Category: Blog

Shakespeare’s sonnets: stones and weeds

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Lisa Gorton This week, I’ve been rereading Shakespeare’s sonnets. I’m thinking ahead to ABR’s sonnet-o-thon at Boyd on Wednesday 28 November. (Yes, a promo! But the event is free: www.australianbookreview.com.au/events/fireside-chats.)  We’re lining up to read as many sonnets as we can in an hour and a half. Some day – some festival – I wish someone would read the lot. Taken together, they repeat and rework images until they make, as much as anything, a study of the way obsessions work in time. And how strange they are.  All those one-syllable words: the sonnets sound clear but get stranger the…

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On realism, Walter Benjamin and cricket commentary

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Lisa Gorton Lately, driving here and there, I have been listening to cricket on the radio. In truth, I take no interest in the game; but talk has its genres, too, and I have been amusing myself by trying to classify cricket commentary. It seems to offer the comfort of realism. Here are men talking together, looking over the same field: a green field of shared experience.  Listening to the men talk, it seems as though this pitch, this green field, has been fenced off from all that Walter Benjamin notices in his sad and brilliant essay, ‘The Storyteller’. In…

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November Monthly Blogger – Lisa Gorton

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Thank you, Pam Brown, for your excellent posts. This month we have Lisa Gorton as our monthly blogger. Lisa Gorton lives in Melbourne. Her second poetry collection, The Hotel Hyperion, is coming out with Giramondo in March 2013. Her novel, Establishment, is coming out with Scribe later that year. Lisa Gorton’s first poetry collection, Press Release, was shortlisted for the Melbourne Prize Best Writing Award and the Mary Gilmore Poetry Prize, and was awarded the Victorian Premier’s Prize for poetry. She has also been awarded the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize.

Holey holey holey : reading Kim Hyesoon

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Pam Brown In the “Translator’s Note” for Korean poet Kim Hyesoon’s book All the Garbage of the World, Unite!, Don Mee Choi says that she responded to a condescending request from a US literary journal to “change the word ‘hole’ because it has negative connotations”.  She wrote: “During the Korean War (1950 – 1953), about 250,000 pounds of napalm per day were dropped by the United States forces. Countless mountains, rice fields, and houses were turned into holes. Four million perished, leaving more holes. It’s a place that is positively holey. Kim Hyesoon’s hole poem comes from there, and so…

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How coded is that : reading Susan Wheeler

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Pam Brown Now that no one can remember how they lived before computers came into their homes almost a quarter of a century ago, I thought I’d say something here about Susan Wheeler’s Source Codes. It’s a collection of poetry, drafts, code and photo-collages published back in 2001. At first these poems can seem discordant but if you stick with them you’ll find that they’re firmly congruent with their sources, and are, in fact, assiduously organised. A ‘source code’ is a written instruction in a list of textual commands that programmers compile and translate into ‘machine code’ that a computer…

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Thinking in collage : reading Duncan White

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Pam Brown This week, as well as distractedly scrolling down hundreds of posts on the corporate social advertising site, facebook, I read hard copies of the Sydney Morning Herald every day, reviews in the London Review of Books, plus real time + onscreen, Rabbit issue 5, Art Monthly, various poems and essays in the current Southerly andvarious articles in Lemon Hound, Rhizome, E-rea, The Believer and Triple Canopy online magazines. I also caught up with the second issue of Pete Spence’s new handmade magazine ETZ . ETZ #2 has poems by Laurie Duggan, Michael Farrell,  Berni Janssen, Rae Jones, Kent…

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Atoms of language : reading Joseph Massey

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Pam Brown Sometimes when I start to read a new book of poems that immediately strike me as poems I’m going to love and most probably be influenced by, I can hardly continue reading the book. I have to close it straightaway and put it aside. I feel a mixture of ardour and mildly disconcerting anticipation where I’ve recognised an aesthetic disposition that seems uncannily aligned with my own. Then later, once I’ve recovered from this short shock, I return and read it like an addict absorbing an anodyne. It happened today when I opened Joseph Massey’s At the Point.…

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The creative writing racket

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Belinda Castles Funding writers through postgraduate creative writing qualifications…skews funding in favour of the gutless. Enrolling in a postgraduate writing course is a hedge against failure, costing thousands of dollars, for those who are too scared to take off a year to get on with it and write. It attracts those who are everything a good writer is not: compliant, institution bound and approval seeking. Lisa Pryor, 27 February 2010 I have a Masters in Novel Writing and am awaiting examiners’ reports on a Doctor of Creative Arts in writing. Only one of my three novels was written independently of…

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The story of that day

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Belinda Castles Just over five years ago, I decided to write a novel about my grandparents. Their names were Fay and Heinz (in the novel they became Hannah and Emil), and like so many caught up in the wars of the last century, their lives in those times were characterised by displacement and agonising separation. Heinz, a German veteran of the First World War and anti-Nazi socialist, escaped from Germany in 1933, fleeing tragedy and great personal danger. Having crossed the border into Holland and then Belgium, he met Fay, a translator, at the Maison du Peuples in Brussels, where…

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Stealing from Hilary Mantel

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Belinda Castles Hello Southerly readers. Pleased to meet you. This month’s blog entries are from No Going to London, a blog about writing, reading and not going to London. For an explanation of the title see here. Briefly, it is about the books I find helpful as a writer, and about the ongoing struggle with procrastination and distraction that is the writing life, for me. Recently I had the misfortune to finish reading Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, her second novel imagining the life of Thomas Cromwell, adviser to Henry VIII. I put off the moment of finishing for several…

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September monthly blogger – Belinda Castles!

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A big thanks to Jill Jones for her fabulously interesting posts. This month we have Belinda Castles blogging for us: Belinda Castles is a writer and editor. Her most recent book is Hannah and Emil, a novel based on the lives of her grandparents. Her grandfather was a German anti-Nazi refugee who met her British-born grandmother when fleeing Germany in 1933. In 1940 he was arrested in Britain and sent to Australia on the infamous HMT Dunera. Belinda’s previous novel, The River Baptists, won the Australian/Vogel Award for Literature for 2006. In 2008 she was named one of the Sydney Morning…

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Sounds, Markings, Places

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Jill Jones I was at the Queensland Poetry Festival last weekend at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts in ‘the Valley’. I had been thinking for a while about how place and poetry work together. I mean, more than usual, as place is important to my poetry. I am to teach into a course about writing and place next year, so there is a work-related imperative. I had also done a conference presentation on ‘Ken Bolton’s Adelaide’ earlier this year. Ken wrote in an email to me that his naming of certain places in poems was a way of…

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