- 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
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 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
Marooned
(a homophonic inversion of Rimbaud’s Marine) DON’T! HOO SANG EX HORTING TURBINES OF LOOM O FURRY FRUITS EXTRA TEA VERITABLY PILLED UP IN THE FORAY IF I LENT OUT SIR CUSS MEN FOR LESS IT’D BE AUDENRY WE SUCK ON …
Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT
Tagged Toby Fitch
Rock Bottom
after Rimbaud The first dawn of June was a dark aquarium belligerent submarines hurled themselves at my chest. The National Security Agency had trumpeted my grave and branded my ass with an ardency we couldn’t run off in the fields. …
Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND
Tagged Toby Fitch
Review Short: Toby Fitch’s Rawshock
Sydney-based poet Toby Fitch’s first book-length collection, Rawshock, is a lively, artful and conceptually engaging excursion into the underworld of a profound poetic imagination; through the eponymous poem sequence, Fitch offers up the viscera and vital organs of the Orpheus myth for the delectation of contemporary readers. Everyday Static’ and ‘Oscillations’ – the two chapbook-length series that accompany this myth – present a sensuous and affable rendering of Fitch’s key theme; the relationship of the present to the poetry of the past.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Nicola Themistes, Toby Fitch
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