- 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
John Jenkins
Introduction to Chris Mann’s Whistlin Is Did
Chris Mann read at Melbourne’s La Mama in the early 1970s, where he first impressed me as a bold exponent of a sort of critical, larrikin and compositional linguistics, and seemed very much at home in the theatre’s performance space, with its nascent egalitarian ethos. Some listeners I noticed may have been equally perplexed as intrigued by his well-timed delivery, his knowingly artful shtick and highly patterned patter.
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Alissa Dinallo, Chris Mann, John Jenkins, Lily Mae Martin
Review Short: Chris Mansell’s STUNG
Chris Mansell is a widely published poet with a lively range of interests, a multi-talented writer who bridges various creative worlds; her work sometimes fusing with music, the visual arts, and theatre. Her departure from a narrow specialisation in poetry is highly admirable, but may have made her somewhat under-appreciated both as an energetic innovator and important poet of her generation. Mansell’s first book of poetry appeared in 1978, and she has published more than 25 books and chapbooks in the intervening decades; while her Schadenvale Road, a collection of short stories, appeared in 2011.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Chris Mansell, John Jenkins
John Jenkins Reviews Rae Desmond Jones
For more than 40 years, Rae Desmond Jones has remained one of Australia’s most challenging and rewarding poets, and in my opinion a major one, who has pursued an often hilarious, always astonishing and sometimes grimly confronting campaign against dullness, comfortable formulas and poetic complacency; and Grand Parade is to be applauded for drawing together some of his best work here.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged John Jenkins, Rae Desmond Jones
Wandering through the Universal Archive
One of the sequences produced by the collaborative entity, A Constructed World, renders the phrases ‘No need to be great’ and ‘Stay in Groups’ in a range of media – silk-stitch, screen print, photography and painting. One of the painted versions of the image shows a naked woman covered in yellow post-it notes overseen by a hulking, shadowy male. These figures represent the artists Jacqueline Riva and Geoff Lowe. The image appears again in the form of a photograph and the installation was staged in various places around the world – as if the only way to get the message across would be to subject it to constant repetition in as many different formats as possible. Indeed, a number of the collective’s performances and installations attest to the impossibility of communication – even as these take the form of images that can’t fail to deliver. Avant Spectacle A Micro Medicine Show, 2011, features skeleton-costumed performers inexpertly singing and playing instruments while six knee-high wooden letters – S, P, E, E, C and H – burn like small condemned buildings at front of stage.
Posted in CHAPBOOKS
Tagged Amaranth Borsuk, Astrid Lorange, Brad Bouse, Charles Bernstein, Eddie Hopely, Fiona Hile, Jessica L. Wilkinson, John Jenkins, John Kinsella, Justin Clemens, Kate Middleton, ken bolton, Louis Armand, Maged Zaher, Marty Hiatt, michael farrell, nick whittock, Oscar Schwartz, Pam Brown, Patrick Jones, Richard Tuttle, Sam Langer, Tim Wright, Timothy Yu, Toby Fitch
Manic at Night
The refrigerator’s humming outside and I like that. Outside of any use I could make of it. But I can’t see it now, cause I’m in a different suburb, but this reminds me of how I used to like the …
Posted in UNIVERSAL ARCHIVE
Tagged John Jenkins, ken bolton
Shock To The Screen Door
You can hear it banging in the wind, or when someone delivers something and lets it ‘have its will’. It causes you to jump, inevitably. “Trouble in your bubble, mate?” is what Dave says when I look morose. Which might …
Posted in 47: NO THEME!
Tagged John Jenkins, ken bolton
John Jenkins Reviews Peter Boyle
“No one can count the number of people we have been in a single / life. One death is never enough.” These lines from Apocrypha sum up a theme that resurfaces through the poetic fragments which make up this fabulous cache of texts: fragments which survive from certain lost books by real and re-discovered authors of the ancient world, including Herodotus, Longinus, Theophrastus, Catullus, Plato and others.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged John Jenkins, Peter Boyle
Jill Bamforth Reviews John Jenkins
John Jenkins' narrative verse, Growing Up with Mr Menzies, begins with an imagined visit by the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, to the Elwood home of the infant Felix Hayes. Like a Wise Man at a nativity, Menzies bears a gift, a 'considerably handsome' pocket watch, which he dangles over Felix's cot.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Jill Bamforth, John Jenkins
The Wedgetails
Order falconiformes, family accipitidae Trees are wheeling in my dream. Diminish to a dot down here on green, my own face looks back up at me, as smaller ground-hugging birds erupt – warning shrieks from silver crowns – choughs and …
Posted in 25: COMMON WEALTH
Tagged John Jenkins
Ern Malley: Pedestrian Verse
A gay, light-hearted bastard, ERN MALLEY cuts a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary scene, his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, grinning cheerfully, at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar sports car, El Cid. It is this image that also carries in its train the stories of later suffering-the affairs, the women, the bad teeth-and, speaking of teeth, the beautiful poems wrenched from the teeth of despair & written on the wrist of happiness “where happiness happens to like its poems written best” (in his inordinate phrase).
Posted in 24: CHILDREN OF MALLEY
Tagged John Jenkins, ken bolton
Ern Malley: I have gone missing from this world
A gay, light-hearted bastard, ERN MALLEY cuts a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary scene, his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, grinning cheerfully, at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar sports car, El Cid. It is this image that also carries in its train the stories of later suffering-the affairs, the women, the bad teeth-and, speaking of teeth, the beautiful poems wrenched from the teeth of despair & written on the wrist of happiness “where happiness happens to like its poems written best” (in his inordinate phrase).
Posted in 24: CHILDREN OF MALLEY
Tagged John Jenkins, ken bolton
Scott Thornton Reviews John Jenkins
In John Jenkins' eighth collection, Dark River, the question he asks the reader is, 'Are we apes or cobalt clouds?' Throughout the collection, a poetic narrator directs the reader towards a continual reassessment of science and aesthetics.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged John Jenkins, Scott Thornton
