Author: Southerly

Some Online Byways

SoutherlyBlog

Phillip Ellis I have, since my late teens, held a so soft spot for the 1890s in my reading heart. Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Machen, Brennan and others, all have a place in that heart, and I want to use one of them, Arthur Machen, to illustrate some places online for those who love books and reading. The first place that I want to stop by is among the most obvious: the Friends of Arthur Machen website. The internet is a great resource for hunting up literary societies, especially those dedicated to particular authors. In this case, the Friends is…

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Kevin Hart Reading at the University of Sydney

SoutherlyNews

Kevin Hart, reknowned Australian poet and academic, will be giving a reading at the University of Sydney. Please come along! The reading will start promptly at 6pm. When: Wednesday June 8th, 6 – 7pm Where: Woolley Common Room, Woolley Buildlng, University of Sydney main campus http://sydney.edu.au/arts/about/maps.shtml

H.P. Lovecraft’s Slim Purpose

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Phillip Ellis  Winfield Townley Scott once made the following remark about H. P. Lovecraft’s verse: “To scare is a slim purpose in poetry.” This is true; there is more to weird verse, poetry of fantasy and horror, than shudder-mongering, and there is more to the genre of horror than refining the evocation of physical disgust and revulsion. Part of the problem is that so much of the Lovecraft’s weird verse feels stylistically deriviative of both Swinburne and Poe. It is only relatively rarely that Lovecraft achieves his own style, his own voice technically. One key example of this latter point is…

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Autumn

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Phillip Ellis I won’t say that this thought has always struck me as evident, or even possible, but, for a long while, it seems to me that Brennan’s focus on the European seasons in his XXI Poems: Towards the Source and his Poems reflects a focus so intense on the absent beloved that all his terms of reference are to her and her world. This is a complicated way of saying that the lover is thinking solely of the beloved. She is his world, his point of departure, his Eden, and his point of return. Which makes the following all the more…

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Form and Content

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Phillip Ellis Part of my poetic practice involves mastering as many poetic forms as I can. By being able to write as many as possible, without explicitly needing to concentrate on their demands, I find that my ability to write effective poetry is enhanced: I need not lose energy concentrating on the rules of a form, and can concentrate, instead, on the poem’s content. Part of this process involves the creation of new poetic forms, usually out of pre-existing elements. A case in point is one that I use for a series of pieces, each titled “Image”. The basis of…

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New Monthly Blogger – Phillip Ellis

SoutherlyNews

Southerly’s Monthly Blogger program has got off to a brilliant start, thanks to the thoughtful, engaging and inspiring posts from Tracy Ryan. Thank you, Tracy! Next in our program is Phillip Ellis. Here’s his bio: Phillip A. Ellis is a freelance critic and scholar, and his poetry collection, The Flayed Man, has been published by Gothic Press. Gothic Press will also edit a collection of essays on Ramsey Campbell, that he is editing with Gary William Crawford. He is working on another collection, to appear through Diminuendo Press. Another collection has been accepted by Hippocampus Press, which has also published his…

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Worldplay and the Writer

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Tracy Ryan What are you able to build with your blocks? Castles and palaces, temples and docks. Rain may keep raining, and others go roam, But I can be happy and building at home. (Robert Louis Stevenson, “Block City”) The imaginative nature of the writer’s life suggests intuitively that it’s linked to earlier play in childhood, and of course Freud makes this connection explicit in his famous if inevitably limited essay/speech, “The Creative Writer and Daydreaming” (1907). I say limited because Freud does not develop in it all the ideas he raises, and many of his points are arguable. Nevertheless,…

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India India

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From useful surveys of Indian-Australian literary relations to a challenging appraisal of the coverage of recent attacks on Indian students in Australia; from a resurrection of the Indian Mollie Skinner to a ground-breaking comparison of life writings by Aboriginal and Dalit/Untouchable women, plus a haunting and absorbing array of stories and poems from some of the most exciting contemporary Indian and Australian writers, India India not only presents a veritable feast from the subcontinent, but reflects just how deeply our cultures, literary and otherwise, are intertwined. An, as ever, there is a selection of the best new Australian writing, whatever its subject.…

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Novels about Writers: Lost Illusions

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Tracy Ryan Novels about writers are sometimes decried as running the risk of being boring, self-indulgent, or failing in imagination, as if their author was doing nothing more than lazily transcribing from his or her own life. And perhaps to some degree that risk is quite real, since the main activity of a writer is often solitary, quiet, assiduous, and looks dull from the outside… Planning, note-taking, researching, thinking, revising, scrapping and starting again – hardly the stuff of high drama. Maybe that’s why popular films about real-life, historic writers almost never show them actually writing – how static would…

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Belated Reads

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Tracy Ryan We probably all have our list of favourites from early in life, but what about the books it took us a lifetime to get to, the ones we’d heard about but never got around to reading, or that had never crossed our path, till much later? Sometimes these belated reads can come like a bolt out of the blue, just when you thought your reading tastes had either stagnated or at least settled into the shape they were always likely to take. For me the first of these bolts from the blue was the French novelist and general…

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Creative Collaboration

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Tracy Ryan Though I happily work as part of a team at other things, as a writer, I am not naturally collaborative. I’m one of those (antisocially?) private writers who does not like even to show what I’m working on – or sometimes even the fact that I’m working. I can’t stand noise, input or suggestion – and prefer to be shut away by myself, preferably in a small space, which makes me focus. It’s not that my process has no spontaneous element; rather that I prefer the spontaneous to happen when there’s no one else around! So it came…

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Willing Suspense: Simenon, Highsmith, Rendell – and Others?

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Tracy Ryan Over the last decade or so I’ve become increasingly interested in suspense fiction. Though “suspense” is an element in most fiction, I mean the sort where it’s the main engine or driver of the work. Suspense is a crucial factor in, say, detective stories and thrillers, but even those are not exactly what I mean, though there’s some overlap. At fourteen I was an Agatha Christie addict – and I still admire the skill with which her books are constructed, as well as those written by many others in the genre, or those who have innovated within the…

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