Dan Disney



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

‘In a station of the vortex pick me up and hurl me’ writes Joyelle McSweeney in the poem ‘Oocyte’, appearing in their celebrated collection Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat Books, 2020). In this heady exchange of ideas, the author of ten books (poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction, translation) reveals a formidable erudition swirls through the heartlands of their elemental writing.

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Dan Disney Reviews Laurie Duggan’s Selected Poems 1971–2017

Laurie Duggan has long been a star within the light-filled firmaments of Australian poetry that first burst into prominence around five decades ago. A so-called ‘Monash poet’, Duggan’s recently published Selected Poems is suffused with images in which he trains an unrelentingly quizzical, reverent eye across apparently mundane terrains.

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Is it true that somewhere the plum trees have happily blossomed? Yi Saek (1328-1396) (i) bee vertical her flickering eye enlarging hindwing shadows skittering the bright 3rd storey dirt -edged aerie >>> trucks gearing down into dusk’s gold overtones (looping …

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Alex Kostas Reviews Dan Disney

Is the contemporary world really as confused and as doomed as it seems? In his latest book of poetry, either, Orpheus, Dan Disney tends towards the affirmative with his ‘elegiac anthroposcenes’ – assaulting scenes of twenty-first century demise – but he does not attempt to grapple with the problem alone. Instead he enlists the help of a stunning amount of other writers and thinkers.

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Review Short: Writing to the Wire, Dan Disney and Kit Kelen, eds.

Hannah Arendt clearly noted it: a dog with a name-tag has a better chance of surviving than an anonymous dog. She also noted that the alleged protections offered by legal and moral rights – human or otherwise – would only be made available to those who did not need them. The right to have rights would be stripped from the rest; they would be consigned to the worst.

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EXPLODE Editorial: Awfully Passionate Egregious Demagogueries … reflections on absolutes, straying, anguish and bees

If poets are in the business of cultivating ‘voice’ then, logically enough, to which ends? Is there an onus not only to learn how to speak but to also become versed in what to speak of?

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Caren Florance Reviews Dan Disney and John Warwicker

The book starts with a full stop. It orders me to stop before I begin. On the next page there is a font that looks like a zebra crossing. It straddles the page spread, white shapes on flat black. I stop, looking hard at the letters to make sense of them, and then realise what they’re saying: WALK WALK STOP! I’ve followed orders; how biddable of me. I move on, turning the page. There’s another black expanse: it says WALK in the same font, followed by a full stop. I guess I have permission to move on. So far, so good.

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Submission to Cordite 56: EXPLODE

Poetry for Cordite 56: EXPLODE is guest-edited by Dan Disney. [[EXPLODE from ex– “out” + plaudere “to clap the hands”]] the spectacle Oculus Rift the α in their brickveneerdoms howzat Omid Fazal Reza Hamid Leo Lucky Country megafires Maulboyheenner form …

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Autumn Royal Reviews Martin Langford and Dan Disney

Matters of identity in relation to land are a major concern for poets writing in Australia. In the introduction to The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2009) John Kinsella points out that since its earliest forms Australian poetry expresses ‘a sense of urgency about communicating the uniqueness and significance of the Australian landscape, and the relationship between individuals and community and country/place’.

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(iii) after Sherry Turkle + John Cage

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Dan Disney Reviews the deciBels Series

These ten tiny tomes each speak (squawk, swoon, glitch, muse, lyricise, confess) of how there is something not ticking precisely inside the reality machine. Or perhaps these books shine light onto how we’ve all gone slightly spectral within our anthropocenic phantasmagorias, lost and unmoored in an experiment that’s become dreadfully strange. Some of these books turn exclusively toward the world, others perhaps come from particular critical engagements; each serves to extend conversation both on what poets do, and what poems are for.

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Review Short: Christopher Barnett’s when they came/ for you elegies/ of resistance

Christopher Barnett is an enigmatic figure: an exile and outsider, an active and proud Socialist, Australian but long based in Europe because of feeling, as Mark Roberts asserts in the book’s foreword, ‘profound disillusionment with Australian society’ (ix)

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Review Short: Cameron Lowe’s Circle Work

The poems in Cameron Lowe’s Circle Work swing across each page at a strangely measured, athletic tilt. The scope is local and vast, the gaze muscular, and Lowe sweeps the vistas (from Corio to the universe) for details apprehended as preternatural. His rapture typified in the lines, ‘the body’s cruel admission// that close is never close enough’ (56), these poems skirt edges of realness without entering the domain of things. Lowe’s is a poetics of evanescence, not arrival, and Circle Work frames the contours of human habitats as noise-filled within <> of silence. This book, a ‘stage of surfaces’ (31), watches carefully the play of order: birds and cats and dogs, flower-filled gardens and houses, dark bays and intersected hills and, everywhere, sound and light tinged by season or time.

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Notes from Yerevan, Armenia

First impression: Yerevan undulates out the semi-desert, ringed with what look suspiciously like nuclear reactors. Flight SU1860 jolts down at (the recently privatised) Zvartnots airport, and we pass a dis-assemblage of passenger jets in various states of stripped-down decay. In …

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Enter Cordite Scholarly

Cordite Scholarly is a new section of Cordite Poetry Review devoted to peer-reviewed research on Australian and international poetry and poetics. Essays published in Cordite Scholarly are reviewed by at least two members of Cordite’s Academic Advisory Board (or see …

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A Series of Fives: Notes from Seoul

This is a country of ghosts and robots. A country of seven thousand living poets – none of them talking to one another. The once-hermit kingdom, where all but gentry were garbed in white, now spills the neon of frantic …

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‘You’re alive, and I’m alive’: Resistance and Remembering in Ko Ŭn’s Maninbo

Ko Ŭn is a literary giant who has gathered together a suite of folk stories, anecdotes, vignettes and asides in order to construct the monumental edifice of his Maninbo. The title translates literally as the ‘family records of ten thousand lives’, and the poet seems compelled to record the details of those who might otherwise be erased from history.

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Trains (an Essay)

A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. Aldous Huxley, Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist The world is medium-sized. Michel Houellebecq, Lanzarote Romania (Part 1) We've …

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Matt Hetherington Reviews Dan Disney

It's reasonable to suggest that we live in somewhat Tragicomic times. A well-known satirist (whose name I forget) recently complained of being completely unable to mock the American government, since those running the country were already effectively satirising themselves by saying and doing things more absurd and laughable than anything he could come up with.

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… I once asked a deaf magician the famed question: if a tree falls in the forest, will it always make a noise? He wrung his hands wretchedly, then signed “yeah; but what’s a man to do?” Earlier, he’d pulled …

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