Jill Jones



Breach

Summer’s path is drenching me with water from a sprinkler like a child (I remember her with no fixed ideas as yet despite the yes/no of rooms as summer turned one year into another year leaving behind severest shadow) Above …

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Poem With a High Wind Blowing Over It From the East

It blows leaves around like letters – forms shapes to- gether in highs and lows I can’t read I’m distracted scatter and branch by voices a cloud that’s now dis- appearing We need clouds – I watch kids bowl at …

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

Joel Ephraims Reviews Ashbery Mode Edited by Michael Farrell

The presence of John Ashbery shines over contemporary literature, for many as an enigma, indisputably as a catalyst. Part of the post-World War II wave of new American poetry, his name is grouped not just alongside his contemporary poets but among their literary schools and movements: the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E school, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, our own ’68ers and J.A.

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‘Mix it with grit’: Claire Albrecht Interviews Jill Jones

Adelaide poet Jill Jones sits down 1,525.5 km from me, Claire Albrecht in Newcastle, to discuss her sparkling twelfth book A History of What I’ll Become.

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Introduction to Em König’s Breathing Plural

Will we miss nature, asks Em König in Breathing Plural? In ‘dreams of stale breath’, maybe. Or ‘in another life, on another planet … maybe’ (echoing The Only Ones’ only hit). Glenn Albrecht says in Earth Emotions, ‘It [nature] effectively no longer exists’.

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Improvisings. Of Sheer Now.

1: What I’ll Become I am assembled a history of what I’ll become Far off there are holdfasts cosmos winks, metal and darkness The mind is also a swirl needless opera The divine numbers are a gamble zero is a …

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

To Split and Join

To praise impressions wherever bodies lie down, whoever To be with skin To not be but be here To not be a cut-out on a back lot To keep shoes fit and batteries keen To be as real and dirty …

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

Review Short: Cary Hamlyn’s Ultrasound in B-Flat and Other Poems and Jill Jones’s The Quality of Light and Other Poems

Jones’s superb collection reinvigorates poetry as a quality of illumination amidst all kinds of opacity, sparking affective and rhythmic conversations between literature, politics, ecology and cosmology. Her poetry engages and enacts what T S Eliot called the ‘auditory imagination’, ‘the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and f eeling’.

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Restless

I’m restless about affinity There’s a form of am in every dream Stress prevaricates Aniseed lingers You can be too fond of fences making shiny choruses Air is a treasury The horizon fills with shallow light There’s devil in the …

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Alex Kostas Reviews Peter Goldsworthy, Jill Jones and Heather Taylor Johnson

Garron Publishing was started in 2010 by Gary MacRae and Sharon Kernott as a means of self-publishing work, but has since expanded into a successful run of poetry chapbooks by established and emerging South Australian poets.

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The Blossoms of Retail

We become our shopping something that’s not quite feeling a semi-emotion as if underwater or near tears unable to breathe or drown. Are we living in the present tense or another kind of mood? Where are the horses, the plains? …

Posted in 84: SUBURBIA | Tagged

At Least Four Instances

how do you fend off the sea it will be here if not ever but as your fever or your shadow when you stop breathing do doors open as they did does your hand feel the same in the night …

Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS | Tagged

Review Short: Jill Jones’s Brink

It’s a neat twenty-five years since Jill Jones’s first book, The Mask and the Jagged Star, was published and in that time she has built for herself a reputation as a serious and ambitious poet whose work demands, and generally rewards, close reading. She is certainly not a poet of easy gestures or flashy effects.

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The Storm

The storm catches on the door. It’s a good sign, a surge that’s more than breathing, that blows away dirt from reliquaries, and directions from their careful signs. It’s near speech and near trembling, sky bringer fate crowning from its …

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

Ekphrasis as ‘Event’: Poets Paint Words and the ‘Performance’ of Ekphrasis in Australia

To commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Newcastle Region Art Gallery (NRAG) in 2007, Lisa Slade and Peter Minter co-curated the exhibition Poets Paint Words. The two curators commissioned some of Australia’s best poets to write poems in response to a selection of paintings held in the NRAG archive.

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

My Skeptic Tremor

Perhaps I require revolution rather than mending day or need to get back to my ill channels, disinterest, a fetish or two and a more obvious sin than procrastination. Force is never equal, not in my calculations, nor is severance …

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

Lucy Van Reviews Little Windows 1 with Jill Jones, Andy Jackson, Alison Flett and John Glenday

The full set of LW1 arrives in the post like a present, a gift-wrapped bundle of square, slate-coloured books. It came to me looking so perfect, that a couple of days passed before I had the heart to a prise a chapbook from under the clear binding ribbon. This situation gave shape to a thought about the necessity of obstruction in order for words to seduce. Some form of this theory of desire continued to occur to me as I read the books’ divergent visions.

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Seven Formulas of Method

1. Data: Sun on the right hand Sand fun this roght hend Sent an tho rught hind Sin ends thumb raght hond Song in that reght hund 2. Mix: on the right sand / sent behind / thumbs end rage …

Posted in 75: FUTURE MACHINES | Tagged

Chloe Wilson Reviews Tracy Ryan and Jill Jones

These two slender and handsomely designed volumes of poetry are the result of the closely con-tested 2014 Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize, of which Tracy Ryan and Jill Jones were joint winners.

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In Flight Entertainment

‘no more blues’, that’s not a promise there’s no traction or policy in the blues all those bars are too long a cycle to make for twittering views no more plaints or graces no thanks, ‘watch and listen carefully’ enhanced …

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

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.

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Bearing False Witness

Stories of the heat rise above the boards and the walls bounce them, like lies. Walls are made of stuff that hides from me, those measurements, the mason’s spans. Dust is the choke, and across vision there’s a bar. I …

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged

In My Shifts

I come in with language I come out of. Its weed, its shrill bugs. A harvest, a rot, a dervish. Cooked into night. Swum from beginnings. Patterns at the bottom of a pool. Something that doesn’t fit. That shifts and …

Posted in 69: TRANSTASMAN | Tagged

Asks

What’s it like to be refurbished tackled or finger-printed? It’s not something you can ask but I’m asking. What is it like to be watched waited, frisked? Whenever I worry about my suit my transparency, I don’t think of brightness …

Posted in 66: OBSOLETE | Tagged