- 114: NO THEME 13with J Toledo & C Tse 113: INVISIBLE WALLSwith A Walker & D Disney 112: TREATwith T Dearborn 111: BABYwith S Deo & L Ferney 110: POP!with Z Frost & B Jessen 109: NO THEME 12with C Maling & N Rhook 108: DEDICATIONwith L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik 107: LIMINALwith B Li 106: OPENwith C Lowe & J Langdon 105: NO THEME 11with E Grills & E Stewart 104: KINwith E Shiosaki 103: AMBLEwith E Gomez and S Gory 102: GAMEwith R Green and J Maxwell 101: NO THEME 10with J Kinsella and J Leanne 100: BROWNFACE with W S Dunn 99: SINGAPOREwith J Ip and A Pang 97 & 98: PROPAGANDAwith M Breeze and S Groth 96: NO THEME IXwith M Gill and J Thayil 95: EARTHwith M Takolander 94: BAYTwith Z Hashem Beck 93: PEACHwith L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong 92: NO THEME VIIIwith C Gaskin 91: MONSTERwith N Curnow 90: AFRICAN DIASPORAwith S Umar 89: DOMESTICwith N Harkin 88: TRANSQUEERwith S Barnes and Q Eades 87: DIFFICULTwith O Schwartz & H Isemonger 86: NO THEME VIIwith L Gorton 85: PHILIPPINESwith Mookie L and S Lua 84: SUBURBIAwith L Brown and N O'Reilly 83: MATHEMATICSwith F Hile 82: LANDwith J Stuart and J Gibian 81: NEW CARIBBEANwith V Lucien 80: NO THEME VIwith J Beveridge 57.1: EKPHRASTICwith C Atherton and P Hetherington 57: CONFESSIONwith K Glastonbury 56: EXPLODE with D Disney 55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUSwith 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
Jacinta Le Plastrier
Tell Me Like You Mean It 3
In curating this chapbook I’m not sure I feel closer to answering these questions: certainly they are never stagnant … But I do feel closer to poetry’s resistance to answer these questions, which does circle back to some kind of answer to my last question – we return to poetry not because we have an answer, but instead return in a process of regeneration.
Posted in CHAPBOOKS
Tagged Alex Creece, Bonnie Reid, Bridget Gilmartin, Claire Albrech, Freya Daly Sadgrove, Gian Manik, Grace Heyer, Harriet McInerney, Jacinta Le Plastrier, Janet Jiahui Wu, Jonno Révanche, Julie Jedda Janson, Kent MacCarter, Manisha Anjali, Melody Paloma, Neika Lehman, Prithvi Varatharajan, Rory Dufficy, Sam Langer, Stella Maynard, Timmah Ball, Ursula Robinson-Shaw, Will Druce, Zoe Kingsley
Poetry of the Eye: The Visual Aspects of Poetry
Image by Tim Grey Presented by Cordite Publishing Inc. and Australian Poetry, and hosted by poet Toby Fitch, this workshop at the 2016 Emerging Writers’ Festival will open your eyes to the potential of the poem on the page. By …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Jacinta Le Plastrier, Kent MacCarter, Toby Fitch
Jacinta Le Plastrier Interview Sarah Holland-Batt
Australian poet Sarah Holland-Batt, b. 1982 in Queensland, grew up in Australia and America and also writes fiction and criticism. She was a Fulbright Scholar at New York University where she attained an M.F.A, and is currently a Senior Lecturer …
Posted in INTERVIEWS
Tagged Jacinta Le Plastrier, Sarah-Holland-Batt
Analogue Bodies: A Conversation with Tom Lee and Zoë Sadokierski
Analogue Bodies is a collection of essays by Tom Lee, materialised as set of illustrated books by Zoë Sadokierski. The project looks at different parts of, and events within, the human body and historical ways of depicting and making sense of them. It aims to humour and, on its day, to educate. It was presented as part of the recent Emerging Writers’ Festival 2014 at the Wheeler Centre.
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Jacinta Le Plastrier, Sam Twyford-Moore, Tom Lee, Zoë Sadokierski
Jacinta Le Plastrier Interviews Nicholas Walton-Healey
Image of and by Nicholas Walton-Healey Land Before Lines is a book from Melbourne-based photographer and writer Nicholas Walton-Healey. The 144-page, full-colour volume (the images appear in black and white here for page recall considerations) features portraits of 68 Victorian …
Posted in INTERVIEWS
Tagged Duncan Hose, Jacinta Le Plastrier, John Hunter, Ken Smeaton, Myron Lysenko, Nathan Curnow, Nicholas Walton-Healey, Petra White
The Writing: Benjamin Laird
Melbourne-based Benjamin Laird writes computer programs and electronic poetry, which he discusses here in the first of a new, occasional blog series looking at the writing practice of contemporary Australian poets.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Benjamin Laird, Jacinta Le Plastrier, Jason Nelson, john tranter, Maged Zaher, mez breeze, William Denton
When they Come for You: Poetry that Resists
‘This machine surrounds hatred and forces it to surrender’ were the words inscribed on the banjo of American folk legend and activist Pete Seeger, who died at 94 in late January 2014. Reading the tributes to Seeger, I was struck by a recurrent theme: his moral courage, which he lived out unrelentingly across a lifetime. Commenting on the ‘not common behaviours’ which made his life exemplary, a New Yorker post by biographer Alec Wilkinson wrote of ‘his insistence on his right to entertain his own conscience’.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Jacinta Le Plastrier
Shining Worlds: On the Artist’s Book of Robert Adamson and Peter Kingston
I’m sitting in the Rare Books room of the State Library of Victoria, lost in time and strangely joyous as I encounter one of its new acquisitions, the late 2012 ‘artist’s book’ and collaboration between poet Robert Adamson and well-known Australian artist Peter Kingston, Shark-net Seahorses of Balmoral: A Harbour Memoir.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Des Cowley, Jacinta Le Plastrier, Nicholas Pounder, Peter Kingston, robert adamson
Silence Turned into Objects: Looking at where Poets Write
Among the most extreme, in the sense of horrific, writing places for poems bequeathed to us would be the conditions in which Ezra Pound produced The Pisan Cantos. There is some speculation as to the exact number of those Cantos …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Alex Skovron, Alison Croggon, Ezra Pound, Jacinta Le Plastrier, Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf
Notes from Medellín, Colombia
Since it began 23 years ago, the Internacional de Poesía de Medellín has grown to become a major poetry festival in the world, in a country riven by 50 years of civil war. This year’s Festival (6-13 July) coincided with a new round of peace talks in Havana between the Colombian Government and FARC, and FARC rebels reportedly fighting security forces in the mountains. The Festival featured Australian poet Les Wicks, who reports on his experience below. The Festival has also ‘grown’ up alongside seismic changes for the city of Medellín, Colombian’s second-largest and once described as the ‘most violent city in the world’ (Time, 1988), due to its brutal cocaine drug-cartel culture.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Jacinta Le Plastrier, Les Wicks
‘It was a place of force—’ Re-reading the Poems of ‘Ariel’
So much has happened to poetry since Sylvia Plath completed her last poems fifty years ago in 1963 that it might seem weird or regressively sentimental to focus back on them. But, encouraged to do so by a number of anniversary events around the globe this year, what strikes is the endurance of these final poems’ brutal clarity.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Jacinta Le Plastrier, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes
Suspensions of the Real
Studying the Sylvia Plath archival papers at Smith College in 1993, poet, editor and critic Felicity Plunkett intuited that a number of pages were missing from one poem draft. Plath assiduously page-marked drafts of the poems that were to become the Ariel poems. Plunkett was unable to uncover these pages in any of the archives made available to her, which were still in the process of being organised. One night, in dream, she ‘receives’ a phone call, made from a black, period-piece telephone, words delivered in Plath’s idiosyncratic trans-Atlantic diction – ‘look in the yellow folder’.
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Donald Crowhurst, Felicity Plunkett, Inger Christensen, Jacinta Le Plastrier, Jordie Albiston, Sylvia Plath
IWD: Murder, She Wrote
Three lines from The Seventh section of Finola Moorhead’s A Handwritten Modern Classic, first published in 1977 and re-issued March 2013 by Spinifex Press, close out a varied discussion by the author on the political nature of death, that Socrates’ death ‘was political’ (as underlined in the handwritten original), that Socrates was not a writer and that writers ‘need teachers like Socrates’. In the same section she argues that artists often use ‘Another’s pain … for the success of expression’. ‘Art as comfort’, Moorhead follows on, ‘ — strange concept. / Such assumptions aren’t questioned often enough.’
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Finola Moorhead, Jacinta Le Plastrier, Libby Hathorn, Rachael Bailey, Rachael Mead, Susan Hampton, Virginia Woolf
