Joan Fleming



‘Like all change, it happens in the margins’: Joan Fleming in conversation with Jeanine Leane

Jeanine Leane and I met in the Spring of 2022 to plot this interview over coffee. Jeanine has a quick, ferocious intelligence that moves associatively, while her fingers make languid circles in her hair. She is fine-boned and extremely upright.

Posted in INTERVIEWS | Tagged ,

Introduction to Joan Fleming’s Song of Less

A song exists because something has been added to the world. A voice strikes out, human or angel or bird. Hands clap together, skin against skin, or move upon an instrument made from a different animal.

Posted in INTRODUCTIONS | Tagged , ,

Excerpt from In the Time of the Manaroans

Miro Bilbrough’s memoir, In the time of the Manaroans, is set in a remote countercultural milieu in Aotearoa in the late seventies.

Posted in CHAPBOOKS, ESSAYS | Tagged ,

CREATURELY: In Praise of New Poetry from Aotearoa

We are living in uncanny, uncertain, and uneven times. It is difficult not to feel undone by it all.

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged , , , , , ,

Joan Fleming Reviews Fiona Hile and Luke Beesley

Two very recent books by two mid-career Melbourne poets offer distinct intellectual gymnasiums in which to lift and push and run and sweat. I may not have been able to master these books, but they knocked the breath out of me.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged , ,

No Safety, No Submission? A Survey of New Zealand Small Presses

There is a preconception that small presses, existing as they do outside the mainstream, publish poetry that is wilder, stranger, more political, and more ethnically diverse. Poetry that the university publishers have turned away, or whose genius such presses have failed to recognise.

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged

‘through worlds & worlds & worlds’: Joan Fleming interviews Jordie Albiston

I first met Albiston in a taxicab in Wellington in November of 2014. When she learned that ‘Fleming’s pool’ near her home in Altona is named after my direct ancestors, she said, ‘All right, no more conversation now.

Posted in INTERVIEWS | Tagged , , ,

Dale and Fleming on as Commissioning Editors

Dale and FlemingCordite is chuffed (once again) to announce that, joining Rosalind McFarlane as Commissioning Editor, Collaborations, Amelia Dale and Joan Fleming are joining the Cordite Poetry Review fold as Commissioning Editor, Experimental Literature and Commissioning Editor, New Zealand Literature respectively.

Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged , ,

Obligation

I am young but I have money like a grandmother. Do you remember seeing that paleface for the first time? Yes, no. Face is trying for openness, passing anti-expositional afternoons. Fieldwork is a bound time. I am designing an entrance, …

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

Review Short: Lisa Jacobson’s The Asylum Poems and Judy Johnson’s Counsel for the Defence

The prettiness of the language is a curious choice, though, given the raw horror of the subject matter. Closely observed grotesque details, like the father yelling ‘Towels! ’ as he carries his bleeding brother over the threshold of their Iraqi home, are among the sequence’s most satisfying moments.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged , ,

Alice Allan Reviews Rabbit, Verge and Cuttlefish

The Australian poetry scene, however you define it, is definitely thriving. So much so that it sometimes causes consternation. Perhaps you’ve been there at a poetry gathering or launch when someone wonders aloud whether, ‘thriving’ is one step removed from ‘overgrown’ – whether this healthy scene is actually in need of some ruthless pruning.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged , , , , , ,

‘We Are all Rejects’: Unsupported Writers and the New New Zealand Journal

The declining level of support offered to poets and other writers in Aotearoa/New Zealand is a source of real distress and debate for those in the writing community. Lee Posna, in an essay published last year on the Pantograph Punch, writes from the position of a poet who feels himself unsupported, and really suffers because of it.

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged , , , , ,