- 115: SPACE
with A Sometimes
114: NO THEME 13
with J Toledo & C Tse
113: INVISIBLE WALLS
with A Walker & D Disney
112: TREAT
with T Dearborn
111: BABY
with S Deo & L Ferney
110: POP!
with Z Frost & B Jessen
109: NO THEME 12
with C Maling & N Rhook
108: DEDICATION
with L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik
107: LIMINAL
with B Li
106: OPEN
with C Lowe & J Langdon
105: NO THEME 11
with E Grills & E Stewart
104: KIN
with E Shiosaki
103: AMBLE
with E Gomez and S Gory
102: GAME
with R Green and J Maxwell
101: NO THEME 10
with J Kinsella and J Leanne
100: BROWNFACE
with W S Dunn
99: SINGAPORE
with J Ip and A Pang
97 & 98: PROPAGANDA
with M Breeze and S Groth
96: NO THEME IX
with M Gill and J Thayil
95: EARTH
with M Takolander
94: BAYT
with Z Hashem Beck
93: PEACH
with L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong
92: NO THEME VIII
with C Gaskin
91: MONSTER
with N Curnow
90: AFRICAN DIASPORA
with S Umar
89: DOMESTIC
with N Harkin
88: TRANSQUEER
with S Barnes and Q Eades
87: DIFFICULT
with O Schwartz & H Isemonger
86: NO THEME VII
with L Gorton
85: PHILIPPINES
with Mookie L and S Lua
84: SUBURBIA
with L Brown and N O'Reilly
83: MATHEMATICS
with F Hile
82: LAND
with J Stuart and J Gibian
81: NEW CARIBBEAN
with V Lucien
80: NO THEME VI
with J Beveridge
57.1: EKPHRASTIC
with C Atherton and P Hetherington
57: CONFESSION
with K Glastonbury
56: EXPLODE
with D Disney
55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUS
with 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
Ouyang Yu
The Ugly Poem: Ouyang Yu’s Terminally Poetic and the Counter-Aesthetics of the Multilingual
Beauty has a quality about it that pretends to neutrality and universality, despite being steeped in asymmetrical constructions of aesthetic judgement. Of course, this is no surprise in a hierarchical world; ‘Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.’
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Ghassan Hage, Kam Louie, Kameron Lai, Mikhail Bakhtin, Ouyang Yu, Yasmin Yildiz
chinaman fish
It’s a pain Not in the arse Not in the neck Not even in the fingers Searching for the word, e.g. in an online Chinese dictionary Called youdao, Having the Way In which the words, Chinaman Fish, is defined as …
Posted in 108: DEDICATION
Tagged Ouyang Yu
Wind
When you are at your loneliest you are this wind at work being itself nonstop
Posted in 107: LIMINAL
Tagged Ouyang Yu
House Style Lifestyle, Or: Same. Same. Same. Same. Same. Same.
Image by Lauren Connelly. 3920 words. 22-minute read. Welcome to the world of snackable content. Listen closely: like an ambient soundscape, its soft tides wash over you and you devour it quickly. Sometimes, it repeats an opinion you’ve already developed, …
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Brandon Taylor, Cher Tan, Fredric Jameson, Kyle Chayka, Ludwig Yeetgenstein, Maria Tumarkin, Ouyang Yu, Rem Koolhaas
4 Duo Er Translations
A layer of feathers, thin, not yet dropped
Posted in TRANSLATIONS
Tagged Duo Er, Ouyang Yu
2 life
No, please don’t Y do u want people 2 admire u And keep admiring u It’s boring that way The business of this business Is basically death In love, no I mean in life U make words come 2 life …
Posted in 100: BROWNFACE
Tagged Ouyang Yu
Shi Jianmin
I must confess that I have not included him in that fiction although I am not sure if that is the reason why he bumps into me now in this crowd. Even though we have not met for nearly 30 …
4 Translated Geng Xiang Poems
Image courtesy of Nichalos Walton-Healy. Translations from Master’s Return Journey: The Fields in Auvers — An Interpretation of 120 Paintings by Van Gogh Prologue For one who pulls someone’s Chestnuts out of the fire, he does not easily voice His …
Posted in TRANSLATIONS
Tagged Geng Xiang, Ouyang Yu
‘Refusing to be published, refusing even to perish’: Amelia Dale Interviews Ouyang Yu
Ouyang Yu, now based between Melbourne and Shanghai, came to Australia in mid-April 1991 and, by early 2018, has published 96 books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, literary translation and literary criticism in English and Chinese. He also edits Australia’s only Chinese literary journal, Otherland.
Posted in INTERVIEWS
Tagged Amelia Dale, Ouyang Yu
Enough
in Austr alia people r af,raid of not making enough money in Austr alia people r af,raid of not being correct enough in Austr alia people r af,raid of not being good enough in Austr alia people r af,raid of …
Posted in 84: SUBURBIA
Tagged Ouyang Yu
Review Short: Ouyang Yu’s Diary of a Naked Official
Well known as a poet, translator, and literary critic, Diary of a Naked Official marks Ouyang Yu’s second foray into the novel form. His first, Loose: A Wild History (Wakefield Press, 2007), mixes fiction and non-fiction, poetry, literary criticism and diaristic writing.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Noel King, Ouyang Yu
6-word stories (50 of them)
1. BBQ: Zero separation, bed being the body. 2. Title, to Come: Music, alive, a fruit of fingers. 3. Each and Every Morning, Electronic Cleansing: Click. Click. Click. No emails coming. 4. Eight for Six, Reduction: No agitation. Peace and …
Posted in 77: EXPLODE
Tagged Ouyang Yu
Bonny Cassidy Reviews Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead
As Feature Reviews Editor and sometime reviewer for Cordite Poetry Review it is an unusual (and therefore fun) privilege to consider a title in which poetry is critically addressed in the company of other forms. Too often it is it either quarantined within poetry-only criticism, or mentioned as an embarrassing aside to discussions of prose.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Bonny Cassidy, John Kinsella, John Mateer, Nicholas Birns, Ouyang Yu, Pam Brown
The Arch i bald Prize: an award-giving history
2015: a white won 2014: a white won 2013: a white won 2012: a white won 2011: a white won 2010: a white won 2009: a white won 2008: a white won 2007: a white won 2006: a white won …
Posted in 72: THE END
Tagged Ouyang Yu
Michael Aiken Reviews Ouyang Yu
Ouyang Yu is a prolific writer whose combination of occupations – poet, novelist, translator, academic – gives some context to this book’s obsessive engagement with word, language and meaning. His biographical note mentions that he came to Australia at the age of 35, and there’s a pervasive trope in Fainting with Freedom of a stranger-in-a-strange-land’s curiosity for the materiality of language and its malleability: something akin to what Kerouac once alluded to when he described his relationship to English – a language he didn’t learn until he was eight – as a tool he could very consciously manipulate as necessary for effect and meaning.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Michael Aiken, Ouyang Yu
L
every day is a loss of it self winter is now baring it all in its unloving look even when it pre tends to be fe male convenience is not square but plural to translate is to be always chronologically …
Posted in 69: TRANSTASMAN
Tagged Ouyang Yu
Sam Moginie Reviews Breaking New Sky: Contemporary Poetry from China
Breaking New Sky is a happily variegated collection of work by contemporary Chinese poets, edited and translated by Chinese-Australian poet, novelist and translator Ouyang Yu. Strangeness produced by means of a ‘neutral’ or ‘plain’ English (a ‘Yu signature tone’) gives the poems and their objects a riddle-like quality whose pleasures and dramas implicate food, sex, work, river systems, animals, domestic space, relationships, the medical system, nostalgia, death, farming and sleep. This plainness is put to work as the material of an aphoristic narrative mode that defines this anthology; making small claims continuously and thereby amassing charm.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Bai Helin, Cheng Chou-yu, Hou Ma, Hu Xian, Liang Yujing, Liu Meisong, Lu Ye, Ouyang Yu, Sam Moginie, Shu Ting, Yue Xuan, Zhou Suotong
Jennifer Mackenzie Reviews Asia Pacific Writing Series Books 1-4
Vagabond Press has recently issued four attractively presented volumes of poetry from the Asia Pacific region. Each contains the work of three poets and represents China, Japan, Vi-etnam and the Philippines, respectively.
5 Poems by Ардак НУРГАЗЫ in English, Chinese and Kazakh
Ardakh Nurgaz (Ардак НУРГАЗЫ) is a Kazakh poet, essayist, critic born in 1972. He graduated from university in 1995, and began publishing work in 1991. From 2006 to 2008, he was editor-in-chief of Foreign Literatures, a bi-monthly in Kazakhstan. He is now correspondent of The Alma-Ata Evening newspaper. He has published the poetry collections A Book of Pseudo Freedoms (2009) and A Collection of Humming Birds (in Chinese and Kazakh, 2012).
Posted in TRANSLATIONS
Tagged Ardakh Nurgaz, Ouyang Yu
The Earth of Kashgar (translated excerpts of a long poem)
Other than the fact that Adili Adili Tuniyazi is a Uyghur poet, I know nothing more about him. But when I first read his work in Dangdai xianfeng shi 30 nian (Avant-Garde Poetry for 30 Years), I was impressed. The word zuguo (motherland) that he refers to frequently in his poem is so ambiguous that I suspect it’s not China proper.
Posted in TRANSLATIONS
Tagged Adili Adili Tuniyazi, Ouyang Yu
Jal Nicholl Reviews Ouyang Yu
In his often quoted poem ‘An identity CV’, Ouyang Yu describes himself as Australian for the last couple of years, Chinese for the first 43; unashamed of either’. National educational priorities notwithstanding, I have not found the time to learn Chinese. Inevitably though, the ideal reader of this bilingual volume would know a little more of that language than nihao. However, I immediately offer an observation that if this book is not strictly intended for English monoglots, it will have to make do with a considerably smaller readership than the average volume of contemporary poetry.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Jal Nicholl, Ouyang Yu
Asian Australian Diasporic Poets: A Commentary
This essay provides a survey of the poetry of some Asian Australian poets, and does not attempt to be definitive. Diasporic poetics raise more questions than they answer and are just as much about dis-placement as about place, just as much about a ‘poetics of uncertainty’ as about certainties of style/nation/identity.
‘Don’t be stupid’ (‘바보같이 굴지 마’)
I looked at his darkening profile, So, you are Korean? No, Chinese, he said If he were the black guy last night I’d keep talking about Kenya and Obama How his dad used to be working in the bank whose …
Posted in 44: OZ-KO (HOJU-HANGUK)
Tagged Kim Gaihyun, Ouyang Yu
Strokes country (획을 긋는 나라)
If you put people next to a stroke Like this丨 On its right Like this:人 You become wings Like this:人丨 If you want to be air Borne you put the person along Side an English Letter: H Like this:人H You …
Posted in 44: OZ-KO (HOJU-HANGUK)
Tagged Kim Sunghyun, Ouyang Yu