Category: Blog

May monthly blogger – Maria Takolander!

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A huge thanks to John Kinsella for his excellent posts last month. This month, our fabulous blogger is Maria Takolander. Her bio is below: Maria Takolander is the author of two books of poems, Ghostly Subjects, published by Salt in 2009, and The End of the World, forthcoming with Giramondo in 2013. She is also an award-winning fiction writer and the author of the forthcoming short-story collection, The Double, which will be published by Text in September. Her book of literary criticism, Catching Butterflies: Bringing Magical Realism to Ground, was published by Peter Lang in 2007. Maria is this year’s judge of theAustralian Book…

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Uses of Knowledge/Data/Detail in Writing and Reading

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by John Kinsella I’ve always loved ‘data’, though I am sceptical of how it is sourced and utilised. This re-engineered novel I’ve been talking about over recent weeks, Morpheus, is a book stuffed with data, yet aims to be a challenge to the ‘empirical’; the data of ‘learning’ — from school, the first year or two of university, private reading and even (scientific) researching. While writing Morpheus, I was studying and occasionally working in my own home lab, complete with Mettler balance, Bunsen burners, titration equipment and micro ground-jointed organic glassware, including Liebig condensers and even a Friedrichs condenser, and…

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I’ll tell you a story

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by John Kinsella I possess two items from my childhood. Both are books. Somehow I have held on to these through the upheavals of my life, including having twice sold vast collections of books to support my various needs (and long-past addictions) twenty and more years ago. When I did my last big ‘sell-off’ in the early nineties, I managed to hang on to my early J. H. Prynne Poems and a few signed collections of poetry as well, but that’s about it. I occasionally run into people who remark that they own books containing dedications from writers to me.…

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The Eternal Work-in-Progress

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by John Kinsella, Writing Morpheus in my late teens went hand-in-hand with a fascination on my part for long, cumulative works of poetry. In Morpheus, through the character of Thomas, I was subtextually mapping possible approaches to creating the work-in-progress, with its echoes of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Also, though I despised him politically, like many of the ‘left’ I felt intrigued and compelled by Ezra Pound’s unfinishable life-work, The Cantos. I have a strong scepticism of Pound these days, but he convinced me, along with Olson’s Maximus Poems and Zukofsky’s ‘A’, that anything we write is inevitably part of what…

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Rereading

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John Kinsella At the age of fifty, I am rereading books I first read when I was in my mid-to-late teens. These are the books I was reading when I wrote my novel Morpheus which, after thirty years and various acts of reconstruction to cover the lacunae of  lost chunks of manuscript, is about to be published. Reading was the most essential referent in the creation of this 400-page ‘text’, and, in going through copy-edits and then proofs, I thought it would be a self-enlightening process to revisit the works that ‘informed’ my late-teenage writing process. Of course, there were…

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April blogger – John Kinsella!

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Thank you, Peter Minter, for your wonderful posts last month. This month, our blogger is John Kinsella. His bio is below: John Kinsella’s many volumes of poetry include Armour (Picador, 2011), Jam Tree Gully (WW Norton, 2012) and The Jaguar’s Dream (Alma/Herla, 2012). His recent book of stories is In the Shade of the Shady Tree (Ohio University Press, 2012). His novel Morpheus will be published in a couple of months by BlazeVox. He is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University. He is poetry editor for Island magazine.

To The Invisible

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Peter Minter 4. Leave-taking, Sydney 1987   The garden blooms no more, my egotist. Day’s butterflies have fled to other flowers, And now the only visitors will be The butterflies of night. Apollinaire “Flower Picking”  (205)   … it is impossible to return to the subjectivity of the experience because it is no longer possible to access the geography in which the language event occurred …   If forgetting is some kind of beautiful annihilation, how is that together with frailty and contingency and indeterminacy it is also so creatively vital? Alongside various others, this question or something like it is at the heart…

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To The Invisible

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Peter Minter 3. Cranes, Hiroshima 1986   Cranes      Hiroshima, 1986.   When the rice farmer trances over the fields his paper room is waiting. Even the blades of grass beside the road are the colour of polishing oil. Autumn is the perfect season for walking home. Overhead, during the day, did you see the cranes swirling in the fickle wind, spiraling round in leaves, in clouds that left no shadows ? “I keep the deities to one side of this life you lead me into. They smile like framed portraits of people in old clothes.”   Madeleines for the survivors.…

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To The Invisible

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Peter Minter 2. Hiroshige’s Journey, Yokohama 1986   Hiroshige’s  Journey Yamashita Park, Yokohama, Winter 1986.   an old man who walked past here cloaked against the blue sky and wind now seems a mile away the white birds there are so many white birds beside the sea.   Why is it that so much of our thinking and writing about poetry is monopolised by a rhetorics of dramatic visibility, clarity and focus? The vivid image, the intense phrase, the memorable line, lucid brilliance and the glow of authenticity are primary objectives in many a poetry workshop and poetry “how too.”…

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To The Invisible

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Peter Minter 1. Gimen no soko no byōki no kao, Yokohama 1986 Gimen no soko no byōki no kao: Sick Face of the Earth Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886-1942) In the earth I see my face, a lonely sick person’s face. From the ground’s darkness grow my eyes like stems of grass, like a fieldmouse from its house of confusion into a field of trembling hair, from the sick and lonely ground of the winter solstice where the roots of the thin new bamboo spread and spread; this pathetic blunder I see today and am forced even more today, today, to see…

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Introducing our guest writer for March, Peter Minter.

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Warm thanks to Kate Holden for her wonderful posts throughout February. For the next month we are hosting work by Peter Minter. Peter Minter is a leading Australian poet, editor and scholar. His books include blue grass and Empty Texas, and his poetry is widely published and regularly anthologised in Australia and internationally. His editorial projects have included titles such as Cordite, Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets, Meanjin, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature and The Literature of Australia (Norton), and he is now poetry editor of Overland. More recently, he has established…

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Writing isn’t like breathing. Writing is grace.

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Kate Holden, My fourth post – I had intended to write twice as many, in an inspired burst of blogging hyperactivity, but after peaking early in the early 2000s with a regular blog (back in the frowsty old dear days when people said, ‘A what?’) I have never again recovered the focus and the steam and the dedication, and alas, this month of February hecticness and an especial dose of personal frenetics too fell victim to lack of puff and excess of distraction. So, many thanks to Southerly and its people for inviting me to burble away here, and thanks…

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