Jennifer Maiden



Diary Poem: Uses of the Nobel Prize

In her comment on my poem about Borges in Geneva —where he and the Archetypal Critic from Australia, on the blue shores of the Lake, haunted each other, both bluely haunted by the Nobel Prize—a reviewer remarked she could think …

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Diary Poem: Uses of Dreams

I have been reading Coleridge on dreams -in an email to the author from Lisa Gorton) I dream that the dead are living. Katharine says soft dreams where the loved dead seem reciprocal and living are really nightmares to suffer, …

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Icon and Iconoclasm

Lachlan Brown called, in an interview with Fiona Wright, a quote from my essay The Suburban Problem of Evil his favourite one on the Suburbs: saying I said, “nowhere else can the eternal and the eternally reversing dialectic between icon …

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World of Feelings: Ghassan Hage, Bruce O’Neill, Magic Steven and the Affective Dimensions of Globalisation

Drive anywhere in Australia for long enough and you’ll pass a Bunnings Warehouse. Bunnings, a titanic home improvement merchant whose buying power enables the offering of low prices on products relating to the building and maintenance of the home, was around when I grew up in Australia, but I think my family went to a different, no-name hardware store.

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Simon Eales Reviews Jennifer Maiden and Stefanie Bennett

Stefanie Bennett woke up alongside Jennifer Maiden one morning, remarking, ‘An enemy is nothing to sneeze at: / Often his eau-de-Cologne’s / All embracing’ (‘Stratum’). This might be the too-cute, not-clever start to an amalgamating take on these two books from two poets with similar concerns and different styles.

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George and the Holy Holiday

George Jeffreys woke up in a sand lagoon on a Wollongong beach on his back. He had just relaxed enough to close his eyes, when a group of holidaymakers grew concerned above him, debating if he’d died. George reached warily …

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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.

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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.

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Diary Poem: Uses of Silence

The great basso profundo Vladimir Miller explained that the reason Russia loves the bass voice is that there are no musical instruments in Church so that the profoundly resonant singer holds the sound of the choir together. When I mention …

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Foreword Viidikas: Reintroduction of the ’68 Poet

John Tranter, renowned Australian poet and occasional but incisive chronicler of the driving forces behind those Australian poets now classified as ‘The Generation of ‘68’ once wrote that the ‘Generation of ‘68’ was all about:

‘not the replacing of the old by the new (which soon becomes the established), but by the continual recognition of the need to ‘make it new’, to break down the urge to establish reputations and an entrenched position.’

Anecdotes surround Vicki Viidikas. None is definitive.

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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.

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Nick Terrell Reviews Jennifer Maiden

Since Jennifer Maiden began publishing in the early 1970s, her work has been charged with a commitment to frame the ethical challenges presented by manifestations of evil. It’s a commitment that was stated plainly in the title of her second volume, The Problem of Evil.

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