James Stuart



Creek Gully Dreaming

Fan-tailed, a brown cuckoo dove swoops across the highway, settling on verge.  You could it take it as a sign there’s undercurrent to asphalt, that it’s the world flowing beneath us. A vinyl-clad demountable demurs  roadside. Blurred country flips through vignettes …

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LAND Editorial

When we chose to edit an issue of Cordite Poetry Review around the theme of ‘Land’, it was with an interest in the inherent openness of the word.

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Submission to Cordite 82: LAND

LandDisturbed land. Conserved land.

Whose land? Yours, mine, the landlady’s?

Landlocked.

Land unlocked.

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After Fu Baoshi

Something so immediate like a heart attack requires decades of preparation: the artist hovers outside the frame & in front of Prague Castle waiting for a gesture to mark the times. Above the games, further east, a bomber pilot absently …

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Review Short: James Stuart’s Anonymous Folk Songs

On the cover of James Stuart’s debut collection Anonymous Folk Songs is an image of a series of kites strung together; tethered to a darkened cityscape, they stretch away from it, curving upwards into the sky above. In any scene where the light falling upon subjects differs, the photographer must choose which part of the image to correctly expose – and therefore to highlight – the earth or sky, the kites or clouds. The photograph is Stuart’s own, and it is the sky that takes up most of the frame, that retains depth and a complexity of colour and tone. And yet the unbroken black silhouette of an urban skyline anchors the sky, just as a barely visible line of string anchors the desiring kites to ground. The same impulse that animates this image on the cover is embedded in the poems within.

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Review Short: Outcrop: radical Australian poetry of land

As I write this review, sunlight filtered through a pall of smoke casts a dull orange glow over my kitchen bench. The Blue Mountains are burning. Sydney’s haze resembles downtown Beijing’s and it’s only October. Such an apocalyptic scene – part of the ‘Australian experience’ I am assured by our Prime Minister – provides context for the world into which Outcrop and its ‘radical poetry of land’ emerges. This is not to suggest that the anthology’s outlook is primarily environmental, but that alternative ways of examining land are sorely needed.

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Asian Australian Diasporic Poets: A Commentary

This essay provides a survey of the poetry of some Asian Australian poets, and does not attempt to be definitive. Diasporic poetics raise more questions than they answer and are just as much about dis-placement as about place, just as much about a ‘poetics of uncertainty’ as about certainties of style/nation/identity.

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Fall in love. Do it now. (사랑에 빠져 버려라. 지금 당장.)

Nutritionists. Openly 9 out of 10 recommend a lifestyle & know the thick-shakes in all tastes & sizes are coming so recommend the following: (with the exception of the following because the following cause: Barbecued food Deep fried food Food …

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Sudden Rain, Tilba Tilba (갑작스런 비, 틸바 틸바*)

We no longer go out to paint, unless the object to be represented is such that it cannot be transported. – Lang Shi Ning (Giuseppe Castiglione, Qing Dynasty court painter) The fly-screen door has only just banged shut & already …

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The Fire Ants Variation

Invariably described as an ecological disaster, fire ants are the evolved antithesis of market garden poets. Recently, a lyrebird's corpse was found littered with crimson pustules in bushland adjoining a continental herb patch. The ants infiltrated this land obscured in …

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The Lyrebird Variation

What is branding? The lyrebird has created this system & preaches it like a benevolent ruler, emphasising freedom of choice, speech, expression. Its plumage is made of melody, a jingle of colour shifting through all the seasons of the bush. …

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Constant Haze (Notes From Chengdu)

Five weeks and I have still not visited Mao's statue, which stands at the heart of Chengdu's First Ring Road. On the map in one of the city's English language magazines his presence has been reduced to a vector-based outline, …

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Tibetan Internet Shield

Chinese text 03:     Near the city centre's First Ring Road a bus explodes like a repressed memory: a shoddy job, done fast & dirty many years ago; in an alleyway, an outline knives a young Han couple. For …

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The White Horse

Chinese text 01:     Wanting so much to learn the classifier for poems about classifiers, I sought out the wisest teacher; she handed me a black ceramic pot the spout of which now daily flowers into smog. I needed …

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Patrick Jones responds to James Stuart

When a poet works with a designer, publisher, artist, typesetter, printmaker, stone mason (in Finlay's case), earthmover, or sign writer there is the potential for the poem to materialise (a shift from transformation), and keep us on our feet.

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James Stuart Reviews Words and Things

“Despite my slightly over-the-top and easily pregnable assertions about what are to my mind the lesser works enclosed therein, it became clear to me as I read (looked?) that Words and Things had a significant contribution to make to our understanding of contemporary poetics.

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James Stuart: From Text To Texture

James Stuart reviews Words and Things (Patrick Jones, ed.) in our Submerged issue. The review is part of a larger article commissioned by Cordite, available here in PDF format.

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James Stuart Reviews Luke Davies

I'll let you in on a secret: I think Luke Davies is in love. OK. So it's not much of a secret. Still, while descriptions on the jacket refer to it in a variety of glowing terms (‘A sustained aria' &#151 Peter Porter; ‘the great Australian long poem' &#151 Judith Beveridge) what they basically elide is that ‘Totem Poem', and its 40 companion poems are pretty much all about love. And so we pass the microphone to Davies.

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James Stuart Reviews Robert Adamson

From his earliest involvement, Robert Adamson has been an iconic figure for contemporary Australian poetry, both as a “post-symbolist”, lyrical poet, and as an editor and publisher. His achievements are testament to this, whether one is reflecting upon his 17 odd collections of poetry, and the consequent awards, or his various engagements on ventures such as the editorship of New Poetry and the founding of Paperbark Press.

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James Stuart Interviews Pierre Brulleacute

Don't let the relative coherence of these interviews fool you: when I conducted them I hadn't spoken French regularly for at least six or seven years. That aside, I had barely engaged with the world of poetry in Australia over the past two. All this added up: playing back the three hours or so of recordings from the interviews was an at times painful experience in which I had to cyclically shake my head at botched phrasings of the most simple questions or comments in French.

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Q&A with Mathieu Hilfiger and Sebastien Raoul

The lasting image that I will retain of Mathieu Hilfiger and Sebastien Raoul is the ever-so French portrait I took of them at the conclusion of our entretien on another biting Paris winter morning. In the photograph, Sebastien is wearing a bright red coat and black beret, and is ill shaven. Mathieu has on a black woollen coat, and a thick, grey scarf that is tied in a knot under his chin.

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Q&A with Pablo Garcia

When Pablo Garcia imparted his belief that a) Poets were shamans of today and b) Poetry was the trunk from which all other branches of art sprouted, I'll admit that I had trouble staying my left eyebrow. In the end, it remained on my forehead and I was able to engage Garcia on his thoughts regarding the cross-breeding or m?©tissage of the arts, and the interconnectivity of the world we live in.

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Q&A with Jean Orizet

As my plane touched down at Charles de Gaulle airport on a drizzly winter evening, I realised that I had completely overlooked the need to organise accommodation. Likewise, I had failed to contact any poets, nor indeed, had I succeeded in gaining any knowledge of French poetry beyond what had previously been fed to me. In the end, though, despite a half-hour walk in cold rain, I found a warm if somewhat over-priced hostel and, eventually, after hours rummaging through bookshops around the city, four editor/poets with four very different views of poetry and poetics.

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