- 115: SPACE
with A Sometimes
114: NO THEME 13
with J Toledo & C Tse
113: INVISIBLE WALLS
with A Walker & D Disney
112: TREAT
with T Dearborn
111: BABY
with S Deo & L Ferney
110: POP!
with Z Frost & B Jessen
109: NO THEME 12
with C Maling & N Rhook
108: DEDICATION
with L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik
107: LIMINAL
with B Li
106: OPEN
with C Lowe & J Langdon
105: NO THEME 11
with E Grills & E Stewart
104: KIN
with E Shiosaki
103: AMBLE
with E Gomez and S Gory
102: GAME
with R Green and J Maxwell
101: NO THEME 10
with J Kinsella and J Leanne
100: BROWNFACE
with W S Dunn
99: SINGAPORE
with J Ip and A Pang
97 & 98: PROPAGANDA
with M Breeze and S Groth
96: NO THEME IX
with M Gill and J Thayil
95: EARTH
with M Takolander
94: BAYT
with Z Hashem Beck
93: PEACH
with L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong
92: NO THEME VIII
with C Gaskin
91: MONSTER
with N Curnow
90: AFRICAN DIASPORA
with S Umar
89: DOMESTIC
with N Harkin
88: TRANSQUEER
with S Barnes and Q Eades
87: DIFFICULT
with O Schwartz & H Isemonger
86: NO THEME VII
with L Gorton
85: PHILIPPINES
with Mookie L and S Lua
84: SUBURBIA
with L Brown and N O'Reilly
83: MATHEMATICS
with F Hile
82: LAND
with J Stuart and J Gibian
81: NEW CARIBBEAN
with V Lucien
80: NO THEME VI
with J Beveridge
57.1: EKPHRASTIC
with C Atherton and P Hetherington
57: CONFESSION
with K Glastonbury
56: EXPLODE
with D Disney
55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUS
with M Chakraborty and K MacCarter
55: FUTURE MACHINES
with Bella Li
54: NO THEME V
with F Wright and O Sakr
53.0: THE END
with P Brown
52.0: TOIL
with C Jenkins
51.1: UMAMI
with L Davies and Lifted Brow
51.0: TRANSTASMAN
with B Cassidy
50.0: NO THEME IV
with J Tranter
49.1: A BRITISH / IRISH
with M Hall and S Seita
49.0: OBSOLETE
with T Ryan
48.1: CANADA
with K MacCarter and S Rhodes
48.0: CONSTRAINT
with C Wakeling
47.0: COLLABORATION
with L Armand and H Lambert
46.1: MELBOURNE
with M Farrell
46.0: NO THEME III
with F Plunkett
45.0: SILENCE
with J Owen
44.0: GONDWANALAND
with D Motion
43.1: PUMPKIN
with K MacCarter
43.0: MASQUE
with A Vickery
42.0: NO THEME II
with G Ryan
41.1: RATBAGGERY
with D Hose
41.0: TRANSPACIFIC
with J Rowe and M Nardone
40.1: INDONESIA
with K MacCarter
40.0: INTERLOCUTOR
with L Hart
39.1: GIBBERBIRD
with S Gory
39.0: JACKPOT!
with S Wagan Watson
38.0: SYDNEY
with A Lorange
37.1: NEBRASKA
with S Whalen
37.0: NO THEME!
with A Wearne
36.0: ELECTRONICA
with J Jones
Gig Ryan
Can Poetry Be Happy?
My uncle named his retro-fitted army van after Field Marshal Erick Von … someone. I’m hesitant to Google.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Corey Wakeling, Corey Worthington, Gareth Morgan, Gig Ryan, John Ashbery, Lucy Van
Astronomical Twilight
In a dress, in a dream your guide points out carvings, a well to kick. Sissy mountains slope to ground. His fans bay in the church of Perpetual Succour. Plane to the apron, a rook abed, to swindle and jack. …
Posted in 74: NO THEME V
Tagged Gig Ryan
John Forbes’s ‘Miraculous Fluidity’
In a book on comedy, philosopher Alenka Zupančič has inadvertently discovered the key to the correlation of late twentieth century Australian poet John Forbes’s mastery of cultural imitation and his deconstruction of the mechanics of national identity so often queried in his work.
Posted in ESSAYS, SCHOLARLY
Tagged Alenka Zupančič, Corey Wakeling, Gig Ryan, Gilles Deleuze, John Forbes
Rob Wilson Reviews Best Australian Poems 2015
Australian poetry, and indeed poetry in Australia, always seems to be undergoing something of a personality crisis. From the bush ballad to Angry Penguins and beyond, Australians have a knack for producing poetry, and a unique language from which to create it, but it’s a cottage industry. Even ‘industry’ seems too strong a term for what Australian poetry produces, though we have (and have had) no shortage of skilled writers working at various levels of poesy and doing remarkable things.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Fiona Wright, Geoff Page, Gig Ryan, Rob Wilson
Interior Spaces: Reading Landscape through Jill Jones
There is a photograph I have returned to several times. It was taken during the drive from Melbourne to Perth, at the petrol station which marks the town of Nullarbor, while Lucas was filling our tank.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Catherine Noske, Corey Wakeling, Gig Ryan, Jill Jones
Gambling
1. You’re not to this world but will sleep in the depths of dream, pat news, cast chat, as tenants grind chemistry’s waved night to a flask and galaxies ping time back to tree-thrilled square, or cross the lake tomorrow …
Cordite Book Launch: Loney, Gibson, Hawke, Harkin
Collected Works Bookstore, Wednesday 6 May, 2015 I will begin with a bit of spontaneous resentful metaphysics. I am sorry to do so, for a number of reasons, but there we are. If it can be justified at all, it …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Alan Loney, Gig Ryan, John Hawke, Justin Clemens, michael farrell, Natalie Harkin, Pam Brown, peter minter, Ross Gibson, Zoë Sadokierski
Fuori le mura: Seven Vicki Viidikas Poems
Vicki Viidikas’s first book Condition Red (UQP, 1973) – which most likely took its title from Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964) in which Condition Red means war – burst with unsettling depictions of contemporary life and the status of women, a year after Equal Pay had become law.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Gig Ryan, Vicki Viidikas
Awakening Slave
‘I never much liked the pictures, starlit, gauzy, a crank hand dealing largesse it didn’t have scrunched skies and foreground sentimental dogs like my great-aunt’s china doorstops …’ Disconcerted at exchange, he returns to his vignette, and last week’s salve …
Posted in 68: NO THEME IV
Tagged Gig Ryan
Introduction to John Hawke’s Aurelia
Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski
John Hawke’s forensic inquiries in this book are layered with casual erudition – Diderot, Czech poet Vladimir Holan – and locate the poem as transformative state. Many of these poems conclude with a mystical ascent into nature, reminiscent of Patrick White scenes in which the division between consciousness and the universe wavers, signifying that any reconciliation is epiphanic, claimed by art or religion. Yet nature belittles human effort – ‘The path to the point is marked by a scattering / of impermanent hand-made memorials’ – that is, the poet’s endeavours are precariously, though heroically, makeshift, overlaid; but nature is also that which threatens or devours, ‘digesting light’.
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Gig Ryan, John Hawke, Kent MacCarter, Zoë Sadokierski
Post It
Technique whittled to a spear prongs earth as tabby night filters a soaped waterfall of recollected words jammed in a shoe, prudently It passes on a cloud and can’t fit in the photo that dissolves trusty leaves that feather bright …
Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT
Tagged Gig Ryan
Gig Ryan Reviews Emma Lew, Bella Li, Kate Lilley, and Jennifer Maiden
Elegy intensifies around the objects that remain, those keepsakes that must signify a spent life. In Kate Lilley’s Realia, the first poem ‘GG’ is an auction listing from Greta Garbo’s estate in which the repetition of Garbo’s name intones like a docked requiem. Only things exist timeless, immutable, saleable, as shining representatives of the once-living. Life’s fraught event is reduced to its acquisitions, and transformed, satirised, into capitalism’s ultimate wearer of labels: the former consumer of commodities is now more amenably cast purely as a selection of those objects, whose value her absence increases.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Bella Li, Emma Lew, Gig Ryan, Jennifer Maiden, Kate Lilley
Spoon Bending: A Chapbook Curated by Kent MacCarter
There is no such thing as a good poem about nothing? What does that mean, exactly? And what’s all this about spoon bending anyways?
Posted in CHAPBOOKS
Tagged Amanda Stewart, Andrew Riemer, Berni M Janssen, Bonny Cassidy, Dorothea Rosa Herliany, Elena Gomez, Elif Sezen, Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese, Gig Ryan, Ingrid de Kok, Jane Gibian, Jennifer K Dick, Jodi Braxton, JS Harry, Kent MacCarter, Lee Kofman, Mark Rothko, Nicolette Stasko, peter minter, Susan Schultz, Tracy Ryan, Vona Groarke
Gig Ryan in Vietnamese Translation
Oppenheimer trước Ủy Ban Điều Tra Những Hoạt Động Phương Hại Mỹ Quốc Những câu hỏi của họ bắt đầu, rồi đến những giả định, tiếp tới là những giả thuyết Mỗi góc cạnh bị tránh né, bị đẩy tới. …
Posted in TRANSLATIONS
Tagged Gig Ryan, Hoang Tien Nguyen
Tide Edit
Encumbered, embarrassed, he turns day to irony and spikes each word onto the carpet One come-down itches another, and perpetrates its dreams of ghosts, haloed in gold that black and white day ignores The Academy turns opinion in its kiln …
Posted in SPOONBENDING
Tagged Gig Ryan
NO THEME 2 Editorial
Of the poems I’ve chosen for this theme-free issue, some are headily elusive, such as the epistolary ‘Shooting“Correspondence”Gallery’ where meanings crumple and re-form through their costly tousled language.
Ratbag’s Polemic
In Michel Serres’s book, The Parasite, rats figure as exemplary relations. When a rat turns up in your kitchen, you are each other’s guests: just as the rat is canny at thieving morsels of bread and rind, so too is the rat canny at crafting a home from a network of theft. A rat’s interference makes you an intruder …
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Astrid Lorange, Gig Ryan, Michel Serres
Re: NO THEME II Submissions
Just a quick thanks to the 423 of you – and your accumulated snowfall of 1200+ poems – who submitted to Cordite 42: NO THEME II with poetry guest-edited by Gig Ryan. That’s quite the crush of submissions from around …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged ann vickery, Gig Ryan
Submissions for Cordite 42: NO THEME II Now Open
It’s summertime in Australia. Weekends officially begin on Thursday mornings. Your fridge will now gestate one bottle of Pinot Grigio, Blaufränkisch (or similar) per week until March. All public holidays go off in one seasonal barrage. We’re going to keep …
Chair Insider: An Intimate Access in Photo Narratives
Andrew Sayers, director of the National Portrait Gallery, wrote of my work, ‘Trust is an important quality in portraiture. Trust is self evident in Juno Gemes’ photographic portraits’. The portraits published here were created in trust with literary friends.
Posted in ARTWORKS
Tagged David Gilbey, Gig Ryan, Jennifer Maiden, John Dale, Juno Gemes, Martin Harrison, Michael Griffiths, Neil Astley, Peter Robb, robert adamson, Toby Davidson, Vicki Viidikas
Gig Ryan’s New and Selected Poems
Gig Ryan asserts that, ‘Poetry is our response to the world, but it’s also the thing we poets find the most taxing, the best of engaging our brains. Ideally – like all good art – it should make us think.’ Yet, as she also acknowledges, meaning is often secondary when reading poetry. That is, it is intensified and made more complex by the poem’s sensual materiality and the affect it may evoke.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS, ESSAYS
Tagged ann vickery, Gig Ryan
Ross Gibson’s Blustertown
The town’s biggest fools are those who come from elsewhere and fall in love with it when they’re young. As a rule, these fools fall hard, beyond reason and recovery. I know because I fell that way. As you do when you’re twenty.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Gig Ryan, John Forbes, Kenneth Slessor, Ross Gibson, Ruth Park
Komninos Zervos Reviews Papertiger #3
The third CD-ROM of poetry has been released by Papertiger Media and yet again presents the work of many of Australia's finest contemporary poets. As well, the Editors have included an eclectic array of international contributors from Canada, Finland, the UK, the USA and Australasia. More interestingly it is the expanded use of the new digital format of this collection i.e. the CD-ROM.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged brett dionysius, CD-Rom, Gig Ryan, Jason Nelson, journals, Komninos Zervos, Mez, paul hardacre
Rameses
Pillar after pillar towers my name. Not all of these could express the life I feel flash through me. My ideas span the earth but now tours litter at my feet folding their waxy guides. Here, I watch life fall …
Posted in 04: UNTHEMED
Tagged Gig Ryan
