Robert Wood



Peripheral Peripheries: Robert Wood on Alvin Pang

Here there are plastic chairs, plastic tables, phone screens, tv soaps, chicken rice, and the poem’s final word, which tells us what we have always known.

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Johanna Featherstone Reviews History and the Poet

Although Robert Wood’s History and the Poet is described as essay, it defies being labelled as one genre. Perhaps like the definition of poetry itself, which shifts and changes between individuals and contexts, language and culture, so do Wood’s words.

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Wembley Food Court

Intent on wonton destruction we fought streets combatted mortality thieved grandness from auto-tuned oysters. They sung out our numbers saucy asked and the sambal yams awaited deliverance. We forgot the steam shucked corn the color of lions drank nettle tea …

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Review Short: Shane Rhodes’s Dead White Men

From the title of Shane Rhodes’s collection Dead White Men, we know we are in fraught if familiar territory. Those men are the subjects to be critiqued, argued with, taken down in light of today’s history.

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Review Short: Homer Rieth’s The Garden of Earth

You could be forgiven for thinking that ‘Australia’ was simply this place, rather than an imagined community. It is of course not only a phantasm or a figment that is whole, but also real and divisible.

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Language Barriers

Many live after L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E then, but few live as it. There is no comparable, or adequate, rupture precisely because there is a lack of Historical, and philosophical, work being done. Cue the misunderstanding of what to radically break with.

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The New Reality in Australian Poetry

The generation of Murray is not my generation. The generation of Adamson is not my generation either. Nor is it Tranter or Kinsella.

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snake-well : a suite of wheatlands poems

i. ash loam and foot flesh farm-bones and skin maps pink, grey, graveground, form-grasses and wavetaints wellbaked and seed black ii. starlows the cropframe saltcanvas of generation, plateau waist the size of place iii. tigerhand by jokebite, and fivethink of …

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Robert Wood Interviews Alan Loney

I first met Alan Loney at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. I was studying there at the time and Alan had been invited as a guest of Robert Creeley at SUNY Buffalo.

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Review Short: Omar Musa’s Parang

Omar Musa is something of a phenomenon. I mean that both in the demotic and the philosophical senses. Self-publisher, author of the successful novel Here Come the Dogs (longlisted for the Miles Franklin), lyricist with international hip hop outfit MoneyKat, Wikipedia subject. As demonstrated by the author photo in this book Parang, autobiographical promotional videos (‘Live and Direct from Kingsley’s Chicken’), comparisons to Junot Diaz and his sartorial style, Musa has made a career from ‘the street’.

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Cruel Buffoonery

In the North American summer of 2015 I journeyed into the heart of the MFA industrial complex.

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Review Short: Daneen Wardrop’s Cyclorama and Terrence Chiusano’s on generation and corruption

About a decade ago ‘trauma’ became an industry in the academic literary critical economy. This was due in part to the success of Cathy Caruth, but there were other theorists that mattered before and after (Freud’s ‘repetition compulsion’ and Elaine Scarry’s body in pain). Holding hands with trauma was ‘witness’. Of course, witnessing has been in the discourse for a long time as well, but there was a steady growth in its paradigmatic quality after the Holocaust industry began to develop more fully (see Norman Finkelstein).

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Review Short: Amelia Dale’s Metadata and Thalia’s A Loose Thread

The question what are we to do at and with the limits of language presents itself as the central question in the two books under review here. That they frame themselves as poetry means that the context in which this occurs is different from art or graphic design – two fields into which both could easily be placed. One does not ‘read’ these works but apprehends them.

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Robert Wood in as Commissioning Editor

I am pleased to announce that Robert Wood has joined the Cordite Poetry Review masthead as a Commissioning Editor. Shortly, we’ll start a series of critical essays from Australian and international writers, about one a month. This is in addition …

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Review Short: Shane McCauley’s Trickster

It is something of a paradigm in literary criticism (poetics included) to couple West Australians with place. Of late Tim Winton and John Kinsella have occupied this ground, but it is there in thinking about Randolph Stow and Dorothy Hewett and many more besides. It was Winton, after all, who wrote – ‘we come from ‘the wrong side of the wrong continent in the wrong hemisphere”. The place, thought of quite literally as location, is simply ‘wrong’, meaning not quite right, meaning askew. This is to say nothing of the spirit here, or how, for a great number of people (some Noongars and others included), this always was and always will be the very centre of the world.

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Review Short: Ian Gibbins’s and Judy Morris’s Floribunda

How far we are from the radical days of realism. Prior to Adorno’s dismantling of Lukacs and the Stalinist led state institutionalisation of it, realism may have laid claim to being an innovative aesthetic with agreeably progressive political inclinations.

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Robert Wood Reviews Duncan Hose, Jean Kent and Alyson Miller

In the library of Australian poetry animals occupy many pages. There are poems on kangaroo, frog, platypus and bandicoot; pig, dog, possum and cow; sheep, fox, dugong and crocodile; and an aviary of birds from budgies and pelicans to magpies and herons.

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