struggle and shame of articulating such bodily thoughts verbally. Neon Daze will be published by Victoria University Press, Wellington, in November 2019.


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Chorography and Toute-eau in the Waters of Lower Murray Country

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Camille Rouliere

I acknowledge the Kaurna Nation as the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which the University of Adelaide is located; and I acknowledge the Ngarrindjeri Nation as the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which this research bears – lands which were never ceded. I respect and acknowledge their respective ongoing relationships with these lands and their connected bodies of water.

The unity is submarine
breathing air, our problem is how to study the fragments
whole.

Edward Kamau Brathwaite (‘Caribbean Man in Space and Time’ 1)

The first line of this fragment by poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite opens philosopher Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. ‘The unity is submarine’. This phrase summarises the orientation of Glissant’s lifework: waters, as the pivot around which to wrap our breathing bodies and imagine a shimmering totality; waters, where the world perpetually swirls and flows together as currents – both aerial and aquatic – carry its many different manifestations from one state to the other. Waters transform. They exchange through collision with others, and yet, they always retain their unicity – their (molecular) structure – even if invisible, buried, quietened, (over)pumped. They remain waters, in their irreducible unity-diversity.

For Glissant, waters are more than simply an abstraction: they give him his raison d’être. Despite the broad reach and implications of his theories in global post/decolonial discourses, he indeed never loses sight of his geographical positioning. He remains firmly anchored in the Caribbean archipelago at all times. And constantly, repeatedly, these archipelagic roots and routes surround him and his words with waters.1 His work stretches around waters, across waters, within waters: it is full of waters. It is itself watery: fluid, malleable, opaque: boundless. It perfectly illustrates philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s statement: ‘(l)iquidity is a principle of language; the language must be swollen with waters’ (258). Glissant’s poetics can thus be equated to a methodology of waters – an aqueous methodology – designed to support and allow for (to respect) textual manifestations or restorations of watery movements. As such, his work underpins my research – it is pivotal to generate a framework of academic deconstruction2 which permits me to weave syntax creation within the text and effectively design an essay that is cognisant of waters’ movements and behaviours: their geo-temporal fluidity and porosity destabilise the text and speak through both form and content.

The unity is submarine
breathing air, our problem is how to study the fragments
whole.

This essay is concerned with this submarine unity: a unity which is to be found underwater – within the waters. It aims to intertwine fragments – to study them (as) whole – by using the rhythms of waters (both intrinsic and human-produced) to shift in between (that is, disrupt) states, perspectives and chronologies. More precisely, this essay consists of hearing the echoes of Glissant’s Tout-monde within the waters of Lower Murray Country; or even more precisely, it aims to articulate these waters as Toute-eau (Whole-water or All-water3) themselves: an imaginary realm of creativity emerging from the forever-expanding totality of all waters, in both space and time.

The fragments under scrutiny are disparate: I move in between (within) bodies of waters. I move in between (within) Lower Murray Country, the Pacific and the Atlantic – through my Glissantian all-connector. These fragments belong to the sonic realm: I explore the unity to be found in watery depth through sound and forms of sonority. I discuss Ngarrindjeri and settler music, collaborative music that crosses ethno- and anthropocentric boundaries; the silence of Murrundi / Murray River’s dried mouth with its brace-barrages, and the compensating loudness of atmospheric rivers – rivers in the sky.

This essay is both associative and cumulative. I approach it as a journey: I follow relationships and passages defined and informed by watery rhythms. I travel from the human to the more-than-human, from the micro to the macro, from the local to the global, from the sky to the earth, from me to (my) others. Glissant says: ‘(t)o write is to speak: the world’ (‘From The Whole-World Treatise’ 32). Relinquishing former absolutes, I slip inside and underneath sound to draw together a series of antagonisms which are progressively brought into collaboration to create, not a synthesis, but a mosaic where each constituent of a pair carries within itself the totality of its counterpart, and of the world; a mosaic where each constituent pays attention to, and composes with, the other.

This journey is unrevised – I retrace my steps (I repeat myself); it does not follow a linear progression but records twists and turns, unlike explorers’ expunged accounts. As spatial historian Paul Carter argues: ‘(t)o describe a country is not to stand back, as if one were not there, but to travel it again. … history and the making of history are one and the same thing’ (The Road 346). This essay is therefore an exercise in imagination. The totality that I speak of is never totalising: this is precisely what imagination prevents. The silences of/in the text are due to its incomplete, partial and fragmentary nature; they are not reducing or essentialising. They leave the text open (to interpretation, to rewriting, to disintegration); open to become another text already. It is a text-in-becoming.

This essay is conceived (built) as a chant to Lower Murray Country’s waters. It rolls over these waters and sings them into textual being.4 This is my contribution, and I wish it to account for a ‘horizon of possibilities’5 that is not happily cradled in environmental degradation, but fights to spring again from the ruins of colonisation. I am ‘breathing air’ as I sing-write. Breath translates as pneuma (πνεῦμα) in Ancient Greek. It also means soul, spirit or creative life force. My breath carries my voice. Exhalations and inhalations give its rhythm to my strokes on the keyboard. My breathing is cyclical; it is tidal. The gestational power of waters6 contributes to my state of mind. Waters run through my veins. With each breath I take, I feel them under my skin. I am pregnant with hopes. Waters show me how to hope. They imprint my body with their rhythms. There is an affective dimension to ‘breathing air’. Breathing implies feeling. I am not alone. My body-as-affect (my affective body) connects to others. Cultural studies scholar Anna Gibbs writes: ‘(r)hythm traverses individual bodies, linking them in affectivity or responsiveness to the world’ (229). ‘(B)reathing air’ generates fertile terrains of affective cross-pollination. It has the potential to transform through connections. This is why explorations of watery sound can be used to (re)create emplaced dialogues. ‘The unity is submarine’: the rhythms of waters intertwine the fragments. They are un-fragmenting.

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Posted in ESSAYS, SCHOLARLY | Tagged ,

6 Poems from Robin M Eames

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Robin M Eames

Through my writing, I am speaking to something larger than myself. I write in conversation with trans, mad, crip, and sex worker communities, and with all other marginalised peoples whose struggles are bound up with my own. I am not interested in lingering in tragedy, but rather in working through grief, shame, and disempowerment to reach a space of radical pride and joy. My work rejects pity and condescension, embracing the possibilities of marginal and marginalised bodies rather than reducing them to narrative props. I often work with myth because I want to trouble and subvert society’s aetiologies and origin stories. I want to introduce new organising elements, new ways of making sense of the world.


prognosis

Time is suddenly precious.
The hours narrow down, each moment
newly golden. The heart breaks,
reforms, breaks again into irregular
beats, seizes against malformation,
counts down against the clock.
You turn the page, resist the urge
to skip to the end. You linger in it.
Here is the tale: the wolf swallows the sun.
The other wolf works ruin on the moon,
and all the stars fall from the sky.
As the world-serpent stirs
the seas rise with icemelt,
the skies flood poison and smoke.
The god of war and thunder
battles the wyrm, slays it, takes nine steps
and falls down dead.
This was written long before his birth:
he was already bitten. The world turns.
You wake at dawn again,
drink in the sunrise bloom
of unruly lavender, soft orange
burnt through with mauve-touched
rose. How many dawns
have you slept through and missed?
How many more? You can’t breathe
with grief for lost mornings. And yet
here it is before you: the sun,
a blot of gold blurred out
by clouded violet, all shot through
with livid streaks of light,
fading quickly now, the violent hues
all bleeding back to blue.
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Aussi / Or: Un Coup de dés and Mistranslation in the Antipodes

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Toby Fitch

‘Shipwrecked on the shoals of contingency’, Australian poetry is haunted by Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Un Coup de Dés. Its publication in Cosmopolis in Paris in 1897 struck a nerve or, rather, a vessel within Australian poetry bloodlines, starting with Christopher Brennan. Un Coup de dés was the score that inspired him to compose ‘Musicopoematographoscope’, also in 1897, a large handwritten mimique manuscript, or pastiche, that transposed the more extreme aesthetics of an avant-garde French Symbolism into the Australian poetic psyche. Now well into the twenty-first century, Un Coup de dés is still a blueprint for experimentation in Australian poetry, spawning a number of versions, two of which are homophonic mistranslations – ‘A Fluke’ by Chris Edwards and ‘Desmond’s Coupé’ by John Tranter – both published in 2006, and both revelling / rebelling in the abject, and in “errors and wrecks’. This essay/assay provides a comparative reading of these homophonic bedfellows, traces their relation(ship)s to their antecedents, to various theories of translation and punning, and begins an enquiry into the significant influence of Mallarmé’s great ‘vessel’ on Australian poetry and poetics.

Read the full article here.

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Every other Friday

Posted on May 1, 2019 by J V Birch

Our telephone is in the hallway
sits high on the wall like a hawk.
It can kill our weekend with its ear-splitting cry.

We wait by the door in coats
bags at our ankles
we know we’re being watched.
The only lights outside are those that don’t move.

I feel the air pull back before it begins
and my brother reach for my hand.

Posted in 91: MONSTER | Tagged

Mutant

Posted on May 1, 2019 by S Niroshini

The ninja turtles are the greatest heroes of our generation.
Heart to heart, this isn’t nostalgia but stone-cold revelation.
Brother, in this time of polar shelfs eroding and coroners
combing the streets for dead girls’ bodies, I suggest all our heroes
rise in the future from the sewers of our torrid cities, renaissance
renewed from the filth of the underground and the litter of empty
pizza boxes, diapers, coke cans, hip hop and corrupt language;
COWABUNGA! At 12, I hoped Donatello would show up and take me
from the placid suburbs of Melbourne to the streets of New York
where a shared sense of casual hatred and social abandonment
permeated. Don’t think this poem is a riff on the allegory of minority
as mutant. I have no desire to look back in time and give a meaning
which otherwise doesn’t exist. What I’m talking about is a spell
you can set when you are 13 and 3 months old to call on superheroes.
It’s the one I used to summon Raphael when a kid stole my swimming
goggles at the local pool, his webbed feet catching on wet stone.
Another time my guinea pig Oscar went into epileptic shock
and Leo raced him in time to the vet. And I summoned them all
when my dad was in hospital, his heart having stopped working.
The beep beep beep of the nurse-call reminds me of the spell.
And when the turtles came they beat and fixed his chest
BEAT BEAT BEAT BEAT. I’m running with them now
with nunchucks and swords whirling our way through the city.
Can you see us Brother? We are soaring through the streets grinning.
Cutting down our enemies in our path. Never lowering our gaze.

Posted in 91: MONSTER | Tagged

I Still Love Without My Head

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Anne Walsh

Poseidon wanted me for a time.
And I was a fool.
He only ever loved himself.
Jealous Athena made me into a gorgon with a head of snakes.
Funny I had always seen myself that way anyway.
Now no one can look at me without turning to stone.
All the stones of grief, my gorgeous snakes
are not the venomous part of me.
My hopelessness is.
My lack of touch is basilisk.
You think I don’t see your shield, Perseus?
I look into it on purpose just to behold my monster face
that isn’t mine but that love made.
Mine was so tender, a poem.
You cut off my willing head
(no wonder you can’t think anymore).
But from my hopeless heart a winged horse springs.
Where she paws earth, water bursts and muses drink.
But the first thing that comes into my mind without my head
(my heart did all my thinking anyway)
when the stars touched down as hooves
was love again, akin to dread .

Posted in 91: MONSTER | Tagged

Heath Ledger’s Joker

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Amy Lin

A caked face crumbles
with aimless cruelty. Eyes
stare from charcoal sockets,
damply disguising how he
came to be. Then a voice
curls at the corners,
billows out like a speech

balloon. Flames are
preferable to money, death
more desirable than status.
We hear the ever-changing
history of his scars,
how deformity

defiles a character.
Beneath a lick of the lips,
yellow teeth bleed
from the inside. Gummy
stigmata of a psychopath.
To be an agent of chaos,

one must sustain the
democracy of random
destruction. Empathy is for
another type of fool, and he
makes us all ridiculous,
satirises virtue in a facial twitch,
the perverse tricks.

He laughs, but is he happy?
Waddling down hospital
steps, havoc biting his
heels. He just does things – the
actions void of volition – while
you remain a reluctant witness

to this macabre magic.
If you’re not careful, he’ll
cut a new smile for you,
carve it clean from your jowls
so you can beam hate,
so you can work the wound
of your mouth
bright as a gunshot.

Posted in 91: MONSTER | Tagged

Only fair

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Melinda Smith

It’s an injustice, be a girlfriend.
Tomorrow is the last eight years,
I’ve had to reduce every single girl.

I’ll be annihilated and love to rot in my
revenge against all these years of you.
I’m the true alpha male.

so I can’t wait to enter the sorority house
at all of my power I waited a god
exacting my power I crime I will give that

to come to other men for it just for it.
and I waited a crime of blood and pleasure.
All those popular kids, never even kissed a god

compared to this. Girls, it’s not fair.
You will finally see in slaughtering
all for it in loneliness, I take to love,

it’s only fair. Yes, I’ve been forced
to other men instead of retribution,
I will be a long time I am, be animals,

Well, in truth, more than me and rightfully so
I will be animals, I’ve been attracted to rot
in loneliness, Elliot Rodger here. [laughs]

You will make you. I hit puberty, depraved
species. I waited a crime of blood and pleasure.
You will have never get over. I’m the true

alpha male. I’ll be annihilated and pleasure
while they throw themselves at these years,
You will have never get over. I will punish you.

Poem created from the transcript of Elliot Rodger’s video ‘Retribution’. Rodger uploaded the video
to YouTube on May 23 2014, the day before he murdered six people and seriously injured 13 others
in Isla Vista, California. He ended by turning the gun on himself. His actions made him somewhat of a hero
to lonely men in the self-styled ‘incel’ (‘involuntarily celibate’) community. Transcript sourced from
the LA Times, May 24 2014. The text was then manipulated using the heroku glass leaves text
manipulation app (in particular, the ‘create Markov chain’ manipulation, which works a little like predictive text).

Posted in 91: MONSTER | Tagged

Agatha

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Libby Hart

Most paintings portray you
as a placid woman bearing a salver,
as if you were offering cupcakes,
rather than the two breasts
that were sheared from your body.

If there is anguish, it’s half-hearted.
If there is blood, it’s a thimbleful.
Such feeble depictions of brutal revenge.

Some say you were then rolled
over broken pottery and scorching coals.
Another version sent you to the stake.
But does the method really matter?
It’s enough to learn you were tortured for saying, “No”.

They held you down for him and raped you for him.
They tied your wrists for him and cut off your breasts for him.
They stoked the tinder for him and burned you for him.

All the while he kept his gaze on the small fire that you made.

Posted in 91: MONSTER | Tagged

small town lazarus

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Ashley Capes
come back grim man
these streets go rotten without your heavy breath
to refresh;
the crisp silver frost
the halo
on eucalypt
the balm on burning litter
in bins
and the long croak of the crow, his
black flickering
across my window

there where I watch for you
& worry
that even your twig of spring
cannot galvanize me

but see how I seek you still
the crumbling whispers of dry earth
heaving,
the stunning suicides
of cherry petals

and all the flat moments, too
the carnival
right after
that final somersault
and the same dead-eyed
hours between town A and town B

if I find you can you tell me, will you know exactly
what to do this time?
can you safely say
forever
in the kind of voice
that even our tombstones
will strain to hear?

Posted in 91: MONSTER | Tagged

shoot

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Jenni Nixon
hi ya all ya all ok?    name is lily lily magnolia   ya know folks big game huntin’ so expensive since rhinoceros elephant tigers became endangered    trump brothers they’re wild    don jnr shot an elephant    cut off the tail as a trophy legends  they’re the true conservationists    if all tha’ wildlife goes there’s nothin’ left to shoot   big business breedin’ lions on ‘canned farms’   eight thousand of ’em     only twelve hundred left in the wild   cubs taken for pettin’ zoos are hand-reared easy to shoot ’cos they’re so tame    in the savannah get so close to a lioness ya can almost see her blink   shots fired bam thud    thrill-in’   rich hobby hunters use bow and arrows sometimes they miss     giraffe not that difficult    a high-powered rifle does tha’ job    porters arrange her all neat folded up like a starched linen napkin     careful camera duddent miss tha’ shot you draped over a dead giraffe     put it up on the wall alongside mounted animals ya killed leopard antelope   big red kangaroo at top-dollar tourist park join a shooter’s outback adventure package     hunt farmed big reds or emus (ya can’t hunt ’roo in oz not like in texas) tha’ reminders of the toys ya had as a child    red lion    purple elephant    ha shure is fun
Posted in 91: MONSTER | Tagged

from Red Black & Blues

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Christopher Patton

children
Pages: 1 2 3 4
Posted in 91: MONSTER | Tagged

Logical Fallacies of Alien

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Damen O'Brien

generalisation
Ripley’s first failure was one
of generalisation: that one alien’s
elemental viciousness could be ascribed to all.

gambler’s fallacy
that the late acid savagery of
subsequent samples was similarly brutal
proved nothing. Repeatedly.

divine fallacy
the Giger-counter leap at intuition:
designed brutality, made monstrosities,
but evolution is its own hidden actor.

two wrongs make a right
after the Nostromo was scoured
and the crew had been killed by the alien, in turn
Ripley punched it into space. Wrong follows wrong.

slippery slope
but Earth must be saved: fragile teardrop,
one alien loosed there, like cognitive bias
becomes the seed of doom. Certainty from assumption.

appeal to emotion
smudged waif stalked by demon
and my favourite of the movies. Ripley rasping
get away from her, you bitch. My gut flips.

appeal to motive
psychopathic automaton, then self-sacrificing
robot helper, androgynous and anodyne companion,
homunculus hubris. Each robot different – all suspect.

false analogy
sleek futurism and vicious intent,
‘strong’ women battling impossible odds, but
Alien is not Terminator, Sigourney not Linda.

appeal to morals
in direct proportion to their moral infamy,
bit parts snatched into crawl spaces, darkness.
Death comes last to crims with golden hearts and innocents.

post hoc ergo propter hoc
was it in the misty unfolding of an egg, a cause
for all the disasters that ensue, that suffocating hand
or hidden machinations, the static SOS disturbing their sleep?

argumentum ad hominem
every time, she is Cassandra prophesying
but the three-movie deal was so good she made a fourth.
sometimes from the mouth of madness, sanity speaks.

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