Carol Jenkins



Barns in Charlevoix

I like the barns, their air of constancy, their un-renovated geometry, their wooden deshabille, that they have high hipped roofs — and windows set without regard to symmetry — that they are unpainted, the wood grey or brown with age, …

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

Morris Hirshfield

The largest manufacturer of boudoir slippers in the city retires to paint, moustached, palette held aloft as standard, the vast pink thighs of his model whose smooth and featureless pudenda still brings pinpoints to his eyes and bristle to his …

Posted in 79: EKPHRASTIC | Tagged

Dunce

That great dunce the new day arrives awkward in her blue pyjamas knowing nothing of what will happen, not even that by evening her clothes will be smeared with rust, streaks of blood, that bruised and pale she will limp …

Posted in 74: NO THEME V | Tagged

TOIL Editorial

To write a poem about work is to go twice through the ropes. Once to see or do, and once to write.

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged ,

La Florista

Every morning we heard her bell. It is La Florista on her parti-colour triciclo. I am four years old, my mother and I always go out to welcome her. She looked Japanese but with coppery skin. Wearing a straw hat, …

Posted in 71: TOIL | Tagged ,

Submission to Cordite 52: TOIL Open!

Selfie in Oaxaca Ethnobotanical Garden Poetry for Cordite 52: TOIL is guest-edited by Carol Jenkins I’m looking to meet the lone toiler, the staff, whole professions, whole guilds. What I want for TOIL are energetic and intelligent takes and insight …

Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged ,

Snow from Hakuba to Nagoya

Each house, each fence, bough, post & letter box has its chapeau or topiary of snow, a cap, a stack whose mosaic interlocks until it’s doffed. Icing sugar, talc-like powder, linen perfect, doona-esque, foot-hold test, temple finial, gravestone grace note; …

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Review Short: Carol Jenkins’s Xn

Xn has been described as a ‘mathematical metaphor for poetry’ and Carol Jenkins as a science-poet, but these are misleading claims. Jenkins’s vocabulary may derive from the sciences, but her themes are firmly grounded in the domestic. From the cosmic to the most mundane, nothing is beneath her scrutiny:

nothing is too large to think into being
or too small to overlook once I turn
my mind that way, such as this pen
the poem and even you.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged ,

Karelia

Every day two villages disappear [insert blank space here] Phwaaa. It’s summer but here are snow drifts in attic corners, great banks resting where the church {insert blank space here} has turned into splinters of silver wood and holey ghosts. …

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

Recording Archives: ‘A Way with Words’

For two years, from September 2009 to October 2011, I produced A Way with Words, a weekly radio program showcasing contemporary Australian poetry. In all, 106 episodes (each of around five minutes) were produced. Presented here is a chance to listen in on six gems from the archives vault – some of my favourites, chosen for the most part because they are impossible to find elsewhere as audio. A Way with Words was broadcast weekly by ArtSound in Canberra, picked up by Ozwrite on the National Community Radio Network, Dover Road Radio broadcasting from the Isle of Wright in the UK, 2KRRR Community Radio in Kandos and 3RRR in Melbourne.

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HCI and The Muses of Poetry: Calliope Recites Jenkins, Lilley, Langdon and Williams

The Muses of Poetry is one of the current projects at the Research and Development Department of the Institute of Animation at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in Germany, that intends to bring poetry – its emotionality, auditory structures and nuances when words meet elocution – to a larger audience.

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Japan Series

Wheat gluten sticks with red miso and Fox tail millet Fox tail millet, one sees the tiny teeth of the vixen, biting tiny bones of wheat, her tail upright in the autumn morning. Sakomoto Noodle Shop We stop for a …

Posted in 54: TRANSPACIFIC | Tagged

Benjamin Dodds Reviews Carol Jenkins

Carol Jenkins's first collection of poetry, Fishing in the Devonian, has been identified as a body of great 'scientific' poems. Michael Sharkey's quote on the publication's back cover and Judith Beveridge's pick of the best books of 2008 in Australian Book Review both single out Jenkins's work for its strong use of science.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged ,

Test Walk

In Atlanta a man takes a prosthetic leg for a test walk and does not come back. When I am six I find my Great Uncle Sid's tin leg alone in the hall. He is asleep in the next room. …

Posted in 28: INNOCENCE | Tagged

Trade-ins: Small Arms

And then there is the soft innocence of small arms, the round oval of the wrist/stock, the clarity of skin/metal, the single crease inside the elbow/trigger that tells it. What happens to the rest of the body when they've sold …

Posted in 28: INNOCENCE | Tagged

Dispossession

the years of collection, walls nacreous from hoardings, a paper codex, squirrelings, till each room, a labyrinth of the past, teeters ceiling to floor with extracted life, objectified, amassed, meant, grows out to clog the doors packs down the hallway, …

Posted in 27: GENERATION OF ZEROES | Tagged

Party Platform

Carol Jenkins lives in Sydney and is currently writing a biographical note on the easy installment plan. So far small parts of it have appeared in Snorkel, Quadrant, Heat, Conversations, Tirra Lirra, Island and Overland.

Posted in 25: COMMON WEALTH | Tagged