Category: Blog

Homage and influence, naked and otherwise

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Jill Jones I was looking over some notes the day I wrote this post (Wednesday). They were towards a piece I had begun some time ago, not completed, about the Canadian poet, Phyllis Webb. As well as reminding me about life’s unfinished projects, it got me thinking about homage, paying respects. I have a wonderful book by John Ashbery, Other Traditions: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (Harvard University Press). In the introduction, Ashbery says he did not want to explain his poetry and chose to speak about poets “who have probably influenced me”. The word “probably” seems to be a…

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The present of books

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Jill Jones Just recently, I found myself receiving a number of books from different sources over a matter of a couple of days. They are all, of course, poetry books. Despite the fact that poetry publishing is not a best-seller type of enterprise, there’s plenty of us who buy or acquire and are interested in books of poetry. I’ve even noticed a welcome increase in poetry reviews in the newspapers. Not all the reviews are terribly well done, or maybe they were savaged by sub-editors (who knows?), but at least they are providing space for dialogues about poems, poetry and…

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Erasures of the self: the body’s poetry

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Michelle Cahill In this last post for Southerly I would like to share the detours of my writing and spiritual journeys, with brief reflections of a more general nature on Australia’s cultural and literary engagement with Asia. I began my sojourns in Buddhist monasteries in Thailand thirteen years ago when I was disillusioned with capitalism, with what the West had taught me about happiness: commodities, acquisitions, the posture of ego, the indoctrinations of education, culture, all of which, without exception had left me unfulfilled and restless. My teacher Pra Ajahn Po had trained under theradical-conservative Thai monk Buddhadhasa Biku, who left the dirty and…

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Of Asylum and Aliens

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Michelle Cahill  Like most of us I’ve been disturbed by the boat tragedies off the coast of Christmas Island. I sometimes describe myself as an “economic refugee” since my family’s postcolonial transit from Kenya to the UK and thence Sydney was in many ways bumpy so the extent and suffering of displaced peoples troubles me. At the end of the month I plan to travel to Medan to spend a week with the Jesuit Refugee Service and to visit the international detention centre in Bedawan as well as community- based refugees. Australia has been slow at processing its quota of…

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Race, Privilege & the Dark Side Of the Dream

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Michelle Cahill There’s a growing awareness within our literary communities and among public intellectuals that the obstacles faced by those marginalised in terms of cultural and literary representation need to be reappraised by a more rigorous analysis of white privilege, and white racial domination. Racial privilege is the notion that a passive benefit is accrued to one race by the manner in which its identity is constructed as superior to Others. Analysis of racial domination goes further by revisiting the historical, economic and legal processes which secure white privilege. For Oz Lit the aim of such analysis is to begin…

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Out of Sight for the Ends of Being: Transcending Morality and Slavery

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Michelle Cahill In sonnet 43 Elizabeth Barrett Browning describes the soul reaching to surpass the feeling of disconnection from “the ends of Being and ideal Grace.” She speaks to the mystery of thought and feeling contained yet unbounded by love. The transcendent state is measured by physical criterion of breadth, height, depth, reach, and by everyday items which confer the passing of time, “sun”, “candle-light”, “breath”. The sonnet’s ardent logic, its repetitions and intensity create an interior world of “breath” and “breadth”, as it structures love’s fabric as paradoxical and conflicted, made more intense by the awareness of death. Barrett…

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Our next guest writer, Michelle Cahill

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Our thanks to Pip for her wonderful posts over these last few weeks. Now please welcome Michelle Cahill, who will be joining us throughout June. Michelle Cahill lives in Sydney. She is the author of two collections of poetry and two chapbooks, most recently Vishvarupa (5IP) and Night Birds (Vagabond). Michelle received the Val Vallis Award and was highly commended in the Blake Poetry Prize, the Wesley Michel Wright Prize and long listed in the Carmel Bird Short Story Award. She was an International resident at Sanskriti Kendra in New Delhi, a Fellow at Hawthornden Castle and has received grants…

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Women from Fetters to Letters

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Pip Smith I had a lot of trouble writing this last blog post. It was meant to be an attempt at a review of Women of Letters, contextualised by the recent discussions of women in literature spurred by the Vida stats of 2010 and 2011 and the inauguration of the Stella Prize, but I can’t help feeling as though everything I have written over the past few weeks has sounded, as Cameron Woodhead might have put it, like “privileged whinging”. I feel trapped by that stance, but don’t know how to side-step it. I keep thinking of the kind of…

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On Reading Out Loud, with the Help of James Ellroy

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Pip Smith What makes a good reading? I have no idea. Or rather, I only have smatterings of vague hunches. And thankfully, there’s no rubric by which to judge a person’s vague hunches. One thing is certain, though – no matter how Nobel Prize-winning your prose is, there is no excuse for reading to a crammed room for twenty minutes, pausing for a breath, and then continuing on as people shift in their seats, answer phones, and leave the room. There’s especially no excuse to then ask if it’s alright to read another, longer story, and when no one says…

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Southerly launches a new issue, A Nest of Bunyips

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Bunyip: (say ‘bunyuhp) noun 1. an imaginary creature of Aboriginal legend, said to haunt rushy swamps and billabongs. 2. Obsolete a full-grown beast (def. 2) which has remain unbranded. 3. Obsolete an impostor. [Aborig.; Wathawurung] Bunyips, apparently, are nocturnal creatures known to haunt waterholes. It’s been suggested that there are more than a couple of Australian poets to whom this description might apply. This, certainly, is a rich poetry issue, a nest-full of the finest new writing, from Jennifer Maiden, John Kinsella, Maria Takolander, Michael Farrell, Craig Powell, Michael Sharkey, Kate Middleton and many others (several of them quite tee-totalling), plus essays by Kevin Hart on A.D. Hope, Lachlan Brown on…

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A Note or Two on the Storytelling Epidemic, and a Cursory Review of Rocket Clock Story Slam

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Pip Smith Over the past few years, it seems many of the communities that tend to swarm around microphones – poetry slams, radio shows, comedy gigs, literary soirees – have become entranced by conversational, back-to-basics storytelling. In Sydney, we have Story Club at Hermann’s Bar, which sits more at the comedy end of the spectrum, and FBi Radio’s All the Best, which firmly models its content on the personal, narrative journalism heard on NPR’s This American Life, amongst others. The short story night I’ve curated since 2008 – Penguin Plays Rough – finds itself attracting interest from the literary community,…

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