michael farrell



Duncan Hose Reviews Best Australian Poems 2014

Being in and of one’s time (in favour of it, in fact) means producing work that is sensitive to the discursive furies of the day – the atmosphere of mutating code that the poet must stick to poems in new and strange forms. All else is nostalgia and denial. No-one knows what it means that Australia’s imperial republic, whose god has finally been revealed as cosmopolitan capitalism, is, in the history of colonies, still in its infancy yet so impressively seems to be approaching an end of days. If you’ve got burnt chaps and a warm six-shooter (cowgirl), these are exciting times.

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Against Colony Collapse Disorder; or, Settler Mess in the Cells of Contemporary Australian Poetry

Colony collapse disorder describes a phenomenon whereby worker bees suddenly and inexplicably disappear from a hive. It has recently been identified as a syndrome following the rapid vanishing of Western honeybee colonies across North America and Europe. Justin Clemens also uses the term to describe an aesthetic collapse, whereby poets can only demonstrate their existence as ‘being caught dead’ given the fragile conditions of poetry and the inevitable, deadly effects of the past.

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Comics Poetry: The Art of the Possible

‘MUSIC OF SHAPE’ | from, HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE, 2007 | Warren Craghead III | pencil on archival paper In 1979, Cecilia Vicuña (Chilean poet, activist and artist) tied a red string around a glass of milk and spilled it …

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Cosmic Primness

They settle on me like a dress, or lobby. The more gestures Manners of an astronaut? The richness comes out eventually. The close star wood promises being and eternity, but turns managers. Princess talk turns into legislation; knowledge is coming …

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MELBOURNE Editorial

Perhaps a good day doesn’t involve getting on a bus, but they are more interesting than trams or trains. It probably involves writing a poem, there’s plenty of it going on.

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Cassidy on with Feature Reviews and Future Themes

The bad news first … I am sorry to see the departure of Lisa Gorton as Cordite’s Feature Reviews Editor. Over the past 18 months, her astute eye, impeccable judgement and gracious style has produced – and leaves us with – a superb legacy of robust and engaging feature reviews. Gorton’s work is testament to what can happen with excellent writing from reviewers and an engaged editorial acumen.

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The Snow

Blue flakes are falling on the tents and the tongues of the kangaroos. It becomes white on contact. It becomes warm. It’s one of the magics of the Monaro of Kosciuzko. My arm and hair are one with the kangaroo …

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Submission to Cordite 46.1: MELBOURNE Now Open!

Poetry for Cordite 46.1: MELBOURNE is guest-edited by Michael Farrell. This will be Cordite Poetry Review‘s first special issue that includes a number of poems selected from open submissions. It is supported by the City of Melbourne through its Arts …

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TV (after Michael Farrell)

Meanwhile, Laura and the rest of the ladyboys are wearing waterwings by their table in front of the Staghunter Motel.

Posted in 58: PUMPKIN | Tagged ,

TV

Janet has been busy turning a banal bourgeois home into a suburban crocodile farm. This morning however she went outside to find her neighbour Bruce had eaten several of the crocodiles and had the head of one in his mouth. …

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Coming in 2014 is Cordite 4X.1: MELBOURNE

Cordite Poetry Review is proud to announce a new partnership and support from the City of Melbourne. This means that our plans for a special issue, MELBOURNE, in response to Astrid Lorange’s beguiling SYDNEY, will proceed. MELBOURNE will be guest-edited …

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Eulogy For Someone In The Room

Recently I’ve been thinking about ghosts ones that seem to have nothing to do with the enhanced or rather … accentuated being of those they appear to, but have their own quest … Elena told me that her husband had …

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

Michael Farrell Reviews MTC Cronin

A book as an experience of sampling, and of reading over a long period of time, may be ideal for the writer; but it won’t be that for all readers, especially not reviewers.

MTC Cronin has published several highly structured books in the past: Talking to Neruda’s Questions, 1-100 and The Flower, The Thing. Here the double title functions in a looser, more umbrella-like way; the book apparently aims to use death as its guiding concept: the assertion that the poems are themselves metaphors suggesting flexibility in her use of death as her theme.

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John Hawke Reviews Javant Biarujia and Michael Farrell

Fans of lists in Finnegans Wake will appreciate Javant Biarujia’s new book of poetry, Resinations. Many of the most amusing juxtapositions in the volume derive from the arrangement of proper names, drawn from (most) high and (very) low cultural references presented as cubistic materials in simultaneity.

Michael Farrell, on the other hand, a leading experimental poet of the next generation, is published by Giramondo – his previous volume, A Raiders Guide, was perhaps the most stylistically provocative book to have appeared with a recognised commercial publisher. Drawing on the Russian formalists’ exploration of the autonomous poem-as-machine, these radical fragmentations highlighted ‘The Word as Such’, and even ‘The Letter as Such’, in their concentration on the visual and sound properties of language.

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Occupations

He’s cutting my hair and flipping his braid imagining the amassing of casualties. he’s A fine rider, and likes a good chestnut for preference, in the. field muttering that’ll Be twenty-nine cents thanks giving you a bullet as if. mogadon …

Posted in 55: RATBAGGERY | Tagged

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.

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Th E Ma N Fr Om Sn Ow Ri Ver

Th E Ma N Fr Om Sn Ow Ri Ver | (16:53) [audio:http://cordite.org.au/audio/farrell_schwartz.mp3|titles=Th E Ma N Fr Om Sn Ow Ri Ver – Michael Farrell and Oscar Schwartz] Michael Farrell and Oscar Schwartz

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Ellipsis Getting Bigger

Me: Yeah, no, I write too … Person: Really, great! What do you write? Me: Poetry Person: ‘…’ Sometimes that person actually lowers their eyes, bows their head, as though I have somehow reached too far into their minds and …

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Michael Farrell Reviews Fremantle Poets 1: New Poets

There is an apt awkwardness and uncertainty in all three poets – Emma Rooksby, Scott-Patrick Mitchell, J.P. Quinton – here: in the expression of sentiment (‘Preparations’, Rooksby), in the use of syntax (Mitchell) and archaisms like ‘verily’ (Quinton). All three are skilled poets, but they are new, and there is a sense that they are still trying things out. As editor Tracy Ryan writes, the three are ‘extremely diverse in tone and approach’ and this diversity is pronounced in a way that would be tempered were there more poets in the book. Ryan’s selected poets represent three modes, rather than merely variety itself. This is not a sampler, however, but three books in one, and perhaps not designed to be read sequentially.

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Transpacific

The view of the watery gardens suggested a truly Verbal rosette. We see the world as a black and White golf course. Constellations, like buttons on Apollinaire. How much longer can we afford it? We fall – in performance – …

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

Fragile

… ha- … thanks … another post … time … hotel … Stanmore train … heavy … it was … full … through the corridors … black … winding down … I went … I was staying … park … …

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

Settlers, Regurgitated

Victoria’s first settlers were whalers as well as prostitutes. They were hale, they drank ale. They were whalewrights, sexwrights – they were Whites. They ate a lot of pasta too – well before the Italians put in an appearance. They …

Posted in 47: NO THEME! | Tagged

sample

1 we have over 45 years experience skin , launched in 1960 with soap messaging ( sm ) and presence protocol suite deal with , use , etc . : a matter contributed online encyclopedia intended for people sneakers make …

Posted in 46: ELECTRONICA | Tagged

Toby Fitch Reviews Michael Farrell and John Ashbery

In her review of John Ashbery’s new translation of Illuminations in The New York Times, Lydia Davis reminded us that: “When Rimbaud’s mother asked of A Season in Hell, ‘What does it mean?’ — a question still asked of Rimbaud’s poetry, and of Ashbery’s, too — Rimbaud would say only, ‘It means what it says, literally and in every sense.'”

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