David McCooey



Bathroom Abstraction

1. You once wrote the following in an essay in a book: ‘His poetry, ambivalent as a bathroom, acknowledges both the body’s pleasures and its incompetencies’. In response, a critic wrote that he only kind of knew what you meant. …

Posted in 92: NO THEME VIII | Tagged

Review Short: Judith Beveridge’s Sun Music: New and Selected Poems

Judith Beveridge’s Sun Music: New and Selected Poems begins with the eponymous poem of her debut collection, The Domesticity of Giraffes (1987), concerning a giraffe in a zoo.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged ,

Questions of Travel

Elizabeth Bishop packs for Seattle, December 1965 Thus, liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon. Victor Turner, The …

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

But Why Am I Telling You this? You Are Not Even Here: Against Defining the Suburb

When I was 17 and finishing my high school exams the petrol station around the corner from our house exploded. I didn’t hear it but my twin brother did: he jingled the keys and we drove in his Subaru ute to check out the damage.

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged , , , , , ,

Posing Cards

found poems i) Mom + Dad Hug Have the couple half hug with their arms crossing in the front. Tell Mom to slightly lean her head into Dad. ii) Family of 5 Standing Have Mom and Dad stand together and …

Posted in 84: SUBURBIA | Tagged

Chloe Wilson Reviews David McCooey

At first, David McCooey’s Star Struck appears to be a collection comprising four sections, each self-contained and corralled from the others. These sections range from a series of lyric poems meditating on a ‘cardiac event’, to poems investigating light and dark, a sequence of eighteen ‘pastorals’ on pop stardom (and fandom) and, finally, two longer narrative poems.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged ,

Paul Munden Reviews The Best Australian Poems 2016

In her introduction to this anthology, editor Sarah Holland-Batt claims for the work ‘a colloquialism, contrarianism and playfulness that separates it from its counterparts in the northern hemisphere’. Being hitherto more familiar with that northern hemisphere, this reviewer’s critical interest was immediately aroused.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged , , , , , ,

Is Contemporary Australian Poetry Contemporary Australian Poetry?

Poet, if you’re looking for your name in this essay, jump ahead a couple of pages. There I begin talking about poets collected in this anthology. Those of you interested in a review about contemporary Australian poetry, let’s begin here.

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

Playing with Light and Dark: Amy Hilhorst Interviews David McCooey

I first became interested in David McCooey’s work while studying an Honours unit at the University of Western Australia, where for an assessment I responded to his essay on Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s poetry, only to learn that he too had taken the same unit some years before.

Posted in INTERVIEWS | Tagged , , , , ,

Intensive Care (ii)

There had been an earlier waking, though, in the ICU, a time you have deeply forgotten, when you had the worst of it—the pain, the detubation, the harrowing scenes of your return to life. Your wife witnessed it, graphically laying …

Posted in 75: FUTURE MACHINES | Tagged

Jim Morrison’s Aubade

You grab my morning hard-on, and we are borne to the immortal motel where we will lodge a brief lifetime, sheltering from an Egyptian sun that burns down upon the illegible gravestones in the withered cemetery. The feathered Indian chants …

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

Review Short: John Tranter’s Heart Starter

What is more old-fashioned than modernity? New York in the 1960s; Paris in the 1920s; Edwardian England: how entranced we are by the bygone milieu of modernity. John Tranter has long appreciated the poetic potential of the almost-new, almost-old, as seen in his poems on movies, jazz, the New York School, and so on. But as seen in his latest book, Heart Starter, his interest in such things is not merely nostalgic. Rather, his work is obsessed with remixing the magic pudding of modernity. The past, in other words, is there to be used, not revered or sentimentalised. Tranter’s poetic revisionism treats source texts and forms as transitional objects (to use Winnicott’s term) that offer open-ended play and creativity, rather than demand compliance.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged ,

David McCooey Reviews Jennifer Maiden

Jennifer Maiden’s Drones and Phantoms opens with ‘Diary Poem: Uses of Live Odds’, a poem that juxtaposes – in a way characteristic of Maiden’s intensely synthesising work – politics, aesthetics, and gambling. Poetry, of course, is a kind of gamble, one in which the stakes are at once ridiculously low (financially speaking) and ridiculously high (personally speaking). Writing a poem – like any creative act – is a risky venture. One’s subjective experience of being creative never fully underwrites the created artefact. And as a communicative act, poetry runs the ever-present risk of obscurity and/or inconsequence.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged ,

Justin Clemens Reviews Poetry and the Trace

Sometimes irritating, often informative, occasionally incisive and sporadically genuinely interrogatory, the thoughtfulness evinced by (many of) the writings collected in Poetry and the Trace triggers further chains of association and dissociation. This is a genuinely critical collection in various senses of that word: at once analytic, hortatory, and urgent.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

David McCooey Reviews Peter Rose and Ken Bolton

The opening poem of Peter Rose’s Crimson Crop – which recently won a Queensland Literary Award – brings together illness, noise, and madness in a powerful vision of human frailty. In that poem, ‘Prelude’, the poet relates seeing a man at the Rome Railway Station banging his head on vending machines, while his countrymen ‘rushed to their trains, / fearful, cashmered, blinkered, / avoiding this glimpse / of what their brother had become’.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged , ,

Electronica Spoken Word Mix

[audio:http://cordite.org.au/audio/Yes-I-Dream-Of-Electric-Sheep.mp3,http://cordite.org.au/audio/Collyer-_Redmond_I-do-want-it.mp3,http://cordite.org.au/audio/McCooey_CollectiveHypnosis.mp3,http://cordite.org.au/audio/Burton-Trouble-Shooter.mp3,http://cordite.org.au/audio/Whelan_DreamMachines.mp3,http://cordite.org.au/audio/bio_komninos.mp3,http://cordite.org.au/audio/Pravda_WeAreHere.mp3,http://cordite.org.au/audio/The-Fire-That-Baba-Threw.mp3,http://cordite.org.au/audio/Crixus_TheNeedFeed.mp3,http://cordite.org.au/audio/moss_myautopsy.mp3,http://cordite.org.au/audio/Jackson_Gathering.mp3,http://cordite.org.au/audio/Recipes-for-the-Disaster.mp3,http://cordite.org.au/audio/05-My-Old-Amish-Grampa.mp3,http://cordite.org.au/audio/Gibbins_the_simple_life.mp3|titles=Yes I Dream of Electric Sheep,I do want it,Collective Hypnosis,Trouble Shooter,Dream Machines,bio,We Are Here,The Fire That Baba Threw,The Need Feed,My Autopsy,Gathering the Pieces of Your Shattered Palace,Recipes for the Disaster,My Old Amish Grampa,The Simple Life|artists=Philip Norton,Emilie Collyer & Tim Redmond,David …

Posted in 46: ELECTRONICA | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Collective Hypnosis (Found South American Poem)

[audio:http://cordite.org.au/audio/McCooey_CollectiveHypnosis.mp3|titles=Collective Hypnosis – David McCooey] Collective Hypnosis (Found South American Poem) (1:41) Written and produced by David McCooey

Posted in 46: ELECTRONICA | Tagged

Amelia Walker Reviews David McCooey and Cameron Lowe

Though relatively young, Geelong-based Whitmore Press’ poetry series already boasts strong collections by Barry Hill, Paul Kane and Maria Takolander, amongst others. With Graphic by David McCooey and Porch Music by Cameron Lowe, Whitmore’s winning streak continues. Both books brim with inventive, surprising and thought-provoking new poetry.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged , ,

David McCooey Reviews Craig Sherborne

As illustrated by his extraordinary memoir, Hoi Polloi (2005), Craig Sherborne has many strengths as a writer. He has immense tonal control (and can range from the tragic to the farcical in a breath); he has an extraordinary ear for the language and hypocrisy of class; he is one of our great contemporary satirists; and he has a genius for the telling anecdote and detail.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged ,