- 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
Toby Fitch
Samuel J. Cox Reviews Toby Fitch and Gareth Sion Jenkins
Toby Fitch’s Object Permanence: Calligrammes (Puncher & Wattmann, 2023) and Gareth Sion Jenkins’ The Inclination Compass (Puncher & Wattmann, 2023) both represent not only the culmination of large bodies of work, but also can be considered avant-garde in their experimentation with the boundaries of poetry as a visual medium.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Gareth Sion Jenkins, Samuel J. Cox, Toby Fitch
Toby Fitch Reviews Catherine Vidler
In the late Catherine Vidler’s first full-length collection of poetry Furious Triangle (2011), a brilliant book of poems using regular old words, the spores to Vidler’s entirely wordless visual poems can be found. There are experiments in the microscopic, such as through anagrammatic play and her ‘20 one-word poems,’ the latter of which highlights the contradictory and proliferative meanings within single words.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Catherine Vidler, Toby Fitch
Toby Fitch Reviews Running time by Emily Stewart
Emily Stewart is the author of numerous chapbooks, including Like and The Internet Blue. Her debut poetry collection Knocks (Vagabond Press 2016) won the inaugural Noel Rowe Poetry Award and reflected an assuredly varied approach as it experimented with multiple voices (not just in monologues but polyphonic within poems), erasure as a feminist poetics (with homage-like condensations of Lydia Davis, Helen Garner, Susan Sontag, Clarice Lispector and more), post-digital affect (extracting poetic value from online idioms in particular, though sometimes overwhelming the poetic value), all while interleaving themes of climate change, the cost of living, and more in an exploration of what it means and feels like to live in so-called Australia in the Anthropocene.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Emily Stewart, Toby Fitch
The Email May Contain Information: Eda Gunaydin on Toby Fitch
What might it mean to acknowledge that this is the substance of the labour performed by many of us, those of us who aspire to do anything but?
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Eda Gunaydin, Toby Fitch
Writing Threat and Trauma: Poetic Witnessing to Social Injustice and Crisis
This article explores creative responses to crises that are written and technologically mediated in a liminal zone between threat and trauma.
Posted in ESSAYS, SCHOLARLY
Tagged Ali Whitelock, Anna Gibbs, CA Conrad, Mark Mordue, Meera Atkinson, Nigel Krauth, Toby Fitch
Dust Red Dawn
Can you convince the wind to change direction? The Opera House dishes in their rack are browning again. The government wants them whitewashed by massive, shock-jock-endorsed horse-racing ads. It’s nearly summer and November’s going loopy. The sky turns ochre, orange …
Posted in 101: NO THEME 10
Tagged Toby Fitch
Joel Ephraims Reviews Ashbery Mode Edited by Michael Farrell
The presence of John Ashbery shines over contemporary literature, for many as an enigma, indisputably as a catalyst. Part of the post-World War II wave of new American poetry, his name is grouped not just alongside his contemporary poets but among their literary schools and movements: the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E school, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, our own ’68ers and J.A.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Angela Gardner, Craig Hallsworth, Jacek Pakula, Jill Jones, Joel Ephraims, john tranter, Julie Chevalier, michael farrell, Toby Fitch
A Massage from the Vice-Chancellor
1 Dear ____ , in a nuanced way. At the shame time I am writing to you this is in addition to your with some key information regular annual crisis disruption. In adjuncting to our management ‘new normal’ you have …
Posted in 97 & 98: PROPAGANDA
Tagged Toby Fitch
‘The amorphousness of meaning-making’: Elena Gomez Interviews Toby Fitch
I did write some poetry at school, just never with much intent.
Posted in INTERVIEWS
Tagged Elena Gomez, Robert Klippel, Toby Fitch
King Tide
we don’t always take stock of or shed our satellite stocks but a blonde woman pointing at maps became historical and the moon shone hysterically on our sector so we embraced our shelves for a large complex weather event an …
Posted in 95: EARTH
Tagged Toby Fitch
Toby Fitch Reviews Holly Friedlander Liddicoat’s CRAVE
First books are a big occasion for poets. Their publication makes something heretofore unofficial official while announcing the poet as one committed to ‘the art of language’, as Gig Ryan describes poetry.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Holly Friedlander Liddicoat, Toby Fitch
Aussi / Or: Un Coup de dés and Mistranslation in the Antipodes
‘Shipwrecked on the shoals of contingency’, Australian poetry is haunted by Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Un Coup de Dés. Its publication in Cosmopolis in Paris in 1897 struck a nerve or, rather, a vessel within Australian poetry bloodlines,
Posted in ESSAYS, SCHOLARLY
Tagged Chris Edwards, john tranter, Stéphane Mallarmé, Toby Fitch
Mangled, or Yet Another Hierarchical Official Oracle
* w e r t q i o u y f goo h j k l zx cvs b nerf , > ( 9 @ …) wtf_ # this ; & gle i is ya the h | dream o …
Posted in 91: MONSTER
Tagged Toby Fitch
Argo Notes
1 irreverence of being a baby amniotic fluid sonic bubble & blood i find you forget you the heart’s action & breathing i keep forgetting you makes spontaneous gesture possible but you remember me our conference about breastfeeding i lose …
Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER
Tagged Toby Fitch
Feel Like I’m Somehow Related to Everyone on the Internet
I am outraged / have been as long as I can remember The sky’s a projector & the moon was brought here by aliens To keep us informed of the shitstorms going on I am outraged / been a member …
Posted in 86: NO THEME VII
Tagged Toby Fitch
The Left Hand of Dankness
/ facts seem to alter w/ an altered voice as one counts capital backwards / i didn’t know it was raining / dank advancing comfortably as fish to the various electric musics that echo thru the deep state / polished …
Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS
Tagged Toby Fitch
Illiterature
I’ll start this off without any words, watching them pass like clouds in the sky, too busy sucking. On warm milk and laxatives I’ll walk you through heartbreak, show you the out-takes—all the dead wood from jungles and cities on …
Posted in 78: CONFESSION
Tagged Toby Fitch
Erin Thornback Reviews Chris Edwards and Toby Fitch
Chris Edwards’s O Sonata dwells in the vortex of the underworld, plumbing the depths of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth and resetting the entrails of Rilke’s Sonnette an Orpheus into a crossword puzzle ready for consumption. In the eponymous sequence, Edwards offers up a renewal of the Orpheus (also known as ‘the futile male’) myth to signal his reconsideration of repetition and originality as the basis of a literary revision – releasing a suite of renditions that purposely misinterpret, transliterate and obscure.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Chris Edwards, Erin Thornback, Toby Fitch
Poetry of the Eye: The Visual Aspects of Poetry
Image by Tim Grey Presented by Cordite Publishing Inc. and Australian Poetry, and hosted by poet Toby Fitch, this workshop at the 2016 Emerging Writers’ Festival will open your eyes to the potential of the poem on the page. By …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Jacinta Le Plastrier, Kent MacCarter, Toby Fitch
After the Orgy
i is an / ugh it’s an ignoramus jamais jamais u say / or maybe nether nether its inland sequel is counting on this Eur optic allusion to echo it &/ or braise it w/ outsourcery in terror pots of …
Posted in 72: THE END
Tagged Toby Fitch
Orb
noon when i woke Dawn long since fallen with a plonk or was that my child on timber floors her massive booty surrounded by discarded labels from the discount sales she crashed at the top of the main drag last …
Posted in 71: TOIL
Tagged Toby Fitch
Villainesque²
We met as phantoms in the mountains, Unable to avoid the transnational arm of sleep Of whatever city we got raised in. I had such a beautiful dreamtime, an electric field, My only weapon against it was to escape Like …
Posted in 68: NO THEME IV
Tagged Toby Fitch
Dan Disney Reviews the deciBels Series
These ten tiny tomes each speak (squawk, swoon, glitch, muse, lyricise, confess) of how there is something not ticking precisely inside the reality machine. Or perhaps these books shine light onto how we’ve all gone slightly spectral within our anthropocenic phantasmagorias, lost and unmoored in an experiment that’s become dreadfully strange. Some of these books turn exclusively toward the world, others perhaps come from particular critical engagements; each serves to extend conversation both on what poets do, and what poems are for.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Angela Gardner, ann vickery, Anselm Berrigan, Dan Disney, Don Mee Choi, Jaimie Gusman, Maged Zaher, Pam Brown, Rachel Loden, Stephanie Christie, Susan Schultz, Toby Fitch